…and some regular publishers are putting out e-books without the right to do so, not to my total surprise. That’s quite annoying. You’d think they’d at least read the contract.
But then I’ve been in this business long enough to know a lot of things are done pending loud protest from persons affected.
CJ,
I, for one, would like to know which publishers, if you can share that information, so that I can avoid them …
Thank you, BeulahBelle, but I think in most cases it is fecklessness—not checking. In one case, I’m pretty sure it’s ‘until you stop us’—but I’ll take care of that. Probably I should delete the post soon, because I was pretty annoyed when I wrote it, but judiciously, I should just take care of it and not say anything. Most publishers are honest; but they get swept up in a notice from the mega-corp like ‘let’s do e-books’ and don’t assign anybody to go through the contracts and find out which e-books they CAN do.
Getting suspicious about one of my publishers… One of them reverted the rights within three months of making contact. The other (12 months after the request) have yet to do so. And this is the publisher that recently announced unilaterally that their old contracts gave the e-publishing rights.
Cute. One of my favorite clauses states that if the book is earning less than 250 dollars a year, it reverts all rights, and the others that do have e-rights state the split is to be 50/50, me and the publisher, who, right now, is paying me the standard print rate—if at all. I think I will have that 250 item inserted on ALL my contracts henceforward. It saves a lot of arguments. Another good thing is the dead-man-switch, ie, ‘failing’ their response by a certain date after a certified letter—it reverts. No publishing house ever gets organized enough to answer a letter.
I’ll be writing a letter of my own, pdq.
A related article:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/01/ebook.piracy/
There WAS a break-in at a California bookstore once—in which the only item taken was a copy of The Faded Sun. I can only imagine the thief must have used it as a doorstop, because if he’d read it, I’d sincerely hope he’d have developed a sense of deep embarrassment for his behavior: I write about honest people.
Writers make, at most, a tenth of a paper book’s cover price, often less. Sure, these people are ripping off the big faceless corporation—but that’s not the point. The guy who created that book doesn’t get paid for what they stole—and they stole his little percentage from him. That’s pretty poor thanks for the creator, I say. And even the big faceless corporation is thousands of people who have electric bills to pay. Readers like these will kill what’s left of the book industry, and then what will they put on their Kindles? Random selections from the Internet?
I was wondering about the search results I got for you while looking through the Kindle store. Are those kosher? They seem like a random bunch in any case. I was thinking that at least your latest books might be on there (at least they would be new enough to have a stance on ebooks one way or another), but the results I got were surprising.
They are pretty random. Amazon and Fictionwise both put out copies of my DAW books they didn’t have the rights to put out. That got corrected. I was never paid for them, insult to injury. Still haven’t been paid. Amazon is distributing some Harper books Harper could theoretically get the right to issue, but the contract states it can only be done with my approval—and did they ask me? No, they did not ask. I think I will have to take that up with them. Plus Remer says the copy of Fortress of Owls is rife with corrupt text. To my knowledge nobody else should be offering these books. If they are—they are not paying me, and never have.
That’s probably my biggest complaint with my Kindle. A lot of the mainstream type books I read seem to have had the red carpet rolled out for them as far as ebooks go, but when I try to look up any scifi or fantasy it starts looking…fishy. Either it it isn’t offered at all or one book here or there from a series is offered and then the cover art looks a bit cropped or stretched funky and there are reports of bad text as if someone had did it on the sly (because an author certainly would have taken more care with it had it been an official release). That seems to be a widespread problem. There are some new releases coming out that look much more official and red-carpet-y, but that has been slow coming and only from a couple of publishers so far. Hopefully they will get all of that sorted out one way or another. It is an emerging market and you don’t want to do it half-assed so to speak. The first one to start doing it properly could make a killing since the competition is so disorganized.
One major problem is that most companies have only recently started using computers, and many people in the companies have not a clue how to use anything more esoteric than a word processor…if that. Talk to them about code and their eyes glaze over, and they’ll start telling you their webmaster does that kind of thing.
