Do crime books make you a criminal?  And if so, do spiritual books make you a saint?

Both questions came up in two articles we came across on the same day.  The first, a New York Times piece by William Glaberson, Prison Books Bring Plot Twist to Cheshire Killings, described the trial of a man charged in a triple-homicide that took place after he and two other men broke into a home in Connecticut, a heinous butchery that drew comparisons to the one described in Truman Capote’s groundbreaking “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. In fact, the similarity was the point of the article.

It seems that the prosecutors had tried to enter into the official court record the names of books that one of the accused checked out of a prison library before the killings. The plots of those books were  “criminally malevolent in the extreme.” The defense wanted the list thrown out. Writes Glaberson: “The defense lawyers’ suggestion that prison library books could have shaped the crime, or that knowing Mr. Hayes read them could turn jurors against him, has created a strange kind of guessing game about the literary interests” of the accused.

Glaberson raises the question why a prison library would possess the kinds of books that might stimulate – or educate – a potential criminal and push him over the line between intellectual and perpetrator, between art for its own sake and art in the service of a murderer.

At this writing the titles have not been revealed, and as there is a huge First Amendment issue riding on the question, we hope all players in this drama will consider the implications.  We’ve seen this issue before in the form of efforts to use the Patriot Act to seize library records of suspected terrorists.  Here’s a report on that controversy by an attorney whose leanings are obvious and suggest how loaded the issue is.

Balance this story with this one reported by Anna Barker in The Guardian about a man who faced a 60-year prison sentence for drug offenses but who was instead granted probation and sentenced to read. Writes Barker: “With one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and the death penalty, the US state of Texas seems the last place to embrace a liberal-minded alternative to prison. But when Mitchell Rouse was convicted of two drug offenses in Houston, the former x-ray technician who faced a 60-year prison sentence – reduced to 30 years if he pleaded guilty – was instead put on probation and sentenced to read.”

In this case we’re allowed to know what he read. His reading list included To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bell Jar and Of Mice and Men.  “I particularly liked some of the ideas in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty,” says Rouse. As well he might, having tasted liberty’s sweetest gifts.

“Five years on,” Barker reports, “he is free from drugs, holding down a job as a building contractor, and reunited with his family. He describes being sentenced to a reading group as ‘a miracle’ and says the six-week reading course ‘changed the way I look at life.’”

Did books in the first story impel a man to kill?  Did they, in the second, impel a man to reform?  Can we the jury accept the first as true but reject the second as false, or vice-versa?  Some stimulating thought for jurists and philosophers.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and The Guardian.

The smart money is on the jackal

Revolutions produce unlikely heroes, and the Digital Revolution has produced a very unlikely one in the form of a man that many believe is so wanting in ethical principles that he is nicknamed The Jackal. Yet it is on literary agent Andrew Wylie’s fangs and claws that the populist dream of a fair e-book royalty rests as he dares the world’s highest profile trade book publisher to do something about the slap he has administered to its face.

The smart money is on The Jackal, and to understand why you have to think like a jackal.  While pundits debate contract law and publishing ethics, the real war is being conducted on a less visible battlefield. But it is one on which Wylie holds the high ground.

To understand Random House’s reluctance to protect its rights from Wylie and other marauders you need to understand a number of not so obvious factors.  The most salient of them is this: Publishers are loath to sue authors (or the widows and children of authors).

Let’s see how these factors play out in the power struggle unfolding before our eyes.

Random House not confident of its legal position

In 2001 Random House sued Rosetta, an e-book startup that acquired directly from authors the digital rights to books by such Random House lions as Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Robert B. Parker and William Styron, books that were still in print in paper format under Random House imprints. Random had published them before there was such a thing as e-books, but nevertheless considered a book is a book is a book whether in tangible or digital form. The courts however rejected Random’s position, denying their request for an injunction against Rosetta. Random filed an appeal and the court turned it down. A second appeal was rejected too, forcing Random to work out a settlement with Rosetta. The critical issue – what is a book? – remained unlitigated and left Random uncertain about its legal position.

