Ebook Resale Rights and Writing for E-Publishers

Does Selling One Ebook Mean Never Selling Another?

Update: After publishing online for over fourteen years, working as a trade author for McGraw-Hill and others with over 100,000 books sold, and publishing my own books under the Foner Books imprint, I finally started publishing my own eBooks direct. Some years ago, when I published eBooks through Lightning Source and sold them through Amazon et al, the files were equipped with Adobe digital rights management, which was supposed to keep them safe from file sharing and resale. It didn't take long for somebody to crack the DRM, and today you can find the more popular of my old eBooks on hundreds of file sharing sites. But for the main part, everybody who uses those sites understands that the file is there illegally, and with the exception of one storefront I know of in the Philippines, nobody is reselling the hacked eBook.

Today I sell eBooks without DRM, on what you would call the honor system. Yet I'm not selling the rights to the ebook, just the right to read it or print it for personal use. In order to make that crystal clear, the order page for each eBook doubles as a license agreement, including the following text:

"Your paid download of this ebook from Foner Books grants you a non-transferable license to retain an electronic copy of the PDF file for reading and to print one copy for personal use in your home or business. You may not create copies of this ebook or excerpts therof, whether electronic or printed on paper, for sale or distribution."

The key features are "non-transferable license" and the restriction on making copies. These are legal restrictions (the license was crafted by my publishing attorney), not physical restrictions. I'm not employing any software tricks to prevent people from reselling my eBooks, but if they do so, they are breaking the law. The reason this needs to be spelled out for eBooks is because eBook replication is free and eBooks themselves, unlike printed books, never wear out. The copies are perfect, so the only thing that prevents another publisher or individual from purchasing a single copy of my eBooks and going into the resale business is the law.

The challenge facing eBook publishers is not limited to resale rights but also to distribution rights. An Internet eBook library that purchases rights to a single copy of an eBook could effectively put eBook publisher out of business if they loaned out that eBook in the wrong way. One of the reasons that publishers have been comfortable with Amazon's Kindle is because the eBooks are transmitted directly to the Kindle, so there's not any appreciable leakage to non-paying customers. Now, there are folks out there selling eBooks with resale rights, sometimes they are called master resale rights, but these aren't eBooks in the sense that I'm using the word - electronic versions of books. The eBooks that are sold with explicit resale rights are a get rich quick scheme, really just some packaged content that the buyer has the legal right to sell to people using Internet marketing tactics, primarily through buying advertising and a high pressure landing page. It's not a crime, the the eBooks that are generated for that market are poor relatives of the real book world, and you wouldn't want your mother to buy one.

The legitimate way to make money selling eBooks if you aren't an author is to become an affiliate of a genuine E-publisher. If you have a website that draw plenty of visitors on a particular subject and you are looking for ways to monetize those visitors, search around for publishers (whether paper books or eBooks) with quality books that you can vouch for, then join their affiliate program and earn commissions. You can get access to a huge variety of books and eBooks simply by signing up as an Amazon affiliate.

Original Article

The Internet has opened up an incredibly valuable publishing platform for writers. Unfortunately, unscrupulous E-publishers lay in wait to take advantage of writers who lack Internet or publishing savvy, primarily through the practice of gaining free content for their sites in return for an "exclusive contract" and the carrot of possible royalties. This practice is particularly effective with unpublished writers who understandably want to have something to show for their labor of love and will eagerly sign on the dotted line for the right to finally tell themselves they have arrived. For some, this may be worth it. Particularly for those who have a large number of short stories stocked up on the hard drive waiting to see the light of day and can therefore afford to lose the rights to one for six months or a year. But when it comes to longer books, representing hundreds or thousands of hours of labor, writers need to carefully examine what they are getting in return for presenting an eBook publishing site with this free bonanza. The only parallel to the current practice of most eBook publishers that I'm aware of is that of unpaid internships. However, unlike the unpaid internship which often carries the implied promise of a paid writing job offer on completion, or at least provides resume experience in the publishing field, the publication of eBooks on many sites returns nothing to the writer.

eBook publishing falls into five basic categories:

An eBook version of a work that has already been published on paper by a traditional publisher in accordance with the original contract terms for the paper book.
An eBook written for an E-publisher, based on the standard proposal-contract-advance model used in traditional publishing, in which the E-publisher has the right to produce a print version.
An eBook written for an E-publisher without a proposal phase, and without an advance. The book may still be given some professional editing or formatting, and will only be accepted for publication based on editorial review or some sort of peer review mechanism. Royalties are possible, if it sells.
An eBook that is automatically accepted for publication by the eBook site; the "quantity" over "quality" approach. Royalties are possible if it sells, and this approach may actually be better for writers than option #3, which may entice these writers to write material tailored to the site which then rejects it or fails to promote it.
Self publication on the writer's own web site, with the option of self-publishing short runs or using print-on-demand to create and sell printed books.

The first category is of little interest here, since all major publishers have locked authors into this option by contract for at least the past ten years. However, if you fall into this category and your book is officially "Out of Print", it is definitely worthwhile to pull the contract out of the drawer and check the clause about how rights can revert to the author. Often, if the publisher doesn't put the book back into print by producing a short run or making it available as "Print on Demand" at the author's request, the author may recover rights to the book, even if the publisher holds the copyright. Some major publishers do license the eBook rights to their printed books, but only to other legitimate publishers or retailers with proven business models.