I *wish* we could make a killing! 😆 but we’re trying, at least. We’re out there, which is better than we were last year! So many, many things we’ve learned—
One thing we CAN do is when we make a mistake, correct it. I’ll be putting out Faery Moon version 1.5 quite soon—AND everybody who bought the first one will get a free download of the corrected file—we have one format that has glitches in it; and I’ve caught some typos, spelling glitch, reversed quotemarks, that sort of thing. I want to ask Jane some operational questions about how to do that, but she’s working hot and heavy on Ring of Lightning, and I don’t want to disturb her train of thought until she gets through it. Funny thing—editing takes one kind of brain and running the book-creator/upload software takes another.
You just need to do some marketing once things settle down and there are a good number of your ebooks out for people to select from. It might take some research to figure out what form that will take. Maybe take an ad out at a popular gathering place for ebook readers (kindleboards.com seems to have a good number of users for example) to promote a particular book. Hardcore fans will probably find their own way here, but a larger number of people will need a little prodding. Get the word out at bigger cons like Comic-Con that you might not attend but do have freebie tables available. Have a fan who is already attending put some fliers out. A lot of mid-sized bands have relied on street crews for years. Even releasing one ebook in Amazon’s marketplace for the sole purpose of seeding the market (a fan downloads the book there and in the title page is a link back to here where they have the opportunity of buying more ebooks) might be a way of redirecting traffic from places where customers of ebooks already gather. It can be a perk or a headache being on the cutting edge of things, but it does seem like ebooks are here to stay. That is firmer footing than a lot of new tech gets. All of this hard work will be put to good use eventually.
Excellent suggestions, Sweetbo, and much appreciated. Some are news to me. It’ll take us time and work to load the shelves, but we have two more books ready to go up, and nearly a third. I don’t know how Lynn is coming with hers, but I’m sure she’s working. We have got to start working on ideas such as yours to catch the spring wave of conventions and events—sometimes I wish I were three people! But I’m confused enough as is—
CJ: Fantastic Fiction never replied to my email. I imagine you will have to contact them yourself to get Closed Circle links on your author page and your e-books listed as a separate category.
Done! Thank you, Tulrose!
One thing that’s annoying me about the ebook market at present is that where an ebook is made available by a publisher (presumably with rights to do so), some shortsighted publishers are placing geographic restrictions on who can buy them.
As a long-time ebook customer from who is NOT a resident of the US, I’m finding increasingly that more and more of the books I want to buy, I cannot due to the Geographic Restrictions that limit sales to buyers in the US and sometimes Canada.
Can anyone explain the logic in a situation whereby while I am perfectly happy to pay for ebooks, often the only copy I could potentially actually obtain would be a pirate copy?
Your country has publishers with rights over the book distribution in your region while we in the USA have own publishers. Our publishers can’t undercut yours. Sorta like how there are R1 and R2 etc DVDs and back in the day were PAL vs NTSC vhs tapes. So as long as there are different publishers distributing the books in different countries they must respect the other publishers in other countries who own rights to those books too. It wasn’t such a big deal in the not so distant past (although the PAL thing was a pain in the butt), but with globalization, internet, and jumps in technology people are more aware of all the invisible lines that were always there. Now if more authors just took control over their ebooks then this wouldn’t be a problem. One person would own distribution rights and everyone in the world would go to one place to get the ebooks. Until then no one wants to step on toes. I feel your pain. I am pissed that the BBC site won’t give me full access to the BBC Doctor Who site without me running proxy programs and being devious. I know all the reasons for that but I still feel annoyed.
Thanks Sweetbo, like you, even though I know the reasons, I still feel annoyed.
It zimply makes no sense that I can choose to buy a print copy of a book from an overseas supplier even though it is available in my country of residence, but not an ebook version that is NOT available locally. Surely any geographic restriction should apply to the location of the seller, not the buyer?
However, enough of my whinges – guess this isn’t the forum for same. Especially given the excellent work Closed Circle is doing! You guys have my fullest support!
oops! make that: simply
Do you have a contract with Alphascript Publishing? They are apparently selling A/U compilations (ISBN 978-6130236885, 978-6130264352), although they seem rather fishy to me.
