I wanted to quickly thank Jenny Bent for taking time out of her day to answer 10 questions from aspiring authors on the Mother. Write. Repeat. blog. I was fortunate enough to be one of the first ten to ask a question and was very pleased to see that Jenny answered my question.
So, without further ado: Here is my question.
Neal Wollenberg said...
Hi Jenny, do you see future rights negotiations between publishers and authors becoming more hostile as more authors e-publish their own books or do you believe that this new trend empowers authors more?
April 15, 2011 8:57 AM
And her Answer:
jenny bent said...
Neal,
I think that publishers will be reducing e-book royalties further--they've reduced them once before and I think as e-book sales continue to grow they will reduce them again. They've also started asking for multimedia rights, in some cases asserting their ownership of those rights rather than asking, where previously those rights were retained by the author. Currently, it's unclear as to whether original e-book publications fall under the non-compete clause in every author's contract; I expect any moment that this will be made explicit. Authors and agents have never been able to influence changes like these (for instance, e-book rights used to be retained by authors, until publishers decided unilaterally that these were their primary right) -- we just don't have the leverage against the big conglomerates. I could go on and on about this, but will spare everyone the boredom!
April 15, 2011 1:36 PM
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Quite frankly, I wasn't bored at all because this is an incredibly fascinating subject to me and I'd love to know more of what Jenny thinks. Anyway, it was fun to actually bend the ear of an actual agent even if it was only for one question!
The entire post with questions by the blogger and other writers can be found here:
http://motherwrite.blogspot.com/2011/04/interactive-interview-with-agent-jenny.html
That's all for now.
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