The second category, in which the E-publisher basically follows the procedures of a traditional publisher, is the most attractive option for writers. What many writers fail to realize is that the hated proposal phase does more to protect them than it does the publisher. This applies primarily to non-fiction, since fiction works from unknown authors must be essentially finished before any serious publisher would even consider them, but seven out of eight books published in this country are non-fiction. Publishers like proposals for non-fiction books, even if they are completed, because the author is required to present a brief market analysis. Many authors may trip over this assignment, primarily due to unfamiliarity with the business or marketing worlds, but there are several excellent books on proposal writing, such as those by Jeff Herman. The important thing about writing proposals is that once the art is mastered, the writer can obtain a contract and possibly an advance payment before investing all the time required to research and write an entire book. The main drawback of E-publishers who follow these procedures is that they are few and far between, and once they are established, getting a contract with them is probably more difficult than finding a paper publisher.

The third option, E-publishers who cherry pick the works they will publish without granting advances or signing contracts for partial works, is probably the most dangerous. Some of these sites are associated with traditional publishing houses, so writers perceive them as a possible back door. The interactivity of these sites can really raise the hopes of unpublished writers who are being taken seriously as writers for perhaps the first time, but most of this interactivity is automated or provided by their peers. While I'm all in favor of feeling good, I'd hate to see a fellow writer invest serious time in writing a book tailored to a suggested topic which that author wouldn't have otherwise taken on. For example, any non-fiction writer with an interest in the stock market might be tempted to try a book on "Dow 20,000" in response to a tempting offer to E-publish the best entry on the subject. However, keep in mind that a decent proposal on such a hot topic can be written in a tiny fraction of the time required to research and write the whole book. The odds of that proposal bringing a real contract and advance from an established publisher are probably appreciably higher than the odds of a completed book, written without editorial feedback, winning the run-off at the E-publisher. Even if the writer wins the contest and has the book produced as an eBook, what is the financial reward? Unknown, but very few writers are earning more than pennies through eBook sales unsupported by print editions. Those who are making real money are likely writing for an E-publisher in our second category. Remember, even the least efficient paper publisher has a strong motivation to try to sell your books once they are printed, to recover the printing, editing and production costs which amount to tens of thousands of dollars for even a relatively short run with no advance. An eBook publisher who only invests a few minutes converting your word-processor file to a PDF or other eBook format has no motivation to push your book. I've even seen "contracts" where these E-publishers have the gall to make you agree not to submit the work anywhere else for 90 days while they are considering it - something no traditional publisher will do until a contract guaranteeing publication is signed.

The fourth type of E-publisher, those who basically accept any finished work for publication, may be the best path for authors who can spare something off the hard drive as a test. Some of these sites are very up-front and honest, allowing even "non-members" to view how much traffic the works posted on the site receive. A recent visit to one such site showed that the largest number of downloads for any of the numerous works on the site the previous week was in the teens. Based on six years of writing and posting books and articles on the web, I generally feel I've missed the boat unless a non-fiction work is at least getting fifty hits a week. Fiction is the best bet for these sites, since getting people to come to your fiction works on an independent site requires active promotion. Some of these sites also offer you a route to "Print-on-Demand" publication, which I'll discuss in the next paragraph. The most important issue in choosing an E-publisher, and the reason I haven't provided a list of favored publishers here, is you want to pick the one that somebody looking for your type of book would be most likely to go to. This means that you need to set aside a little time for web surfing in one of the honest search engines, like http://www.google.com and figure out where would YOU go if YOU were looking for an eBook like yours to read. Don't simply go with the first site you find; try a variety of search words and phrases and follow some links and banner advertisements. By the way, don't be surprised if an idea for a book you thought was unique has already been done by five other authors. Anything so unique that it has no comparison may well have no audience, and stands a slim chance of ever attracting a paper publisher, if you're interested in that option.

The fifth category of eBook publishing is self-publishing on your own web site. The advantages to this route are:

You retain all rights to your works.
Any traffic or positive e-mails or press coverage your site generates will be extremely useful for landing a paper publisher (see The Path to Publication in the New Millennium).
There are several "Print-on-Demand" options, from doing it yourself to Booklocker.com, who pays a 35% royalty on the cover price.
You control promotion for your book, without getting stuck promoting somebody else's whole eBook site to do it.
The Internet is here to stay, may as well learn something about it.

The drawbacks are:

Cost. While you can build a site with a free hosting service, I discourage it. Site statistics are unavailable, performance is lousy, they bombard you and your visitors with advertisements, and most importantly, they are ignored by most search engines. On the bright side, you can buy a decent commercial site with your own domain name (the domain name for this site is fonerbooks, as in www.fonerbooks.com) for $10/month or less, with a $25 or $30 setup charge and no long term contract required.
You have to design the site yourself, because anybody who charges to do it for you will charge an arm or a leg, $1000 or more being the rule unless you find a kid to do it.

In stock and shipping next business day.

U.S. residents can order the 171 page paperback direct from the publisher for $14.95 plus $2.25 shipping and handling (media mail - normally 4 to 14 business days). The book can also be ordered through any retail store by the title "Print-On-Demand Book Publishing" or ISBN which is: 0-9723801-3-2.

Click here for Credit Card or Amazon Orders

Starting a Self Publishing Company | Print on Demand Publishing | Offset Press Publishing | Getting Published | E-mail Morris