Authors are in a tizzy today over Simon & Schuster’s new policy of maintaining control of books even after they go out of print, effectively co-owning your copyright. S&S says it’s a POD issue, authors disagree.
More from The Book Standard, the Author’s Guild website and the Dear Author blog.
Tizzied authors
I talked to the author of a non-fiction 2003 title this week. She’d love to update it; no go from the publisher because lst ed. is still selling. For copyright, I suppose its a hostage situation with the author buying it back. What will librarians do? Who do they side with? Authors or publishers.
The Rise of Self-Publishing
This is one of the many reasons that self-publishing will only increase over the next few years. Any more, publishers insist that authors take on more and more of the roles of advertising, promotions, events, news, etc. Some authors are looking at that increased workload and thinking “Hrm, if I’m going to write it and then I’m going to have to promote it and advertise it, then why don’t I just go ahead and publish it myself and that way, I can keep more of the profits off the book?”
Granted, I doubt you’ll see Patricia Cornwell or James Patterson over on Lulu.com anytime soon. But when publishers are making it harder and harder to get published unless you already have been published, and when they’re making authors do work that publishers used to do, and when an author doesn’t actually own what they created anymore… Well, why not?
Just think of the shake-up in the traditional publishing world if an author of James Patterson’s caliber, and more importantly his selling potential, suddenly published a book on their own and, instead of getting a few cents to a few dollars per sale they got, say, more than 50% per item sold. That’s a serious hit and one that traditional publishers should take just as seriously.
We’ll need new reversion clauses
(For anyone who reads Furdlog, I was the source of the correction about reversion clauses–that is, they’re not that rare in contracts where the author or agent knows what they’re doing.)
I think we’ll need new reversion agreements. Otherwise, S&S’s move undermines reversion–as I’ve noted before (in print) as a real downside to PoD.
On the other hand, a publisher unwilling to do a revised edition of a nonfiction book because the 1st edition is still selling: Good grief! The best time to do a revision is while there’s still some life in the book–assuming that the revision is a real one. There’s a publisher who has not the vaguest idea of what they’re doing… (which, I’m afraid, is probably not unique).
As far as a general shift to PoD–the problem is that it’s a very expensive way to produce books and distribute them. My PoD 250-page paperback costs $9+ a copy to produce (or at least that’s the charge). Any decent publisher should be able to turn out a 250-page trade paperback for no more than $2-$3 a copy in a medium-size run, and probably a lot less. For books with bookstore sales and target audiences in the tens of thousands, self-publishing may or may not make sense–but PoD almost certainly doesn’t. (They’re not the same–you can self-publish using job printers/binders, but there’s a capital outlay, you have to use accrual accounting, and you have to handle distribution and all that.)