A recent post on one of MWA’s proprietary email lists decried a new practice by some of the major publishers of reissuing titles, originally published in mass market paperback, as POD trade paper editions. The publishers’ goals are obvious. Since trade paper PODs essentially never go out of print, the publishers can retain the rights to those works indefinitely.
I discussed one author’s works in particular, and used it as an example of how even the major houses are learning that – in order to survive in the POD world – it’s necessary to either refuse bookseller returns, or jack the price through the ceiling. In this author’s case, they have released her titles with a cover price of $19.00.
Between 2001 and 2006, I released trade paper editions of my books through my own imprint, Back Alley Books. In order to attempt to keep these titles marginally competitive with the trade paper titles being released by the big boys, I capped cover prices at $15.95.
Now, Dell (among others) is releasing similarly sized books for three dollars more!
I expect that all POD-based small presses will follow suit, shortly, and re-price their own editions. I expect that it won’t be long before the Bigs switch their entire trade paper operation over to a POD model. The day of the $21.95 trade paperback as a relatively standard industry model isn’t far off. I recall the days when we paid that much for hardcover editions.
But that’s not my beef today.
What really got to me in the whole discussion was that the author in question was somehow incensed that her title was going to remain in print ad infinitum! Of course, this would mean that she would continue to receive royalties on those titles, and readers would continue to be able to keep reading her work. Somehow, however, she was upset because this meant that the rights to these titles would never revert to her.
And this is what bugged me.
As authors, we have become a bunch of spoiled, pantywaist drones. The assumptions under which we work apply to almost no other endeavor (save, perhaps, music).
If I, as a visual artist, paint a picture, and a consumer then pays me for it, I am not renting it to him. I should not expect to receive monthly payments from that consumer in return for allowing the picture to hang on his living room walls. When he buys my painting, it becomes his, and he has the right to do whatever he damn well wants to do with it, FOREVER!
I build acoustic guitars – as creative an endeavor as writing a book. If I sell a musician my guitar, do I expect him to remit 15% of his take at every gig he plays as long as he owns the instrument I built? No! Of course not – it’s his guitar; he can damn well smash it against a tree if he wants, and I have no right to tell him he can’t.
Building an acoustic guitar takes approximately 100 hours, and requires perhaps two hundred dollars worth of materials if you mill the wood yourself, or four hundred if you buy it prepared to work. I figure my time working on a guitar is worth more or less twenty dollars an hour. So, when I price the guitar to sell, I charge about $2500, which is more or less the lower end of the going rate for a hand-made instrument.
If I want more money, I make another guitar.
That musician, however, can turn around and write a song with my guitar, sell the song to a music publisher, and THEN will expect to be paid AGAIN every single time that song is played on the radio, forever and forever and forever.
Some people need more time, some less, but on average it takes about 100 hours to write a book. Under the current model for publishing, an author (for whatever reason) expects to be paid OVER AND OVER AND OVER for that 100 hours of work. We sell our books to a publisher, but the copyrights remain under our names. We expect that when the publisher is finished with our books they will be returned to us, free of charge, so that we can sell them again. Not only that, but after the publisher buys our books, we expect him to continue paying us royalties to keep the books!
We don’t sell books to publishers – we freakin’ lease them!
I would like to suggest that this system is seriously broken, and one clear example that it’s broken is the response this author I mentioned above had when she discovered that her book was going to remain in print indefinitely - meaning, of course, that it would continue to be available for READING. Despite this, she had a beef that her book would not somehow become her property again at some point in the future, even after she had already sold it to someone else.
“But what about intellectual property?” I hear most of you screaming.
There is no such thing. The term ‘intellectual property’ is a term drummed up by entertainment lawyers so that they can sue people to make a lot of money.
I do a lot of thinking when I build a guitar. I use my knowledge of wood species and their tonal properties, and how different types of wood sound together. I use my knowledge of resonance and engineering, and my understanding of the physical process of shaping my materials from their raw state into a synergistic system that produces a pleasant (I hope) auditory effect. Is this not an intellectual property?
No! It’s a damn guitar, and a book is just a damned book, and a song is just a damned song. If I produce it, and then I sell it to someone else, then it becomes THEIRS! If I want more money, I need to go create another guitar, or another book, or another song.
Here is a radical suggestion for revamping the publishing world, so that it will make a little more sense. Submitted for your approval (yeah, right!) is a world in which all works of literature – short stories, novels, poems – yea, even song lyrics – are considered ‘works for hire’. We write them, we sell them for money that we use to live, and then we write some more if we want more money.
Back in the early part of the twentieth century, there was a gentleman named Edward Stratemeyer. You may know him better as Franklin W. Dixon, or Victor Applegate, or Carolyn Keene, or Laura Lee Hope. Stratemeyer operated The Stratemeyer Syndicate. He generated ideas for his many series (The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, Bomba The Jungle Boy, etc), and handed them off to hired authors with clearly defined instructions regarding book structure, chapter length, organization, etc. The authors wrote the books, Stratemeyer paid them for the books, and that was the end of the transaction. Period.
Nobody talked to Edward Stratemeyer about ‘intellectual property’ – not if he/she wanted to write another book for the syndicate. The authors were fairly compensated for their time and effort, and if they wanted to make more money from the syndicate they could write another book.
I like this model. It’s clean. It’s simple. And, in the long run, it could result in a lot more books being published legitimately, rather than by POD vanity printers posing as ‘publishers’.
Let’s go back to our original issue. An author was concerned that her book, which she had sold to a major publisher, was being reissued as a POD trade paperback.
In my publishing world, where all rights convey to the buyer of a work, she would already have been fairly compensated for this book, and that would be the end of it.
By ‘fairly compensated’ I mean that – understanding that she would never again own the work she had created (just like selling a painting or a sculpture or – well, a guitar) she and the publisher would negotiate a fair price for the work. Upon payment, the ownership of the work would pass to the publisher, who could continue to sell the work as long as he wants. If the work becomes a huge success – well, both the author and the publisher benefit from this. The publisher benefits because he made a shrewd investment. The author benefits because now he/she can command a much higher price for his/her next work!
And, because in this model all trade paperback novels are now produced and distributed using the POD model, publishers are free to take more chances with lesser-known authors, because the initial cost (after the cost of buying the book from the author) of placing the book in front of the reading public is extremely low – potentially much less than a thousand dollars, depending on the extent of the cover art.
A radical idea? Only if you have completely bought into the fallacy that just because you create something you should also own it forever.
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