Posted on 08/18/2011 7:22:05 PM PDT by SanFranDan
Electronic devices mean writers receive lower royalties
An award-winning writer has warned that e-readers like the Kindle are threatening the future of literature. Graham Swift, author of Last Orders which won the Booker Prize in 1996, said the growing popularity of the devices have led to new writers receiving lower royalties than hard and paperback books.
He said that could stop aspiring authors from writing potentially good books as they are unable to make a living from their work.
Speeaking to BBC Radio Four's World at One, he said: 'I wouldn't envy a young aspiring writer now.
'The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.
'I think the tendency will be that writers will get even less than they get now for their work and sadly that could mean that some potential writers will see that they can't make a living, they will give up and the world would be poorer for the books they might have written, so in that way it is quite a serious prospect.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Well authors need to address this in their contracts to publishers.
I’m pretty sure he has this one wrong. We have all read great authors who discovered the joy of the book deal over the joy of creating. Some of my greatest disappointments have come from established authors who became comfortable.
If you love to write and write well, there is no reason to fear electronic publishing. On the other hand if you produce pulp for the check so you don’t suffer real life experience.
I understand the allure of Kindle and e-books, but I’m an “in print for posterity” type of gal. Given how quickly history is being re-written, I want the original, crusty, yellowed sources.
Ping.
I believe you had some comments on an earlier thread which related to this book publishing phenomenon.
I love my Kindle.
I think it’s more that the reading public will more decide who gets read. Until now, the writers had to meet the favor of the publishers to get into print and into the bookstores.
I agree with you. If you only have the digital version, it can be changed instantaneously. With the printed version, the changers have to track down all the copies. Without all of those printed books out there refuting the FDR historical lies, no one would know what an abysmal failure that FDR was actually.
I make more from Amazon from a Kindle sale than a paper sale. That is, 70% of my $9.99 selling price for the kindle versions.
And I don’t need to spend money to produce, store or ship my electronic books.
Ha ha ha... BS!
The fact is publishing in this manner increases the income to “writers.”
Traditional authors may not see this. If you have knowledge on a subject, you can write your own book now(you can even if you don’t have knowledge).
How much do you think a traditional author gets paid per book? $1, $.25, $5. I don’t know. I do know if you write and publish a book on kindle, you get all proceeds - amazon’s cut you get to keep. That could be $7, $19, $48 per copy vs. what a traditional paper book publisher will give you when the “accept” your book.
Very true. People need to know what is truly “saved” on their electronic devices, and what is merely “parked” there at the pleasure of the electronic publisher/distributer. Your e-books could be deemed subversive and “poof” they could be gone, as easily as they had appeared. I encourage folks to get paper backups for any books a future despotic regime might want to disappear.
Why did you address that to me?
I think people on FR are really skeptical of government and sinister plots and mind control by the media which history proves is wise.
Revisionism has been occurring since 1913 and it is intentional—by socialist/communists/progressives/ so they can destroy the heroes and reinstate zero-type/socialism worship of the Howard Zinn variety.
Hard copies can be subversive, also—and all public school textbooks should be burned. The following was written in 1913 and worshipped by the media and our universities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Economic_Interpretation_of_the_Constitution_of_the_United_States
I’m making as much off ebook sales as my regular sales.
How do sign an e-book?
With a ZOT!
I hate my Kindle.
Although I concede if all someone reads is pulp fiction, then a Kindle is probably good enough.
I originally bought my Kindle for those books that are not worth buying in hardcover.
But the few nonfiction books I've read on my Kindle, were a miserable experience, because of the charts and illustrations which are miniaturized.
Navigation and zooming is a miserable affair.
And having to constantly refer back to this map or that chart, is another miserable, clunky experience.
And forget about books with footnotes at the end of every chapter.
I will add one opinion I have not seen yet.
I began collecting electronic books mostly of titles I already own. This applies to all non-fiction books, and those novels which gather a meaty body of historical and physical facts about geography, physical science, which are often used for reference.
I prefer not to mutilate my books, but even if I were so inclined, it would be absurd to try easily to find, a phrase, a name, facts, dates about the subject matter. In essence, an electronic book becomes its own index in its entirety.
The only reason I would ever buy a kindle, if for convenience in reading fiction away from home. I certainly would never try to view a textbook, an Atlas or a Math textbook on it!
