Wall Street Journal: Random House Lays Claim to E-Book Rights
The Authors Guild: Random House’s Retroactive Rights Grab
It’s regrettable and unhelpful that Random House has chosen to try to intimidate authors and agents over these old book contracts. With such a weak legal hand, it would be well advised to stick to its strength — the advantages that its marketing muscle can provide owners of e-book rights. It should also start offering a fair royalty for those rights. Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We’re confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That’s beginning to change.
Tags: eBook Commentary
kirsten saell wrote,
I kept saying it about a year ago–when ebook sales were paltry was the time for authors to stand up and demand a fair royalty. Publishers would have been much more likely to hand over a bigger slice of a few hundred copies than they are now that the pie is more substantial. Everyone kept saying it was stupid to quibble over a couple hundred bucks. Now that it’s potentially in the thousands of dollars, well, all I can say is “good luck with that.”
And I love Authors’ Guild’s flip flop on this issue. Wasn’t it just this year they were advising authors to not sell ebook rights because of the audiobook conflict, but refusing to educate authors on what measures they could take to effectively exploit those rights while protecting themselves and their audio rights? They’re like abstinence sex educators who’ve finally woken up to the fact that their “education” has only resulted in unwanted pregnancies and STDs. Oops.
Link | December 15th, 2009 at 11:14 am
TeddyPig wrote,
Yeah unfortunately authors are gonna be put in the middle of these format wars and they better have some good lawyers handy. The publishers are going down for the count and they are not against abusing authors in the process so the authors had better be circling the wagons against them.
Link | December 15th, 2009 at 11:30 am