Kristine Kathryn Rusch » Business Rusch, featured, free nonfiction, Freelancer's Survival Guide, On Writing » The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements
The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements
The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Imagine this:
Pretend you run a very large business. The business has a lot of built-in problems, things not easily fixed. You’re aware of the problems and are trying to solve them. A decade ago, you actually had hope you could solve them. It will simply take time, you thought, but back then, your business was a leisurely business. Back then, you had no idea that the word “leisure” would leave your vocabulary and never return.
In that decade, your business has changed dramatically. Your corporate masters sold out to large conglomerates, so now you can no longer point to your small but steady profit as normal for your industry. The conglomerate doesn’t care. All the conglomerate cares about is quarterly profits, which should rise steadily.
Your industry doesn’t work that way, but you do your best to make those quarterly balance sheets work for the conglomerate. Unfortunately, that means any long-term outlook you used to have no longer works for your corporate masters. Now you can only look one year ahead, maximum, because that’s all the focus the conglomerate will allow.
One of your business’s largest problem comes out of the nature of the industry itself. The success of each product cannot be replicated. Just because you build one really good widget doesn’t mean that your next widget will sell at all. Your business has a luck aspect to it, an unpredictability that no matter how much you plan, you can’t fix.
The other built-in problems mentioned above cause your prices to verge on too high. If you solve the built-in problems, you might lose even more revenue, because most of those problems benefit the stores that sell your product. Those stores have made it clear they will not order from you if you take those harmful (to you) perks (to them) away. So your prices hover at a point too high for an impulse purchase, even though your business does better when consumers can buy your product on impulse.
You have maintained this system for decades now, trying different ways to fix the built-in problems. None of the solutions work, because the only way to fix the built-in problem would be to have an industry-wide change, one that all of the businesses in the industry agree to. Unfortunately, if all of the businesses in the industry make that change, it will hurt stores, which will say that the industry businesses colluded to hurt their retail business—and sadly, the stores, under U.S. law, would be right.
So the easy solution is impossible, and all other solutions are half-assed. You hang on and your business maintains a consistent, if unspectacular, profit year after year after year.
Then some changes hit your industry that force you to cut costs where you can. Some of that cost cutting comes in employees. You have to lay off necessary folk and hope that the remaining staff can pick up the slack. These things have happened before, and you believe that you’ll be able to rehire in a few years.
Only this time, the economy “craters” and a global recession hits. Every business loses much-needed revenue and products like yours, which are not necessities, sell to fewer and fewer consumers because the consumers have less disposable income.
You anticipate, cutting everything you can, dumping real estate, abandoning rent, maybe even negotiating your way out of some long-term contracts. At the very end, though, you can’t prevent it: You cut staff to the bone.
Now, in some departments of your business, one person quite literally does the job that five people used to do as recently as a decade ago. You have no flexibility left.
And then the industry you work in undergoes a technological revolution, one so big, so profound, that it changes the way business gets done. Because you aren’t flexible, you adapt to the change late. You can’t hire new employees to help with the shift without firing the remaining good, valuable (and dare we say it), unbelievably efficient employees that you kept when the recession started. Yet your old employees can’t adapt to the new world.
Worse, this new world requires new systems. You have to figure out new ways to produce your product. You need to shoehorn these changes into the existing contracts with your suppliers. You need an entirely new production crew because the old ways to produce your widgets are becoming obsolete.
And, most annoyingly, you need to develop an entirely new accounting system, because everything you’ve known, everything you’ve done, no longer applies in this brand-spanking new technological age.
But you can’t hire employees who can actually help you develop these systems. Because those employees won’t earn you any money. At best, they’ll prevent a loss of revenue. At worst, the systems they develop will cost you money because your suppliers, whom you pay a percentage of the retail price of the product they supply, will realize you’ve been inadvertently shorting them since the technological change hit at the same time as the beginning of the global recession.
In other words, to fix this problem, you will need to invest—in new employees, in brand new technological systems, in new ways of doing business. More importantly, you will have to take a huge loss as you make this change. A loss that might eat into your profits for not one, not two, not three quarters, but maybe for two to three years, something your corporate masters will never, ever allow.
Better to close your eyes and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Better to hope no one notices. Better to keep doing business as usual until profits rise, the recession ends, the world becomes wealthy again, and you can make the changes without causing a series of quarterly losses on your balance sheet.
Better to keep kicking this problem down the road until you retire or move to another company, preferably one which has already solved this problem so you don’t have to deal with it.
Does this scenario sound familiar? It should if you watch the evening news or read a daily newspaper. Industry after industry suffers a variation of these problems, some caused by inefficiency, some by technological change, and all exacerbated by the worst recession to hit in the last eighty years.
But this blog deals with publishing, and what I just described to you is the situation at traditional publishers—the big publishers, the ones most people mistakenly call The Big Six (there are more than six, but leave it)—all over New York City.
