The Bookseller.com

9th September 2010

Tom Holland is chair of the Society of Authors.

Show us the money

08.01.10

The late Stephen Jay Gould mooted a theory of evolution that he termed “punctuated equilibrium”. Transformations in the tree of life, he argued, owe less to any smooth and gradual process of change than they do to abrupt and unexpected dislocations. So it is, for instance, that dinosaurs get hit by a meteor, and the way is thereby made clear for shrews to evolve into booksellers, publishers, and authors. Now, with the arrival of the internet, we are all experiencing a renewed bout of punctuated equilibrium. A meteor has hit the world of publishing. Everything has gone fin de Mesozoic.

Authors, no less than retailers and publishing houses, need to move with these unsettling times. The principal arena that we have to adapt to, of course, is one that barely existed a decade ago: the digital one. Yet despite the fact that the long-predicted explosion of e-book sales is surely now almost upon us, there remains a complete lack of consensus as to how the market will evolve. There is only one thing that the pundits can agree on: prepare for the unexpected.

That being so, it is unconscionable that publishers should be attempting to strong­arm authors into accepting fixed royalty rates on e-books for the entire duration of copyright—and setting them, what is more, at a miserly 15% to 25% of their receipts. That may still be fair enough back in the Cretaceous world of dead tree publishing, but it is hard to see what it is about the selling of an e-book that entitles the publisher to cream off such an exorbitant share of the revenue. Rather than provide authors with an open breakdown of the figures, publishers seem instead to have constructed a collective wall of silence around their accounting. If not a pre-emptive land grab, then it looks suspiciously like one.

Authors quite understand that mastering the economics of something as new as the publishing of e-books is bound to take time. Yet that is precisely why we are reluctant to accept that the presumptions of non-virtual publishing should apply by default to what seems bound to emerge as a very different paradigm. If publishers can justify why they should not share at least half of their income from e-books with authors, then we at the Society of Authors are certainly open to being persuaded. So far, however, the omertà has been deafening. 

Accordingly, we have advised our members and their agents to go through any publishing contract which relates to e-books with the very finest of toothcombs. This is not done in any spirit of troublemaking, but simply so as to ensure that authors do not end up like the dinosaurs.