[Hitch]

Originally Posted by crossi

Practically speaking the vast majority of books are published - once. They are on the shelves a few months then pushed off to make room for the next month's crop of books. Any money the author gets will come from those few months, year at the most. Then because of the long copyright the publisher who owns it won't publish it again and no one else can either. The book simply disappears and the author gets nothing. With a more reasonable copyright the author could at least spend a little time converting it to an ebook and at least make a few sales himself and the book wouldn't be lost in publishing limbo.

"Publishing Rights" are not the same as "length of copyright"

I think you're conflating copyright with rights, but more on that down the post.

Back in the Old Days, and the MidLister "Death Spiral"

For dog's years, back in Ye Olden Days of print publishing, a midlist author could count on continued printed editions of their books for quite a while. This was, not even 20 years ago, the way most legacy-pubbed authors lived. They received a steady, if not huge, stream of royalties over time. Once that had a few titles up there, those steady smaller royalties could support them, if not lavishly, at least, reasonably. Library purchases made up a good amount, believe it or not. This mostly worked from both viewpoints--the publisher's and the author's--because the publisher had already spent the biggest chunk of money the first time around (editing and the like), and only had to spend enough for a smallish second print run, then third, and so on, and thus, the author had a nice stream over time.

However, due to the economic pressures I mentioned in my last long post (as opposed to the first doozy-in-length), that model became increasingly hard for publishers to maintain, and they started dropping midlist authors like hotcakes. There were simply too many midlisters that didn't get read "enough," had a higher rate of unsold books, didn't earn out, and the publishers stopped making that second investment (of printing) in them. Too many discounted books, really, is the short of it. The publishers, with ever-increasing disparities between best-sellers and not-bestsellers, started to cut where they had the least return--the no-sellers and then the lower-level midlisters, and now ever more midlisters.

You'll have particularly noticed this in the fantasy and sci-fi genres--if you read Ace, Tor or Baen or the like, you'll have seen an ever-decreasing amount of shelf-space for those "old reliable" midlist authors you used to read. Many of them just got dropped altogether by their publishers, forcing them to seek out new publishers, or in some cases, create a new pseudonym and submit to new publishers, to reinvent themselves as a new property. Somewhere, there are some good blogs using/reusing the "Death Spiral" as a title, about this very phenomenon.

Meanwhile, Publishing Rights versus Copyrights

Anyway, back to the instant topic: what you've said doesn't really have anything to do with the length of copyright, per se; it's about the term of rights that the author sells to the publisher. Nowadays, that's usually 7 years, and while many authors were fortunate enough to finagle contracts that didn't include electronic rights, in the 90's and early 2000's, of course, that's a hard sell today. I can't think of any author I've met who wasn't able to get their rights back after 7 years, or sometimes, even sooner.

You realistically cannot expect a publisher to put the kind of money and effort into a book that they do, and then be willing to give all the equity created, however much, back to the author in some ridiculously short period of time, say, a year. A 7-year period for rights seems to me to be a decent-enough length of time for both parties, although we may even see this change to something more like 5, in the current high-speed, short-attention-span climate. That might suit both sides better. (On the other hand--look at late bloomers like GOT.)

Generally, there seems to be a conflation here, in this thread, between the length of copyright versus the duration of rights owned by a publishing house. Many of the posts about books disappearing into the ether seem to indicate/imply that books owned by corporations, outright, can disappear into the ether for all of eternity (a hopeful reader's lifetime, anyway), for the copyright period of X (life + 50, whatever it ends up as, if it even changes). But the vast majority of authors do not sell their book rights for the duration of the copyright period in toto. They sell the print rights, e-book rights, audiobook rights, foreign rights, etc., for a short and explicit contract duration. (Obviously, we're not discussing work-for-hire here, in numerous ways.)

For the purposes of this thread, we should distinguish between an older style of publishing--when, for example, someone might sell the entire rights of a short that they wrote to Black Mask--and today's publishing paradigm, or at least, publishing after 1950 or thereabouts, because conflating the two just confuses the issue.

...Versus the "Death Star" Scenario

I say to you that this situation will become worse--more authors will sell their entire rights to a corporation (oh, the horror!) for the duration, if some type of "cut off at death" scenario arises. (The "Death Star" scenario. When you die, your royalties explode into nothingness.)

I've worked for deferred payment in many, many instances (in my previous life developing 5-star hotels--I would get a very hefty chunk of my payment when the hotel opened), and I certainly would NEVER agree to some idiotic scenario in which, if I died, the money that was owed to me suddenly wasn't payable to my heirs. That's just...the kindest word I can use is "ridiculous." My web developer works that way, somewhat--50% upfront, the balance upon completion (quick aside: I've found that this tends to actually get web work done within a year of the originally-agreed due date, rather than 2, 3 or 5 years down the road); should I not pay his family the 50% if he completes the work and then gets hit by a bus? Man, there's a deal.

When folks think about these things, they need to contemplate it without the wacky tabaccy. Just because someone a) essentially works on commission, selling one item at a time, and b) takes this commission in a deferred way, over a very, very long time, does not mean that somehow, someway, the monies he earned when he created the thing in the first place aren't owed to him if he DIES. They're owed to his estate, just as my deferred payments would have been and my web guy's payment would be. I absolutely don't understand how anyone here can justify such a silly argument.

A sculptor can receive his payment for his year, or 6 months, or whatever, when he sells his work. Ditto a painter. A dancer sells his work show-to-show. Most film folks get a payment that is hardly shabby, compared to what the average working slob gets, plus, if they are good, a small piece of the action (more royalties, which, by the way, CERTAINLY get paid to their heirs if they die--think about Law & Order, for an example).

The Door To Door Salesman...

Only authors are really forced to sell their wares "door to door," one copy at a time, and to wait however long it takes for as many people possible in the entire world to buy a copy. Can any of you imagine, trying to sell all your time--let's say, to make it easy, a year's worth of time--door-to-door, a minute at a time? Particularly on some type of deferred schedule?


It would be helpful if we could stop confusing length of copyright with publishing rights. If we want to discuss publishing rights, then let's discuss that. But length of copyright really has very little to do with the publishers, except in unusual situations, e.g., when rights are sold by a family to a corporation or placed in a trust. This isn't typical, and if we're going to discuss this intelligently, we ought to distinguish which type of scenario we're complaining about. Otherwise, the whole muddle starts to make no sense, as in when we conflate 75 years to mean that "a work will disappear forever because some evil corporation will never publish it again."

Just my dime's worth ($0.10), this time. I apologize for the length (truly, I do), but this can't be discussed with any productivity if we keep commingling the terms and the legalities.

Hitch