Last fall, I dealt with these problems in depth. Before you decide to comment on this post and tell me that traditional publishing will die (which I do not believe), read the first few posts I did in the publishing series, starting here.
I’m grappling with the changes in publishing just like everyone else is. I knew that the changes—particularly the rise of e-publishing—would hit traditional publishing hard. And it has, although not as hard as I initially thought. As Publishers Weekly reported earlier in the month, traditional publishers have remained profitable in the transition so far.
The reasons why should sound familiar to those of you who read my earlier posts. Publishers Weekly puts it succinctly: “While the improvement in the economy helped all publishers in 2010, companies where profits improved all pointed to two main contributing factors—cost controls and skyrocketing e-book sales.”
Right now, e-books comprise about 10% of the book market, but some analysts believe that e-books will be as much as 50% of the e-book market by 2015. Some see evidence that e-books will grow faster than that. A month ago, a Barnes & Noble executive made news when he stated in a speech that e-books will “dominate the market” in 24 months.
We all know these figures are important. Daily, writers tell me about their careers and then ask me if they should become independent publishers or go to traditional publishing. As I’ve said repeatedly, I see no harm in doing both.
Earlier this month, however, I opened my mail to find a big fat warning sign of the future. And if the problem that I—and hundreds of other writers—noted doesn’t get resolved, then traditional publishing will cease to be viable for all writers.
What happened?
I got a royalty statement for backlist titles of one of my on-going series. The statement came from a traditional publisher. Let me give you some background.
A few years ago, the publisher refused to buy the next two books in the series saying that while the series had some growth, the growth was not enough to justify the expense of a new contract. I started writing some novellas in that series and publishing them in the magazine markets while I searched for a new publisher.
Then the e-book revolution hit, and as an experiment, I put up two of those novellas as e-books. Since they were the first two e-books I had ever done, the covers—in a word—sucked. I did no promotion and no advertising, except to say in the cover copy that these e-books were part of this particular series.
In the first six months of 2010, those badly designed short novels sold about 300 copies each on Kindle, the only venue they were on at the time. No advertising, bad covers, just hanging out waiting for buyers to find them.
I would occasionally check the Amazon sales ranking (that weird number you see on each book Amazon publishes, the thing they use to compile their hourly bestseller list). Even though that ranking did not give me actual sales numbers, I did note that the sales of the novellas were less than the sales of the traditionally published e-books on Kindle in the same series.
In August, I wrote to the traditional publisher, asking that my rights revert. The kind woman in rights reversal explained to me that she couldn’t revert the book rights because the e-books were “selling too well” to revert. Okay. All well and good. What I care about is getting books into the hands of my readers. I figured I would eventually be compensated for this. I just had to wait until the royalty statement hit.
Which it did. At the beginning of this month.
How many e-books did the traditional publisher say I sold? 30. That’s right. 30.
When the novellas, which had worse sales rankings from Amazon, sold 300 each.
That 30 number didn’t pass the sniff test for me. So I talked with other writers who have books in the same genre with the same company. The writers I talked with also had some e-book savvy.
Guess what? They had been shocked by how low their e-book numbers were as well, especially in comparison with their indie published titles. The indie books which had Amazon rankings indicating fewer sales sold more copies than the traditionally published books by a factor of ten or better.
Let me indulge in another sidebar for a moment. I’m involved with four different indie publishers, two of which allow me to see the day-to-day operations, and one of which I own part of. We’ve been having trouble setting up an accounting system that works efficiently for more than 100 different e-book titles. The problem is, in short, that the ebook distributors report sales by publisher and then by title, and not by author, so if you’re published by AAA Publishing and your book is called The Embalming and I also have an older book called The Embalming through AAA Publishing and they’re both in e-book, AAA Publisher will get sales figures on a daily basis for The Embalming. Which Embalming does that statement refer to?
Also, the e-stributors report at varying times throughout the year (some daily, some monthly, some quarterly), so if I want to know how many copies my book The Embalming sold in March of 2010, I can’t easily get that information because the info might not have been reported yet from some e-bookstore in some faraway country.
What all of the various indie publishers have figured out is that using a standard spreadsheet for each title is labor-intensive. You can easily input data into a spreadsheet for one or two or even ten novels. But when it comes to 50 or 100, the data-entry—figuring out what book belongs where and when (even if you use the estributor’s the computerized spreadsheet)—becomes prohibitive.
What we need is a cloud-based system that can be queried. For example, the system should easily answer these two questions: How many copies did KKR’s The Embalming sell worldwide in March; and how many copies did KKR’s The Embalming sell through Kobo’s out-of-country distribution channels? Right now, no spreadsheet program can answer that information easily from a pool of 100 titles and various e-book outlets without a lot of man-hours of data entry.
