Oops! Random House has been selling a lot of e-books for which they never negotiated in the original contracts (probably because they didn't exist back then) and didn't bother going back and requesting -- titles nobody has heard of like PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT and INVISIBLE MAN. "It's the equivalent of a horse and buggy salesman assuming a Ford dealership for free," writes author Matt Stewart (THE FRENCH REVOLUTION) in the Huffington Post.
Agent Andrew Wylie, who represents that author and that estate respectively, responded by threatening to sue Random and cutting his own deal with Amazon, effectively uncoupling the print book from its digital format. It's weird to see the agent that involved; then again, he's probably getting a bigger cut this way. Of course, no one at Random will take his calls now.
(Must just be me but I could read these digital-copyright stories all day. I think I have an illness.)
2 days ago
2 comments:
I'm afraid I have to disagree with Matt Stewart's assessment of the situation. The point of publishing a book, when it's done right, is that it's not the same product when it goes out the door as it was when it came in. It's been shaped in cooperation with an editor--sometimes substantially shaped, especially in the case of non-fiction (or sometimes fiction) that may have been sold on as little as a 10-page proposal, or a meeting and a handshake. It's been copyedited, proofread, and designed in order to create the best possible experience for the reader, and it's been publicized and marketed in order to make the public aware that it's a great book in the first place. To simply make it available in e-book form is to ride on the backs of a lot of people besides the author at no cost, and that's not fair. Even if Odyssey isn't buying files from the publisher to convert--not that any publisher in its right mind would let them--any edition of the book that they might have someone re-keyboard already contains a lot of work and money that doesn't belong to them.
If current e-book royalty rates are intolerable, then authors should (and will) band together to negotiate better ones. If people want to sell electronic rights to their new titles separately, as they sometimes do with audio and paperbacks, fine. If Wylie wants to ask Philip Roth to dig up his original, unedited manuscript for Portnoy's Complaint and publish that, then let him. But to say that the author is the sole owner of the now-suddenly-extant derivative rights to a product he didn't create alone is specious.
Molly, you make a good point, and I definitely wouldn't want to downplay the role of the editor in creating a critically acclaimed work. (Even if I wanted to, last year's Gordon Lish affair wouldn't let me.)
It really surprises me, though, that Random assumed that rights that weren't written into old contracts (because we didn't know e-books were coming) automatically belonged to them. I'm no expert on contracts but that strikes me as a logic failure on several fronts and they could have opened themselves up to massive liability. If this is the worst it gets for them, they are getting off easy! They're just seeding nitrogen into the atmosphere of distrust currently hovering over e-books.
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