The growth in sales of ebooks and the devices you need to read them, ebook readers, has taken many people by surprise and it’s affecting all areas of the market: publishers grappling with new technology, business models, marketing strategies, versions and supply chains; tech companies looking for a lead in the eReader space; booksellers looking ways of staying in business, dreaming up new services and products to compete with Amazon and other large etailers; and last but not least, authors. This last group now find themselves negotiating with their publishers over how much they should be paid for ebook sales, and indeed if the publishers of authors' print editions even have any rights to the sales of ebook versions.
At the end of last year Arthur Klebanoff, CEO and founder of ebook business RosettaBooks secured a deal with Amazon whereby the online bookseller acquired the exclusive digital rights to Stephen Covey’s bestselling titles The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Principle-Centered Leadership. This agreement means that Simon & Schuster, the original print publisher of the books, has been left out of the equation, leading to speculation that other publishers may also lose revenue from critical backlist titles in digital formats. The move has lead some publishers to contact literary agents to assert their rights over digital versions of backlist titles. Agents and authors have fired back, referencing a court ruling 2001 finding in favour of the author as owner of the rights (at least of those books published pre-digital).
The Amazon deal gives Covey 50% royalties from ebook download sales – til now a publisher’s standard digital rights deal gave authors 25% or less, so this is a big departure from the norm and is causing some publishers to panic. This development raises questions about authors’ loyalty to publishers, and whether authors and agents believe they’ll be better served by dedicated and expert ebooks channels. This issue seems to be causing more trouble in the US than the UK market where it's said publishers are happy to renegotiate digital rights and authors are prepared to stick with their existing publishers.
The question of branding is also relevant to this argument – how much does a well established author rely on the publisher’s brand to market and sell a book? Answer: probably not very much. But if the publisher has nurtured and developed that author over a period of time, contributing to his or her success in many ways, then should the publisher not share in the continued success of that author’s work – even if in different format? And will lesser known authors stand a better chance of being marketed and achieving sales via a traditional well established publishing brand, whether in print or ebook formats? Quite possibly..
These are some of the thorny questions being asked in an industry going through change...