Traditional publishers—and indie publishers, for that matter—don’t have the staff with the ability to organize this wealth of information. Still, traditional publishers must —by contract— report the information to the best of their ability on royalty statements.
To do so, they revert to an old pre-computer accounting method. The method existed back when there was too much data to be quickly processed. We all learned it in school. They used little snippets of data to estimate, often using an algebraic equation that goes something like this: If The Embalming sold (x) copies in January and e-books sales rose on a trajectory of (y) copies over a six-month period of time, then (x) times 6 adjusted for (y) equals the number of sales of The Embalming.
Close enough. And frankly, I would be satisfied with that, if the number the publisher had come up with wasn’t so wildly off.
For me, in the instance with the traditional publisher I mentioned above, the difference between 30 copies per title and 300 copies per title is pennies on the dollar. It’s not worth an audit.
But I never think in small terms. My training in three fields—journalism, history, and the extrapolative field of science fiction—forces me to think in terms of the future.
Right now, e-book rights are a subsidiary right, negligible and relatively unimportant. Between two and five years from now, e-book rights will become the dominant book right.
If traditional publishers do not change their accounting methods now, then these accounting methods will end up costing writers hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. (In some writers’ cases, millions of dollars.)
Those of you who have any knowledge of journalism have just looked up and asked, Why the hell did Rusch bury her lead? That’s the story: publishers are screwing writers on e-book royalties.
But those of you who have had journalism careers know why I buried that lead. When I was a news director faced with a reporter who had brought me information like the information I gave to you above, I would have said, Sounds like a good story. But it’s all supposition. Now get me something concrete. Somthing I can use.
So that’s what I tried to do. Last week, I contacted dozens of traditionally published writers who also had put up some backlist on their own in electronic format. The writers who had the information handy responded with actual numbers. The writers who didn’t told me that they had worried about their royalty numbers when the statements arrived, but had no real proof that anything had gone awry.
I also spoke to some trusted agent friends, several lawyers who are active in the publishing industry, a few certified public accountants, and other professionals who see a lot of publishing data cross their desks, and I asked those people if they had heard of a problem like this.
To a person, they all confirmed that they had. All spoke off the record, none with numbers. A few hinted that they couldn’t talk because of pending action.
In other words, I got the confirmation I needed, just nothing that a reputable journalist could print. Most people spoke to me on what’s called deep background, confirming my theory, and giving me some suggestions of places to look, and people to contact. Several people, mostly writers, spoke on the record, but rather than using their information in isolation, I’ve chosen to keep their statistics confidential and to only go with mine.
Frankly, what I’ve learned is this:
Right now, some—and I must emphasize some, not all—traditional publishing houses are significantly underreporting e-book sales. In some cases these sales are off by a factor of 10 or more.
This is a problem, but at the moment, not a serious one. When e-books are 10% of the market, we’re talking a relatively insignificant amount of money per author. As one long-term writer said to me, “Ever since I got into this business, I expect my publisher to screw me on the sales figures. This is no different.”
If you don’t understand that writer’s point of view, read the trust-me post I wrote a few weeks ago.
In the past, I would have agreed with that writer. But I don’t in this instance. We’re at an important moment in publishing. We have the opportunity to change the behavior of traditional publishers. We can, with an effort, get them to change their accounting practices.
The reason I started the blog post the way I did is this: I wanted to explain, before I got to the heart of this post, how traditional publishing works. I wanted understanding before I worried some of you.
Because here’s the truth: traditional publishers are not indulging in a criminal act. They’re doing the best they can out of necessity. They see no reason to spend precious dollars revamping their accounting systems to accommodate e-publishing when those dollars can be used elsewhere in the company. Especially when an accounting change will cost them money, and might lead to payouts that will hurt quarterly profits for months to come.
It’s up to writers—and writers organizations—to force publishers to allocate those scarce dollars to develop systems for accurate e-book accounting.
If you are a traditionally published author, do not—I repeat, do not—write a blistering letter to your publisher accusing him of stealing your money. Instead, contact any writers organization you belong to and point that organization to this blog.
What needs to happen is this: writers organizations need to band together and order group audits of e-book sales on behalf of their traditionally published authors. One organization cannot handle the cost of this group accounting alone. It’s better to have all of the writers organizations work in concert here.
A group audit of all the traditional publishers in various publishing divisions will force an accounting change—and that’s all we need. But we need it before e-books become the dominant way that books are sold.
If you’re a traditionally published author who has also produced some self-published e-books and you want to do more than contact your organization, do this:
1. Look over all of your royalty statements. Compare your indie e-book sales to your traditionally published e-book sales. Make sure your comparison is for the same time period. For example, do not compare January 2011 sales to January 2010.
2. Compare similar books. It’s best if you have books in the same series, some indie published and some traditionally published. If you don’t have series books, then compare books in the same genre only. Comparing romance sales to science fiction sales will not work because romance novels always outsell sf novels.
