The UK Society of authors has something to say about dealing with tradpubs:
http://www.societyofauthors.org/soa-...-writers-group
Quote:
Solomon noted that legislation is needed to protect creators, who suffer from a power imbalance when negotiating with publishers:
Authors are not in a strong negotiating position. Publishers are often large multinationals while authors typically work alone. Especially at the start of their careers they may have little or no advice and are thrilled to be offered publishing contracts. Creators frequently need to negotiate with monopolies or with dominant players in highly specialised markets, such as scientific publishers. Individual creators are therefore at an inherent disadvantage when negotiating the terms of their contracts.
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Quote:
Philip Pullman, President of the Society of Authors, backed the call, saying:
Authors often work in a solitary way, and our main task is very different from negotiating contracts and rights. It's not always easy to see our way through the thickets of legal language that grow so vigorously around the commercial exploitation of our work, nor to know how our own position with regard to our rights compares with others. When a paper like the EU Study shows how much worse the position of authors is in the UK than in many other countries, we can only welcome it strongly, and urge publishers to comply with its recommendations. The essential point is that the balance of fairness has tilted the wrong way, and it's often not only the work that's being exploited - its creators are too. It's time for that to stop, and for authors to be rewarded here as justly as they are elsewhere.
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Tradpub may not be down to the level of child labor and sweatshops but neither are they doing their captives any favors.
Do note that a big bone of contention is rights squatting and rights reversion.
Again, the issue isn't one small publisher (or ten) but the "industry standard" contract the majority of authors are stuck with on "take it or leave it" terms. In the olden days, they had no choice.
Now they do, mostly thanks to ebooks.
That needs to be celebrated not denigrated.
More books for readers, more power to authors.
This is bad?