Last Thursday I had the opportunity to speak to someone from Simon & Schuster, and asked his side of the story on the issue discussed in the previous post, about their contract revision.
His argument was that the writer's business is to write and the publishing company's business was to make sure that writer got published and got the money from their writing, and that was what they did, to put it simply, and wanted to continue to be able to do (Most publishing companies do stay in business because of their backlist).
The main group that raised issue with S&S was the Author's Guild, which he said was heavily associated with agents as much as actual writers. Eventually they did reach an agreement, which led to a re-revision of the contract, which said that if S&S was failing to make a certain amount of money for an author by publishing their book per year, the rights would then revert back to the author. It was a high amount for author royalties, too, something over a thousand dollars (which, by the way, the majority of authors will not see in a year). In other words, if Simon & Schuster fails to do its job in selling the book, the author can get out of contract and seek publication elsewhere.
The issue remains complicated, but there are two sides to every story, and that was one of them.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
The Exaggerated Reporting of Print's Death
So I've been in this publishing program for three weeks and change, and we're finally done with the magazine section (yay!) and on to books. Report: Print is not dead. Or, that's what practically every speaker said, apparently trying to answer some unasked question. It's like my dog is sitting there on the bed next to me and someone comes up and says, "Your dog isn't dead."
"Uhm, thanks, I know that from the fact that he's breathing?"
Stan Lee said something in an interview for the history channel during their history of comics segment about how reading something on a screen will never be as pleasant as holding it your hands, which is why comics will always exist. I don't doubt he's right; the manner in which they're delivered will be different.
I grew up with the internet. I was on it when I was thirteen, stupidly giving my name and address out to all takers who were interested in the same cartoon shows as me on Prodigy's bulletin boards until a nice man from the FBI called my mom and said maybe I shouldn't be doing that (true story). However, despite the many, many hours I spend reading things online - even novel-length fanfic that is sometimes better than novels I've recently read - it hasn't stopped me from buying books and subscribing to magazines. I read 2-4 books a week and subscribe to about 6 magazines, 3 of them weeklies (I'm a fast reader). I suppose I could be downloading illegal .pdfs and printing them out, but the cost of paper and ink is high and the product unwieldly in comparison to a bound book. However, I don't imagine that it's going to be that way, which is why the industry's response has been stunningly pathetic.
Print magazines seemed to have discovered the internet about yesterday. Several editor-in-chiefs came to speak to us and showed us their websites, which were relatively new (1-2 years) and largely just the content of their magazine with some video clips, and man were they nervous about the fact that all of these other magazines seemed to be doing a better job than them. And yes, a successful magazine website has a major effect on the magazine's health, it turns out. How are these people genuinely surprised by that?
More interesting to me, aside from the hilarity value, is the alarming change Simon & Schuster made to its boilerplate book contracts. As this was back in May, it's been much-talked about elsewhere, so I won't go into it in technical detail, but apparently it involves them retaining at least digital rights to your book forever. People have theorized as to why they did this, but as a technocrat I find the explanation pretty basic. Right now we have the technology to print on demand - meaning someone can take a .pdf of a book, put it into a computer, and a big printer will pop out a book a few hours later or whatever. It's costly and large - you know, like computers used to be. It's not impossible to imagine that we're only 10 or 20 years away from small, retail-priced printers that you can put on your shelf next to your scanner and your external hard drive. It'll come with glue cartridges and ink cartridges and you'll have to buy cover and inside-weight paper. You'll hit "print" on your file and about an hour later, an honest-to-goodness bound book will pop out. Books will live on, but the format in which they're delivered will be entirely different, and probably just as pirated as music is today. Publishers will deal.
If I was a betting woman, I'd be willing to put money on the idea that Simon & Schuster was thinking along similar lines, which means that they need those digital rights to your book, because in the future, all they may have to sell is digital files. They just want to get it in the boilerplate now, so it becomes standard and non-negotiable while it's still unprofitable, so when it is profitable, no one thinks twice. It's about the only clever response I've seen non-digital media form to the threat of the internet. That said, it's also pretty evil, so someone tell me when they reverse that, because I'm not signing any contracts with them until they do.
"Uhm, thanks, I know that from the fact that he's breathing?"
Stan Lee said something in an interview for the history channel during their history of comics segment about how reading something on a screen will never be as pleasant as holding it your hands, which is why comics will always exist. I don't doubt he's right; the manner in which they're delivered will be different.