3. If you see a discrepancy, report that—with the numbers—to your writers organization. Be clear in the letter you send to your organization as to what level of involvement you want in this issue. Are you only there to provide background information? Will you take part in a group audit? Will you work on this project?
I’ll be honest. I’m not going to participate in any group action. Even though I’ve published with every single major publisher in New York, I only have two books caught in this problem. I’m more interested in getting the rights in those books reverted than I am in insignificant back royalties.
If I was still a reporter, I would spend the month or two going after this story with a vengeance. But I am not. In nonfiction, I am just your humble blogger, stirring up the pot. My career is in fiction, and I have found no problem with the publishers of my frontlist books. I also have six novels with firm deadlines that won’t allow me to take time away from fiction writing to pursue this.
So all I can offer is a blueprint.
If you’re a reporter who specializes in the publishing industry and you want to tackle this story, e-mail me privately. I’ll tell you what I can without revealing confidential sources.
If you’re a traditionally published writer, please follow the steps above.
If you’re an indie-only writer, stop gloating and for heavens’ sake don’t tell me or anyone else that this is proof traditional publishing is dead. The majority of writers don’t want to self-publish, even when told how easy and financially beneficial it is. They want a traditionally published novel.
Here’s what I believe: If a writer wants to publish traditionally and can secure a contract, then that writer should be treated fairly, with accurate sales reporting and good royalty rates.
Let me state again for the record. I do not believe that anyone in traditional publishing is setting out to screw writers on this issue. I do believe the scenario I wrote in the first 800 words of this blog: I think traditional publishers are overwhelmed and stretched to the limit. Accurate e-book sales reporting is not even on their radar.
Right now, changing the accounting system is not high on their priority list. It’s up to the writers—acting in concert through their writers organizations—to make accurate e-book sales reporting and accurate e-book royalty accounting a number-one priority in publishing houses across the country.
Let’s work together to solve this glitch before it becomes an industry-wide disaster for writers—anywhere from two to five years from now.
Last week, a few of you asked in e-mail why I have a donate button on this blog. Also, last week, this blog marked its two-year anniversary. Every Thursday for two years without a miss, I have published an article on freelancing, business, writing or publishing (and sometimes on all four of those topics). For the first 18 months, those blog posts were part of a book I was writing called The Freelancer’s Survival Guide (which, even though it’s now published, is still available for free on this website).
Initially, I had hoped to make my publishing articles into a book as well, but the industry is changing too fast. I cannot make the publishing articles into a book that will be accurate in the short time it takes to produce. So when this month rolled around, I did the numbers like I always do. When I do a strict economic analysis, I am losing about $100 per week on each post—even with donations. That’s because I can’t leverage these posts into any other income source.
However, I always ask the next question: am I getting something besides money out of these blogs? Right now, I am. I would be doing the same research, the same work, and the same analysis with or without the blog. I would be discussing the changes with my writer pals. But I would lose the week-to-week contact with writers all over the world, who comment on the blog or in e-mail, sharing their own stories.
And that would be a significant loss. It more than makes up for the financial loss. But the donate button is here to minimize some of the financial damage, and to encourage me in busy or difficult weeks to carve out the time to write my post.
I hope that answers the question. As always, I appreciate the feedback and all of the support.
“The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Filed under: Business Rusch, featured, free nonfiction, Freelancer's Survival Guide, On Writing · Tags: accounting, Freelancer's Survival Guide, publishing, royalty statements, Writers, writers organizations, writing
91 Responses to "The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements"
APP press release is here: http://www.publishers.org/press/30/
And an interesting analysis, including a bit about how much things have changed in just two months here: http://write2publish.blogspot.com/
“Because here’s the truth: traditional publishers are not indulging in a criminal act. They’re doing the best they can out of necessity.”
To me, theft is a criminal act whether through willful manipulation of the numbers or sheer negligence of keeping up with them. Either way, the publisher is keeping money that does not belong to them. A well-meaning publisher, a good person even, can still steal from an author by neglecting to maintain proper business practices. That’s how I see this. Don’t know how a court would interpret the law, precisely, but this is going to lead to litigation eventually.
Kris, I don’t think it’s the case that 10% is the only verifiable data. The issue is that that 10% includes all the business the publishers are doing. It’s not 10% of fiction sales, not according to the numbers the AAP has been reporting for a long time now. People close to publishing love to throw out that 10% figure because it makes ebooks look insignificant (it used to be 5%, or 8%, etc.), but it’s a very misleading figure because it doesn’t refer to the overall percentage of *fiction* sales.
(Epic comment warning)
On Accounting…
One thing to note is that most of the “heavy lifting” in cooperate accounting is performed by what are essentially interns and temps. The person who is downloading the file, and doing the data entry probably doesn’t even know what they are looking at, and because on the global report, the “big picture”, confirms assumptions (10% ebook sales) no one looks any closer.
