Traditional Publishing Stupidity

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Two traditional publishing news stories caught my eye, primarily because I blog about contracts all the time, trying to convince writers to stay away from traditional publishing contracts for their books—or at least to negotiate the hell out of those contracts. . . . . The first story to catch my … Read more

How to Read a Book Contract – Non-Competition

Continuing a Thanksgiving weekend reprise of the most popular earlier posts. Once more, Passive Guy dips into his Contract Collection for another little horror. (What?! You haven’t contributed to PG’s Contract Collection yet? Click HERE to mend your ways!) PG doesn’t disclose who, what or where regarding the sources for his contracts and he has modified today’s … Read more

Is the Devil You Know Really Better Than Amazon?

From bestselling author Barry Eisler: A lot of conversation in and about the publishing world is fixated on fear of Amazon’s purported potential monopoly power—on the possibility that Amazon will eventually enjoy such market dominance as a publisher that it will abuse its position and begin to punish authors, perhaps with extremely low royalties. Which … Read more

Strip Mining the Authors

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written another important essay on the changing face of publishing. I’ll intersperse some excerpts with my comments, but this is one you’ll want to read in its entirety. There is, as always, a link at the bottom. As will be abundantly clear from Kris’ examples, traditional publishers and the new agents-turned-publishers … Read more