U-Turn at Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept and Flirt
From the website of Random House’s almost-vanity imprints:
In response to recent constructive discussions with authors, agents and writers’ groups, including the Horror Writers Association, we are making adjustments to our proposed terms for authors with Random House’s new digital imprints, Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, and Flirt. Prospective authors will have a choice of two models under which to publish: a profit share or an advance plus royalty.
- Under the profit share model, there is no advance offered. Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, or Flirt and the author will split profits 50-50 from the first copy sold. The term “profit” will be defined as net sales revenue minus deductions as follows: For print editions, deductions will include actual costs directly attributable to production and shipping of the book; for digital editions, Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, or Flirt will cover the cost of production. For both print and digital editions, Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, or Flirt will cover all marketing costs connected with general, category- or imprint-wide marketing programs. Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, or Flirt will also cover costs of marketing activities undertaken specifically on behalf of the book up to $10,000. Title-specific marketing costs above $10,000 will be proposed in advance to the author. If the author agrees, the incremental costs of such title-specific marketing activities over $10,000 will be deducted from sales revenue before profits are split. Cash payments owed to authors will be made quarterly.
- Under the advance plus royalty model, authors are offered a more traditional publishing arrangement, with Random House’s standard eBook royalty of 25 percent of net receipts. These authors will be paid an agreed-upon advance against royalties, and Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, or Flirt will cover production, shipping, and marketing for all formats at 100 percent of cost.
. . . .
Hydra, Alibi, Loveswept, and Flirt acquire rights to every book for the term of copyright, subject to an “out-of-print” clause, which provides for the author to request reversion of his or her rights three years after publication if the title fails to sell 300 copies in the 12 months immediately preceding the request.
Link to the rest at At Random and thanks to Kat and others for the tip.
PG will leave it to his visitors to determine whether this is true reform on the part of these imprints or if their first deal terms were more reflective of their true attitude towards authors.
He will opine that an out-of-print clause that is based on digital copies sold instead of cash paid to an author is a sucker’s game. What is the price of these digital books? 99 cents? 10 cents? one cent?
Remember, as the HALF folks say, they are acquiring rights to every book forever. During “forever”, no author can assume that Amazon’s present rules for pricing will continue. During “forever”, inflation will almost certainly occur so today’s 99 cents becomes tomorrow’s one cent.
PG also reminds all who would venture into HALF’s domain to read the contract. It will certainly contain provisions that are not discussed in the organization’s blog posts.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
P.G.
Why would anyone want to be a writer?
If Scalzi is correct, it’s unceasingly difficult, subject to wicked criticism and 99% don’t get paid enuff to put bread on the table.
On a side note, why is my Amazon page relentlessly trying to sell me Tilly Bagshawe’s book? I don’t buy chiclit, never have. So, why the big sales push?
brendan
If you’re not a writer, what good are all those voices in your head, Brendan?
@ PG and Brendan – Lol.
For me:
Writing can be difficult, but it is just as often a lot of fun. The criticism is manageable (i.e. the good outweighs the bad) if you put out a quality product. And every month I can buy bread, as well as a video game to play while I eat it.
It’s not for everybody, no. But it is for writers.
“Because it is less painful to write than not to write.”
RAH – The Cat Who Walks Through Walls
By the way, PG … first “The Price-Fix Six,” and now “HALF?” You have good writers.
While it’s a (baby) step in the right direction, the whole buying your copyright is still a dealbreaker. HALF of nothing is still nothing.
Besides a lawyer, who can make sense of these paragraphs?
There is so much wiggle room that Moby Dick and his pals could throw a dance party with space left over for the Titanic to be used as the bar.
They should have had one of their industry-leading editors take a look at the explanation before they posted it, Barb.
Whatever the corrections to their contracts due to the outcry against them, let’s never forget that these people tried to ruin their authors. Just how much trust do they deserve?
Ever again?
Just needed to stop by to say thanks again (and again and again) PG.
I’ll be honest … I don’t always read the articles or comments (when I read the articles, I always read the comments), but I a-l-w-a-y-s read the “PG commentary!”
I feel like, in a sentence or two, you got my back (and without a retainer or even coming to Vegas to allow me to buy you lunch).
c”,)
A Loyal Reader who’s been your fan from the beginning.
p.s. I continue to thank you in the front matter of every book I publish, along with the other usual suspects – Sensei Dean and his geisha Kristine, my indomitable brutha-from-anutha Joe. K, et al.
Blessings & continued success!
You’re welcome, Gerard, and thanks for the mention in your books.
I totally second Gerard. I read the commentaries before I even read the articles!
Your input is so invaluable, I’d have no way to assess this without your expertise, PG.
So, my comment on the change is: Good. Not the fact that they are undoubtedly still trying to screw over the writer in the clauses PG pointed out, and most likely in other points of fine print. But the fact that they bowed to public pressure.
It may have been a half-bow, while they calculated ways to get out of it, but they bowed. They gave the author some options. They responded to some concerns. This is good. They are listening, and I wasn’t sure they would listen at all.
We still have far to go, but it’s very, very good for authors to know they can have a collective impact, and that they have power.
Thanks, Mira.
They blinked. This is the huge fact that we have to get out of this. In the span of a week, one of the largest publishing companies in the world backpedaled because authors all over the internet–all of us–stood up for themselves. Sure, the HALF deal still sucks, but they flinched, and everyone has seen it.
Mira’s right. Authors have the power. They always have, as they are the primary producer in publishing’s economic model. But for the first time, authors as a whole are starting to understand this.
It warms the cockles of my anarchistic heart.
I had to laugh at “constructive discussions.”
Paraphrase from memory:
“THIS IS A TERRIBLE HORRIBLE NO GOOD CONTRACT THAT IS BAD AND NO AUTHOR SHOULD SIGN IT EVER.”