Random Backs off from Open Road Threat

When publishing superstar Jane Friedman launched her Open Road e-book venture she declared her intention to start with several works by Styron including Sophie’s Choice and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Confessions of Nat Turner. The problem was, Random House claimed it owned those rights (presumably having recovered them from Rosetta as part of the settlement) and it issued a stern warning to all “third parties” without naming Friedman specifically. Authors, stated CEO Marcus Dohle, are “precluded from granting publishing rights to third parties that would compromise the rights for which Random House has bargained.” By drawing a line in the sand, Random expected Friedman and other potential interlopers to back off or face the full wrath of the publisher’s litigators. (see Random House Serves Notice on Would-Be E-Interlopers)

It is  a fundamental business principle that you don’t make threats you aren’t prepared to act on. And that is why we were flabbergasted four months later to learn that Random House had released e-rights to the Styron estate (See Random Returns Sabre to Scabbard in Styron E-Book Standoff). What was that about?

“The decision of the Styron estate is an exception,” Random executive Stuart Applebaum explained. “Our understanding is that this is a unique family situation.”

Why, after rattling its saber so truculently, did Random give in? In our estimation it’s because ultimately, to make good on their threat, they would have had to sue Styron’s widow and children. And that would be a public relations disaster.

Whether Styron was truly an exception or Random blinked, one thing was clear to publishing professionals: sooner or later there would be further tests of the publisher’s determination. How would Random react the next time?

We’re about to find out.

Don’t Bother Suing Agents

Claiming that he hates the low e-book royalties paid by traditional publishers (see Random House Changes E-Book Royalty Policy), agent Wylie, representing hundreds of distinguished authors such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and the late John Updike, announced that he is starting his own e-book publishing venture and intends to launch it with books published by Random House and other trade book publishers.

Does he have the right to do that? Wylie says he does: “The fact remains that backlist digital rights were not conveyed to publishers, and so there’s an opportunity to do something with those rights,” he declares.

Despite what happened with Open Road, some industry observers expected Random House to threaten to sue Wylie’s ass into pebble-sized pieces. But Wylie knows they won’t, because, generally speaking, agents are not legally liable for breaches of contract committed by their clients. A lawsuit against Wylie would in all likelihood be thrown out of court, and the judge would tell Random that if they have a beef it’s with Wylie’s authors, they’ll have to sue Wylie’s authors. Which brings us back to our thesis: Publishers are loath to sue authors (or the widows and children of authors).

So? How does Random intend to punish Wylie? “Regrettably,” Applebaum declared, “Random House on a worldwide basis will not be entering into any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this situation is resolved.”

This is known as the We’ll Cut Off Our Nose to Spite Your Face ploy, and it will avail Random nothing. Wylie’s clients are so coveted by Random’s rivals that if Random made good on its threat you’d see the greatest migration since the Aleuts crossed the Bering Land Bridge.  Jackals are standing by!

Buyer? Seller?

Though legal threats won’t faze Andrew Wylie, handling the challenge of being both an agent and an e-book publisher might. A number of knowledgeable people like Macmillan’s John Sargent have not only deplored Wylie’s decision to put all his authors’ eggs in Amazon’s basket but have questioned whether it’s in the best interests of his authors. There is arguably more money to be made selling not just to Amazon but to Sony, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and other retailers.

Navigating the shoals of conflict of interest between buyer and seller is another daunting task. Even if he is able to build a “Chinese wall” insulating the two functions from short-circuiting each other, Wylie’s own clients will reasonably want to know how it’s going to work: “If my agent is now my publisher, who am I supposed hire to negotiate with him?”

Will Wylie’s stratagem succeed in forcing publishers to raise their royalty rate?  Not a chance.  E-book royalties will eventually go up, but it will be no thanks to Crusader Wylie. But we thank him for articulating the dissatisfaction of authors and agents with low royalty rates and for so fearlessly acting on his convictions.

