Is there a reason things canât be a very simple straight forward thing between person that wants to get the thing they wrote to a wider audiance and the publisher that wants content to sell to the public?
Other than the obviousâŚ
It sounds like more recent eBook sales have found some language that allows them to treat them as sales while still not giving the buyer the rights they should have for a sale. Thatâs unfortunate.
Iâm not a big fan of this. Iâd have considered it unethical if the big guys used a technicality to try and extract more money from the little guys, and the ethics donât change simply because of who is victimizing whom.
As just to forestall the obvious, weâve seen far too clearly what the result is of using somebody elseâs unethical behaviour as an excuse for our own.
No thanks.
Only that we have always done things this way.
Writers are working on resolving the issue. I donât know how successful weâll be or how soon you can expect âresults.â
Itâs not a technicality that publishers are making all their money off writers but 99% of all writers canât make a living off what theyâre being paid.
Writersâ royalties on ebooks are a minuscule amount.
Statute of limitations runs out after six yearsâŚ
Not if you can prove fraud.
In any industry with essentially unlimited upside (i.e. you are working for yourself and your earning depend upon sales), the vast majority of players wonât be making a living. If somehow most players are earning a living (i.e. during a âgold rushâ phase for a new medium), enough people enter the market until most people are not earning a living.
The fact that most people who self-publish also donât make any money (where they keep 100% of the revenues) makes it clear that this is simply a function of the market, not âevilâ publishers.
The reality is that for the vast majority of consumers value creative works as negative until the work has been through one or more gatekeepers. Ask how many people are willing to experience random works with literally no gatekeeping at all. In books itâs called slush-pile reading and you have to pay people to do it.
So yes, publishers (which also go bankrupt), do make the majority of the money. But as long as they can remain accepted gatekeepers, and charge a premium for doing so, that function will be worth that majorityâŚ
Iâm not a fan, in the sense that Iâm not a fan of the shift to âlicensed, not soldâ as a circumvention of first sale and a host of other unpleasant things; but I am very much a fan of this in the âAll they that take the sword shall perish by the swordâ sense.
The playing with âintellectual propertyâ in order to create âsale-likeâ conditions that provide the buyer with few or none of the actual advantages of a sale is deeply obnoxious; and if the publishers doing so are also screwing over the writers, they are egregiously trying to have it both ways: whenever itâs more profitable for it to be a âsaleâ, itâs a sale, whenever they have more leverage because its only a âlicenseâ, well, itâs a license. That is unacceptable.
If they want to âlicenseâ it, and the contract stipulates different payments for âlicencesâ than for âsalesâ, they should shut up and pay.(or just sell, which would be an improvement).
Vendor fuckery.
The best possible outcome from this? Publishers all drop the âlicensingâ language from our ebooks from now on, and writers get a big payday besides.
This is refreshingly optimistic. More realistically, though, the likely possible outcome is that after dragging their feet for months or (more likely) years, theyâll settle for half or less of what they truly owe and pinky swear to not do it again.
Do which bit again? Use the licensing language, or give the author a cut as if it were sales?
[quote=âtlwest, post:7, topic:78967â]
In any industry with essentially unlimited upside (i.e. you are working for yourself and your earning depend upon sales), the vast majority of players wonât be making a living. If somehow most players are earning a living (i.e. during a âgold rushâ phase for a new medium), enough people enter the market until most people are not earning a living.[/quote]
According to The Authorâs Guild approximately a year ago, the average mainstream published author makes 50% less royalties per dollar of profit off ebook sales than off traditional paper sales.
The publisher is not contributing more value to the production of an ebook than they were to the production of a paper book and they wouldnât have anything to sell if not for the authors.
For most published authors, the publishers are actually doing less than they were doing previously because now publishers expect their authors to do the bulk of the marketing for the books theyâve written.
Not only that, but they also usually try to wrangle away your film, television, and other rights.
The ones who donât make money (because there are self-published writers who are making money on ebooks) donât make money because of any number of reasons. Most of which has nothing to do with the ebook market. They also mostly werenât making money before the industry switched over to ebooks.
They arenât making money because of one or more of the following:
- Not good writers (yet)
- Publishing something so niche that even theyâre not expecting to make money at it
- Not good at marketing (yet)
- Havenât found their audience
All of the above are just as true in âdead treeâ edition as they are in ebook format.
And none of it justifies giving a non-negotiable 50% pay cut to published authors.
