Random House Raises the Stakes

The climate for writers is changing as it is changing for so many other professions.  At least three writers I know believe that we are approaching a tipping point where a sustainable writing career might slip beyond the grasp of many talented and deserving writers. Contracts written prior to 1994, when Random House modified its contracts to include electronic rights, are subject to interpretation as to whether e-rights are covered.   It is primarily these backlist titles that are the focus of much of the current dispute.  Large publishers' legal departments see sufficient ambiguity in older contracts to claim the rights advantage before the courts intervene and define these terms for them. While publishers, agents, lawyers and judges argue whether imprecise pre-ebook contract language amounts to legally defined rights, the practical result is denied opportunity for writers.  This is not meant to ignore that the economic downturn and the paradigm shift in technology have also forced publishers into an urgent sprint to develop a business model that works for them.  My focus here is on writers and their ability to continue to create the raw material required by the publishing industries. Uncertainty in publishing leads to risk aversion among all parties, delay, and ultimately a degraded environment for writers whose professional survival is already a marginal existence. Last night, I dreamed I was a polar bear on a small floating patch of rapidly melting ice.  Nothing symbolic there, right?

Are traditional publishing's aggressive responses to the evolving e-book market threatening the careers of writers who invent, research, and craft original literary fiction?  Probably not in the long-term, yet it seems that way sometimes.

If you haven't already read it, here is the Authors Guild Dec. 15th Advocacy article, "Random House's Retroactive Rights Grab," in response to Random House CEO Markus Dohle's letter.

Golden Rule

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

or

He who has the gold makes the rules

Publishers are lining up for a high stakes confrontation with writers and agents. Traditional publishers are positioning for expanded control of individual author's rights, including wrapping e-rights into their traditional print rights contracts. Authors want to share in the revenues produced by e-books at a level that reflects the lower cost of marketing e-books vs. print books. If publishers will not honor this proportionality, then it seems reasonable that authors would want to retain the opportunity to market the e-rights to their books. The Authors Guild sides with the writer. Where will the courts side? Which Golden Rule will guide them? Ultimately, enterprise and economics will decide. In the meantime, we writers have to keep writing, keep finding ways to support ourselves while writing, and keep faith that our work will make a difference.

DISCOVERY of the Day

Melville House Publishing and its informative MobyLives literary blog keep the literary flame burning.  For another perspective on the Random House story, take a look at MobyLives' Dec. 16 coverage.

Write The Story That Will Change Your Life

Why write something if it will not change your life?

Too high a standard?  Not a chance.

Care deeply about your characters, the questions that affect them, the relationships, ideals, and treasure they gamble, and your reader will care. Writing a book takes time, a year or more, sometimes much more. At the end of that time when you turn around and look back at what you’ve been doing all of that time, you want to see your book in a window on Main Street, or your characters brought to life by actors on stage, or your screenplay moving people to laughter and tears in the cinema, right?

…if a story is important to you, it may be important to a lot of other people in the audience. And when you’re done writing the story, no matter what else happens, you’ve changed your life.

John Truby – The ANATOMY OF STORY (2007)

How Much Does Amazon Want?

From The Authors Guild: Amazon Accuses Someone Else of Monopolizing Bookselling

Amazon made it official yesterday, filing a brief in the Google case claiming that someone else might gain a monopoly in bookselling. It seems we're compelled to state the obvious:

Amazon's hypocrisy is breathtaking. It dominates online bookselling and the fledgling e-book industry. At this moment it's trying to cement its control of the e-book industry by routinely selling e-books at a loss. It won't do that forever, of course. Eventually, when enough readers are locked in to its Kindle, everyone in the industry expects Amazon to squeeze publishers and authors. The results could be devastating for the economics of authorship.

Amazon apparently fears that Google could upend its plans. Amazon needn't worry, really: this agreement is about out-of-print books. Its lock on the online distribution of in-print books, unfortunately, seems secure.

The settlement would make millions of out-of-print books available to readers again, and Google would get no exclusive rights under the agreement. The agreement opens new markets, and that's a good thing for readers and authors. It offers to make millions upon millions of out-of-print books available for free online viewing at 16,500 public library buildings and more than 4,000 colleges and universities, and that's a great thing for readers, students and scholars. The public has an overwhelming interest in having this settlement approved.

(Reprinted with permission of the Authors Guild)

e-Publishing Opens Doors for Authors

Good Times

Just as when the IBM personal computer arrived (1981), Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh with GUI (1984), the venerable Selectric and Selectric II became obsolete, and a universe of entrepreneurial and artistic opportunities opened to writers, the Kindle, Sony Readers, iRex, Lexcycle's Stanza and other downloadable readers have opened doors to a new world of publishing possibilities. While the major players sort out the e-Publishing landscape, engineer the infrastructure, and build the new e-pub world, we writers are exploring, beta testing, and blazing new entrepreneurial paths ... all while continuing to write, write, write. This is a good time to be a writer, don't you think?

♦

Kindle UPDATE - Kindle vs. B&N Free eReader:  See David Pogue's PERSONAL TECH column, "New Entry in E-Books a Paper Tiger," in the August 6th edition of the New York Times.  Barnes & Noble's new e-reader offers PC access to e-books.  The eReader tablet itself is promised for later.

Creative Writing & The Money Myth

Creative Writing

What is creative writing?  Opening to an idea, following where it leads, exploring it, getting inside it and crafting a way to bring it alive through story.  Creative writing is observing a subject, its strengths, weaknesses, contexts, perceptions and misperceptions about it, wants, needs, identity, senses... the full spectrum of facts. Then writing a story, poem, screenplay, stageplay, or novel in an imaginative way that is characterized by originality and expressiveness.

Why write? Developing an idea into a concept, then into a premise, and then writing about it is Sisyphean, like hauling a wheelbarrow up K2. No one undertakes this lightly. So why do it? Often, the ambition sprouts from a fertile childhood, a sense of otherness from earliest memory, or distinctive experience. Maybe something as simple as an insatiable curiosity to learn and understand. Michael Chabon ( in Imaginary Homelands, which first appeared in Civilization) describes it:

I write from the place I live: in exile.   ...    I bear no marks or scars. I haven't lost anything that isn't lost by everyone.

And yet here I am - here I have always been, for as long as I can remember knowing anything about myself - feeling like a stranger.

For his entire life, he says he has been engaged in

One search, with a sole objective: a home, a world to call my own.

The Money Myth

Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Samuel Johnson ("No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money") notwithstanding, no writer starts writing for the money.  For most if not all of the writers I know there is never any rumuneration equal to a living wage for the work invested in a novel. "If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write," said Epictetus.  Novelists write to learn, to understand, to experience, to entertain, to create a world in which to live. That's pretty much the sum of it.

The Last :05 Seconds

If I can’t write the final beat of a story, brief, or article, or the last five seconds of a commercial or video, I know that the premise is not yet fully realized. Those concluding seconds, or those cascading syllables leading to a final conclusive sustaining note should resonate.  The end should resolve, summarize and underscore the point.  If those qualities are absent or not sufficiently present, then the foundational work – the premise in most instances – is not done; the ad, video, short story, screenplay or novel is not complete. The piece might move, twitch, even walk, but it won’t fly.