CHECK OUT YOUR RIGHTS. NEW GOOGLE SETTLEMENT MAY AFFECT YOU!

Hello All – LAUGH, WEEP, BUT MOST OF ALL—CHECK OUT YOUR RIGHTS. NEW GOOGLE SETTLEMENT MAY AFFECT YOU!

In December, 2008 it looked like publishing had come to the end of our book world. The economic recession had an impact on the market and at first this appears to have been understood as a result of rising unemployment and the economy itself. But I don’t think it’s just that simple. Many of the large houses were loaded with debt as a result of mergers and acquisitions, led by Wall Street. Example – Houghton Mifflin Harcout was purchased by Vivendi Universal in 2001. A private equity firm then took it on (think leveraged buyouts-remember Other People’s Money?). The company was sold again in 2006 and was soon merged with one of their toughest competitors, Harcourt Press. Now drowning in debt, Harcourt has recently announced it will accept no more manuscripts this year!!

So it appears that Wall Street—the Masters of the Universe not understanding how publishing works—thought that as owners they’d be able to generate profits of 15 to 20 percent in the book business, as opposed to traditional profit margins of 3 to 4%. Big layoffs in December resulted at large publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House (and their dissolution of Doubleday and Bantam Dell). Interesting because these bombshells didn’t occur just because people quit reading books! See, Read it and Weep, at www.salon.com/book/sfeature/2008/12/23/publishing.

A New York Times on-line article reports that wholesale book sales in the US fell 2.4 percent last year. Interestingly, however, book sales in continental Europe seem to be holding their own. www.nytimes.com Of course some of our problems in the US are due to higher costs, and there is some deep discounting on hard covers. The drop in book sales was significantly less than the 8.3% drop in the overall retail segment of the economy, however.

And there’s hope—a good book is like comfort food. Good stories and writing lift us out of our own problems; it’s good escapism and I don’t think this will ever stop. Andre Breedt, research and development analyst at Nielson Bookscan says “People have been reading and they will keep reading, no matter what happens.” And advances in technology will help publishers control their costs in the future. Now, I personally prefer to hold onto a good book that I’m reading, but e-books will save huge costs for publishers—no more printing costs, the distribution is easy. But authors—keep up with your rights! First of all, check royalties in new contracts for e-book sales. Publishers have minimal printing and distributions costs for those, so the trend is for royalty percentages there to go up.

And be aware. Web sites are popping up on-line allowing readers to download digital versions of popular best-sellers for less cost than the actual book. (I’m not going to publish those addresses.) Along the ‘be aware’ line: Google’s new Library Project will allow readers to preview, read large portions of books for sale, and access the books, on-line and in libraries and universities. Three years ago various publishers, authors and the Author’s Guild sued Google in a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of all authors and publishers, claiming that Google has violated copyrights and various other rights, by scanning large portions of their books, creating an electronic database, and displaying excerpts without permission of the copyright holders. Google denied the claim, and now the lawsuit has been settled. The issue that was frightening authors related to the number of pages that Google planned to scan and make accessible on-line to readers for free. Currently they are supposed to be limited to displaying 20% of the book, although I believe that’s negotiable by the publishers. Check that out. For most of us, 20% means 60-80 pages! So contact your agents and publishers to see if they’re working on your behalf to limit the pages accessible under the Google project. In any case, particularly if you are self-published, check out your rights under the Google Book Settlement pages on-line at www.books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement. See you soon! Pamela