The trouble with licensed, not sold, is that information is different from a physical good. You can essentially sell information once (or more likely, very few times). If the transaction costs of exchanging information are minimal (and trust that Amazon (or a competitor) would be on it within days to make certain that when you âboughtâ and e-book, youâd simply be transferring the bits from a âusedâ copy).
(I still remember the hit that authors took when Amazon made ordering used copies of a book as easy as ordering new. Reduce the friction, nuke the sales. But at least there, the (1) the original owner really didnât keep possession, and (2) the cost of physical transportation kept the incidence survivable. But boy, did royalties and eventually advances drop.)
Anyway, this is, after all, the Internet age. Any loophole that you make to be convenient to the few customers who really want/need it will become the business model for a company who will ensure everyone exploits it to maximal effect (with them taking their slice, of course). Itâs how Internet business works.
There is no digital middle ground. Either books are sold, in which case the industry drops 80% or so of its sales forever, or theyâre licensed, in which case consumers lose some of their rights, which were not exercised all that often. Of course, consumer reaction tends to be âeverything digital should be nearly free, and if theyâre not nearly free, then to hell with publishers/authors being greedy, and if they canât survive on nearly free, then itâs not my job to find a business model that works just theyâre just stupid.â
(Of course, this is often followed by âhow dare they outsource my job, those greedy bastardsâŚâ)
There is no possible solution that preserves the status quo. Someone is going to get screwed - one side nearly fatally, one side somewhat. To no-oneâs surprise, the publishers didnât decide to commit mass suicide.
Well, you have lots of company - including the US government, terrorists, and essentially everyone who feels that the someone âhas done 'em wrongâ, which around here can be almost everyone.
Me, Iâm far too aware that by being born and with every action Iâve taken thereafter, Iâve taken the sword in someoneâs eyes.
[Edit: Typos, grammar]
Okay, publishers provide one real service - access to bookstores, who have no interest in stocking something which hasnât been thoroughly vetted.
That service, however, is so valuable, giving you the 1 in 100 chance of âmaking itâ (âmaking itâ = able to quit day job and not starve, not make a $50K+ living), that itâs worth the 92% that the publishers keep.
If a publisher is not putting you in n-thousand bookstores, then thereâs no reason to pay a substantial part of the royalties to someone else - after all, publisher or not, youâre now amongst the 1 in 10,000 chance of success (thatâs after the marketing the hell out of it).
They arenât making money because there are lot more readable books than people willing to buy them, and the price theyâre willing to pay for readable books keeps going down. Thereâs no magic pony here. If all customers spend a total of $X on books, then thatâs all the money there is to divide among everyone involved in the process. The only way to pay more authors more (while keeping publishers in business) is to increase $X and unless something miraculous happens, people are expecting prices to go down so they can spend less on books (but get more books) and more on gadgetry.
Cheap e-books looked like a solution until people got 600 books in their to-read queue and realized that instead of buying 6 times as many books at 1/3 the price, (2 x $X! Hurrah!), they might as well buy at the rate they were buying before at 1/3 the price ($X / 3? Weâre doomed!).
I donât think that magical thinking is helpful. Authors have always supplied information and had publishers clothe it in a physical form that allowed the customers to justify spending the money on the information. Now that the physical form is being stripped away, people still want the information, but are incapable of stomaching the idea that the physical book wasnât really much of the price. Weâre not rational creatures, and I expect a beloved market to whither because we canât handle paying what it would take to sustain it.
Happens all over the place with other goods, I donât see books being any different.
[Added:]
My personal example is strategic game apps. Iâm willing to pay $20-30 dollars for a low-end strategy game on the PC - itâs a niche market, small companies can (barely) survive on it. However, move the game to the iPad, where Iâd play it far more, and get far more value, and I cannot make myself pay more than $9.99, even though itâs the same game, same effort, better format for me.
So what happens? People donât make the sort of strategy game I desperately want on iOS because I (and from heard about sales figures, most of my peers), canât handle paying the same price even simply because itâs an app and not a PC game. As I said, consumers (including me) are not rational, and itâs quite possible for there to be no market even though both sides would desperately like there to be one.
(I also saw this first hand 25 years ago when I had a man yell at me for selling a CD with our software for $25, yell and me for selling the thick user manual that went with it for $35, and happily walk out with a box that had only the CD and the manual with it for $99. It was before I learned the concept of anchor price, and at the time it felt surreal. Now I understand itâs just being human. CD = shovelware, and should be $10. Softcover book should be $20. Software, on the other hand was $400 (it was the early 90âs), and thus a steal at $99.)
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