Self-publishing author Will Entrekin has written a very interesting blog post about his participation in Amazon’s “Kindle Select” program, in which his books are made available exclusively on Amazon and are part of the Amazon Prime Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. In the first part, he talks about why he made the decision to go exclusive with Amazon. It boiled down to having greater comfort developing for Amazon’s platform, and liking the kind of control Amazon gave him over the presentation of his book that he didn’t feel he could get with Barnes & Noble. (And also, he never...

On new Silicon Valley news startup Pando Daily, ex-TechCruncher Sarah Lacey posts an email she got from an anonymous publishing industry insider who sees Amazon gunning for the publishing industry with a long-term plan to put big publishers out of business. By selling books at slim or even negative profit margins, this insider notes, Amazon is targeting publishers own profit margins—if Amazon can convince consumers that books are “supposed to be” cheaper, publishers will have to lower prices sooner or later. And Amazon also has its sights on the books that earn the publishing industry most of its money—celebrity...

In 2008, I wrote about some authors’ desire to force second-hand bookstores to pay royalties when they resell used books, comparing it to the droit de suite laws in Europe that require royalties be paid on resale of original works of art. Now, Mike Masnick writes on Techdirt about legislation that has just been introduced to bring droit de suite to the United States. The law would only apply to art valued over $10,000. The problem with this law, Masnick points out, is that it makes ownership of art more expensive—people who would buy it as an investment...

On FutureBook, Martyn Daniels takes a look at writer Michael Chabon’s decision to take the e-book rights to his backlist books to an e-publisher that will give him a 50% royalty rate rather than the 25% his print publisher offered. Daniels compares the decision to the sentiment expressed in a Jessie J song, “Price Tag” (which I’d never heard of), whose lyrics suggest that, for the singer, creative freedom is more important than making money. He wonders whether Chabon’s decision is just about the money, or whether it suggests authors are starting to become more canny about binding themselves into “digital...

Mike Shatzkin has another long and thoughtful post, this time arguing that publishers should change the accounting methods they use in order to pay authors more for sales of e-books. At the moment, publishers count the 70% of e-book cover price they keep under the agency model as their revenue, and pay authors a percentage of that revenue. If authors are paid a 25% royalty, for instance, 25% of the 70% works out to 17.5% of the e-book’s cover price. Shatzkin argues that publishers should instead call the whole price revenue, and account for the 30% as a “cost...

Mike Shatzkin has another fascinating essay in which he goes into detail about how e-books are priced by various actors in the e-book publishing industry. He explains that the break between agency pricing and non-agency pricing creates two separate standards—the “digital retail price” (of which agency vendors take 30% and are not allowed to change), and the “suggested retail price” (which is usually close to the cost of the lowest print version, and agency vendors pay half of to the publisher but can then choose to mark down for their own sales). The non-agency publishers who sell to Apple are obliged...

The new chair of the UK-based Society of Authors, Lindsey Davis, has said that she is going to focus on pressing for a better e-book royalty rate during her two-year term, the Bookseller  reports. Davis said: "Naturally I follow the well-warmed footsteps of my King Wenceslas predecessor Tom Holland and believe we should claim 30% e-book royalties, and that higher than that would be right. It is important that we remember that when we signed our e-books away it was with a review period of two years—and those two years are now up. We must make...

If Amazon accidentally gave 6,000 copies of your e-book away for free—without compensating you for the downloads—you’d be a little ticked off, right? That happened to self-publishing author James Crawford, whose zombie novel Blood Soaked & Contagious was inadvertently given away by Amazon, due to a glitch in the web-crawling robot that makes sure Amazon’s prices are always equivalent to the lowest price the book is offered for elsewhere. As originally reported by GalleyCat (and in a rather more balanced article on PaidContent), on September 30th Amazon’s bot mistook a free sample of the first few chapters of the...

At FutureBook, Philip Jones has a look at the current status of digital royalties. There appears to be some ambivalence going around the publishing industry at the moment, as even though some agents are reporting getting rates better than the current 25% industry standard, publishers are still largely adamant that they will go no higher. This makes Amazon’s self-publishing operations, offering 70% royalties on the e-books they sell, look more attractive. HarperCollins’ Worldwide chief executive Brian Murray points out that the 25% royalty rate is better than the 16%-18% authors traditionally get on print books, and that there should...

The Bookseller has a commentary column from Caradoc King, chairman and joint managing director of prestigious literary agency A P Watt. King reflects on the quandaries that the new digital age brings with it, questions for which one would expect such an agency to have ready answers—but that remain pernicious even today. A number of these questions have to do with the 25% vs. 50% e-book royalty issue on backlist titles—and whether to set up independent e-publishing units for out-of-print books or titles that do not appeal to traditional publishers. Some publishers are refusing to budge on the 25%...

We’re all used to the idea that publishers are struggling to stay afloat in this brave new e-book-and-pirate-infested recessionary world. This is why they can’t pay greater royalties on lower-marginal-cost e-books, and why they want to keep their e-book prices high so consumers don’t come to devalue e-books (or to protect sales of hardcovers, whichever explanation you prefer). But every so often publicly-held corporations are required to let the public know how they’re doing, and Simon & Schuster just announced that, thanks to e-books, its recent revenues are up considerably. For the three months to...

The Bookseller has some interesting coverage of the London Book Fair, but I don’t have time right now to go over all of it. I’ll focus on the one bit that just leaped out at me. A number of execs—David Shelley of Little, Brown, Richard Mollet of the Publishers Association, and Stephen Page from Faber—explained that fighting online piracy is costing publishers a bundle, and is one of the reasons publishers cannot afford to raise e-book royalty rates as some publishers have been requesting. In the FutureBook blog, Philip Jones notes that there was some skepticism from the audience, and also...