On 10%…
One thing that really bugs me is that 10% number. Even if the “true number” is 25%, the number is meaningless to most authors. I’ve been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to figure out how to explain this, hope thing makes sense. In my day job I see a lot of statistics like this. Where someone is trying to provide relevant information by providing non-revelvant statistics. If I was paid as an analyst to figure out what that number meant, this is what I would look at…
What is that number exactly? 10% of the money spent by consumers buying products sold by members of the AAP is spent on ebooks. That means it’s in money earned by publishers net sales, not gross, and NOT units sold. It means it’s also the experience of some specific publishers, not small press and not self publishers. Now let’s look for things that would effect that number, i.e. WHY is it 10%, not 2% or 50%.
First thing I would look at is what markets are under represented in the membership of the AAP. If you look at the membership, it looks to me that a number of Romance (specifically digital first) and SciFi/Fantasy publishers are missing. I really don’t know, the corporate structure of the publishing industry is… well “interesting”… so it’s hard to tell.
Next thing I would look at is vender mix, how much of that number is the result of units sold by Amazon, or B&N, or Borders? Is that jump from 10% to 25% for Feb caused by Borders? Did we suddenly loose a major player selling pBooks, but that continued to sell eBooks? Did that major player stop paying the publishers, so that their numbers wouldn’t have been reported? ummm yeah, but how much did that effect those number, no clue.
I would look at Author mix how much do Patterson, King, Rowlings, Meyers, and other Best Sellers weigh the scales. How much of the total was earned by Best Sellers? If Patterson is selling 80% ebooks, does that mean that ebooks sales only account for 5% of the “non-best-sellers” revenue? If Rowlings doesn’t sell ebooks does that mean that the “non-best-sellers” percentage should be 50%? I use those as examples illustrate a point, best sellers can move that number, most midlist writers can’t. In fact if Patterson and Rowlings earn more than all the midlist put together, the midlist could be 100% ebooks and that 10% would still be 10%.
Also it’s sensitive to accounting practices, is there a middle man between the publisher and the vender, does the publisher subtract certain expenses before they book that revenue? Are those accounting practices different between eBook and pBooks?
Finally I would look at what that report completely ignores… Hocking, Konrath, Locke, Nicholson, and other self published authors. It also ignores international book sellers.
My guess, and it’s only a guess because so much of the information is missing, is that the 10% if pretty much meaningless, for the average author. When an author is trying to figure out how to manage their business, what they need to know is what to expect for the average author. That 10% doesn’t tell that author anything useful, which is very unfortunate.
And another interesting analysis of the AAP numbers, one which includes an estimate for indie/small press ebook sales that places the ebook percent over the 1/3 mark: http://ebookcomments.blogspot.com/2011/04/february-2011-ebook-sales.html
Interesting stuff.
Now, Mike Shatzkin said that the breakdown of print publishing happens when ebooks reach 20-25% – at which point, print publishers lose the economy of scale to produce books at their current cost, and have to raise price, which Shatzkin predicts pushes more people to ebooks, resulting in less print sales and higher print prices, etc. Eventually print stabilizes roughly at POD pricing, but it probably kills the mass-market paperback, or nearly so.
If ebooks really hit 29-34% in February, we’re past the Shaktzin Point already.
Just thought of a good analogy… let’s say you’re mechanic and you need a new tool that’s specific to the make of the car. And you know that nationally, Ford accounts for 10% of the auto industry revenue.
Do you buy the Ford tool for your shop? Do you have enough information?
Hi Kris,
You can read the original AAP press release here: http://www.mediabistro.com/ebooknewser/ebook-top-trade-publishing-format-in-february_b9154#more-9154
And I blogged about it here (with a link to this article, I hope you don’t mind): http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/
Dave
Great post, Kris. It really worries me as a new writer, I have less to gain and a whole lot more to lose through traditional publishing. I’m still sending novels to them, but I’m certainly pushing harder on my indie side.
Tom
Um, Dave Wisehart, that’s not a precedent at all. Amazon just licensed a subsidiary right. This is an old-fashioned deal. Once upon a time, different publishers published hardcovers but didn’t publish paperbacks. So they licensed the paperback rights to another publishing house. Apparently, Amazon doesn’t do trade papers. So they licensed the rights under to HMH. This is industry standard, and if the writers have an industry standard contract, they got 50% of the money from that sale. Again, this is no different, nothing new, nothing changed. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about here, get the Copyright Handbook.
Actually, a closer read of the article says that Amazon (like Hocking) wants to use HMH to get into more retail markets. That’s why Amazon licensed the trade rights when they could have done the book themselves. Think like a business owner, folks, because publishers/retailers certainly are.
