Last week, buried in the middle of my blog post were these lines.
Yesterday Icelandic author Baldur Bjarnason wrote a great
piece on ethics in publishing. This is a great observation on what a lot of
commentators are seeing as the great divide between the two different
publishing communities.
Hands up those people who can tell me what the two
communities are....hmmmm.
Today, in a breaking news bombshell, those communities just
got wider with a new website launched and funded by Hugh Howey looking
specifically at crunching the data on publishing stats and earnings for Self
Publishing and Hybrid authors.
For those of you who don’t understand what this
means...
If you have a Traditional publishing contract. Your book
gets published...you may get an advance. You may get up to 10% net of print
price or up to 25% ebook price. You may get a quarterly statement on how sales
are going but no other information. The marketing window for your book is
usually 6 months...that’s 2 months before publication and 4 months after. After
that the publisher is onto the next book and any blip in sales comes from
author promotion. In the fine print of your book contract there may be a
non-compete clause, you can’t publish with anyone else or anything else except the publisher. Your rights may be held
in perpetuity (US law is the lifetime of the author plus 70 years) with no
rights reversal clauses.
If you choose to self publish you may get up to 70% of ebook
price with Amazon and whatever you set the profit of the book, after your costs
have been taken out, on print. You do all the marketing work for as long as you
want to.
In both models the author doesn’t really know what they are
doing right or wrong with marketing. Data on what works and how different
publishing models are successful is very thin on the ground.
From time to time surveys come out with data that says how
well self publishing is doing against traditional publishing. I have linked to a
few over the last few years in my blog.
The ebook market where most authors
self publish has been on the up.
Today Hugh Howey’s report was released
looking at raw data that crunched the numbers of the biggest selling genres
(romance, sci-fi/fantasy and thriller/suspense) on Amazon on one day. 92% of
the top 100 genre bestsellers were ebooks. Indie authors were outselling
Traditional Big 5 authors in these categories.
There are many bombs in this
report. Porter Anderson does a good job of looking at them and extrapolating ideas but you should read the report for yourself. Hugh is the leading voice in
the Indie author community at the moment. He is advocating a change to fairer
contracts for authors and a partnership model with publishers. Below is his
mission statement for the AuthorEarnings website.
Welcome to AuthorEarnings, where our purpose is to gather and
share information so that writers can make informed decisions. Our secondary
mission is to call for change within the publishing community for better pay
and fairer terms in all contracts. This is a website by authors and for
authors.
Two weeks ago he made it very clear just exactly what he thinks author contracts should consist of and what he thinks author societies
should be advocating.
So after a few hours digesting The Report, Digital BookWorld weighed in with their analysis and they took issue with the one day data
and the extrapolation thereof... however they also agreed that there was
something rotten in the state of ....
Now Hugh is the first to say that this is one day...on
Amazon... in January... and he is keen to have that dialogue from other authors
on their experiences (see the website for ways to contribute to the
discussion.) Steve Moseby takes up the challenge, he looks at the figures from
The Report and wonders whether they are true based on his UK print figures and
annual income after only one days data.
In Other News
Passive Guy sends out a warning over a contractual clause where any future law changes in any territory in the world will be the problem of the author. This, after an author was accused of blasphemy, following the
passing of a law in India after her book was published. It all hinges on the
word ‘will.’ He follows that up with another post on contracts. (As he is a
lawyer he doth know what he speaks of.)
Cassandra Clare is tired of the constant carping of some who
keep asking why she is still writing her book series ... she notes that male
authors don’t get asked this. A thoughtful restrained response from a YA
author.
In the Craft Section,
5 big screenwriting mistakes and 5 fixes...(this is a
bookmark post!)
In the Marketing Section,
K M Weiland - Story Cartel...how she got 50 + positive reviews (great review site)
Julie Musil - On connecting charities with books...this is a
great post!
To Finish,
Hugh Howey again... He responds to a writer who has decided not to be tainted with self publishing because the goal is to emulate his
heroes and publish the same way. A very interesting read and response by Hugh.
Pic is from
Passive Voices new range of tee shirts...check them out and chuckle... and
maybe buy one or two.
