SFWA supports Author's Guild protest of S&S rights grab

Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) supports the Authors Guild protest of the S&S rights grab I wrote about yesterday. Read it here. No surprise - it's a shoddy, cheap and greedy move. Just how cheap shoddy and greedy can be determined from S&S's response to the Author's Guild protest. That's here.

They strike me as protesting too much. They're too intent on selling us the benefits. I don't doubt that what they say is true, but not surprisingly, they're trying to justify their grab on the basis that the book will never BE out of print in the way that books traditionally have been. And they're right - with print on demand technology, a book can be printed at a consumer's request anytime they want it. The problem is that the consumer has to know about the existence of the book before they can ask to have it printed.

S&S claims that this new arrangement will work to the benefit of the "publishing partnership" because of the "incremental income" that the POD database will provide over time. Well, maybe. It certainly will to S&S, since the book will never be 'out of print' and hence, any requests for the book to be printed will mean that they'll get income from it. So will the author, but for the moment, that's beside the point.

Think about this for a second - there are a lot of books that were brought out by Laurel Leaf a few years ago - they were all reprints of old Newbery titles, and they appealed to a whole new generation of kids. It generated income for the publishers of the line, and it generated new income for the authors. But it happened because the titles had been out of print for a number of years, the rights had reverted to the author and they were free to make a new deal with a new publisher for the title. And the new income was generated by the new publisher advertising the new titles and featuring them to the booksellers in the catalog's.

Under S&S's new contract re-sales and featured advertising won't happen anymore - and even though S&S claims it will continue to keep the old titles in the sales catalog, I can already predict where and how those titles will show up - right at the back of the book in a list - nothing featured, nothing standing out - it'll simply be called Print on Demand Titles, or Our Backlist. The bookstore will look it up if they happen to get a request for this title. Which will happen how often? I'd be willing to bet, less often than if the book were reissued with another (or even the same) publisher with a new contract and new advertising. This is especially true of the midlist - which never gets enough advertising dollars to begin with!

There's something else to consider as well. Remember Stoddart? Canadian publisher who went out of business. Another publisher - it might have been Raincoast but I'm not sure of that - bought up Stoddart's stock. They sold it, and they announced when they did that they wouldn't honor the contracts that Stoddart had signed with the authors - they weren't going to pay royalties on the stock they'd bought.

Suppose someone down the road buys S&S? Suppose they buy the database of titles? Suppose they decide not to honor the contract and don't pay royalties to the authors in the backlist? Then what? Effectively, the writer has lost all rights to the title at that point. Not only can we not have the book republished with another publisher, but we are no longer being paid royalties on the books that are already "in print" in the database, and we lose ALL incremental income from the book because the successor to S&S isn't honoring the contract with the "existing stock" in the database. Lovely. What about if S&S buys another publisher? Will their database of in print titles join S&S's and therefore never go out of print? And will S&S honor the contracts signed with the taken over publisher, and pay royalties on the "existing stock"? Don't hold your breath!

And this isn't a rights grab? Yeah - tell me about it, S&S.