Catherine Cookson estate signs exclusive e-publishing deal with Amazon

I remember when I was much younger my mother told me that one of her favorite authors was Catherine Cookson. I tried reading one of her books, but I couldn’t really get into it. Perhaps I should try again. Certainly, I’ll have the opportunity to do so, as The Bookseller reports that the late Cookson’s estate has signed a deal to release 100 of her novels as e-books directly through Amazon, bypassing her print publishers.

Amusingly, the trust’s literary agent Sonia Land didn’t even bother to consult those publishers.

She told the newspaper: "I haven’t told either firm about the deal and I am sure they are going to kick up a fuss about it. But at the end of the day, what can they say? They do not own the electronic publishing rights to the works. In recent years, they have shown little interest in marketing or exploiting the Cookson brand. It is a wake-up call for the industry."

The rest of the Bookseller article (three paragraphs) is devoted to explaining how popular Cookson is in the UK, “with more than 14 million library lends during the past decade.” Certainly it’s a coup for Amazon. Nate Hoffelder at Mediabistro’s eBookNewser points out that most of the titles are available from $1.50 to $5.99 each, both in the US and internationally, including amazon.co.uk. (Some titles are still in print as e-books from the print publishers, and cost more.)

On The Bookseller’s e-book blog, FutureBook, Philip Jones editorializes at length about what this, and the earlier print-publisher-bypass by Ian Fleming’s estate, could mean for print publishers. When the estates choose to publish backlist directly, they are cutting the print publishers out of potentially lucrative income on books that are long since finished products. The costs of editing are sunk, and beyond whatever it costs to get them scanned and formatted into e-books, anything the estates make from them is essentially “found money.” And since they don’t have to set aside a share for the publishers, the estates are laughing all the way to the bank.

And these are only the first pebbles; the avalanche is yet to begin in earnest. There are 88 years’ worth of dead authors with extensive still-in-copyright backlists out there, just waiting for e-publishers to make them an offer. To name a couple, where are the e-books of Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan stories? Only six of prolific author John Creasey’s novels are available as Kindle e-books, and likewise only a handful of John Dickson Carr’s novels are available as e-books (though more can be found on Project Gutenberg Australia, where they’re already in the public domain).

For the estates of those authors who have clearly-defined copyright heirs, this could be a license to print money. And since they don’t really need publishers to do anything for these works that have already been polished through the editorial process, why should they give publishers any money? That’s not going to make publishers very happy, given that not only are they not getting income out of it but the books will also be competing for reading time with the new works from which they are getting income.

Of course, this isn’t going to help people who want to get ahold of orphan works, which can’t be put back in print or e-print because nobody knows who owns them—and given the setbacks in the Google Books settlement, and lack of any action from Congress, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath waiting there.