Prior to 2009, when publishers scoffed at the ebook market, they offered writers contracts which gave us half of the money they made off ebook sales.
~ Michael A. Stackpole
When publishers scoffed
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Mike Stackpole gets little credit for this, but he was all on board independent publishing and eBooks long before most other people. He was loudly predicting the decline in print publishing and big six consolidation as early as 2004 and 2005 well before the kindle came out.
Back when people were saying “mmmm… ebooks.. I dunno, it might be a good Market”, Stackpole was saying “Publishers have built a business around warehousing and shipping wood. Authors are story tellers, we’re not in the wood business.”
Sometimes I wish I dove into writing rather than IT & Robotics back when I first started hearing Mike on his podcast talk about the dynamic shift coming to publishing. But having a stable healthcare & benefits while writing is pretty good also.
They offered 50%, and after ebooks exploded around the end of 2010, immediately began trying to pay less. I was told, “If you don’t sign this addendum for 25% ebook royalties, we won’t put out an ebook.” And they were very serious about that.
My favorite was, after realizing a publisher was only paying me 20% royalties was “That’s our standard rate.(email 1)” And after asking about the 50% in the contract, “Those were subsidiary rights, not ebook rights. Ebook rights weren’t included in the contract.(email 2)” Well, then!
If Stackpole is making 50% royalties on his Star Wars ebooks he’s doing super awesome! Sweet.
Those terms ended in 2009, which is what he’s referring to.
Once the BPHs realized there was big money in ebooks, they moved to reduce author shares across the board.
Nowadays it’s closer to 17%.
(And the 50% was by default. Because they had no explicit ebook clauses. As soon as they thought of it, they cut it to pbook levels.)
17% of what? “publisher’s net” or “list”?
List, which is what print is based on and the reason the price is on the cover.
With ebooks, the publisher gets 70% of list/retail (or less, thanks to Agency Part Deux) and the author gets a quarter of that, 17.5%.
Before it was 50% of net because absent a specific ebook clause they fell under subsidiary/licensing. That, BTW, was the trick Torstar/Harlequin used in their self-dealing scam.
Aha. Thanks.
I’m guessing my 2003-2005 books (with Thomson/Course/Reuters/Cengage) fell into that subsidiary/licensing area. I remember that they started to offer the book(s) as “electronic books”, i.e., PDFs, if I recall correctly. Don’t remember seeing much action on royalty statements with that. At that time, I couldn’t image why anyone would want a PDF book.
Now, I’m happy with the 70% (minus “digital handling”) for ebooks. And making ~175% more in royalty on each $4.99 book vs. what I was getting for each $39.95 trade paperback (at 12% of publisher’s net).
Then again, I also remember printing with hot type! 😉
You weren’t alone in seeing very little off early ebooks.
That is why Random House got away with the bait and switch: they offered up 2 extra points on print in return for the cut on digital.
The time was mid 2009, when they had seen the numbers for holiday 2008 after the Oprah Kindle endorsement but authors hadn’t. In fact, since Kindle sold out early in its 2007 launch and didn’t return until may, and since tradpub financials generally ran (run?) 6 months to a year behind, the numbers the authors were seeing were essentially pre-Kindle numbers.
A form of insider trading that.
And then, since RH got away with it, the rest of the Manhattan mafia followed suit. Just in time for the Agency Conspiracy that was already gestating.
Semi-interesting little side note to this…
Because I once swam around the island of Manhattan (nonstop), one could say that I “swam circles” around the Manhattan Mafia. I’ll call that a goal. 😉
Works for me.
Felix, would I be right in recalling that the publishers wrote direct to the authors in this case, cutting out the agents (who might have objected to the sums to which their 15% was applied being reduced)? Also, if the author was canny enough to decline the change did the publishers retaliate by not bothering to do e-books?
You recall correctly.
At least as I recall, that was the report on Teleread. 😉
It struck me as odd at the time that the agents didn’t mind the bait-n-switch, just that the contract amendments bypassed them.
The latter I don’t know. It does sound like them but most resulting author plaints were about ebooks killing their print sales, not about lacking a digital release.
The BPHs dropped a lot of midlisters at the time, though. By some published reports they dropped any author not doing at least 30,000 sales during the launch window, without regard to genre, past record, or total sales of the most recent book.
I suspect that if they hadn’t bypassed the agents there wouldn’t have been any reports at all. Publishing omerta at work.