Richard Curtis

If you read a blurb that began as follows would you rush out and buy the book?

“Not since Pericles has such eloquence…”

or…

“In a debut novel that beggars Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens…”

or…

“Once in a millennium an author brings forth a work so exquisitely wrought…”

You may scoff but, according to one publisher, no matter how absurdly hyperbolic blurbs may be, up to 62% of readers are sufficiently influenced by them to purchase the book.

This factoid was produced by Laura Miller, senior writer and co-founder of Salon, in an analysis of blurbs inspired by one so extravagant – for a book by David Grossman – that it could easily be mistaken for a parody. It begins “Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before.” It ends “To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.”

Miller’s disquisition on blurbing may shed some light on the process for civilians who have never thought about where these quotes come from.  Among other points of interest:

• “Blurb” is sometimes mistakenly used for the publisher-generated description printed on a book’s dust jacket — that’s actually the flap copy. “Blurb” really only applies to bylined endorsements by other authors or cultural figures.
• Prominent authors are inundated with far more requests for blurbs than they can handle. They turn down most of them, but “might do it for a good friend or a former student, or as a favor to their editor or agent.
• Positive reviews are hard to write. Authors who aren’t used to writing them write them badly.
• “So why is it done at all? Because you, dear reading public, persist in giving credence to it.”

After reading the Grossman blurb you could not be blamed for believing that nothing more absurd could ever be written. How wrong you would be. Inspired by that blurb, The Guardian has held a contest for the worst one its readers can come up, using a Dan Brown novel as the basis for their sendups.  For some laugh-out-loud There’ll Always Be An England wit read the contest entries in the Comments section of The Guardian’s article. They are, without a shadow of the doubt, the sublimest works ever produced by the human imagination since our emergence from the primordial muck…

Richard Curtis

“Next time you visit London,” we wrote about a year ago, “if you have an hour or two after visiting London Bridge, Westminster Palace and Big Ben, drop by a solicitor’s office and sue someone for libel. It will more than pay for the cost of your vacation. When you do, you’ll be participating in the blood sport known as libel tourism, a legal ploy so appalling that victims have described it as a form of terrorism.” (See Can’t Sue for Libel In US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World.)

Apparently Americans aren’t the only people bothered by this barbaric legal practice, which is founded on the presumption of guilt. Some 10,000 Britons signed petitions sponsored by reform groups urging the government to overturn the law.

Calling it “an archaic and unbalanced body of law,” the new coalition government picked up the groundswell of protest and has encouraged parliament to fix the statute. “Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy,” said the government’s justice minister, “We need investigative journalism and scientific research to be able to flourish without the fear of unfounded, lengthy and costly defamation and libel cases being brought against them. We are committed to reforming the law on defamation and want to focus on ensuring that a right and a fair balance is struck between freedom of expression and the protection of reputation.”

Details in UK government plans major review of libel law

Richard Curtis

Can you be sued for posting a bad review? It not only happened in England, but triggered a delicious scandal as well, one involving a distinguished historian, his barrister wife, a couple of historian rivals, Josef Stalin and amazon.co.uk.

In the eye of the storm is historian Orlando Figes, who anonymously posted on amazon hatchet jobs on two books by historians working in the same academic discipline as Figes, modern Russian history.

He described one book as ”dense” and ”pretentious” and ”the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”. The other book he termed “awful.”  He did however heap praise on one book, The Whisperers: Private life in Stalin’s Russia. The author of The Whisperers was…himself.

As the identity of the hatchet-wielder began to focus on Figes, his wife – a barrister and Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge – initially claimed that she herself had written the reviews. As the spotlight shifted to Figes himself he started rattling the sword of litigation at the press and academic colleagues to scare them off the trail. The ploy did not work. Now he is not only dining on humble pie but will pay damages and costs to the author victims of his nasty reviews.

