There has been an interesting brouhaha since last Thursday when the Wylie Agency announced plans to launch a digital book publishing venture called Odyssey Editions.
Wylie is no slouch of an agency.
Odyssey Editions plans to publish e-book editions of some of Wylie’s author’s backlist titles that have yet to be published as e-books. These include books by literary heavy-hitters Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. Wylie is said to represent more than 700 authors and author’s heirs.
Agency founder Andrew Wylie, is apparently frustrated by two things:
1.) The stance Random House and other publishers have taken that e-book and other digital rights are included in older contracts signed before digital rights existed and thus were not explicitly listed in a contract. (Most contracts spell out exactly what rights the author is licensing to the publisher, such as hardcover, trade paperback, mass market, or foreign language, and retain any rights not mentioned for the author.)
2.) What Wylie sees as e-book royalty rates that are too low to be fair to authors.
Is this ok?
Beyond the contract and the royalty rate issues, there is a lot to question about an agency becoming a publisher.
First and foremost is the appearance of a conflict of interest, if not an actual conflict. How will the agency-publisher-author split be figured?
Will there be advances paid? Is the agency prepared to do all the things a publisher does? Will the e-book be an exact duplicate of the printed book if the final editing is done by the print book publisher?
How likely is the printed book publisher to aggressively promote and market the printed versions knowing some of the cream of its endeavors, in the form of e-book sales, will be skimmed off the top?
Wait, it gets weirder.
Wylie further confused the issue by saying he planned to give Amazon.com exclusive rights to Odyssey titles for its Kindle editions for two years.
It is commonly thought that Amazon isn’t paying for this exclusivity since that would likely trigger “favored nation” clauses present in contracts Amazon has with other publishers. So what benefit does the author receive by limiting the titles to one e-book edition? What benefit does Wylie receive?
IMHO
Publishers should remain publishers and literary agencies should remain literary agencies and never the twain should meet.
A word about e-book royalties
It’s my experience that royalty rates on e-books appear to be settling in at about 25 percent of net proceeds. I don’t think this will stand.
Our plan for The Write Thought’s “Classic Wisdom on Writing” e-book series of reissued writing titles, to be launched in 2011, is to pay authors 50 percent of net proceeds.
With pressures from the big authors and their agents, I imagine a figure closer to 50 percent than 25 percent will eventually prevail in most publishing agreements.
Just a write thought.