Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Yep. If a publisher invests money in an author and makes them a household name, then obviously they're going to want some return on that investment. Some authors seem to want it both ways: use a publisher to get known, and then jump ship to make more money.
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But what about the authors who know they'll never be household names--say because they write historical fiction or litfic?
What do publishers bring to the table that justifies a life-of-copyright contract with low royalties, abusive first-refusal and non-compete clauses, and deep-discount royalty de-escalators? A 4-digit payday loan?
"Don't like the contract, don't sign it" was a great strategy for tradpub when "don't sign it" meant "go home and forget about it" because there was no alternative and, because there was no alternative, nobody dared challenge the contract terms. Today? Not so much.
People challenging tradpub predatory contracts are actually trying to help publishers adapt to the new reality so they can survive in an age of transparency and true professional contracted publishing services (not to be confused with Author Solutions and their many potempkin fronts) and don't end up as yet another imprint in the megacorp publishing empire.
The key is transparency.
To those in Traditional Publishing, indie publishing looks like a shadow industry because they can't see its sales, only the effect on their sales and submissions.
But to authors, indie publishing is transparent as glass:
- professional (original) covers can be bought for as little as $300, though $500 is more typical.
- professional editors? $500 is typical, $1500 if the manuscript needs majir "nurturing".
- layout and design? A few hundred at most; for text only genre books, you can buy a template to reuse for an entire series for a one time fee.
- marketing? There's dozens of services available at reasonable prices and one, Bookbub, is so effective it is being flooded with BPH titles...
- print editions? Access to B&M bookstores? Aside from the fact that many tradpub contracts no longer guarantee an actual print edition or the shrinking self space issue, there is the fact that the major distributors are now offering print distribution to indies on reasonable terms,in some cases through their own subsidiaries.
Everything tradpub offers can be obtained, unbundled, without the predatory contracts, as one-time upfront purchases from the same people working for the corporate publishers. Many used to work at the corporate publishers and got laid off. Tradpub is not the only road to market anymore so walking away is very viable... for the author. For the (smaller) publishers, though, it is poison. And in some regions they are already falling like flies.
The big corporate publishers have big backlist catalogs (making up 30% of their sales these days) but smaller publishers don't have that option; they need a stream of new content to stay in business and there is an entire cohort of new authors who are simply bypassing the entire traditional pathway and ramping up their careers on their own. Some of them might become successful enough to be offered tradpub contracts but the ones who don't laugh off the offers are going to be very expensive to sign. Not a game for smaller publishers.
If publishing isn't to evolve into "megacorp vs a million indies" the midsize publishers really need to purge their contracts of those toxic terms before it is too late. And right now, too late is already on the horizon...