![AndrewWylie.PhotographEamonnMcCabe[1]](http://www.teleread.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/AndrewWylie.PhotographEamonnMcCabe1.jpg "AndrewWylie.PhotographEamonnMcCabe[1]")
Sarah Weinman at Daily Finance has an interesting look at the aftermath of the Random House/Andrew Wylie reconciliation, looking at some oddities around the original publishing deal and the settlement and pondering about what it might mean for the future of e-publishing.
As a result of the make-up, 13 out of Odyssey’s 20 books will no longer be published through Amazon, but will instead revert to Random House. While the exact details are unclear, a Random House spokesman said that the deal would not affect the standard e-book author royalty rates of 25 to 40 percent.
Weinman also considers whether Wylie ever really meant to make a go of it as a publisher, or it was just a publicity stunt to get a better bargaining position. Even granting that Wylie may have been talking about this for a while, she notes:
But even for 20 titles — or just seven, as the case may be now — being an e-publisher is not just about finding a company to do the dirty work of file formatting, then handing over exclusive rights to a retailer as the path of least resistance. To be successful requires a solid infrastructure that multitasks the concerns of authors, publishers, distributors and technology companies. Considering that it’s the offspring of a literary agency that represents 700 authors and employs far fewer personnel to handle those rights, Odyssey Editions smacks of a water-dipped toe, a publicity ploy, rather than a deep commitment to digital publishing.
As Weinman concludes, it’s still uncertain what—if anything—this means for the future of digital publishing. After all, this only directly affects the relatively small subset of backlist titles—books that are still in print whose contracts pre-date the addition of e-book terms. Far more influence might be wielded by authors of new works such as J.A. Konrath or Seth Godin who help to blaze a self-publishing trail, or by Google Books’s digitization of entire out-of-print libraries.
(Found via BookSquare.)
I don’t know why she suggests better success for recent authors as it all reads to me like Wylie and his authors got a sweetener enough to come back into the fold. The comment about ‘deep commitment’ is just silly. It’s business Sarah. Business. It’s about getting the best deal for the client.
any chance that the titles in dispute will now be published in e – by random house? and if so, would they have been published in e-versions/editions anyway? or did it take the threat of infringement to make random house aware that those titles still have value?