Leave it to Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler to take on the titans of the publishing industry without fear. In a recent blog at A Newbies’ Guide to Publishing, Joe and Barry take apart a post made elsewhere by Scott Turow. Scott is the president of the Author’s Guild (I guess; so say Joe and Barry). His post was against the recent lawsuit threats made by the Department of Justice against Apple and five of the Big Six publishers.
The lawsuit is about price-fixing between Apple and the five, based on Apple’s “agency model” for e-book sales via Apple’s iTunes store. I’m not sure I fully understand what the agency model is, but that’s probably not germane to this post. Suffice to say that DoJ considers it price-fixing, and are in the process of taking the perpetrators to task.
Warning: Joe and Barry are not shy about the language they use. You will have to wade through a few four letter words, though not too many.
The writers basically say that Turow and the Author’s Guild are supposed to represent authors, but the post appears to be one in favor of publishers at author’s expense. Turow argues that the actions by the five were justified because Amazon is taking too much market share. This is bad for the literary world in that it will restrict consumer choices and reduce author income.
This is clearly ridiculous. Amazon’s e-publishing platform and store have busted wide open the stranglehold that the Big Six previously held on book distribution. Consumers now have a much greater range of choices, and authors have a distribution outlet that doesn’t require a Big Six or Little Seventy-Five (or however many other publishers there are) contract.
One wonders why Turow and the Author’s Guild aren’t sticking up for authors. I’m working through the comments on Konrath’s blog. It will be interesting to see if Turow himself leaves a comment, or if anyone defends him.
I have no stake in the traditional publishing industry (or legacy publishing, as Konrath calls them). So far they haven’t deemed my work worthy of inclusion in their publishing plans. Then again, the world isn’t beating a path to the door of on-line publishers to buy my stuff either. As I’ll report in the next post to this blog, I currently have no submittals pending to any traditional publishing outlet, neither agent nor publisher/editor. I think I’m pretty much locked in to independent publishing from this point on.
But I have nothing against the traditional publishing world (other than they don’t recognize my obvious genius :), but I’m going another way. This lawsuit, if it comes to that, will be an interesting development. If the Five lose, it seems that will hasten the day when they will be obsolete.