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Scrivener's Error| null | |
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Scrivener's Error |
Law and reality in publishing (seldom the same thing) from the author's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting. |
link to: 12:03 [GMT-6]
In honor of the first day of spring, I offer a musical tribute to the season...
Meanwhile, the UK government continues to discriminate against actual visits by foreign performers. This has long been a problem in football, and in certain sectors of the arts; however, it raises one's eyebrows to read that customs officials "subjected [a cellist] to eight hours of questioning before [telling her] she was taking work away from UK musicians and sent home." Since when do customs officials give a rat's ass about how domestic classical musicians avoid starvation?
First, note that Eisler isn't relying upon whatever he earns from that next book to pay the bills; almost nobody who is getting mid-six-figure-and-up advances is, because those people already have a significant track record and nest egg. That means that he can afford to wait for the absolutely uncertain amount of time that it will require for his anticipated better returns from self-publishing to come in. Again, this is the variable that most economic and financial analyses in the arts neglect: t.
Second, he's doing so in relationship to an agency arrangement that — reading between the lines — just isn't working well (or at least well enough) for him. This might be perceived lack of value for the 15% agency commission; it might be nonfinancial issues with contracting; it might be miscommunication; it might be any number of things. The point, though, is that there is an existing agency relationship that led to the offer of the Big Advance; absent an existing agent (and, particularly, absent so prominent an existing agent), we wouldn't be hearing about this. At all.
Third, one must remember that Eisler's work is — like Amanda Hocking's and Jon Konrath's — proven (not necessarily the same thing as "previously commercially published", as a couple of e-mails to me concerning my comments last week have misunderstood). That is, it is material with a clear marketplace niche; it is material with an existing brand; etc., etc., etc. The point here is that first-time-novelists by definition are not proven, and neither are their works (unless, perhaps, they're celebrities with really good ghostwriters).
Fourth, and perhaps most important, is what Eisler and Konrath do not say in their online conversation: That commercial publishers are becoming increasingly difficult to deal with (and downright inept) on many contracting terms other than the financial ones. All I had to do was see who — both as "what imprint" and "which conglomerate" — made that rejected offer to know what some of those difficulties are. Of course, there's a slightly different, but significantly overlapping, set of those problems (increasingly converging through the antitrust/unfair competition issue of conscious parallelism (both PDFs)) with each media conglomerate — that's where having the right agent can be extraordinarily helpful. It can, of course, lead to authors leaving publishers despite satisfaction with most of the business relationship.
In conclusion, the real reason to leave commercial publishing, for those whose Rawlsian original position allows them to do so without an unacceptable and clear adverse excursion, is less about the size of the advance than the size and nature of everything else that will be dragged into a commercial publishing transaction. And the less said about commercial publishing's insistance on using a "sale" model for author-publisher relationships while it tries to impose a "license" model on end-users of its product, the better! <SARCASM> No unfair competition issues like artificial creation of market-entry barriers involved here at all. Nope. Everyone in the entertainment industry (and in the commercial publishing niche of it) is completely trustworthy. </SARCASM>
Labels: arts, intellectual property, jurisprudence, mass media, miscellany, publishing
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Sausages?
Internet link sausages, as frequently appear here, are gathered from uninspected meaty internet products and byproducts via processes you really, really don't want to observe; spiced with my own secret, snarky, sarcastic blend; quite possibly extended with sawdust or other indigestibles; and stuffed into your monitor (instead of either real or artificial casings). They're sort of like "link salad" or "pot pourri" or "miscellaneous musings" (or, for that matter, "making law"), but far more disturbing.
I am not responsible for any changes to your lipid counts or blood pressure from consuming these sausages... nor for your monitor if you insist on covering them with mash or sauce.
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Warped Weft
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by unravelling them from the blawg tapestry (and hopefully eliminating some
of the sillier typos). Sometimes, the threads have been slightly reordered for clarity.
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