Just Passing Through, in th 1920s, writers did not have agents.
Michael K, you are right. This will end up in court. Which is, again, why I want writers organizations to do this, and not individual writers. If the organizations do it, the court cases will have an impact on all writers. If a single writer does it, it will only have an impact on that writer.
Shawn, I wish I knew.
Kevin, thanks for all the links. It wouldn’t surprise me if we hit 25-35%.
And again, everyone complaining about the statistic, I only use the industry statistics in this blog. I am using information I can verify, because I was (and still am at heart) a reporter. It may be that e-book sales are higher, but when I wrote that piece (2 whole days ago), the only number I could verify was 10%. And if you don’t understand why that’s a bogus number, even if it’s the only verifiable one, read Christian’s truly excellent comments on how statistics can be misused. He’s right; numbers can lie, if someone knows how to manipulate them.
David, yep, litigation will happen. But in civil court, most likely, not criminal. There are different legal standards, which is all I’m talking about here.
David G., of course I don’t mind that you cited this article. I want the news to spread, so I appreciate everyone letting others know about this.
Mike Shatzkin, though he doesn’t use the work “precedent,” seems to think the Amazon/Houghton deal is something new:
“We’re in a period of transition. Houghton’s deal, just like Barry Eisler’s decision two weeks ago to decline a half-million bucks from a house so he could self-publish, are first times for business practices that will soon be normal.”
http://www.idealog.com/blog/its-official-putting-books-in-stores-is-a-subsidiary-right
If Amazon is now licensing print-only rights to a traditional publisher, that seems to open the door for similar deals with smaller publishers (like, say, WMG).
So there does seem to be a way around traditional publishers’ refusal to break out ebook rights. Publish the ebook first, through your own publishing company, then license the print version as a subsidiary right to get into the big chains.
And while that’s always been an option in theory, I hadn’t yet noticed this happening in practice.
As for the Copyright Handbook, I do own it but haven’t looked at it in years. It’s in a box somewhere because I’m moving, but I should probably give it another look in light of the new publishing landscape.
David
Just had a rather chilling thought while running errands… Well chilling for the publishing industry. What if the numbers are correct? What if, for whatever reason, Kris is ten times better than a publisher at moving units? It could be price, 2.99/4.99 vs 9.99/12.99? It could be fan loyalty. But what if it isn’t an accounting mistake? What if for every 30 units a publisher can sell, the author can sell 300? What would THAT mean to the publishing industry?
See I can write a non-epic comment!
It is something new, David, just not what you said in your first post. Now print rights are subsidiary rights to e-rights. That’s what’s new.
Amazon started its print arm because of the success of e-rights. These books were picked up by Amazon print because the e-books sold well. You do realize that those books in that deal have already sold e-rights to Kindle exclusively, right? So the e-rights are sold now. They became exclusive when Amazon did the print rights. So it’s new in that e-rights and success in e-publishing initiated these Amazon book deals, but HMH deal is just an old-fashioned subsidiary rights deal.
And I stand by my earlier statement. Right now, no traditional publisher–on the primary deal (not the subsidiary rights deal) will make a deal without e-rights. That is still a deal breaker for the primary deal. Even with Amazon.
Great post! And you’re so right: this is the ULTIMATE battle for writers: if they lose it, e-rights will remain elusive forever. I appreciate the pains of traditional publishers – and I’ve blogged about their problems recently several times (see for example http://claudenougat.blogspot.com/2011/04/is-traditional-publishing-headed-for.html)but I’m still convinced that no one is making gifts to anyone.
So e-rights reversal is not in the cards but e-rights re-negotiation might still be possible. For example, giving traditional publishers e-rights for a limited period of time – say 5 years.
Because time here is of the essence. E-rights are “forever” (or at least some 70 years)and that’s the point that should be discussed and fought for…
Great post and I just tweeted about it!
I agree with all you say and would add that e-rights reversal is not in the cards, but what about re-negotiating their duration? Say give them for a period of 5 years?
Because e-rights are, as Konrath and Eisler say, “forever” (or at least 70 years – a very long time) and it’s not fair that traditional publishers should cash in on such a long period when their input has been so small (e-pub costs are minimal)…
Eek! What a mess. One thing I love about your posts is that you’re not “I hate big publishers” – you understand and explain the deeply entrenched problems in the industry.
But every time I read one of your posts, I end up happier that I’m going the indie route for now. (Although I know that getting reliable sales figures from the various distributors isn’t easy-peasy either…)
Actually, I think the numbers aren’t that far off. There’s a big difference between an author pushing backlist in ebooks reasonably prices, say @2.99 and a trad publisher with backlist they do nothing about selling from $6.99 to $12.99.
My indie sales of my backlist in one week equal the total of what Random House is doing in six months. So much so, they’re reverting rights to me because, frankly, they don’t care.
