Hey, let's hear it for the Brits!
While the AG talks (softly) about publisher abuses but spends its time and effort slavishly defending the five year old conspiracy (a moot point by now) their UK counterparts are actually doing something about tradpub misbehavior:
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/so...uggling-317464
Quote:
The Society of Authors is seeing a number of "once well-known authors" apply for assistance to its Pension Fund, intended to help those who have fallen on hard times - when with fairer contracts allowing rights reversion they could be making an income from their backlist, SoA chief executive Nicola Solomon has said.
Speaking at the FutureBook Author Day this morning (Monday 30th November), Solomon said that the SoA was now earning around £7,000 a year per title from republishing the work of novelist Catherine Gaskin, who left her estate to the author body. When she died, all her work was out of print, but the SoA was able to revert the works. That £7,000-per-title sum is far more than the Pension Fund is able to offer in its bursaries, which are around £2,000 a year, Solomon said, "yet many of our authors are unable to persuade publishers to revert the rights to even quite moribund titles."
Reversion clauses are just one of the areas where publishing contracts are unfair to authors, Solomon said, reminding her audience that the typical annual earnings of authors has fallen to £11,000 a year. "The terms publishers are asking for are no longer fair or sustainable," Solomon told the Author Day delegates.
|
Quote:
Solomon repeated her call for the government to pass legislation to protect authors, in line with the Consumer Rights Act, and in line with laws in many other European countries, with the SoA currently engaged on campaigning for so-called CREATOR contracts, which are clearer, offering fair remuneration, operate a "use it or lose it" principle on rights exploitation, have limited contracts terms, recognise author ownership of their work and have fair and understandable clauses on accounting.
|
Their proposal actually sounds sensible:
http://www.societyofauthors.org/soa-...-writers-group
At a minimum, they are focusing government attention in the right direction: predatory contracts. And pointing out the viability of avoiding those contracts altogether.