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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: 14:02 [GMT-6]
I've been spending the last week-plus surrounded by various types of dead bodies. (And the house sure stinks because of it... although one should also recall that the term for the back files of a periodical is a "morgue".) Zombies, however, don't make for great blogging. At least not for me.
Do I have your attention now?
This involves some simple math and complex contract interpretation, so please digest this whole sausage first. When authors review contracts to see what they should be getting for royalties, they tend to focus on the obvious stuff: x% of list price. That is, indeed, the default royalty calculation for printed books (at least at present; more and more publishers are pushing toward a y% of net model, but even those contracts follow the rest of this paragraph...). The kicker, though, is the "high discount" clause, which cuts the royalty in half for copies "sold"1 at a "high discount." As y'all may well be aware — and is the factual context even if you're not — books are sent to bookstores, including Amazon, at a discount from the list price. The ordinary terms are called the "long" or "trade" discount. Historically — that is, from the late 1960s to about 2003 or so — this was a fairly iron-clad 40%. Sometimes, though, there were "special deals" offered at higher discounts, which the publisher then demanded be treated differently. If you're cynical, you can probably spot what's coming...
The high-discount clauses typically kick in at a 50% discount from list, at least for contracts negotiated before mid-2004 or so (and even for the vast majority of contracts negotiated after that time). The problem here is that Amazon as its standard term demands a discount of greater than that from many publishers, particularly independent small presses (which, BTW, one is most likely to encounter at an independent bookstore); as of early 2010, the standard terms demanded of Publishers Z1, Z2, Z3, and Z4, for example, was 52%. That would trigger the high-discount clause in older contracts (and I've confirmed that Z2 and Z3 have invoked that clause) for calculating author compensation for every sale through Amazon. What makes this worse is what will happen when Z4 is acquired by a conglomerate and becomes, at most, a brand subset — like Buick — because the existing distribution agreements will continue until renegotiated...
Now, this does not hold true for all publishers, or all books, or all of anything, sold through or via Amazon; one of the ways that the Big Brazilian River has thus far avoided being dammed by the antitrust authorities is that it maintains the pretense of negotiating contracts with vendors. Similarly, not all authors have been so foolish as to accede to a 50% trigger for the high discount clause (although, to be honest, I've yet to meet an agent or author who had considered this issue until I pointed it out). Nonetheless, there's a substantial chance that when someone buys a book from Amazon that was printed by a publisher that is not one of the Big Six (and even if it was), the author is getting a lot less money from that transaction than if that same book were purchased via the (now, lamentably, closed) Pages for All Ages here in Chambanana, or the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, or the Tattered Cover in Denver, or any other independent bookstore.
Labels: intellectual property, internet, politics, publishing, science
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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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