…very constructive!
How much will the publishing companies give an author in negotiating? The same as any successful businessman: as much as they have to & as little as they need to.
They had to give on these proposed contracts, & they gave as little as they could.
Good observation, Geoff, although the market will determine whether RH gave enough in this case.
“Title-specific marketing costs above $10,000 will be proposed in advance to the author. If the author agrees, the incremental costs of such title-specific marketing activities over $10,000 will be deducted from sales revenue before profits are split.”
First, RH will never spend one penny on marketing these books. But IF they do, and if they spend at least $10,000, after that, then you foot the bill for the publicist they decide to hire.
I wrote a big listing of things still wrong with their offering over at Forward Motion Writers. I’ll spare everyone the pasting in of the entire thing, but I do want to make these points here:
No word about their first-option clause which stipulated any book must go to them first for first-refusal. If they want it, it automatically gets the same terms as the current book. Watch out for that one!
They are still going for a rights grab with all languages and all countries. Their new contract says “Earnings from subsidiary rights are split between the imprint and the author subject to the business model the author chooses.” Which means 50/50 if you take the ‘profit-sharing’ model, or 25/75 option if you take the advance/royalty option (that last one really stinks). Typically, to take the right to sell in other countries and other languages is something a publisher will pay extra for. As John Scalzi said:
“There is nothing in the Alibi contract that says that Alibi is going to do anything with those foreign rights in itself (I’m guessing it does not have a bank of translators on call, slavering to translate your work) or that it’s going to make an active attempt to sell those rights to foreign publishers (including Random House publishers across the world). It’s just… taking those rights. Because, why not?”
They are still grabbing print, even with their own admission that going into print is unlikely. Oh, not planning on using the right, but still want to grab and sit on it? Yeash. As an aside, if your book does go into print and you choose the profit-sharing option, guess who gets to pay for all of the production AND shipping? Yep, the author. The new ‘covering all production costs’ applies ONLY to the digital version.
Random House says:
“If we see opportunities with select manuscripts for performance or transformative digital editions (such as video games), we will seek to acquire additional rights, subject to negotiation with the author.”
Nice of them. But, what about print? Audio? Serial, book club and merchandising? Sorry, they are sitting on those rights, too, even if they have no plans to use them (at least, that’s what it still looks like from the new model).
As a reminder, all of these imprints are “DIGITAL-only imprints.” DIGITAL! Did I say that loud enough? This is how Random House itself describes all of these imprints! If this is a digital imprint, then they don’t need these other rights. If they want them, they should pay extra for them.
As for the initial author-insulting terms, sorry, I have problems with this. Allison Dobson of V.P., Digital Publishing Director Random House “strongly disagree with” the well-deserved criticism in their initial response to all the criticism. And now they are calling this response as “In response to recent constructive discussions with authors, agents and writers’ groups…” I guess after the firestorm in the publishing industry started getting picked up by major news outlets, they decided to maybe listen. Um, yeah. Nice about-face, forced on them only after the story went big.
(Note: the above opinions are only my own. As with any business decision, read up, research, ask questions, go into any negotiation of your own with your own team that includes an IP lawyer to counter all their lawyers, keep your eyes open, and be willing to walk if you can’t get the deal you want that shows respect to you as the content maker.)
I’ll stop there. This is getting too long already.
J.A., you’re posts are never too long. Writers, especially the new ones these reprehensible deals are targeting, can never have enough common sense.
It’s well worth reading David G.’s analysis in an article or two above this, Publishers Behaving Badly, and clicking through to the article.
For one thing, he points out that although the author no longer has to shoulder the costs for e-book distribution, they may still need to shoulder costs for print. Which are, needless to say, HUGE.
Anyone know what “net sales revenue” is? That’s an extremely important part of the equation. The term can mean just about anything depending on how net is determined. Is there some commonly accepted definition in publishing?
From the summarized information, I have an idea there is a total sales level below which the author is better off with the royalty option, and above which he is better off with the half option. The opposite will be true for RH.
We can probably game out an equation for it, but more detail is necessary.
It’s still terrible, but now it looks about as terrible as the typical Big Countdown contract.
As Reinhardt said above, the most important thing is that they blinked. They changed the contract terms because the internet and writers’ organizations had a fit about how seriously bad the contract was. If enough of us yell loud enough, we CAN make them change. Now if SFWA and the others would be just as upset about the typical “boilerplate” contract … well, I can dream, right?
Some of you are saying things like, “They blinked.” or “They listened.”
Maybe they did. But I’m betting that they were counting on people responding that way.
Look.
I’ve worked with a very intelligent (if ethically challenged in some ways) businessman. (In fact, I’ve worked with several.) He would regularly propose we do things just to stir the pot so he could approach the customer, “listen”, and do things the way we’d been planning on in the first place.
The theory was that they would be so happy that you listened and “backed down” from your previous position, that they won’t notice that it’s the same business model you’ve been following all along (only now they were actively happy with it rather than taking it as given).
And, you know, if the customers don’t protest, then the business gets to pad their pockets a bit more than anticipated.
I feel like so many of the original protesters were just so happy HALF “listened” to them, they’ve backed off, even though the terms are really about as bad (or in some cases perhaps worse) than the original.
Their reversions sure were rather quick, weren’t they? Even their “I write to you in sorrow to ask you why, why didn’t you come to us first…?” responses to these top-shelf protestors was a fast turn-around. To me – especially coming from the publishing industry (who are notoriously slow) – it smacks of tactics, not losing their nerve.
I’m just saying that I hope the voices who have a following keep saying that HALF is a bad deal and keep putting the pressure on them by shaming them and warning away writers. Because settling when the deal is still this bad is only fighting the scouting party and ignoring the army behind it.