Print rights are indeed going to become subsidiary to erights. Amazon just made a 10 book deal with Houghton Mifflin.
The worm has turned.
What will happen is not the death of publishers, but a merging of various forms into something new.
The real key is the 25% royalty rate from traditional publishers. That can’t stand.
Claude, just checked out your post. Had to scan because I’m on a deadline this am, but I marked it to return. Looks really fascinating. Like what you said about e-rights expanding the market. I agree. I also agree that we need a sunset clause. Right now we have a velocity clause, which isn’t the same thing. I’m pretty sure, as others have pointed out, that eventually print publishers won’t have the clout that they have at the moment, and will need to give on e-rights percentages. At least, that’s what I hope.
Alex, the more I write about this, the more I am convincing myself to do a lot of this indie. Although my two current frontlist publishers are still helping the series they publish, so as a fast writer, I feel I can work with them, and not lose a lot of profit on my own. I’m doing both indie & traditional, and at the moment, it’s working. (I say at the moment because things are changing so dang fast!)
I thought of that, Bob, which is why I checked with other writers and industry professionals before writing this post. Honestly, the number of sales of my e-books from the company that started this for me are not in line with a similarly priced book in the same genre from another traditional publishing house. In that case–and this should scare you–that tradtionally published book outsold the books in the traditionally published series by 50 times in that same time period. In other words, that traditionally published book, price “high” ($6.99) sold 1500 copies in that time period as reported by the publisher–also a traditional publisher. The three traditionally published books, in that time period, were my bestsellers on Amazon, going 1, 2, & 3 for months. The novellas were at the bottom of my “bestselling” list during that time.
So no, the numbers are not in line with reality, even if you believe that the publisher’s price was too high. (It was $7.99 & 6.99. The other book I refer to above was 6.99. The novellas were 2.99). Other professional writers have reported to me that they have indie books selling in that time period that sold more per day than this same publishing house reported for the entire six-month period. These problems do not exist in all houses (the newer ones seem to have a better handle on the accounting). But this house in particular is seriously, seriously underreporting e-book sales.
You are right about subsidiary rights. Fascinating the way things are changing.
I hope some writers with clout negotiate away that 25%. I had hoped Hocking would do it. I haven’t heard if she did. I do know of other good-selling indie writers who walked away from deals because the publisher would not give them more than 25% in e-rights.
[...] with receiving royalties from print publishers for ebook sales on Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog. The same argument works with printed book sales but Kristine does not talk about [...]
Kris,
It’s good you give them the benefit of the doubt and ascribe it to old systems. But the reports you’re having a hard time with–look, they’re just reports. The fact is that the data is in the distributor’s database. It would take a programmer familiar with their system very little time to create a report that pulls the data and formats it in hardcopy or a file format that can be uploaded to another system. Heck, what they’d probably do is take the report you’re now getting and tweak it. Which means we’re talking probably less than a day’s worth of labor. And if it’s just a dump of some fields that are then uploaded, we’re talking half a day’s labor to create the routine. And then another half day to create a routine that automatically loads it in the publishers system. If Mr. Big Conglomerate wants that data from their distributors, it’s easy to get it. The cost is miniscule to their total budget.
Yep, John, I know that. But I’ve talked to folks who work(ed) in large corporations. Sometimes the simplest things for small businesses and regular folks are hard for a large organization for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual work. Changing systems inside an organization isn’t as simple as doing. You have to convince the boss, find the funding, and do the work on top of everything else. The difficulty isn’t with the actual doing. It’s with the human relationships and the corporate policies. I watched publishing deal with the advent of the PC from inside corporate publishing. Something I learned in a day took the companies I was familiar with three years to get right. It was ridiculous and not at all uncommon.
As a database professional, I have to agree with John: it’s NOT THAT HARD. I work for a public school district in a large city. Strapped for cash? We’ve forgotten what black ink looks like. Changing systems? Every year my job looks different, thanks to rapidly evolving state and federal reporting requirements and the fact that our student information system just got bought by a competitor. But we roll with it; we don’t have a choice. The Big Six+ need to roll with it too.
That’s exactly my point. Someone has decided that it’s not worth the miniscule $$$ required to report this accurately. I’m talking from my experience with a company that sells ERP software to fortune 500 companies and helps them implement. It’s always the soft side that’s the big issue. I’ve seen the politics and approvals etc. But the actual software system and even the bureaucracy is not the issue. It’s someone who has consciously decided to report inaccurately.
I know, John & Tiel. That’s why I’m telling writers to contact their organizations and set up a huge audit, one that can’t be ignored. Because if publishers know writers will not only track but take action if their royalty statements are wrong on this, then the publishers will invest the miniscule money to get this right. Until then–as I said in my original piece–it’s not worth their time or limited resources to do.
