Dear Author » SFWA

Saturday Midday Links Roundup: Writers Organizations Mad at Harlequin

Jane — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:03:20 +0000

TBIResearch believes that Amazon is losing quite a bit of money on the ebook market as it tries to drive down prices of books. Publishers are trying hard to maintain a higher price, but researchers and retailers believe that consumers will not pay a high price for ebooks. The good news according to the research paper is that publishers can still maintain a 10% margin with ebooks because of savings in manufacturing and shipping costs.

Publishers should be able to sell e-books to distributors like Amazon at $5 and still maintain the profit margins they enjoyed on print book sales. In turn, distributors like Amazon should be able to sell e-books at the current $9-$10 price and still enjoy a healthy profit.
The bad news for authors is that their royalties will decrease since they are based off of retail sales price.

It’s a pretty interesting article and includes a mock profit and loss statement. I wouldn’t agree with all the points in the article such as author royalties which are increasingly off the net making the publisher margin more manageable.

Three major writing organizations are urging Harlequin to make changes to the Harlequin Horizon business venture. SFWA wants Harlequin to divest itself entirely of the venture (I hope they urge RandomHouse to sell its 49% interest in Xlibris and HarperCollins to shed Authonomy); MWA hasn’t said what would make it happy and neither has RWA. I guess the next move is up to Harlequin. It occurs to me that Harlequin could sue if these other writers’ organizations do not apply their standards evenly across the board so I wonder if we’ll see more publishers unrecognized by the writers’ organizations.

Lori posted her thoughts on the Amazon’s top 2009 books. The customers’ favorites are quite different than Amazon’s top 10 list.

The list for customer favorites is:

Vision in White

Bed of Roses

Lover Avenged

Skin Trade

Black Hills

Hidden Currents

Dream Fever

Bad Moon Rising

Dark Slayer

Covet

Editor’s top picks are:

Angels’ Blood

Smooth Talking Stranger

Kiss of a Demon King

The Perfect Poison

Bending the Rules

What Happens in London

Fireside

A Duke of Her Own

Immortal Outlaw

Angel Lane

I haven’t read a lot of those books.

According to a press release posted over at Teleread.org, Smashwords has purchased BookHabit Limited, a New Zealand author community. Earlier, Smashwords announced a partnership with Shortcovers.

Toronto, Canada-based Shortcovers, an eReading application owned by Indigo Books & Music, will distribute eBooks published by Smashwords on a worldwide basis. Shortcovers will distribute the eBooks in 189 countries. Smashwords has more than 5,000 original eBooks from 2,300 self-published authors and small publishers from 20 countries.

I do think the advantage of digital books is the ease of international delivery. Perhaps what will be lost in margin can be made up in volume.

SFWA Comes Under Fire Again for Its “Talks Like a Duck” New Committee

Jane — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:57:20 +0000

Science Fiction Writers Association came under scrutiny when its e-piracy committee chair, Andrew Burt, undertook to issue thousands of copyright violation notices. When others stepped forward to take Burt to task, the e-piracy committee was disbanded and a new interim committee was formed to determine what would take its place. The new committee, chaired by author John Scalzi, served its recommendations to the SFWA including a strongly worded proclamation that Burt should not be allowed to be part of the new committee.

The SFWA responded by forming a new committee regarding copyright and placing Andrew Burt as the head of it.

Not sure how the “new” committee isn’t the old committee with just a new name. After all, if the charge is the same (dealing with issues of piracy and copyright) and the committee head is the same (Andrew Burt), then isn’t it really just the old committee? i.e., if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, then it is still Andrew Burt’s DMCA takedown happy email box in charge?

Via Boing Boing.

Science Fiction Writer’s Association Dissolves Anti E Piracy Committee

Jane — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:18:27 +0000

Science Fiction Writer’s Association Dissolves Anti E Piracy Committee

If you aren’t a member of the SFWA or a regular reader of that community, you might have missed out on an important development that took place over the last week. The SFWA sent out take down notices under the auspices of the DMCA (the act used by the RIAA to target music downloaders) to various sites on the ‘net. Most of the take down notices were improperly executed because the SFWA had not had authorization from the copyright holders to send out the notices.

Cory Doctorow was one of the victims of the notices because he has been a long advocate of giving his work away for free. He had reader email calling him a hypocrite for encouraging the copying of his work on the one hand and ostensibly giving SFWA authority to order a take down of his work on the other. Doctorow called SFWA on this and many other writers and bloggers took up the clarion call against the SFWA’s unauthorized action.

In response (and a knee jerk one at that), the SFWA disbanded the anti epiracy committee. I think we’ll have to talk about the DMCA and epiracy this weekend on eBook Sunday.