However, the (free) PC version of Kindle is gloriously useful for reading or browsing ANY book, and if all Kindles eventually are able to view books in PDF format, just about every book I would have time to read in my lifetime, written prior to 1925 or so is available free online as a PDF.
Lets talk about cost. It is unconscionable for an author to get less than 50% of the price of every book sold. I suspect that the retailer typically earns more than the author. Never mind what the "publisher's" cut is. But therein lies a huge fraud.
The authors don't write books. Editors do. And the publisher justifies his absurd cut of the book price by listing all the remedial services done to the manuscript (editing,) advertising, promotion, etc. before bringing it to the consumer, as well as the physical management of paper, ink, presses, trimmers binders, etc., shipping warehousing and distributing tens of tons of paper.
If the authors are truly competent they certainly should get the lion's share of the sale price. If they're not, they are entitled only to the token amount for the general idea of the story, if someone else must write the book for them.
I would gladly pay the authors twice as much as they are currently getting from traditional printed books, for an electronic version that can't be edited, modified or duplicated, but which will allow me to cut and paste one paragraph at a time, for purposes of reference or citations.
In summary, I consider the publishing/printing industry the buggy whip manufacturers of the 21st century, and I despise them as much as I do the RIAA, which presume my criminality, and slow down everything I must do on a computer (with Microshaft's complicity) to safeguard their monopoly. I'd rather celebrate and promote and support the competent author.
I agree 100% about the shortcomings of Kindle when it comes to navigating around to charts and illustrations. It works a lot better in fiction, where the reading is a linear experience.
I feel sorry for authors who obtained a marginal “real” (sic) publishing contract from a “real” (sic) publisher, and are now trapped in a 7% royalty structure, when most of their sales are going to be via Amazon and Amazon Kindle anyway, and less and less from brick and mortar (dinosaur) stores.
Unless one is already a name-brand author of best sellers, brick and mortar sales are a tiny fraction of the business, and rapidly declining. And that is the only area of the business where a “real” (sic) publishing contract still gives an author an edge. The demise of Borders Books (and its 500 outlets) spells doom on that model. To give up the rights to one’s work for that small and declining edge seems foolish to me.
I need a physical book in my hands to enjoy reading. I like books themselves.
Nice collection ya got there. Say, you wouldn’t happen to be the author of them books, would ya?
All the good books have solid color covers; yellow, red, blue, black.
How many Kindle sales in percentage is there versus printed? Just curious.
Quick off-topic question. Does a Kindle have a text-to-speech function, so that I can “listen” to books I buy on Kindle? Just wondering, since I “read” a lot more audio books than written ones.
You got that right. With e-books, there is no heavy investment. A writer could even self-publish his own e-book, have it be downloadable from his own website, and skip the publisher.
Or killing the section of the music business whose customers would rather steal than buy.
Baen Books publishes the e-book version of their new science fiction novels at the same time they release the hardback. I tend to buy e-books from them rather than paper books. They have no DRM on their books, but I still buy rather than search for a bootleg copy because $8 for an e-book is no big deal for me, and I like supporting my favorite authors.
You got that right. With e-books, there is no heavy investment. A writer could even self-publish his own e-book, have it be downloadable from his own website, and skip the publisher.
I agree except that that's hard to do if you're Joe Shpootul and no one has heard of you. I think you need to work through some trafficked website.
Believe me, I'm trending my book vs kindle sales closely. I Kindled CC first, then I think in order, about one a month since January. No matter. In this calender year Kindles are outselling dead-trees about 60-40. Shazaam. I see a slight down-tick in dead-trees, mebbee, but it's far, far more than made up in Kindle sales.
I love Amazon and Jeff Bezos or whoever that guy is. For the honor of passing my intellectual content through his servers, he gives me $7 out of $10 for each Kindle sold. I hope he makes trillions and buys the biggest megayacht ever dreamed of. Or whatever he's into. He is the best thing that ever happened to singleton outsider authors like me.
Now I can just laugh at those blue and purple-haired maven gatekeepers in NYC. They are guarding portals that are now moot. The dino is dead. Long live the indie author.
I’ve been doing this since 2003, on Kindle since 2011. There are three sides of the triangle: writing, manufacturing and marketing. With e-books manufacturing is just another step done on the computer, format-wise. By FAR the most challenging leg of the triangle is MARKETING. You can write total crapola and sell a bazzilion with good internet marketing. Sometime, I’ll name names. You can write the best stuff since Hemingway and die from lack of an understanding of modern internet marketing. It’s all about internet marketing.
