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Originally Posted by Blue Tyson
BigBestseller?
Depends who, perhaps. If I was Stephen King, I'd possibly be considering keeping all electronic rights for myself, and selling to whoever I wanted to.
Rowling's agent somehow needs to beat some sense into her, although of course she has enough money to do whatever crazy she wants.
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I must admit that I had assumed a moderately lower level of bestseller than King or Rowling. They -- along with a very few other authors -- are special cases because they sell
so extremely well that they can dictate to publishers, rather than the other way around. I was thinking of the next notch down of bestseller -- the folks who regularly hit the bestseller lists and are certainly well-known authors, but who aren't selling multiple-million copies in hardcover for every new book. You know, the top 1% or .5% of authors, not the top 10 authors. Obviously I should have said so.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blue Tyson
In fact, if there were a group of authors like this peeved with publishing they could go their own way, electronically. That's possibly what makes them the most money on that part. That means they get all the money, minus whatever expenses and bookshop cuts if they wanted to sell at Fictionwise, Amazon, etc.
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For authors who are not at the absolute top of publishing, getting their electronic rights back is nearly impossible. It does happen, but it's extremely rare. It seems that bean-counters prefer to hold on to rights they aren't using -- and may not even have a plan to use! -- rather than to give or sell those rights back to an author who plans to actually use them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blue Tyson
[SNIP a bit]
Asking nicely hasn't worked, nor simple explanation.
Neither has a bunch of smart people giving them advice. Some more lambasting earlier might have been good for them.
The Tor example is a good case study of executive incompetence as far as their corporate masters, certainly!  3 years later... |
Asking nicely, simple explanation, advice, and lambasting have yet to be tried
in the venues where they might actually have some effect. Remember -- we readers are not the customers that the publishers have to worry about. They must be concerned first with the corporate buyers for the big bookstores and for Amazon -- readers come after that. The proper venue for asking, and explaining, and the rest is inside the publishing industry -- at conferences and business meetings, in industry trade magazines, in author and agent groups (can you say Writer's Guild or SFWA?), and such places. Fussing on the net, or at enthusiast web-sites, or even in the general press is essentially invisible. It sucks, but that's the way it is.
As for the Tor example, it certainly
was a good case study of executive incompetence. And that incompetence appears to have been addressed (mostly) by Holtzbrinck's new senior management.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blue Tyson
How many industries take years to get small deals done like that, in general?
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It happens all over the place. Even in the tech industry. In fact, small deals often take longer than large ones.
Xenophon