[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by da_jane

That might be true for Baen, but I don't believe it is an industry wide phenomenon. I believe that Harlequin's e-rights are quite punitive to the author and S&S wanted to stage a rights grab similar to what Harlequin has had. There was much discussion of the S&S "rights grab" over the late spring. There are also different royalty rates for some authors for ebook sales and print sales. You are right that ebook and print sales are treated differently.

I remember much fuss over the S&S "rights grab" in the spring. I also remember thinking that it indicated that S&S didn't really get it yet.

Originally Posted by da_jane

I.e., some authors are resistant to ebook sales because those sales are not reported to any of the major bestseller lists and thus ebook sales can hurt an authors' chances of getting on those lists (which is hugely important and not simply because of the recognition but because being on the list can propel sales).

I also haven't seen any publisher, outside of Baen, purchase non-exclusive rights to ebooks, particularly the epublishers. Where would their profit be then?

Not being reported to any of the major bestseller lists is an issue. Of course, the NYT bestseller list doesn't use anything that even resembles a statistical sampling of sales. They gather non-audited reports from a basket of booksellers they've chosen, with a definite emphasis away from any "genre fiction" (e.g. SF/Fantasy, Romance, Westerns, etc.). They're ripe for the kind of revolution that cash-register scanning brought to the music business. Remember when Country music "suddenly" took over the pop charts? That was due to a switch from NYT-style reporting to actual data from cash registers.

I'm sure that it would be easy for sellers of electronic books to report to any of the bestseller lists that would be willing to take their reports. Certainly Baen & Fictionwise must already collect the necessary information in order to pay royalties...


As for ePublishers taking non-exclusive rights. Well, in addition to Baen, there's Fictionwise and Sony (at least) who do that. Of course Fictionwise and Sony aren't publishers, they're retailers.

Baen switched to non-exclusive rights partly to do an end-run around the problem of e-sales and rights reversions, and partly because Eric Flint challenged Jim Baen to "put his money where his mouth is" and really demonstrate that his low-cost no-DRM model is the winner -- by letting authors sell their books to other vendors who are clueless (by comparison) and see what happens.

So far, the word is that authors get a better per-copy royalty from Fictionwise (they say), but the royalty checks from Baen for e-sales are MUCH larger in aggregate.

If you want a bunch of the low-down on these issues, go read Eric Flint's essays on copyright and digital publishing at Jim Baen's Universe. They're archived in full (and free!) at Baen's Columns Archive.