Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Bypassing Publishers By Signing Authors Directly
Hugh Pickens writes "David Streitfeld reports that Amazon is aggressively wooing top authors, gnawing away at the services publishers, critics and agents used to provide. 'Everyone's afraid of Amazon,' says Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. 'The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,' adds Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon's top executives. 'Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.' But publishers are fighting back at writers who publish with Amazon. In 2010 Kiana Davenport signed with a division of Penguin for The Chinese Soldier's Daughter, a Civil War love story, and received a $20,000 advance. In the meantime Davenport packaged several award-winning short stories she had written 20 years ago and packaged them in an e-book, Cannibal Nights, available on Amazon. When Penguin found out, it went 'ballistic,' accusing her of breaking her contractual promise to avoid competition, canceling her novel, and suing Davenport to recover her advance. Davenport knows her crime: 'Sleeping with the enemy? Perhaps. But now I know who the enemy is.'"
One Company to rule them all, One Click to find them,
One Company to contract with them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Profit where the Bezos lies.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Maybe they got tired of having to qualify every eBook price with "This price was set by the publisher".
Want to know what's wrong with the eBook market? Just check out this page; $15 for a poorly scanned version of a book that was written more than 40 years ago, that's available new in paperback and even hardcover for less. Seriously? Who the hell comes up with these pricing models? Even as a huge eBook fan there's been plenty of books that I've passed on because I just can't justify the cost for a digital copy, even ignoring the fact that the digital copy is DRM'd to Amazon's tool set.
They'd offer her $40k + legal expenses. This is a pissing match, plain and simple.
Amazon is a retailer; it's only recently become a publisher as well. From what they've said, one of the reasons why established authors have been signing up with Amazon as a publisher is that their contracts are far more author-friendly than trade publishers.
The contract gave Penguin exclusive rights to The Chinese Soldier's Daughter, not every single piece ever written by the author.
Assuming so is treading in dangerous waters.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I think some people are too quick to write off the publishing industry. They still provide things you won't find on Amazon, such as EDITORS. An early author may be able to put a book together, but sometimes they need a very experienced set of eyes to help them fix problems and eliminate some cruft. An experienced writer may not need one as much (although they generally still do), but starting authors almost certainly will. You also cannot get your ebook into nearly as many hands as a hardcopy. Any literate person with functional eyes can read a hardcopy, but you need a Kindle or similar device to read an ebook.
What I hope to see from this is two competing markets. Hopefully this will coax the publishing industry to give authors a better cut. Maybe that's a bit too pie-in-the-sky, but it's possible. Let's hope the publishing industry can adapt better than the goddamned RIAA.
The more of these middle man made-up positions we can remove, the better.
Next up: record executives, realtors, and oil prospectors.
Firstly, his quote is entirely untrue. If there were noone between the writer and reader, you'd end up with lackluster works.
Have you been to a bookstore lately?
Sparkly Vampire #16, Sparkly Werewolf #5, Oscar Wilde - Vampire Hunter (Ok, I might read that one), Zombies Vs Vampires #9, More Zombies #97.
There's a reason why I mostly buy self-published books these days; they may have more typos, but at least there's some variety in the stories for sale.
Publishers typically have been leeches. Sucking 98% of the profit out of a book.
It's high time that writers were able to sell to a reader and keep most of the sale, they did 90% of the work, they deserve 90% of the sale price.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That depends. They got a deal for the novel "The Chinese Soldier's Daughter". She repackaged a collection short stories and sold them on Amazon.
Did the publisher have any rights to those short stories? She did sign a non-compete but does a collection of short stories compete with a novel?
At this point we are into lawyer land where logic and reason do not apply.
Kind of like the Twilight Zone except without the almost universal just outcome.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Of course. If the whole chain is in-house they'll be able to eliminate a lot of unnecessary overhead, making it more efficient and profitable than having to deal with external business partners stuck in the 19th century.
One can easily make up "if this, then that" scenarios. But, they're all worthless.
The author says she didn't violate the contract. The publisher's actions imply that they think she did. From the author's description, it sounds like a "no compete" clause, not an "exclusivity" one. The author says one of the e-published works was actually published prior to their contract. The e-published works were short story collections, which according to the author, contained subject matter different than the contracted novel.
She says that the works were previously rejected by the "big six" publishers, which includes Penguin. From that, it seems to me that Penguin, by their prior rejection of the work, had already determined that it wasn't competitive.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is significant case law on the matter. Further, an advance of $20k to not work in the entire field of writing for 2 years won't get any traction in court.
