Indie writers: Read this post now in case you decide to get a traditional publisher to publish your paper copies. Especially if you had (or will have) an agent negotiate the deal. Because much of what I’m going to discuss here applies to paper books, not ebooks. This is one of those areas where you, the indie who has gone hybrid, is most likely to get screwed.
In fact, this area is where writers have been getting screwed since some publisher thought to change their contracts in the last 1990s—and then all the other publishers followed suit. (How is this not collusion? Oh…Department of Justice…)
Discount clauses always send a ting of discomfort through me, and not just because the things are damaging to writers’ careers and writers’ incomes. But because they are one of those let’s-screw-the-writer clauses that got added into contracts in the past twenty years or so.