GBBR: The Authors' Vote Is In

The Authors Guild of America represent some 8,000 authors the Society of Authors in the UK has another 8,500 members and both support the revised Google Book Settlement. Today came the surprising and shocking news from the Guardian that some 6,500 authors agents and publishers have exercised their right and consciously opted out of the settlement.

Many in the industry advised the authors to opt in by default with the proviso they could collect their few bits of silver and then opt out at a later date. Many have followed that route with caution, many are still lost is the reams of paper, complexity of legal jargon and some still don’t know about it. However, 6,500 had taken the bold step to say ‘No’ and with some defiance send a cold message to their representative bodies. The silent majority is speaking out and should have their concerns listened too.

The list of opt outs is also surprising as it is littered with significant names from authors such as Ursula K Le Guin, Jeffery Archer , Zadie Smith , Monica Ali, Jacqueline Wilson, Jeanette Winterson, , Anne Fine, Helen Dunmore, Conn Iggulden, Graham Swift, Keri Hulme, John le Carre, Andrea Levy, Quentin Blake, Philip Pullman, Louis de Bernières Melvyn Bragg and Simon Sebag Montefiore. Literary estates have also opted out and include ; Roald Dahl, Rudyard Kipling, H G Wells, J G Ballard, James Herriott and Neville Shute. The list goes on and agencies have also opted out on behalf of their clients.

6,500 is no mean number and in terms of those who created the deal and supported it revision it must question their judgement. This is without the orphans and estates who where overridden and dragged into this settlement. The sheer weight of literary objection should make the people behind this cheap backdoor sale of copyright have sleepless nights. Let’s hope that common sense prevails and that the courts reject it as a bad settlement. The question we have to ask is how you put 6,500 objectors back in the bottle if is accepted?

The Three Rs: Authoring in a Digitral Age. No. 3 Rights

This is the first part of the presentation given to the Swanwick Writers Summer School, 11th August,2009. It is based on The Three ‘Rs’: Authoring in the Digital Age.

The third R is shared between rights and reward.

It brings me back to that Litopia discussion and the issue of how authors get rewarded in this digital age. Let’s try and park the physical book world to one side and look purely at digital rights and reward.

Today author advances are disappearing or shrinking. Digital rights are effectively being talked of as a single subsidiary right but we must recognise that these are different from the rights we are familiar with today but can also affect them.

What happens to the rights reversal in a digital age where print on demand and an ebook can mean a book is never out of print? Why should a work be effectively tethered to a publisher in perpetuity?

Always make sure that you can revert your rights and when the conditions for reversal are reached get them back. You can with little effort, sell as many digital individual copies of an out of print work as a publisher and enjoy more return.

Guess what the price of an ebook is today?

I can’t tell you the answer only that some publishers tie it to the current renditions RRP, others to the hardback, and others to whatever. The price has to include tax which changes from state to state, country to country and even within the EU is not standardised. The consumer is however now seeing Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders US, Indigo in Canada and others trying to create a $9.99 price point.

Remember that iTunes moment everyone talks about? They did it by creating a .99 cent price point. I would predict that ebook prices can only go one way and it isn’t up.
Many are using the ebook as the promotional lost leader to capture the physical sale. Others are saying that they will not release the ebook until after the hardback has had its day so avoiding the cannibalising of hardback sales.

James Patterson today has a best selling US ebook ‘The Angel Experiment’. It isn’t new it came out 4 years ago. The reason it is a best seller today is that its been given away to promote his new series. Mega authors such as Patterson may be able to give their books away, big publishers may think it a smart marketing move, but what impact could it have on authors and publishers who don’t enjoy the same economic freedom?

It’s often like the wild west out there today.

But remember the contract you sign today will not deliver royalties for some time and can you predict what the market will look like in 2 years or 3 years?

Should there be a separate digital rights contract which is not based on the physical rendition but on a fixed term licence?

With physical sales came returns and so royalties took time to be paid. However with digital sales there are no returns so why does the author have to wait? Why not transfer the money when it hits the till or at least not long after?

Should digital royalties’ be based on a % of RRP, which is often meaningless in the digital rendition?

Should digital royalties be based on a % of net receipts, which if the current trends continue could be a % of little or nothing?

Should digital royalties be fixed amount? Publishing may be a gambling business but who will gamble on predicting that today?

Should you negotiate different rates based on the different channels as Google, Amazon, Apple are all different in their models? Just like yesterday’s territorial rights they can all be done separately.

Then there is the Google Book Settlement in the US. My thoughts on this debacle are well documented but what I would say it has raised it the whole issue on copyright. I find it amazing that an industry that is all about copyright and rights failed to create a rights registry to control them and waited for a handout from Google to even start the process.


I see a fantastic opportunity for writing talent in the digital world. Tomorrow you may not have the same dependency on some relationships that you believe pivotal today.

I believe that publishing is about joining those dots between the author and the reader.

I believe in the right for authors to revert their rights and not be tethered to a publisher unless they want to be.

I believe that digital rights should be term based and reflect the different channels.

I strongly believe authors should see a greater slice of the digital pie.

I also believe that there will always be publishers and retailers, but they may not be the same number, or that they will provide the same services they do today.
The one thing that is certain is that tomorrow will be different and you are in the best position to benefit.

You are no longer in that theatre performing to an audience hidden in the dark. You can switch on the lights and embrace the digital age.
Enjoy the journey!

The GBBR: The Book of Revelations

On Saturday The Wall Street Journal published and interesting article by Ms. Chu who is a principal at Writers Representatives LLC, ‘Google's Book Settlement Is a Ripoff for Authors ‘ We believe that the debate that is being swept under so many tables is finally coming out into the open albeit very close the 5th May deadline.

The article again raises many questions;

‘No one elected these "class representatives" to represent America's tens of thousands of authors and publishers to convey their digital rights to Google. Nor are the interests of this so-called class identical.’

‘Under the settlement, every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote -- and every excerpt permission ever granted to others -- at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs. This is a massive burden on everyone in the book industry, making us all, in effect, Google's data-entry slaves. Indeed, in most cases such information about every permission ever granted is unlocatable. It opens a Pandora's box of disputes and mistaken claims about who actually owns what.’

'The BRR is in fact merely Google's contract negotiation and claims department. As in Hollywood, the settlement deal turns book authors into fully subordinated, last-in-line net residuaries. This reverses the economics of books.'

'The U.S. Constitution grants authors small monopolies in their own copyrights. Author market power is talent-based and individual, not collective. This class action seeks to wipe all this out -- just for Google. But U.S. law does not grant any single publisher monopoly power to herd all of us into its list.'

'Disputes will be fixed in arbitration with no access to federal courts which have often shown mercy to authors. Arbitrators will be "you sign it you eat it" line-parsing bureaucrats.'

It time that we stop accepting it will happen and trying to work how to work within it and just say no before this bad settlement is pushed through.