Shelf Awareness
In a statement on issues raised by the Wylie Agency agreement to sell e-versions of 20 major titles exclusively on Amazon for two years, the Authors Guild found favor with some parties and fault with all.
The Guild asserted that "authors retain e-rights in standard publishing contracts unless they expressly grant those rights to the publisher," and thus "we applaud the Wylie Agency for finding a way to make it happen."
At the same time, the Guild stated that "when an agency acts as publisher, serious potential conflicts of interest immediately come to mind. The most obvious of these is the possibility of self-dealing to the detriment of the agency's client, the author."
The exclusive aspect of the Wylie/Amazon deal "raises many questions and concerns," the Guild continued. "Authors should have access to all responsible vendors of e-books. Moreover, Amazon's power in the book publishing industry grows daily. Few publishers have the clout to stand up to the online giant, which dominates every significant growth sector of the book industry: e-books, online new books, online used books, downloadable audio, and on-demand books. (That Random House, by far the largest trade book publisher, has retaliated against the powerful Wylie Agency but not against Amazon, which must be equally culpable in Random House's view, tells you all you need to know about where power truly lies in today's publishing industry.)"
The Guild asserted, too, that "to a large extent, publishers have brought this on themselves" by offering bad e-deals to authors and agents: "e-book royalty rates of 25% of net proceeds are exceedingly low and contrary to the long-standing practice of authors and publishers to, effectively, split evenly the net proceeds of book sales."
Publishers will agree to "reasonable royalties," the Guild said, but "are postponing the unavoidable because it seems to make sense in the short run. We believe this is short-sighted."
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