E-book Rights Grab

It seems that everyone wants their piece of the ebook pie, and there is a general tendency to toss up your hands and assume that because the folks who are fighting for those right are huge, mega-corportations who are, for lack of a better phrase, “too big too fail,” that there is nothing that can be done about it.

It started with Google. Most of you have heard, at least in passing, what Google did. It started digitizing books. Not just out of print books, all books. Just kind of sucked them up so fast, digitized them so fast, that some pages have images of the hands of the folks doing the digitizing. Reminds me, many years ago, about seeing film of inmates making license plates. One slip, there goes a finger.

In doing this, Google violated the rights of every author whose work was in copyright. Statutory damages for that sort of thing run between $750 and $100,000 per count. The proposed Google settlement would not require Google to admit they did anything wrong (boo, hiss), will maybe require them to pay between $60 and $300 per infringed item (boo, hiss) and will cover all authors unless they specifically choose to opt out.

In short, they steal your stuff, they make a profit off it, and they get to tell you how much they’re willing to pay you for it, and you are bound by the agreement even though you had no hand in negotiating it. No wonder the Department of Justice is not happy with the settlement. Using this as a precedent, any big corporation can do whatever it wants, then negotiates a settlement and you’re bound by it without ever being consulted all after the fact. You might not think it will happen to you, and then you’ll wake up and WalMart has paved your front yard. Enjoy that settlement. 🙂

A bit closer to home, Random House has recently asserted the right to publish all books they have under contract as ebooks, regardless as to whether or not they actually ever purchased ebook rights. The reason they’re doing this is simple: they’ve realized that, by contract, they actually own the rights on maybe fifteen years worth of content. 1996 was the first year any of my contracts mentioned ebooks, and in that case it was agreed that the publisher and I would negotiate “in good faith” for those rights if they ever came to be exercised. As I recall, SF/Fantasy publishers were ahead of the curve on securing ebook rights so, in other genres then, I’m assuming the picture is not even as rosy as it is in the SF/F area.

But do they do anything with those rights? Nope.

Three examples ought to point out the sort of stupidity that goes on with their exercising the rights they already have.

1) ROC relinquished the rights to the BattleTech novels three years ago. And yet, I can go out to Amazon, the Sony store, and other online retail ebook outlets and buy those books under a ROC imprint. The royalties for those sales are going somewhere, and all I know is that they’re not ending up with me.

2) Random House owns the ebook rights to my entire DragonCrown War cycle. They’ve only made the last two books available as ebooks. Now, this might just could be me, but I really don’t think we’re going to see a lot of sales of the ebooks of three and four in a series, when books one and two aren’t available in that format.

3) Random House again: Despite owning the rights to the entire DragonCrown War cycle, and the rights to the Age of Discovery books (all of which are available for the Kindle, but only the first two are available for the Sony e-reader, go figure); they have failed to produce an Omnibus edition of the series as an ebook. This would be the work of an afternoon—at the very most—to combine the files, could be done by an unpaid intern, and would provide a wonderful package deal for folks looking for books to put in their electronic word boxes. (The reason they don’t is hilarious—they’d never do it as a print book because it would be too expensive to publish, so clearly that would be so for the ebook version! I wish I was making this stuff up.)

Mind you, Random House’s assertion that they own rights on books that they never signed contracts for those rights on is problematic on two fronts. First, they didn’t buy the rights and the courts have upheld that aspects of contracts when the case has been brought up for litigation. They’ll lose any suit they bring, but the threat of a suit is enough to stop folks from striking profitable deals.

Second, in 2009 Random House decided that whereas in the past that authors and publishers would split money from ebook sales 50-50; now (because there is an ebook market), authors should get 25% and publishers 75%! Such a deal for authors.

If that seems rather outrageous, it’s because it is. Random House suggested that “it’s not as easy to make an ebook as everyone thinks,” hence publishers need more money for having done so. And yet you all know that I’ve been doing ebooks for years without having Random House’s resources. Michael Zapp and I had books selling through Apple’s Appstore six months before Random House did. Think about that just for a second, and you’ll see why the rights grabs are on. If publishers can convince writers that they cannot do what I have done, their entire house of cards comes tumbling down.

Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has recently cut a deal with an ebook publisher that bypasses his traditional publisher. If you read through the article, you’ll also note that his consulting firm is “experimenting with self-publishing.” If Covey, who is a smart guy and understands business, is getting into the publishing business himself, then he’s certainly seeing profit potential and trends that excite him in the post-paper era. And, again, in the article, it seems that what attracts him is Amazon’s willingness to promote his work—which is the job of a publisher, and yet something few of them seem to do.

I’ve tossed a lot of stuff out here, but it boils down to pretty simple terms:

1) Middle men (Google, Random House, others) see the ease with which authors can go digital as a threat to their futures. They are attempting, through means of questionable legality, to lock up rights to make it appear as if they are the only game in town. If you want to do business, you have to do it with them—as it had been before when the cost of production was too high for most individuals to swing it themselves.

2) Smart business people, like Covey, see serious profit potential in new modes of production.

3) Producing ebooks is not hard. In fact, it’s painfully simple, and if you are reading this (even if someone printed it out for you), you have the resources to be producing, distributing, selling and profiting from your own written work.

4) The only person who is going to publicize and promote your work is you. Old-line publishers have abandoned effective publicity methods and are not well versed in how to handle publicity or publication in the new digital world. If they’re not going to bring promotion to the table, why do they get a cut again? (Not for editorial services. They hire out a great deal of editorial, and you can find editorial help in any number of ways.)

The only person who should be grabbing the electronic rights to your work is you. If someone cannot or will not exploit those rights, they don’t deserve to have them. And if that means that traditional publishing has to address these problems or go away, well, I know a few consultants who could give them practical advice on how to reshape their business model to make it viable.

And if they don’t want to address those problems, we can all just be little digital velociraptors thriving while the giants fail.