No, I never heard of them. Pi-rate.
CJ, did you find incidents of repeated text in Faery Moon? I don’t know if that was in the original or a consequence of the conversion and movement to the Kindle, but there were several places where a phrase was repeated in my download. I could go back and look for them for you if it would be helpful but I can’t give page cites since I have it on the Kindle. Of course I could just give you the phrases and you could do a search in Word for them, I guess? Let me know if that would help.
Mmm. I have seen it happen as an ‘artifact’—a temporary thing where you page backward too rapidly and the ‘reader’ gets confused. But it goes away once you go to the beginning and go forward again. If you do spot these things, note the line, and I’ll use ‘search text’ to find it.
I’m still puzzling out getting the file to everybody—it’s not a huge number of buyers, but more than my hosting site will like to output letters for at one go. And there are buyers who aren’t regular members here, so it will have to be a letter with a download code. Sometime this week, I’m sure!
Sounds almost like you need something like ASCAP or BMI like musicians have to collect royalties, defend rights (though maybe this too is getting obsolete).
In my distant youth (1970s), a composer/performer friend of mine bounced up to the ASCAP office to get his quarterly check. They politely informed him that they didn’t make out checks for less than $1.00.
Then he walked down the hill from the ASCAP office to our taxi garage for the night shift shape up.
Seriously, not much money may be involved now, but you may have to consult an entertainment lawyer to write letters. (That’s what another friend at the garage, an actor, eventually went into).
Alas, that’s what should have been done, ages ago. There are writer’s organizations, but they have piffled away their power by concentrating more on moving the deck chairs about (endless time spent rearranging the rules for professional status, and redefining categories) while the iceberg was looming on the horizon.
Publishing used to be, on its upper end, and only theoretically, a gentlemanly business concluded with a handshake, in which regard for one’s reputation assured good behavior. The miracle is—it sort of worked. To this day, publishers won’t ‘steal’ a manuscript and publish it without paying the writer. To this day, writers try to adhere to rules of submission of mss. so they will be in good odor with the publishers.
Under the table, however, there were bad practices and moments of high comedy—payment only on threat of lawsuit; aggravated agents snatching mss off the shelves of a publisher and running with them; sleaze merchants holding ‘bring us your unpublished mss’ events in small town motels, taking them to read, then of course disappearing and hiring hacks to insert sex scenes so the mss could be manufactured into—you guessed it.
And lying about the print runs. Or not even KNOWING what the print run was, then deducting ‘returns’ (returned books) against their best guess of what they had printed, and docking the writers’ income for it.
Amid all this, the Authors Guild, and, to my personal knowledge, the Science Fiction Writers of America (or Association, another tediously lengthy debate and vote: oops, no, the SFFantasyWA, yet one more long debate and fuss) have been effective on some matters. SFWA famously recovered a fair chunk of back payment for writers from one publisher, it scotched the move of another to put contract terms on the backs of writers’ checks (cash the check and you are deemed to have signed the new clause)…and for a while it looked as if things might run well. Now the oil companies have taken over: writer’s associations aren’t keeping up. It was always—well, it’s not our member having problems, so why should we get involved and spend our resources?
I don’t think it’s hopeless, but when even the publishers are losing the power to make their own decisions, that’s a heckuva large iceberg we’re facing.
CJ and the other Circlines,
Arisia Sci-Fi convention in Boston, MA is coming up over the Martin Luther King day weekend: if you have a Closed Circle flyer with your names and titles (inclu. upcoming?) books, I can print it out and make copies to place in the Con’s “grab this info” table near the entrance of the hotel. That should generate some additional Closed Circle traffic.
Raesean
I can do that. Thanks, Raesean!
I’ve composed a flyer—I’m going to install it as a CC free download sometime maybe this evening, so it will always be available. I just need to get Jane to help me get it loaded: I don’t want to blow up the site!
Excellent; for those of us distant from the usual convention venues, it will be helpful.
I don’t suppose you would ever come out to the Maui Writers’ Conference? ]:)
I wish! Sounds like fun!
Dream On
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