STATUS: Heading out tomorrow morning for RWA in San Francisco. To be honest, I don’t know how much time I will have to blog but if I can, I’ll try and send reports from the floor.
What’s playing on the iPod right now? APOLOGIZE by OneRepublic
Hey it didn’t work all that effectively for S&S in the United States but who says it won’t fly across the pond?
The agents over there of course. Since I do have an international reading base, this is for you Brits out there. It’s Random House UK’s turn to see if they can play with the Out of Print clause in this digital age.
Here’s the story. Haven’t heard any news about whether RH USA will be follow suit but I imagine we Yanks will be watching closely.
“Our initiative to modernise our contracts started over two years ago and we have received significant praise from both authors and agents for the clear and concise language and our balanced approach.
It’s early…. I misread that to say they modernized their contracts 2 years ago “when we received significant praise…” for thier clear and concise language. As if they wanted to make it confusing.
o-O
But… I do see the author’s point. I a publishing house is no longer doing anything with your work, if it isn’t on the shelves regularly, then you want to have a chance to look at other avenues of revenue as they become available.
Backlist, thanks to POD, ebooks, and graphic novel adaptations among other possibilities, now has a value it didn’t have a few years back when print was the only option.
Backlist is where a bunch of the action is these days so the publishers want it for nothing, just in case.
This article didn’t mention this, but another I saw said that S&S UK also wants to give the author only 15% royalties on ebook sales. That’s robbery.
The standard ebook royalty from epublishers runs between 50 to 75%, and epublishers have the extra expense of editing, etc. The big publishers already have that done for the paper version, and the authors shouldn’t have to shoulder the entire expense for these multibillion-dollar conglomerates to build their ebook infrastructure.
I meant RH UK, not S&S.
15% ?
For Ebooks? The no printing costs, barely a blip on the bandwidth to download, completely digital distribution kind of Ebooks?
LOL…
I also like the brazen attempt to squat on intellectual property even if they have no intention of doing squat with it themselves. What audacity.
???The standard ebook royalty from epublishers runs between 50 to 75%,???
That’s on NET, I suspect, because the usual figure given for ebook royalty average is 30%.