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More than…

In a recent op-ed for The NY Times, ‘There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen’, Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, asked:

Are e-books a new frontier in publishing, a fresh version of the author’s work? Or are they simply the latest editions of the books produced by publishers like Random House?

This is essentially a more articulate framing of a question I asked here a couple of weeks ago. But unsurprisingly Galassi offers a far more compelling defence of Random House than I could manage:

[S]hould another company be able to issue e-book versions of Random House’s editions without its involvement? An e-book version of Mr. Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” will contain more than the author’s original words. It will also comprise Mr. Loomis’s editing, as well as all the labor of copy editing, designing and producing, not to mention marketing and sales, that went into making it a desirable candidate for e-book distribution. Mr. Styron’s books took the form they have, are what they are today, not only because of his remarkable genius but also, as he himself acknowledged, because of the dedicated work of those at Random House.

I think the point here is that books are often a collaboration between author and publisher, and in this sense publishers add value — or, at least, they did in the past. Galassi’s example is Styron, but we now know that Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish was instrumental in defining the author’s trademark style. No doubt there are other high profile examples…

As Peter Ginna, director of Bloomsbury Press, points out in this post, and in a comment on my post here, there are definitely some issues around royalty payments that Random House need to address. But while e-books are little more than converting the file format of a work, I do have some sympathy for Random House’s argument about rights.

2 Comments

  1. There are, of course, all kinds of hidden costs involved in getting a book published. Publishers are not especially careful, though, to keep costs to the author, over and above those involved in writing the book, finding an agent and/or finding a publisher to a minimum. The editor may be months late in sending them, thereby disrupting work on the author’s next book; the copy-editor may make hundreds of gratuitous alterations; the designer may come up with a design without reading the book (introducing scope for confusion that was not in the original document); the typesetter may lack relevant competence. If the book sent out to the public is not to be littered with mistakes, the author may have to spend a year, over and above the time spent writing it, removing mistakes that were not there in the first place. If foreign rights have been sold, and a disk with the uncorrected version has been sent out to foreign publishers, the author may be fixing those same mistakes for years to come.

    I once talked to a designer who told me he never read the books he designed, he simply didn’t have the time. If I write a book, and 6 chapters have the same title (A good samurai will parry the blow), I am unlikely to be unaware of the fact; I am likely to help the reader keep track by, um, numbering the chapters. I shouldn’t really get the proofs back and find that the designer has helpfully removed chapter numbers; I shouldn’t have to fight to get them back in; I numbered them for a reason, and I shouldn’t have to do battle to prevent the publisher from subtracting intelligibility from the book.

    I spent 9 years at Oxford studying classics; if I type a passage of Greek into a text it normally takes 5 minutes unless the lay-out is tricky. I may ask whether the publisher wants me to get a professional Greek font; if they say there’s no need, I assume they have matters in hand. If they then hand the book over to someone who knows no Greek, if he is unaware that Modern Greek fonts don’t work for Ancient Greek ( they don’t have the breathings and full range of accents)… First of all, I’ll probably end up having to get them a proper font at very short notice, and may not be able to get something handsome overnight. Secondly, I’ll have to proofread and explain corrections to all these fiddly bits to someone who can’t actually see the difference. So yes, an enormous amount of extra work goes into getting the published version right – the work done by me to restore the document to the state of accuracy which obtained when the book was accepted for publication.

    The problem with all this is not just that the publisher is not improving the book. It’s not just that work is held up on other books, expensive though that is. The problem is that the publisher is teaching me that I must be much more cautious when writing future books: every time I think of using text in another language, every time I think of incorporating graphics, every time I think of an expressive use of punctuation, I shall be asking myself how much time I’ll have to spend getting these features into print.

    When a contract is negotiated, an agreement is reached on the payment the author will receive for various versions, the degree of control the author has over the text. It would be extremely difficult to provide for adjustments in proportion to the amount of work the two parties contribute to getting the book right; in practice, it’s simply accepted that this will cost both some time and energy, and both hope the amount will not prohibitively high. It would be very odd, though, to decide that the publisher had some sort of moral right to unanticipated new formats, on the presumption that value added to the original text can only have come from the publisher.

    • Dan

      Hi Helen. Thank you for your comment. I really appreciate you taking so much time to share your opinions and experiences. I had read in interviews that your experience with your publisher and The Seventh Samurai/The Last Samurai had not been a good one. I hope that your collaborative writing and self-publishing projects have been better in every respect.

      Ideally, of course, the relationship between author and publisher is both collaborative and constructive. One hopes that the book is better at the end of the process than at the beginning and that both parties benefit as a result. It is always disappointing when this doesn’t happen and I don’t suppose for one moment that your case is isolated. That said, I don’t believe that your experience is completely representative of all publisher-author interactions, or that such relationships are necessarily as acrimonious and attritional as you describe them.

      Nevertheless, one of the joyous things about DTP and the internet is that you can bypass publishers altogether and plough your own furrow (as you are now doing). If we can figure out how to make sure authors still get paid to write, this will surely create more interesting work and better books. In the long run it might well benefit publishers too.

      With regard to e-books specifically, I am not an expert in either publishing or rights, but I absolutely 100% think it behoves publishers to discuss and negotiate e-book rights and royalties with authors in good faith.

      Where I see difficulties is around the definition of what an e-book actually is, and whether it can always be said to be a entirely different format.

      My sense is that, yes, we should be thinking of e-books as separate from print (and work out rights accordingly), but I’m not sure that is always the case practically. For example, is a PDF made available online an e-book? And if that PDF (or a similar version of it) was used to create the print edition of the same book, can it be said to be different? What if the PDF used for the print edition is uploaded to a retailer site and used on their reading device? Is that a new format or just a different kind of distribution?

      I don’t know the answers, but unless we start talking about some of these issues, I doubt we will get any satisfactory answers.

      Thanks again.

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