The question nags: what exactly did Figes do that was wrong? He was nasty, mean-spirited, petty, jealous, truculent and craven (he blamed his conduct on depression caused by “immersion in Stalin’s crimes while researching his book,” said one report). Now, we are not lawyers – solicitors as they call them in England – but as ugly as Figes’ transgressions are, none of them is illegal as far as we know.  Indeed, if all the malicious anonymous reviewers were sued for libel our court system would break under the weight of ligitation.

Obviously the laws in UK are different from America’s. We know this to be true in the matter of “libel tourism” about which we have written here. (See Can’t Sue for Libel in US?  Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World.) The issue seems to be anonymous malice (is there a lawyer in the house to help us out?) The charges can be inferred by the apologies he made to the authors and pledges that Figes made to the court: “He also gave an undertaking not to repeat the allegations, not to post pseudonymous reviews of their works, and not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage [the authors] in their professional capacity.”

Whatever law was invoked, Figes was required to pay damages plus legal costs.

In the absence of a solid legal opinion we can only draw this moral from the shabby case of Orlando Figes: If you’re going to be malicious, do it under your real name.

For further details read Orlando Figes agrees to pay damages over negative Amazon reviews and The TLS, Orlando Figes and the law

Richard Curtis

If you think clearing permissions is a nightmare today...

The word is “Greed”, says author Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal.

Is that the right word? We can agree on it as a working hypothesis, but in truth the issues are far too complicated for such oversimplification, and unfortunately they’re about to become even more complicated. Fiendishly, maybe even insolubly, complicated.

The High Cost of Permissions

In a cautionary anecdote Woodlief voices a complaint about the high cost of clearing permissions: “When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.” Woodlief spurned the record company’s price and elected instead to use a quote from a public domain source. In a masterfully understated phrase, he muses “it’s not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here.”

The debate over permissions has gone on for as long as copyright protection was established by statute, including the American Constitution, centuries ago. These laws attempt to navigate the tension – or perhaps conflict is a better word – between rewarding content creators for their works and satisfying the public’s need to benefit from those creations. Woodlief phrases it cogently: “While we want to give artists incentives, we don’t want the costs to be so high that art appreciation—a difficult cultural attribute to re-establish once it is lost —declines.”

Publishers and agents daily walk this tightrope, setting prices for licenses for properties under their control that recognize the licensor’s intentions and budget on the one hand and the value of the artist’s work on the other.  To the seller the price may seem reasonable, to the buyer exorbitant. The battle is never-ending.  Except that in the Digital Era the battle is intolerable and will simply have to stop.

Permissions clearance a disaster in the Digital Age

The reason it has to stop is the emerging species called Enhanced E-Books. Unlike simple print anthologies of an earlier, quainter century (the 20th), enhanced e-books draw on film, video, music, photographs, and other art forms. For which reason they are also known as “vooks” in contemporary parlance, a hybrid of “videos” and “books”. (See If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?)

So? What’s the problem?  For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

“Though an enhanced e-book would appear to be a digital product, in fact most of the processes necessary to produce it rely on the traditional and extremely tedious tasks of clearing rights and permissions, something publishers and agents have been doing for a century. For nothing more than a single image you will have to track down the credit line for the photographer or artist to give proper attribution; then you need to ascertain the source – where was it originally published? Then you must examine the contract to learn the terms by which the image was acquired. One time use only? Or did the purchaser buy rights in perpetuity? If the latter, you need to locate the purchaser to negotiate permission. If you’re using the image worldwide you need to clear permission with copyright owners in each territory (North American, UK, foreign language publishers, etc.

“And that’s for one image. If you use dozens, plus copyrighted texts, plus YouTube videos, plus movie clips, music and other protected works, the clearance process can be so daunting as to be not worth it.”

The solution?  Become a Renaissance man

“There’s gotta be a better way,” I concluded.

Is there? Bartering isn’t practical, though Woodlief actually tried it. “Will you,” he asked some poet friends, “give me a poem in return for a book and dinner?” Some of them agreed, and their poems ended up in his book.

