Tom Holland, chair of the Society of Authors, has an editorial on Bookseller.com today regarding royalties for ebooks.
… it is unconscionable that publishers should be attempting to strong arm authors into accepting fixed royalty rates on e-books for the entire duration of copyright—and setting them, what is more, at a miserly 15% to 25% of their receipts. That may still be fair enough back in the Cretaceous world of dead tree publishing, but it is hard to see what it is about the selling of an e-book that entitles the publisher to cream off such an exorbitant share of the revenue. Rather than provide authors with an open breakdown of the figures, publishers seem instead to have constructed a collective wall of silence around their accounting. If not a pre-emptive land grab, then it looks suspiciously like one.
You can read the full text here.
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