Some of this is the fault of writers. In the past, as writers got screwed on this issue or that issue, writers did not stand up as a group and say, “Enough!” Individuals, like Jerry Weinberg below, did. But their action only had an impact on them and when they told other writers, the other writers just shrugged and said, “I can’t do that.” That’s why I’m insisting on action.
And after getting Yonatan Zunger’s comment below, I did some investigating into the exact terms of the post-Enron law, Sarbanes-Oxley, in particular Section 4. Yonatan Zunger is right: the failure to keep accurate internal books is now criminal. It wasn’t before, when 90% of publishing companies started their screwy royalty practices. I can tell you that in the years after Enron, no publishing house I worked with in what is incorrectly called The Big Six changed the way they produced their royalty statements. So that means that most, if not all, are in some kind of violation of SOX. (Yes, I’ve let several organizations & all the lawyers I contacted for the article know about this.)
We are living in interesting times.
Did more digging, found out that SOX will not apply to some of the so-called Big Six, since they’re not publically traded here in the US. Others are, however. So to be clear, SOX only applies to corporations publically traded in the US. Since I’m not naming names here, you’ll have to dig that information out on your own, but it’s not hard to find. Publishers Weekly publishes a list every year of the publishing corporations, their conglomerates, and where they are based/traded/etc.
I guess the silver lining in all of this is that, ultimately, I think writers come out on top. Of course you’re right that traditionally published authors need to be on top of their royalty statements, but in the end I see the market allowing for writers to get out the work that they want to write and profiting from their work. I guess my point is that I’m optimistic even when things look bad, as they do in this case!
I think you’re right, AE. Things will get resolved one way or another. And that resolution should benefit writers. I still think this is a great time to be a writer.
Ma’am, off topic but I think the other places that it might be more appropriate are full of tumbleweeds and dry dust: How many words should a ebook be? And how many words should a eshortstory be? (I understand that it’s more than likely “to each their own”, but being as you are a professional I figure what you say is akin to the Pope giving the okay to eat fish on Friday.)
Thanks for your time ma’am.
You already guessed the answer, Just Passing Through. An ebook can be as long as you want it to be. Be sure to charge more for longer books than shorter ones.
Short stories can go from short shorts (under 1K) to 10K. Over that, and you’re in novelette/novella categories, which I would price a little higher because they’re too long to read in one sitting. (An hour is what I figure one sitting to be.)
Those are my rules. They mean nothing to the next professional writer over.
Thanks for the suggestion ma’am. And I’m glad that you said what you said, because I had been looking up the question on the ol’ Internet and came across sight after sight with varied opinions on length but the one thing in common they had was that it shouldn’t be too long because people don’t like to wade through that many pages. Yeah, too many pages! Like it’s a pain in the keister to read a book! So, it’s nice to get a professional’s opinion on length.
(mutters to self walking away: too many pages! like it’s such a bad thing to read a long book! Jimminey Christmas!)
Speaking from the perspective of a writer with a day-job as a corporate consultant, I wanted to toss one more thought into the mix: business decisions are often made on the basis of “what do we have to spend/what can we get away with not doing to save money” (a simplistic way of putting it, I know, but that’s often what it boils down to). Now combine that thinking with the surge in the ebook market occurring during the extreme belt-tightening of the current economy, and it beomes pretty obvious that corporations are going to avoid putting even a little extra money into changing their accounting systems for as long as they possibly can. It’s not just a question of how easy/hard it is to implement the change, or whether it’s right/wrong for them to continue to report using old models. If there isn’t enough pressure driving the proposed changes to force them to spend their closely-guarded, limited funds (limited in the corporate sense, that is), the change won’t happen. Another good reason why the idea of numerous writers banding together through their organizations to pound at the doors of the ivory towers will have greater potential for getting the attention of the decision-makers upstairs than an individual writer going it alone.
Thanks, Lauryn, for succinctly saying what I’ve been trying to say all week. What she said, y’all.
[...] another front, Kristine Kathryn Rusch has a follow-up to her post about royalty statements. I wrote about the original article earlier this week. As I said then, [...]
And then we have the next mystery: Why can’t or won’t the digitally savvy ebook distributors create and or part with accurate sales data in the first place? I’ve seen on Amazon where one of my books, which has sold ONE COPY of record so far, has outranked its predecessor, which is still selling several hundred copies a week. Not a good feeling, brothers and sisters. I can’t clamor for my publisher to fix what’s amiss farther up the food chain.
Grace, figuring out Amazon’s sales rankings is like…I don’t know. Hard to fathom. But one thing that is included in the rankings are how many times the sample gets downloaded. Don’t check hourly. Just follow the pattern. It becomes clear after a while that sometimes things blip up and then go away.
What’s great about Amazon, Pubit and the rest is that you actually do know how many copies you’ve sold–the day you’ve sold them. In traditional publishing, you might know what you’ve sold three years later. Maybe.