Marc Aronson took a stab at a more realistic approach in a recent NY Times op-ed. “For e-books, the new model would look something like this: Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads… If rights holders were compensated for actual downloads, there would be a perfect fit. The better a book did, the more the original rights holder would be paid.”

Unfortunately, Aronson doesn’t address how the book’s creator would divide payments among movie companies, music composers, photographers, videographers, and garden variety authors.  Nor does he venture into the question of how to place comparative values on a one paragraph quote from an obscure journal versus a three minute clip from a blockbuster movie versus a top-of-the-charts hit song. Nor does he tell us how a humble little vookmaker will be able to afford the permissions cost of all that imported content when even a few minutes of music will bust his budget.

In all likelihood Aronson didn’t venture into this territory because it’s radioactive. It’s hard to imagine how we will come up with a solution in the foreseeable future, even though the success of this exciting new genre desperately depends on it. Unless…

Some years ago as the Digital Age dawned I wrote a piece called Author? What’s an Author? suggesting that the author of tomorrow would have to become more like the breed of filmmaker called “auteur” who writes, produces, directs, edits and scores his or her own movies.

“The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works,” I wrote. “As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of ‘author’ will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.”

In short, if you possess the filmmaking gifts of a Hitchcock, the song-writing skills of Rogers and Hammerstein and the photographic genius of a Cartier-Bresson, and – oh yes – if you’re as good a writer as Tolstoy, you’ll be able to create your own enhanced e-books without laying out a dime for permissions. You’ll be nominated for a Vookie, which is undoubtedly what they will call the award given out to auteurs of vooks.  Just make sure you have your speech ready if you win.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Was Fatal Attraction's Glenn Close your typical editor?

An agent friend of mine wrote to me as follows:

“Her eyes were crystal blue and she looked at me across the table with withering candor.  ‘I just don’t think she would climax that fast,’  she said.  ‘She’s the kind of woman who needs to take it up slowly.’ Her gaze never unlocked from mine as she spoke to me.

“Had I been the brooding hero of a novel I’d have responded with a seductive rejoinder.  But I’m not the hero of a novel.  I’m a literary agent. The stunning woman opposite me was an editor, and we were discussing a sex scene in a romance novel by an author I represented. Whatever repartee I might have thought of, there was only one appropriate – if wimpy – response:  ‘I’ll discuss it with my client.’”

Exchanges like that one take place every day in the book industry, and Russell Smith, writing in the Globe and Mail about a prominent publishing executive recently caught up in a sexual harassment scandal, reminds us that the publishing business is saturated in sexuality.

“It’s an unusual industry,” Smith writes, “one dominated by highly educated and intelligent women, many of them young. Most of the high-up executives on the commercial side of publishing are still men. The literary side is female. Most of the editors-in-chief of the major publishing houses are women; most of the publicists are women; almost all the agents are women; the powerful CBC Radio programs that discuss books are hosted by women; most of the readers are women; the single powerful bookstore chain in the country is run by a woman. And it is a highly social industry, because social events promote books: Anyone who works for a publishing house must attend, as part of work, frequent evening book launches, book fairs and literary festivals, and they are all soaked in booze. So are most of the writers.

“Furthermore, if you’re involved with fiction, or even with memoir and biography, you’re discussing sex and romance the whole time – because most novels still have relationships at their core. So you spend a lot of genuine professional work time, as a straight male talking to straight females, answering questions like, ‘Why would she let him take her top off right then?’ It becomes difficult to define exactly what flirting is in this environment.”

So – why aren’t there more sex scandals in publishing?  A key reason is professionalism.  Fatal Attraction notwithstanding, lust and lechery do not mix with representing or publishing authors.  “I need these people working at their best and most relaxed,” says Smith. “They make me look good. If I made any of my colleagues nervous about talking to me or seeing me then I would only be damaging myself. They wouldn’t want to help me. So you could say it’s a selfish self-control. Hell, even a consensual relationship would be idiotic: I need my colleagues to be objective and unemotional. And I need my career more than I need the ego-boost of impressing a lady. Perhaps I’m getting old, but believe it or not, I actually value my colleagues’ professional abilities more than their beauty.”