Non compete in this sense means those characters/story/universe don't get presented somewhere else. That the publisher gets first release of not just the book, but anything to do with the book.
This is bullying an author, plain and simple. (if the story is as the author has written)
t
The question is, do you really want Amazon to be the only place you can get books?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Depends how the contract is worded. The author seems to think she gave Penguin exclusivity on her new book, not her old stuff. I've never heard of a publishing company having a fit when you publish old stuff (previously published no less, just bound up in a new collection), while working on a book for them. It's possible that Penguin writes their contacts that way and the author simply misunderstood or didn't read carefully enough, but it seems really odd to me. It sounds like Penguin is interpreting a non-compete clause rather more liberally than is traditional in order to punish the author for going through Amazon. I don't have all the facts of course, she may have legitimately broken faith with them, but from what we have that doesn't appear to be that case.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Publishers take a lot of the profit from successful books. They also end up paying a lot of advances on complete duds on which they lost money. (Same thing with music labels.) Vanity publishing has always been available to authors that think they can make more money by cutting out the middleman. (If you could convince a bookstore to carry the things... most booksellers have better things to do than wade through self-published crap.)
I agree that the traditional publishing model is now becoming outdated with the advent of e-books, but it had it's purpose at the time.
Not only were the short story collections she published with Amazon already published by other publishers, they had been submitted to the Big 6 publisher who is currently breaching its contract. The Big 6 publisher had specifically said that they did not want to publish the short story collections, and the author has the rejection notices to prove it.
So the publisher basically hasn't got a leg to stand on. Their interpretation of the contract is void, in restraint of trade, tortured to justify their fear and hatred of the possibility of any competition from Amazon, even when no such threat exists in this case. Further, they are trying to effectively exert ownership over works that are not only NOT under contract, but had specifically been rejected by them, and to claim rights to put out of print without further compensation all the author's past works and works up to two years in the future (when they are contractually obligated to publish her novel).
She has an excellent chance of prevailing in court, for far more than the advance - this firm is trying to destroy her career, to make sure she is never published by anyone but Amazon if she publishes anything with Amazon. This is really a case that the NY AG and the Justice Department could slam-dunk on multiple counts, too.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
For you not to directly compete with your own products seems like a reasonable expectation, provided the terms are laid out clearly.
If you think any of the terms of a typical publisher contract are laid out clearly, you have completely missed the point. My book went into print a year ago, and it seems every month I find a new way I'm being screwed I didn't see coming. The latest wrinkle involves how I don't get any per-copy royalties for the foreign translations (of which there currently are one). This means I'm now competing against the foreign copies of my own book! It's in there, now that I go back and re-read the dense fine print in that one section, but "laid out clearly" is certainly is not. Like a lot of contract exchanges, the publishing company has enormously more legal resources to craft a contract that benefits them, compared to any one author. This is why the contracts all favor the publisher, and authors normally feel abused--unless you're a famous enough author to have your own agent and legal team.
The idea that the advance on a book represents some giant sum the publisher should get all sorts of benefits from is exactly the line of thinking that needs to be stopped here. Publishers used to lay out that money and a large second sum for printing of books, which may or may not get sold. They were assuming a lot of risk, and traditional publication contracts reflect that. But it's not true any more, as printing moves to on-demand or not at all, in the e-book case. Much like the big music industry, publishers haven't quite figured out yet they can easily end up being only minimally useful middle-men to experienced content creators. And like a lot of negotiation the easiest way to get better terms is to just walk away altogether. The big decision on my next book isn't "which publisher", it's "do I need a regular publisher at all?". Right now, one of the biggest problems I have is that my publisher screwed up the Kindle version of my book; they just didn't do the QA to make it readable. I'm pretty sure Amazon has that down had they done it themselves.
I think it's amusing that Penguin is involved here (although it may as well be any publisher for this particular story).
When Penguin was founded in the 1930s, they were probably as much of a disruptive force as Amazon is now. Paperbacks were pretty much unheard of. At the time new books -- which meant cloth-bound books -- generally cost about 6 shillings, or say about 20-30 pounds in today's UK money, or 40-60 US$. The first Pengins were sold for 6 pence, or 2-3 pounds, or 4-6 US$. All the original Penguins were reprints, i.e. not new original works but titles licensed from other publishers. The public reaction was positive. The publishing community started with an attitude of amused skepticism, and soon evolved to something like fear, as they watched Penguin cannibalize their sales.
These days Penguin is still around, having outlived and/or absorbed most of the old British publishing companies. It's interesting to think that they might be confronting an upheaval in the industry similar to the one they caused themselves 80 years ago.