Yes, Kindle has an audio function, but it’s in “robo-voice” that maybe only a blind person would appreciate. It doesn’t stop at periods, even. But you can choose a male or female voice. It’s sort of like the electronic Coast Guard robo-voice who reads the marine weather forecast on VHF. It gets the job done, but it ain’t pretty.
I’ve done all that since 2003. Sold over 40,000 books, and not at a paltry 7% royalty.
Rampant illiteracy born of poor education and also, horribly bad writers who get empty prizes from addlepated idiots are things threatening the future of literature. It makes no sense to blame a bad meal on the dishes on which it is served.
I’m sorry he’s a horse and buggy man in a automobile age.
Amazon has make allowances for this. For instance they doubled the royalty rate for books costing less than $10.
Writers are going to have to adapt to the new formats. There are only a few books I would buy in “dead tree” format, these days.
The monks filed a class action suit against Gutenberg, too. It didn’t work. :)
That Internets thingy has been great for everyone. We in the software world also find Internet distribution, marketing and sales to be in our favor over traditional means. I work for a company that own 97% of our market segment, yet, we are finding we had better change our ways (and we are) or else that kid in his basement is going to slaughter us. Freedom of choice works great!
BTW, the wife is loving your book Castigo Cay. She says it reads well and she tends to ignore me when she’s reading it. As she puts it, “You guys have just too much fun thinking about these things.”
Will one of the next books use the acronym FOAD?
I generally read 5 books at a time, I get bored easily. Kindle is the way to go except for graphics heavy tomes.
I believe it.
Do you believe you'd have managed to get published in the pre-internet days?
I'm guessing it's been awhile since this gentleman was an "aspiring" author if he's a Booker winner. In fact, the biggest hurdle to an unpublished writer in the conventional publishing business is getting a publisher to put out the capital necessary to place that first book on the market at what is usually a loss. They really do "invest" in authors, especially in competitive and lower-paying markets such as science fiction/mystery.
E-publishing and its hybrid, print-on-demand, lower the mostly unrecoverable cost of printing, binding, shipping, and then dealing with the remainders. That is a formidable threshold for a new author to surmount but not the only one. It does not lower the costs of advertisement and marketing, and it is these that tend to funnel new writers in search of a career, and not just a sale, into the hands of the traditional houses even if the latter only publish their work electronically.
Authors don't actually sell books so much as they sell themselves. It's like a lot of entertainment industries in that regard.
Getting published was not the hardest part, even 20 years ago, pre-internet. Even then, only one out of 20 first-time “published authors” earned out their (pitiful) advances and saw royalty check one. 19/20 “published authors” never got book deal # two.
The NYC publishing world could treat new authors like the input to a sausage machine, it didn’t matter. Every day, 300 new manuscripts would arrive from desperately eager would-be novelists. What did they care, as long as a few best-seller emerged every year? If 19/20 “published authors” went down in flames (and still lost the rights to their works forever), what did they care?
Good riddance to the bad old days. Now it’s wide open for anybody who can turn a good phrase and find their own audience. The modalities of delivery are now a mere formality. Are you smart enough to figure out MS Word adn Adobe PDFs? That’s about it.
If your written words are good enough to attract a fan base.
There is still that talent thing.
Tomorrow is our 20th wedding anniversary.
Today, almost all my thrills are vicarious. That's why I write.
Probably not. So far my books have ended with C, D, E and F.
I’ll need to start TNB (the next book) with a B or a G.
Same here. I have Nook Color that was a gift from my husband. He thought it would be a plus when I travel so I would not need to take a heavy book bag. LOL However I take the Nook and the book bag too. Can’t separate me form the real thing.
I agree, Kindle is perfect for that mood-shifting author. Each book just stays on the last page read.
But it lacks in graphics-intensive works, because the bookmarking and searching features are clunky and slow.
wow..bubba...she gonna kill u
wonder were Joe is now?
Spain is my guess
Congragulations
Thanks. 28 years is a long time and it’s been anything but smooth at times. We had an 8 year year honeymoon, mostly on boats, so I can’t ever complain.
All day we’ve both been mixing up 20th and 28th, because the day is the 20th I suppose. We’ve been married 28 years, not 20.
28 years is a long time...twice as long as A and I have been hitched.
God bless
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