Publishing people are commendably restrained when it comes to surrendering to sexual temptation with their professional colleagues.  Most of us are content to enjoy hot sex vicariously through the vehicle of a well crafted (what I call a Three Cold Shower) fictional sex scene.  And some people I know have confided that seeing a book they’re involved in hit the bestseller list is better than sex.

Call it weird. Call it perverse.  Call it publishing.

Read The truth about publishing: It’s full of hotties

Richard Curtis

Mummified remains of literary agent, Jurassic Period

A fierce debate about the role of literary agents has burst into flames. Agent Victoria Strauss has summed it up in a posting in Writer Beware entitled Are agents underpaid?

Those who are sympathetic towards the agents’ plight point out that “agents’ job descriptions have expanded over the past couple of decades, and that they must now do much more for the same 15% they earned twenty years ago.” writes Strauss. “They also get no payment at all for a good portion of what they do on a regular basis–reading queries and manuscripts, editing, submitting books that never sell. In a highly competitive environment, with shrinking advances (at the midlist level, anyway) and cautious publishers, it’s getting harder and harder to make a living.” (That’s putting it mildly.  See What Your Agent Has Done for You Lately.”)

A variety of remedies for suffering agents is being promulgated. One is to shift their compensation from a contingency basis to charging for billable hours the way lawyers do.  Another is charging for specific services that are now freely offered, such as editing, lecture and tour arrangements, marketing, promotional activities, website management, and social networking. Still others are setting up publication programs for clients who contemplate self-publication. Another answer is for agents to raise their commissions. About this option Strauss reminds us that “During the 1980s and 1990s, US agents raised their commissions from 10% to 15%; it seems to me that an increase to 20% could be undertaken with relatively minimal pain on all sides. This would acknowledge the ways in which agenting has changed and expanded, but wouldn’t unfairly burden writers.” (Strauss does not seem to have confirmed that with any authors.)

These are all viable alternatives, and some of them are being implemented as agents urgently strive to redefine themselves. Many of them will work. But will agents still be defined as agents as we know them today? Or are we witnessing the birth of a new species?

Years ago, in anticipation of the changing identity of authors in a digital paradigm, I asked the question “Author?  What’s an Author?” Implied in that question was another question: “Agent? What’s an Agent?” As the nature of authorship evolves, so will the nature of agentship. But a day will come when agents are unrecognizably transformed from the fearsome breed that tramped the Earth in the late 20th century. Which leads me to wonder if we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not “Are agents underpaid?” but rather, Are agents doomed?

The inescapable fact is that agents are intermediaries in a disintermediating world, and digital technology is remorseless in its dissolution of those who stand between buyer and seller. The chasm between writers and publishers, for so long occupied by literary agents, has narrowed as authors realize that they are but one touch of their Send key away from their readers.

That depressing but inescapable truth should be borne in mind as you read Strauss’s Are Agents Underpaid? and the equally thought-provoking response by Jane Friedman, Director of Content & Community Development at Writer’s Digest, entitled Agents Need to Develop Alternative Models.

Richard Curtis

When he announced his self-publication experiment in Publishers Weekly we asked “What Can Publishers Learn from Cory Doctorow?”

Our answer was – everything.

Since then we have tracked Doctorow’s lurching progress toward publication of his story collection With a Little Help, and at times it’s seemed that he could learn more from publishers than they could learn from him. In his monthly journal in PW he has reported his mistakes with searing candor including one doozy that any rookie editorial assistant could have foreseen: he failed to notice that book publishing is a complex venture that relies on other people.

In his latest column, however, he hits paydirt with a priceless epiphany, one that every publisher should write over his office lintel.  It’s that “The Internet makes it cheaper to coordinate complex tasks than ever before.”  How much cheaper?

