How Ordinary People Can Change the World

I've promised not just to flack my titles on this page, but I did say I was going to tell you about them now and again. That's what makes you publish a book--the urge to share it with other readers.

The one that's on my mind today is The Union of Their Dreams by Miriam Pawel. The Los Angeles Times reviews it this coming Sunday and calls it a "masterpiece." I agree. It reminds me of classics like Anthony Lukas’s COMMON GROUND, or Randy Shilts’ AND THE BAND PLAYED ON in the way it weaves a narrative from the stories of ordinary people that you come to care about intensely.

The story of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers is one of the great American struggles for social justice, an astonishingly successful movement built from scratch. Miriam tells it through the experience of eight people who became key players in the UFW, from workers who learned organizing in the fields, to idealistic lawyers, ministers, and college kids. They found meaning and passion in "The Cause," and did incredible things, including leading the most effective consumer boycotts in history.

Kerfuffle of the Week: E-Book Royalties

One hot topic in publishing this week was Macmillan’s announcement that their new boilerplate contract, across all their trade imprints, will feature a standard royalty of 20 percent of net receipts. This is 5 percent less than the rate offered by some major houses such as Simon & Schuster, Random House (and my own, Bloomsbury). Some houses have paid royalties as high as 50 percent of net.

Here’s an area where, as I've said in an earlier post, we see how our industry has gone from a mature one—where basic contract terms were well established, virtually universal across houses—to what’s almost a state of nature free-for-all as we thrash out how the new, electronic pie is going to be divided.

The 50 percent royalties I just mentioned were blithely agreed to by many publishers back when e-books were mostly hypothetical and e-book receipts were basically zero. For that matter, many agents agreed to rolling them back to 25 for the same reason—it was 25 percent of nothin'.  Now there’s real money flowing in the door and if you’re giving half, or even a quarter of it, to an author, it’s a significant chunk off your bottom line.

Some people make the argument that "e-books don't cost anything to produce," so e-royalties should be correspondingly higher. There are at least two problems with this position:

1. There are many costs that go into creating a book beyond those of printing the physical volume. These might be a lot smaller if we only produced e-books. But as long as we create print books we're paying for jacket designers, typographers, warehouse staff, review copy mailings, etc. None of those costs go away just because you sell a book on Kindle. (For more on this see Bob Miller's post and the comment thread on HarperStudio's blog.) Maybe what publishers should say is, we’ll pay you a 50 percent net royalty as long as you don’t mind that an e-dition is the only one.
2. Publishers are also concerned because we don’t know how much the sales of e-books are cannibalizing p-books. It’s one thing if, as e-vangelists maintain, e-book sales are expanding the market and that revenue is additional to print sales. It’s another if the e-book, quite possibly at a lower price, is replacing the sale of a printed book. Again, in that case, the publisher is probably earning less money on the e-book. Its bottom line will suffer unless it can claw back some of the revenue from the author’s share. And right now publishers are more anxious about their bottom lines than ever. 

I can’t tell whether Macmillan is, as the British say, trying it on, or whether they’re drawing a line in the sand here. They are sure to get intense pushback from agents. But I think the skirmishes around this line will get more intense as e-book revenues grow, which they are doing rapidly.

P.S. Agent and e-publisher Richard Curtis has a typically smart and opinionated post on this at ereads.com. He suggests, and I agree, that maybe the bigger news in the new Macmillan boilerplate is their increased focus (and better royalties) on direct-to-consumer sales. The next frontier for publishers is selling books right to readers instead of being dependent on Amazon and the bookstore chains. How to do this while supporting independent booksellers, which is also vital, is a tricky one, but will have to be a subject for future posts.

Is Amazon Shooting the Kindle in the Foot?

Publishers are watching the current price war between Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target with misgivings. The retail and e-tail behemoths are offering loss-leader prices around the 9-dollar mark for many new hardcovers, and some fear that pushing prices on major titles down will devalue other books in consumers' minds.

What's On Your Shame List?

Robert Gray, the bookseller who writes one of the most astute and engaging blogs in the book trade, has a wonderful post this week at Shelf Awareness on "The Shame List." The Shame List includes "those backlist books every bookstore would be 'embarrassed' and even 'mortified' not to have in stock when a customer asks for them." He lists a few titles--some you might not expect--that are on his personal shortlist of books he'd hand-sell without even looking at the shelf. And he asks readers what titles are on their own Shame Lists.

I can’t remember where I saw this, but I once read a piece by an author about her “Middlemarch test.” If she went into a bookstore and it didn’t have Middlemarch, she knew the place was not up to scratch. Maybe that’s setting the bar too low, but I would certainly agree that if there’s no Middlemarch the backlist pickings are going to be slim.