Dear Friends,
I first became aware of the New-York based National Writers’ Union (NWU) during our recent battle against the Google Book Settlement. Unlike our Canadian unions — and the American Authors’ Guild, which brokered the Google deal — the NWU spoke up bitingly against the GBS, demonstrating an inspirational level of leadership on behalf of its members. Continue reading
Here’s a new post from guest blogger, David Bolt:
Fiction #1. I’m going to get $60 a book.
In your dreams. Note that it’s (US)$60 per book to “the rightsholder”. How that gets split between authors and publishers remains to be determined.
And if the book is deemed “in print” (many US publishers say all their
backlist is now in print forever because they are making it available in
POD or e-book format), the $60 is paid to the publisher. It’s up to the
publisher to decide how much, if any, to pass on to the author(s),
according to the split specified in the author-publisher contract (which
of course probably didn’t provide for such a situation).
Even if authors believe that they own the electronic rights 100%, I think
the best they can hope for with most publishers is for the $60 to be
treated under the subsidiary rights clause, with a typical 50/50 split, or
US$30 per book for the authors. More likely publishers will treat the $60
under the book royalty clause, and send the authors US$6-9 per book. To
get any better split, authors will have to take publishers to arbitration
or (maybe, if they can get past the arbitration clause) to court.
Continue reading
David Bolt is a distinguished Canadian actor and playwright, active for over 40 years in Canadian theatre. He has been closely following the Google Book Settlement and its possible implications for Canadian creators. I’ve invited him to contribute his analysis of the international response to Google’s case, now before the U.S. court.
Bolt is one of a tiny handful of Canadian writers speaking up publicly against the Google Settlement. He was interviewed about Google in this week’s issue of ‘Tandem’, (Corriere Canadese’s English-language supplement.)
Sarah — Since Canadian papers are not covering the Frankfurt Book Fair, I thought your blog readers might be interested to know what is going on there.
The first big item for discussion is the Google Settlement. Europeans don’t like this thing at all and the German government (in the person of Chancellor Angela Merkel) kicked the whole thing off by announcing “We reject the scanning in of books without any copyright protection, like Google is doing. The government places a lot of weight on this position on copyrights to protect writers in Germany.”