Awesome! What an interesting guy.
Or what Prince did. People made fun of him for changing his name to a symbol, but I thought it was brilliant.JRHenderson said:Isn't this cool? It reminds me of what Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks did in 1919 to take control of their own work...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Artists
It may be a moot point. Wool was showing up in bookstores as a Createspace POD book, even in Barnes and Noble. You may not want a print-only deal at all. (Did you see the thread about B&N closing a ton of stores?)ShortySmalls said:Seems to me like it's all or nothing right now, right? 25% or nothing at all.
Trailblazers like you, Hugh, have been able to keep your ebook rights but you're one of the rare few who have been able to do so. How do we smaller potatoes do the same if our product is not as successful as Wool?
(I'm not being facetious or bitter. This is a genuine question. I really want to know! lol)
Would you mind elaborating on this, please? I don't know enough to make sense of it.Hugh Howey said:My hope is that we'll see a different revolution other than print-only deals. The real solution is terms of license, which is the holy grail of book deals. This is what foreign publishers already offer in their contracts (for everyone, not just blockbusters). US and UK publishers will need to adopt this when they realize that it isn't fair to authors (and no one will sign) now that books are in print (digitally and physically) FOREVER. The 6-month window of old is gone. Terms of licensing for 5-7 years is a fair deal, and my bet is that most authors will have these contracts 10 years from now (hopefully sooner).
Wow. I had no idea that clauses worked like that. I'm glad you explained it as I had seen the video yesterday, but wasn't exactly sure of the importance.Hugh Howey said:Or what Prince did. People made fun of him for changing his name to a symbol, but I thought it was brilliant.
I will add this: Joe is wrong to take this out on Random House. It's a problem created by all the major publishers, their agents, and big-name authors. A ton of lucrative contracts out there have these automatic clauses in them that go into effect if anyone at the same publishing house is offered a higher digital royalty rate. Some include provisions for rates at other houses. That means if Random House gave Dave Adams 50% royalty rates for his next book (which he totally deserves, btw), they would have to then give 50% to every author who had one of these clauses in their contracts!
It's a huge problem that agents and authors have helped create. If I were to sell my digital rights, I would ask that this clause NOT be put in there, simply on principle. Publishers should have the freedom to move their pay scale up and down as they see fit. Right now, they can't. Not because they don't want to, but because it would have a much larger effect than anyone realizes.
Solutions are possible, I'm sure, but only after a steady stream of losses. That's when contracts will be renegotiated en masse. (or something like that).
I can't speak to this specific author because obviously he isn't mine and I don't know the particulars of his contracts. In general, companies view all variants of a product as the same product. If a toothpaste company puts out a new line of toothpaste in peppermint, ocean blast, arctic cool, and orange (same formula, but different flavors) they treat all of those flavors as a single product when determining their price structure. They aren't going to say "Well, we already made all of our money back on the peppermint, so since all we did was change the flavoring in the others we'll sell those cheaper." They will track the different flavors to make sure that the cost/benefit of having the separate flavor is profitable, but they aren't going to apply different pricing to each flavor simply because the main flavor earned out.Soothesayer said:Since I'm not in any of the traditional publishing gigs, maybe someone can explain to me why they think they NEED 75% of the revenues from his books if they are electronic? What possible costs could amount to that level of vampirism?
Publishers take 75% of their authors' royalties because that's the way they have always operated. As Julie explained, they operate with a lot of overhead.Soothesayer said:Since I'm not in any of the traditional publishing gigs, maybe someone can explain to me why they think they NEED 75% of the revenues from his books if they are electronic? What possible costs could amount to that level of vampirism?