I have some questions for all you publishy/economicsy types. When dealing with eBook distributors, can publishers reasonably expect to set the terms of trade? With enough collective bargaining power, could we garner sufficient market pressure that the eDistros would be forced to capitulate?

It seems there are two choices when deciding how many eDistros to sign with: just the big guns (which I’m gonna go ahead and dub The Bazooka Approach – choose a core group of big distros, and sell to them hard), or all of the little ones as well (The Scatter Gun Approach – spray your books at as many distros as possible and hope your files don’t wind up on torrentz.eu).

The total administrative resources required to sign with all these eDistros, whose terms seem varied to the nth degree, is gargantuan, and what if the big guys squeeze out the little guys when the market settles? All those resources will have been wasted. But The Bazooka Approach means accepting unfavourable terms – some of which are actually illegal in Australia.

If you don’t have the answers/ideas, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d love to see a stream of discussion on this here humble blog about ignorance.

An argument for The Scatter Gun approach is that you wouldn’t limit yourself to certain retailers in the pBook trade, though there’s an argument that you would do this: say, if the retailer was actually a lemonade stand. An argument against The Scatter Gun approach is: who knows what sort of DRM software these cowboy operators are using; how do you monitor that? Google Alerts? By then it’s too late – there’s no turning back from torrentz.eu.

An argument for The Bazooka Approach is that your administrative resources are more targeted, and marketing through these outlets much more manageable. And the security’s probably better. (Key word: ‘probably’.) An argument against The Bazooka Approach is you might miss whole territories, such as those where the big guns won’t aim, such as China, if China pinches America’s breakfast one morning.

More of the reason I ask is that I wonder if shooting for something like this would make the whole business of dealing with eDistros far more efficient, at least for publishers. Disclaimer: I’ve never been a bookseller, so I don’t know how it feels to negotiate terms from that side. Maybe the terms we’d like could never be reasonable to enough eDistros that the market would survive.

The Big Five did a bit of muscling against Amazon to get the agency model established, yeah? And The Little Thousands are benefiting from that. Maybe we could ask our bigger brothers to sort these fuckers out for us – get some heads knocked.

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Who knows? Not me. That’s why I’m asking you. Bring it!
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I had to do some quick research into ‘second and subsequent serial rights’ recently, and realised it might be worthwhile demystifying some of what I learnt – it’s such a minefield of ambiguity out there, it must be terrifying if you’ve finally got a book deal and then have to learn legalese when you get the actual contract.

First, second and subsequent serial rights are part of the subsidiary rights clauses in your contract: primary rights being things like the right to edit, produce, publicise and distribute your book (der stuff, basically); subsidiary rights being things like the right to license the work to film producers, or have it turned into an audio book or eBook.

Selling your first serial rights means the publisher can license portions of your content to magazines or newspapers, for promotional purposes.

Selling your second and subsequent serial rights simply means they can publish extracts in more than one newspaper or magazine. This is good for you – they’re bound to have more contacts with these outlets than you have.

Bet you’re glad you skipped dinner for that!

Here are the articles I found about these curious subsidiary rights. Disregard the mid-90s styling of these pages – no surprise that information about print-book rights is not the domain of the internetologically savvy.

In the same week that I gored myself, I accepted a job offer from Wakefield Press. I’m visiting Brisbane for Christmas, then I’ll be heading to Adelaide to resume a seat at my old desk, to make books full time again. I won’t be needing any presents this year.

This may come as a surprise to many of my friends and colleagues in Melbourne, but it’s been on my mind and in the works for a couple of months. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and working with the wonderful people at Wakefield. I’m looking forward to having an occupation again.

For seven months after Voiceworks I drove aimlessly around Queensland in my campervan, Delilah. For the last five months in Melbourne I have found it difficult to shake my holiday habits – in particular my tendency to start the day by sitting down with a computer and/or a book and chasing miscellaneous ideas down rabbit holes, which is fun, but not conducive to gainful employment or paying the bills or saving the world.

A lot of these ideas have related to agency and social entrepreneurship, as I have dallied with the idea of starting up a literary agency. The loftiness of this ambition has dawned on me only recently – along with the fact I am wildly under qualified. So I’ve deferred these aspirations for the short term. I will spend the next couple of years gaining experience of other areas in the industry – rights and contract management, hopefully. I will knuckle down and get to New York, where I hope to gain a placement with an agency – as a reading assistant or general work-experience lacky.

Wakefield, blessedly, are aware of my long-term ambitions. They always have been, even as I fumble about figuring out exactly what they are. When they originally employed me as a typesetter, they knew about and supported my aspirations to work as an editor. I took manuscripts home to work on in my spare time, and gradually worked up to the point where I was typesetting half the time, and editing the rest of the time, or thereabouts. I will do the same again.

Because this work aligns so perfectly with my own work, I don’t baulk at working overtime to advance my skills and experience. So I’ll continue to work with the writers I have been building relationships with, to the extent that I can in my spare time or within my new in-house capacity. I hope to bring my new networks and experience into this equation.

This decision also has ramifications for this blog: the new focus in my life will inevitably be reflected here. It’s early yet, but I have plans to move this away from a blog where I ‘empty my thoughts … on literary culture, philosophy and interesting things that happen’, and develop a focus on my exploits going into bat for young writers, as a book editor, aspiring agent and location-independent social entrepreneur.

Wakefield Press are incredibly supportive employers – such that Michael and Stephanie, as well as various members of the long-term staff have continued to be inspirational mentors and friends during my years at Voiceworks. I look forward to upholding their motto: ‘We love good stories and make beautiful books.’

I’ll be having short-notice farewell drinks at Prudence this Friday, from 5pm if you want to come.

There’s a really good agent blog coming out of Sydney, called Call My Agent! The anonymous blogger, Agent Sydney, posts and answers fictional queries based on what are, presumably, emails that an agent might receive, in a pithy and sometimes scathing manner.

In a post about competitions and rights, Agent Sydney dishes out such pithy advice as ‘don’t sign away your subsidiary rights’, and challenges publishing houses’ acquisitions of world-exclusive rights from the runners-up of prizes around the nation. Agent Sydney puts it best about Allen & Unwin’s acquisitions:

The Vogel Award, for example, is not an award for One Really Good Novel and Four Close Calls. It’s an award for one novel alone. Once the winner is announced, the others should either be set free immediately or given a (short) time frame within which the publisher has exclusivity.

This blog is in the business of answering stupid questions about publishing, with (mostly) kind and clever answers. Compare this with my dad, who used to answer silly questions with ‘pumpkin’ and then get a rise out of saying, ‘Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.’

Pumpkin!

Pumpkin!

For what it’s worth, I have become highly skeptical of literary prizes, and will be advising clients at Paine Management to seriously consider their motives for entering. Various factors of competition culture appear to be geared against the long-term interests of writers, and Agent Sydney’s is one good example: being shortlisted for a prize might even compromise your chances of getting picked up – if a house is holding onto your second-place MS, you can’t send it elsewhere. Something to think about.

Even if you win, your book comes out among annually regurgitated hype and is presented to the public as an award-winning book. When I read this books I am invariably disappointed: they are award-winning manuscripts; often, at best, they are marginally publishable novels.

This is why so many manuscript-award-winning novelists are one-hit wonders. Sorry if that sounds harsh – it should be no more abrasive than saying Kris Kross were one-hit wonders.

Jump!