We reported on Jonathan Galassi’s position on ebooks here, where he essentially said that it is the publisher who does all the work so should really have rights to the ebook as well as the print book.
Now comes two answers to his position. The first from Laura Dawson of LJNDawson.com:
Authors have traditionally complained that their publishers aren’t doing such a great job marketing and selling their books; the explosion of self-publishing ventures and digital marketing consultancies (ahem), as well as the influx of new marketing-department hires at traditional houses, are evidence that these authors may in fact have a point. If an author can demonstrate an increase in sales after moving to a self-publishing model (as Steven Covey appears to be doing) or hiring a marketing consultant, what value is the publisher actually bringing? (I AM excited about publishing’s new digital marketing hires – many of them are very clued-in and will contribute a great deal of value – if they are allowed to do the things that need to be done.) … I’d argue that we can’t take for granted that a traditional publishing house – simply by virtue of being a publishing house – adds value. The value a publishing house adds really depends on the editor, the author, the culture of the publishing house, and the book itself.
Then comes Kassia Krozser of Booksquare:
… I am of the mindset that the position advocated by Galassi will lead to deeper questions about the roles of publishers and how they serve authors. For seemingly perpetual rights, there will need to be more consideration. Galassi distinguishes between a publisher and a distributor, but fails to acknowledge that when it comes to digital distribution the playing field is beyond level, and when it comes to backlist titles, traditional publishers need to step up their game. … Still, this attempt leaves me more convinced than ever that publishing isn’t really ready to have a public discussion about ebooks and pricing, though it’s long overdue. It won’t be a conversation filled with comfortable silences. And it won’t be a conversation lead by the industry. Which you know, is a shame. It’s not like ebooks are a surprising new product.
Related
Between the publisher and the author, if you remove the author you don’t have a product. If you remove the editor, you may not have a polished product, but you do still have a product. If you remove the publisher then you still have a product, but it may not be promoted the way the author would like. It surely seems to me that the author is the most important link in this chain because without the author, the rest of these contributors have nothing to work with. The publisher agreed to take a percentage of the sales for editing, promoting, etc. If the publisher did not agree to electronic rights, then I don’t think they deserve to come in after the fact and demand that they have those rights because they added an incremental value to the book. What part of All Rights Reserved don’t you understand?
Authors are two-a-penny. Good authors are five for a dime. The supply of authors far exceeds the demand for authors. Hence authors get low pay. Here’s a tale related to that.
Once upon a time, publishers were the gatekeepers that separated the two kinds of authors and only printed the good authors. They were the printing press owners and business men who had the contacts and infrastructure to choose books to be printed, print them, and send them to shop owners. Good publishers were rare, and they got the lion’s share of profits.
The distribution business spun off of publishing, as did a lot of printing. The publishers were left as the editors and gatekeepers, with good Rolodexes of printers and distributors. Everyone still made a nice profit, but there were more profit centers needing to make profits (author, publisher, printer, distributor).
Big companies began to buy up smaller ones, until a handful of large publishers plus a myriad of tiny ones were left. Big companies want predictable, steady streams of _high_ profits. They have overhead structures to fund from economies of scale. Divisions that don’t manage that get reorganized, combined, broken up, closed, or sold.
Enter the Internet. Rolodexes and a stable of editors were not enough. Gatekeeping wasn’t such a good business. Profit demands went up, prices couldn’t go up fast enough, and companies got squeezed for cost reductions. The stable of editors got smaller, and less editing was done.
Now comes ebooks. Almost anyone could play. Suddenly, the fastest growing segment of the book world was not under the control of the people who thought they mattered. Panic!
The future looks like:
1) Even more books published, most of them ebooks, each year. Most of them bad; worse than today. The start-up costs and barriers to entry for publishing are going down. No one needs the big Rolodexes as much. It may suck to be a reader soon; no more gatekeepers.
2) Authors getting bigger percentages of smaller profits by whatever mechanism. Result: still low pay.
3) Publishers shaking out. Some will figure out how to make a profit. Many won’t. Many authors will self-publish.
4) The physical printing and distribution business shrinking. Many things will still get printed, just not books of simple text.
5) The ebook distribution business growing, but with small profit margins due to competition and consumer fragmentation. I can buy an ebook from a lot of different places, not just the bookstore nearest me.
6) The physical bookstore business shrinking still further as a bigger percentage of the market moves to ebooks.
7) Libraries (of some sort) will offer more and more electronic information, especially as the public domain grows (slowly).
These are the easy trivial predictions from my tale. The details are the hard part. I’m glad I don’t work in publishing.
Regards,
Jack Tingle
The problem is that the Styron’s first novel never would have been published in today’s cebrity-vampire-zombie culture. More on this at my blog.
Jack Tingle basically has it right, although I would want to see numbers to back up the claim that publishing has ever had “high profits.” Certain sectors of publishing, maybe, like commercial STM publishing. But compared to other industries that exploit intellectual property–say, the pharmaceutical industry–the profit margins in publishing are anemic.
The basic problem of the publishing industry has always been an over-supply of material that could be published. Publishers have never had to offer new authors very much in exchange for their intellectual property because there’s always another unpublished author out there.
As the cost of publication has decreased with new technologies, more authors can get published and there is evermore competition for the only scarce commodity in the equation: the reader’s attention. Readers can’t read faster and the numbers of readers does not appear to actually be increasing.
Competition for the reader’s attention has only gone up. Breaking out new authors profitably gets increasingly difficult. It’s an exciting time to be in publishing; just a very difficult environment to publish well and still be profitable.