| Macmillan and ebook royalties |
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| MyBlog |
| Written by Nicholas Clee |
| Thursday, 29 October 2009 00:00 |
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Macmillan in the US has developed a new "boilerplate" contract for ebook royalties, offering 20% of net receipts. The figure is 5% lower than that offered by other houses, among them Random House and Simon & Schuster. But policies vary. Penguin offers 25%, while RH UK offers 15%. The New York Times places Macmillan's move in the context of price-cutting of ebooks by Amazon and others: Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said that Macmillan was anticipating a time when Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-book retailers would try to push down wholesale book prices. "This is Macmillan’s attempt to pre-emptively squeeze authors." Authors' groups including the UK Society of Authors believe that ebook royalties should be at least 25% of receipts, and probably higher. The NYT quotes literary agent Richard Curtis as saying: The point is whether we should be playing on such a low ballfield at all, and whether the industry should not really be thinking about a 50 percent royalty of net receipts. This argument seems to be based on the assumption that ebooks are incremental sales, incurring minimal costs. But it seems more probable that ebook sales will replace some sales of physical books. If so, publishers' savings in production costs will not pay for a doubling or more of current royalty rates. However, in the absence of any ebook economic models, how can we tell?
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