Who Owns the Rights to Your Work?
By Jerry D. Simmons | October 21st, 2008 | 2 Comments » (Click to add yours!)
Of all the questions I receive from writers and authors, the single most important issue is: who owns the rights to your manuscript, and for how long? Of all the issues and decisions surrounding publication and how to get it done, the key is rights. Who owns them and for how long is critical information for any author publishing their manuscript.
If you self-publish, i.e. you are paying to have your manuscript published, you should retain all of your rights, but if you make a mistake choosing the form of publication it will cost you time and money. Signing with a publisher may make things easier, but before you sign that contract, you must be absolutely certain you understand the terms, especially where it concerns the rights to your work.
If your work is being published traditionally, meaning you are paying nothing to the publisher, then you must give at least some of the rights to your book the publisher. They can’t legally publish a single word without your permission and most want to do more than just produce books from your work. They are investing in you. In order to recoup their investment, most publishers will try to make sure that they can publish and produce your writing any manner they choose.
If you are going to pay to have your manuscript published, please use caution when choosing a subsidy press. There are many scam artists and unscrupulous people waiting to trap the unwary. I remember one client who had paid such an outfit to publish his manuscript. Then he landed a contract with a New York publisher and discovered that his pay-as-you-go publisher didn’t want to let go of his book. He had a very difficult time recovering his rights. This almost cost him his contract because no traditional publisher will ever sign an author if they do not own the rights to their work. Fortunately, he won the battle with the subsidy press and secured the deal the New York house.
The Risks to Distribution
By Jerry D. Simmons | October 7th, 2008 | No Comments » (Click to add yours!)
Self-published authors and small independent publishers seeking distribution for their book need to understand, there is a financial risk. Finding a distributor that will handle your book is just one part of the puzzle, what happens next is where you need to be informed.
If you haven’t read my previous post on Distribution, then I suggest you do. Click on the title What is Distribution and Why does it Matter? If you prefer you may cut and paste the link to your browser, http://www.writersreaders.com/blog.php?thebid=206.
Let’s go with the premise that you have a distributor who has agreed to distribute your book. First off they will require an advance payment of anywhere from $500 to $2500 as a set-up fee. Secondly they will expect you to spend in the neighborhood of between $5000 & $10,000 for marketing. Next you will be required to create a sell sheet for your book. You can follow the template they provide or you can be unique and create your own. If you’ve never done this or have never seen one then I suggest you follow the suggestion of your distributor.
Once the sell sheet is created, one of three types of sales organizations will handle the actual presentation to booksellers. They will either be a commission group (not employees of the distributor but paid a commission to sell your book), in-house (meaning employees of the distributor) or merely a tele-marketing staff (they don’t actually make sales calls face-to-face, they do an advanced mailing and follow-up with a phone call). One of these three types of organizations is trying to get orders for your book.
Once the orders start to come into the distributor, which is all cases should be six to eight months in advance of publication or distribution, the orders are sent to you. Your next step is to make certain you have enough copies printed to cover all orders and allow for a very small amount of inventory in the distributors warehouse.
For most self-published titles you should expect orders will range from 200 copies to 2000 copies and anywhere in between. The key of course is exactly where those copies are being shipped. So for sake of discussion let’s say you have orders of 1000 copies for your book, you now need to trigger a print order of around 1050 copies as a minimum. Your distributor will ask you to print more but that isn’t necessary at this time.
So you spend the money, have your book printed and shipped to the warehouse of your distributor. Next step is they package, invoice and ship to each bookseller that placed an order. Your distributor will take a percent of the net billing for your book. For example, if your book has a cover price of $20, then your distributor will resell to booksellers at around a 50% discount, or $10. This means the net billing on your book will total $10,000 (1000 copies in orders X discounted price of your book $10 = $10,000). If your distributor takes 25% of the net billing then their fee is $2500 of the net billing.
You wait 60 to 120 days and eventually returns will start to filter back to your distributor. For discussion let’s say your book achieved a 60% sell through. This means you shipped 1000 copies, had 50 copies in the warehouse for reorders, and you sold 600, meaning returns totaled 400 copies. These returns may not be in saleable condition, so the chances you will be able to resell these is highly unlikely.
Your distributor is now going to charge you for processing of returns, warehousing fees, catalog fees, return reserves, possibly sales reporting and potentially a variety of fees that you need to examine closely in your distribution agreement. Suddenly the $6000 in net sales (600 copies sold X $10 discounted price = $6000) is dwindling, remember you paid $2500 for distribution cost, so actually you now have only $3500 in net sales. At this point you have to take into account the fact that you have the cost of printing the 1050 copies, you spent at least $5000 marketing, and now you have approximately $3500 coming back as sales. Was it worth it?
Of course that is an individual decision and no one can answer that question for you. Also keep in mind that if your book sold through at 60% there is a good possibility that reorders will continue and your book is remain on store shelves for a very long time. Anything is possible, the important point is that you understand the financial risk before you venture into book distribution.
This article is not meant to discourage or frighten you, the intent is to give you the facts so you are smarter and wiser about the process. If you have questions about any of the above please send me an email. I take most of this for granted when I explain to writers and authors and if I’ve been confusing let me know. You may reach me by clicking the Contact link at the bottom of each page. If you’d like to read a great article on how to calculate book profits, click Business Calculations for New Authors by Marilyn Haight, or if your prefer you may cut and paste to your browser http://www.writersreaders.com/blog.php?thebid=155
This blog is unedited, please disregard mistakes in spelling and grammar.
