Already I’m confused. All agents? Just those agents with clients at Macmillan? There is a difference. But, since I’m definitely a Macmillan author, whose Amazon buttons have yet to reappear, I kept reading…
Over the last few years we have been deeply concerned about the pricing of electronic books. That pricing, combined with the traditional business model we were using, was creating a market that we believe was fundamentally unbalanced. In the last three weeks, from a standing start we have moved to a new business model. We will make less money on the sale of e books, but we will have a stable and rational market. To repeat myself from last Sunday’s letter, we will now have a business model that will ensure our intellectual property will be available digitally through many channels, at a price that is both fair to the consumer and that allows those who create and publish it to be fairly compensated.
About that “we,” Mr. Sargent…. Exactly who are the “we” who’ve been deeply concerned, who’ve moved from a standing start to a new business model in just three weeks!? I assumed, through the first four sentences, that “we” was “you”—corporate Macmillan—rather than “us”—because why else would you be sending me a letter.
Then I hit the fifth sentence: …”our intellectual property”…
I checked, just to make certain, but there it is on the title page verso – copyright 2006 / Lynn Abbey. Rifkind’s Challenge is MY intellectual property. It is licensed to Macmillan/TOR under a contract that sometimes feels like indentured servitude (or maybe like the old Hollywood studio/contract system). License is not quite the same as ownership.
But, by golly, they’re going to be fair to “those who create.”
These are the good guys?
Is it any wonder I’m confused…and just a teeny bit skeptical?
Back in the Dark Ages—the mid 70s, the post Star-Wars period when Hollywood started optioning SF—the wise words were: Get all your money up front; and if that doesn’t work never, ever take a share of net anything, especially profits.
So, now I’m back to thinking about that Wall Street Journal article I linked to few days back. Macmillan’s got the same problem…a problem they can partially solve by sweetening current/future contracts and then offering to sprinkle the same sweetner on old contracts…all in the name of fairness….toward the creators of their intellectual property.
Yeah, there are going to be problems. Somebody’s going to have to come up with the publishing equivalent of United Artists. UA didn’t change the game because they won an anti-trust suit against the system; they did it by beating the system at its own game
What I found most astonishing was his admission that they will be making *less* money on ebooks. How kind of them. . . .
They’re going to make up the difference with volume…or it’s the spongy “we” — it might be that only the creator part of Sargent’s “we” is going to make less money; the corporate “we” might make out okay
I’m not a Macmillan author, but understand your anger and frustration. Read the last two blogs from Nathan Bransford . . . especially the last one which gives hope in volatile times.
I read that Nathan Bransford post and the ensuing comments…the poll there is a little wrong since it seems like most of the people voting either don’t read/value/understand ebooks or have a stake in the business more than voting as a consumer.
Right now newspapers are seeing hard times because of the internet and publishers will be increasingly bothered by ebooks in a similar way. I still see the need for pieces of the publishing industry (editors/promoters/internet storefronts), but not for it as a whole unless you want to preserve it for the museum and artificially subsidize it like the USPS. Maybe fresh blood needs to start the ebook business and publishers need to go the way of the dino. They don’t seem to be adapting and hate ebooks like a red-headed stepchild. That is not the attitude to have when imagining a new media.
Thank you. This if the first major skirmish in the coming war. Thank you for being clearheaded and on the right side. We must rid ourselves of the corporate middlemen and forge new connections between authors and readers. This is the beginning, all of the future lies ahead.
I’m very glad we started Closed Circle no later, for the sanity of all of us. This is going to be a royal mess, with no signs of getting better.
Funny thing, that.
What’s striking me is how concerned we were in the cloud-talk stage about print-on-demand, yet that doesn’t seem to be the main focus…at least not now. Who knows what next week might bring.
Another thing I wasn’t really expecting was how energized cutting loose was going to make me feel–a little like taking the sword to the Gordian knot that the book industry had become