For anyone who is self-publishing in the hopes of attracting a publisher, here’s a horror story for you: If A Publisher Offers You a Contract for Your Self-Published Book, Will You Be Forced (By Amazon) To Refund Past Customers Who Bought It?. You can also read the writer’s original post here: http://www.jamiemcguire.com/amazon-beautiful-disaster-emails/. What is happening to this author doesn’t make any sense at all. The original book isn’t “defective” like a short wire in a waffle iron (and then those companies rarely inform their customers of the defect and offer a refund). Is (part of) the lesson that one avoid doing business with Amazon?
Category: Digital Publishing Rights
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Despite the disparaging of e-books as cold, hard, unfriendly sources of reading, traditional publishers apparently think there’s money to be made through publishing in “electronic book publishing formats.” The authors may be long-dead, but their publishers are in a tussle with their estates over who owns whose rights. In the case of William Styron’s books, Random House expects to “continue to publish the Styron books we own in all formats, including e-books.” (Click here for the full story.) Hmmm … the Styron books they own? OK, I understand that traditional publishers invest capital and even some sweat equity in an author’s work, but just who wrote Styron’s books? Could they maybe express it differently … say, they expect to publish to the books that they bought rights to? I know I probably sound like I’m splitting hairs, but wouldn’t any author wince to hear a publisher say that he “owns” the author’s books?