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...

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...

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...

A very interesting article in The Bookseller this morning.  Here's a snippet: Literary agents speaking at Publishers Launch Frankfurt have challenged publishers to approach e-book royalty discussions in a more "knowledgeable" way or face a "reckoning" from the digital revolution. But there are signs of movement on the 25% royalty from UK publishers, with UK agent David Miller [pictured] stating that he had negotiated better rates for some of his authors. Robert Gottlieb, chairman of the US literary agency Trident Media Group, said publishers were still fixed in their traditional models. "American publishers have to...

From the Edmonton Journal, here's part of the interview with Greg Hollingshead, chairman of the Writers' Union of Canada: Q: One of the Writers' Union's proposals is that the publisher split proceeds of e-book sales equally with the author. So, are you proposing a royalty rate of 50 per cent? Do you think this is feasible? A: The traditional 15 per cent of the list price of a hardcover book is derived, approximately, from an understanding that the publisher and author share the net proceeds 50 per cent. (Roughly, if 70 per cent of the cost...

Since The Bookseller's site is down I'm reprinting this email article in full (block quotes omitted): Man Booker-winning author Graham Swift has said there is a danger aspiring writers may be put off from writing if the rates they are paid decrease in the digital age. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's "The World at One" yesterday [17th August], Swift said that, though a reader choosing an e-book over a paper book "doesn't matter" for them, "that happy and balanced picture changes rather when you think about the other end of that process and the...

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%...

In a two-part announcement Harlequin said: The landscape of digital publishing continues to evolve at a fast pace and Harlequin is at the forefront of this evolution. In 2007 Harlequin was the first publisher to simultaneously publish print and digital editions of our entire frontlist. Since then we have also digitized and brought to market our backlist and now have a current catalogue of over 11,000 ebooks! The Harlequin brand has always offered an advantage other publishers don’t have and this is especially true for ebooks. Our digital marketing efforts focus on building the Harlequin brand to drive the sales of...