Black Plastic Glasses » royalties

Pass the Gestalt, Please

Evan — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:08:24 +0000

In the past two weeks I have heard forcefully stated pronouncements by agent Andrew Wylie and chair of the Society of Authors, Tom Holland, regarding ebook royalty rates. A 50/50 share between author and publisher is the only possible outcome they can accept, citing the tired and somewhat old argument we have heard before:

The publisher has little or no incremental out of pocket cost to create ebooks, therefore the income should be split in the same manner as subsidiary rights, which is generally 50/50.

The average person would be hard pressed to disagree—certainly in this day and age the digital file created to make a print book cannot cost much to...

Book Advances

Evan — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:47:51 +0000

MICHAEL MEYER has a piece in the Sunday NY Times book review section entitled "About That Book Advance ...". While it logically has the perspective of an author, it does point out some of the issues associated with the predominant model in current trade publishing. One part that I think doesn't quite compute is the following: "In 1971, for example, Viking sold paperback rights to “The Day of the Jackal” to Bantam for 36 times the $10,000 hardcover advance it had paid its author, Frederick Forsyth. “Agents realized that they should be the ones holding auctions for their authors and get advances more in line with the anticipated total value of their books,” Georges Borchardt, who brokered...