“Too cheap to fail,” declares Doctorow, and like the bumbling magician who misleads us into thinking he doesn’t know what he’s doing, the author pulls a rabbit out of mid-air.  We understand at last why his experiment will succeed: because he’s not in the least afraid to fail.  Why should he be?  Not only has it cost him almost nothing, he has in fact already made money on it.

“I consider With a Little Help to be a Silicon Valley experiment. My upfront costs are minimal. I’ve spent $2256 getting into production, and taken in about $14,400 in payments. I’ll probably spend another $200-$300 before I ship, and that’s the last money I should have to spend without taking in money first: every time someone buys an on-demand book from Lulu, I’ll get paid without expending any capital. I’m printing and binding my short-run hardcovers in lots of 20, after being paid for them. The audiobook CDs are also produced on-demand by a third party, which means no capital costs for me, either. Setting up the donation page took a few hours fiddling with PayPal, and even if I never take in a penny in donations, I’m not out a penny either.”

But if you think Doctorow’s achievement is in getting his book published or in making money, the joke is on you. Abandon your establishment thinking, he urges, and look at how Silicon Valley IT engineers regard experimentation. Whereas publishing a traditional book is fraught with such expense that editors quake at the prospect of making a mistake, book publication the Silicon Valley way is dirt cheap.

“Unlike New York publishing,” Doctorow reminds us, “Silicon Valley’s products remain experimental long after they reach the marketplace. Google can change its search layout in seconds flat, try it out on a million searchers, crunch the data, revise the experiment and do it again, a hundred times a day if they wish. And bad ideas can be just as interesting as good ideas, because when it doesn’t cost anything to find out how bad an idea is, you can afford to be pleasantly and enormously surprised when it turns out that, say, people really do want to play Pac-Man on their search-results page.”

Read New York Meet Silicon Valley and if you don’t get it, read it again.  Eventually you will,and you’ll be a better publisher for it.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial

Call me morbid, but I collect horror stories about authors whose legacies were ruined by mismanagement of their estates. How often has a bid for posterity been lost or compromised when an author’s fortunes were squandered or priceless papers destroyed!

Take the case of the English explorer and adventurer Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He fearlessly studied foreign cultures and was fascinated with sexuality in an era when it was considered impolite if not scandalous to speak of such things. Among those he scandalized was his Catholic wife Isabel, who burned many of his papers after he died, claiming it would have harmed her husband’s reputation. What precious treasures were lost in that conflagration we will never know but you want to tear your hair out thinking about it.

Apparently Jacob Silverman shares my interest in authors whose legacies fell into the wrong hands.  In an article called What Good are Authors’ Estates? published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Silverman cites James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and even the recently laid to rest Stieg Larsson, and his conclusion is depressing: if you don’t make adequate preparations for what comes after you’re laid to rest, your literary estate could be be dispersed to the four corners of the globe.

“A well-run estate, guided by an ironclad will,” writes Silverman, ” could provide financial security for several generations of a writer’s family and ensure that the work itself—these precious texts that should be our true concern—is open to future publication, scholarship, adaptation, and the like. Given the United States’ conservative copyright laws, such an arrangement could survive for 75 years or more.”

What “adequate preparations” can you make to protect your literary estate? Silverman boils them down to two: make sure you draw up a will, and make sure you don’t leave your estate to “inept, rapacious family members.” I would add a third one: educate your heirs.

Most literary agents can tell tales comparable to those reported by Silverman. Spouses and children don’t always take interest in an author’s work or know how to assess it.  Sibling rivalries often break out, making the literary estate a football or, worse, Exhibit A in a lawsuit whose biggest beneficiaries are lawyers.

If you want the next generation to value your literary legacy, either sit your heirs down for a long talk, or write a letter that will guide them to make wise decisions with your estate.  And if you’re not aware of Article 23 of the US Copyright Law, the so-called “Widows and Orphans provision”, you owe it to yourself to familiarize yourself with it and its implications. (For reference here it is.) In essence it entitles your heirs to recover many copyrights that you granted for what you thought was perpetuity.

Richard Curtis