Flipping the bird at answers

There’s been a recent development in the ebook royalties debate, with literary agent Andrew Wylie taking matters into his own hands and negotiating a deal with Amazon to sell ebooks through an imprint of his agency called Odyssey Editions. That’s right. Imprint. Agency. That shit happened for real. I guess this is so he can force publishers to give in to his demands for higher royalties for his authors by going into direct competition with them. After releasing 20 books by prestigious clients of his to be sold only through the Kindle book store for the next two years, he is threatening to expand this to 2,000 if publishers don’t atone for their sinful underpaying of authors.

So a literary agent is going in to bat for his authors. Makes sense, right? But in doing so isn’t he’s also making himself some pretty powerful enemies in publishing and doing his authors a disservice for future print publications?

Sam Cooney wrote an excellent article on the effects of digital selling on booksellers, and part of this explored whether it was advisable for publishers to sell direct to consumers rather than go through the old channels. I can’t help but feel Wylie’s move falls into this same debate. Should you move away from traditional forms of publishing if you think you can get a better deal elsewhere, or should we be supporting each other and trying to come to a compromise? It’s sort of like if you were the manager of a football team and you decided your players weren’t getting paid enough so you told the AFL you were going to start your own league. People will probably still come and see your team play, but now the AFL is split. Well done. Because publishing isn’t disparate and parochial enough, bozo.

“I am only trying to make a point in order to underscore the importance of getting the right terms with a view to uniting the two [print and digital] revenue streams,” Wylie said (via The Bookseller website)

Fair shout, and I can sort of see the weird logic. Future unification on his terms through deliberate deprivation. But this point he’s trying to make has effects that last at least two years. So even if you do sort out the royalties thing in the mean time, which I guess everyone hopes will happen, these first 20 books won’t be available from anywhere except Kindle book store until 2012. Do it for the other 2,000 and that’s giving exclusive sales rights for a huge number of potential high sellers to an already massive company, taking away opportunities from smaller booksellers. CEO of ABA Oren Teicher made an excellent point when he said:

Diminishing the availability of titles and narrowing the options for readers can only harm our society in the long run. That the Wylie agency has sought to distribute these works through a single retailer is bad for the book industry and bad for consumers. Books — in whatever format — are crucibles of ideas and unique expression, and we should be doing all that we can to expand, not constrict, readers’ access to them.

Should Wylie be more worried about authors in this debate, or about the industry in general? Book buyers won’t give a fuck about royalty rates, they’ll just not be able to find the ebooks through other outlets and might not bother looking for them on the Kindle book store. Is it wrong for an agent to go this far to protect the interests of his authors?

Besides which, I have this sneaking suspicion that Amazon are slightly evil… It’s completely unfounded at the moment, just a sort gut feeling that they are getting too big for their boots and, eventually they’ll make all publishers bend to their will or be destroyed.

Or maybe I’ve just been smoking too much pot.

An excellent article on this (the Wylie vs publishers, not me smoking pot) can be found here: Welcome to Wylie World