Random House, as we noted earlier, wants e-rights in “the vast majority of our backlist contracts.” But could this backfire? The New York Times says agents are grumpy about the twenty-five-percent of net that writers commonly receive from big publishers on digital titles. Typical authors don’t have the clout to change this.
But what if you’re William Styron’s daughter? You just might go to Open Road Integrated Media—which is to republish classics in E. In fact, the Times quotes Alexandra Styron as saying she liked the idea of the novelists books ending up at a company “focused on the future of the book industry.” Probable translation: We wanted more money.
Fine by me. By asserting e-rights and in effect wresting them away from large publishers, estates like Styron’s could be helping living writers, too—in playing up the importance of authors as profit centers.
Imagine a trickledown effect to the benefit of living, breathing, producing writers, even though most books lose money.
Of course, there’s the danger that the trickledown won’t happen, that the big e-rights battles over the classics will just make the rich richer. But remember one of the factors lurking in the background—the economies of E compared to P. That’s true of living writers’ books as well.
It’s too early to predict for sure what’ll happen, but here’s hoping that writers beyond the dead and famous will benefit.
Shown earlier in this post is Sophie’s Choice, a Styron novel that Random House published.
Detail: Yes, I’m still against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, though I can’t blame estates for taking advantage of it; what’s more, the e-e-rights issue is different from the copyright length one.
(Thanks to Gary Price.)