I grew up with the internet. I was on it when I was thirteen, stupidly giving my name and address out to all takers who were interested in the same cartoon shows as me on Prodigy's bulletin boards until a nice man from the FBI called my mom and said maybe I shouldn't be doing that (true story). However, despite the many, many hours I spend reading things online - even novel-length fanfic that is sometimes better than novels I've recently read - it hasn't stopped me from buying books and subscribing to magazines. I read 2-4 books a week and subscribe to about 6 magazines, 3 of them weeklies (I'm a fast reader). I suppose I could be downloading illegal .pdfs and printing them out, but the cost of paper and ink is high and the product unwieldly in comparison to a bound book. However, I don't imagine that it's going to be that way, which is why the industry's response has been stunningly pathetic.
Print magazines seemed to have discovered the internet about yesterday. Several editor-in-chiefs came to speak to us and showed us their websites, which were relatively new (1-2 years) and largely just the content of their magazine with some video clips, and man were they nervous about the fact that all of these other magazines seemed to be doing a better job than them. And yes, a successful magazine website has a major effect on the magazine's health, it turns out. How are these people genuinely surprised by that?
More interesting to me, aside from the hilarity value, is the alarming change Simon & Schuster made to its boilerplate book contracts. As this was back in May, it's been much-talked about elsewhere, so I won't go into it in technical detail, but apparently it involves them retaining at least digital rights to your book forever. People have theorized as to why they did this, but as a technocrat I find the explanation pretty basic. Right now we have the technology to print on demand - meaning someone can take a .pdf of a book, put it into a computer, and a big printer will pop out a book a few hours later or whatever. It's costly and large - you know, like computers used to be. It's not impossible to imagine that we're only 10 or 20 years away from small, retail-priced printers that you can put on your shelf next to your scanner and your external hard drive. It'll come with glue cartridges and ink cartridges and you'll have to buy cover and inside-weight paper. You'll hit "print" on your file and about an hour later, an honest-to-goodness bound book will pop out. Books will live on, but the format in which they're delivered will be entirely different, and probably just as pirated as music is today. Publishers will deal.
If I was a betting woman, I'd be willing to put money on the idea that Simon & Schuster was thinking along similar lines, which means that they need those digital rights to your book, because in the future, all they may have to sell is digital files. They just want to get it in the boilerplate now, so it becomes standard and non-negotiable while it's still unprofitable, so when it is profitable, no one thinks twice. It's about the only clever response I've seen non-digital media form to the threat of the internet. That said, it's also pretty evil, so someone tell me when they reverse that, because I'm not signing any contracts with them until they do.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Posting Query Letters
I am curious, what are the legal implications of publicly publishing their query (aside from publicly carping about it)?
Is there no sort of client-vendor confidentiality agreement (spoken or unspoken)?
Well, in strictly general terms, [but not necessarily legal] you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want on the internet (aside from child porn) as long as your ISP backs you up or your ISP is based in a country that makes it very hard to legally pursue, like China or Russia. Child porn is the only thing Interpol really clamps down on internationally. If I posted your query letter here, since I'm anonymous, your main legal recourse would be to ask blogger to take it down, and blogger would probably not care enough to make me do it. If I wasn't anonymous, you could report me to the AAR or the BBB, or various other guilds, but it wouldn't come to anything.
That said, I'm not going to post any query letters. I mean, aside from that spamming anonymous jackass. Yes, it is an unspoken non-client/agent agreement, because we're nice, and don't generally like to piss off writers. Actually, most of us like writers, as they are the thing that makes our business exist and we base our careers on making the good ones into stars because we love literature. It's why we're in the exciting, low-paying world of publishing.
My general policy is not to post people's email addresses or even letters in entirety unless it's a question they obviously mean for the blog and I want to answer it on the blog. That's just common courtesy.
Is there no sort of client-vendor confidentiality agreement (spoken or unspoken)?
Well, in strictly general terms, [but not necessarily legal] you can pretty much do whatever the hell you want on the internet (aside from child porn) as long as your ISP backs you up or your ISP is based in a country that makes it very hard to legally pursue, like China or Russia. Child porn is the only thing Interpol really clamps down on internationally. If I posted your query letter here, since I'm anonymous, your main legal recourse would be to ask blogger to take it down, and blogger would probably not care enough to make me do it. If I wasn't anonymous, you could report me to the AAR or the BBB, or various other guilds, but it wouldn't come to anything.
That said, I'm not going to post any query letters. I mean, aside from that spamming anonymous jackass. Yes, it is an unspoken non-client/agent agreement, because we're nice, and don't generally like to piss off writers. Actually, most of us like writers, as they are the thing that makes our business exist and we base our careers on making the good ones into stars because we love literature. It's why we're in the exciting, low-paying world of publishing.
My general policy is not to post people's email addresses or even letters in entirety unless it's a question they obviously mean for the blog and I want to answer it on the blog. That's just common courtesy.
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