Recent comments on the blog, and emails to me, have brought up questions of distribution. Specifically, why is it that (for example) Australians can't buy English books in Australia, or German readers can't buy U.S. books in Germany?
The answer lies in the rights negotiated and granted in the original publishing contract.
Make no mistake: Publishers of all stripes have one thing in common. We want people buying and reading our books. At the end of the day, that's how we bring in money and pay the bills (including royalties to authors). We have no reason to ever knowingly or willfully prevent people from purchasing our products; doing so is against our self-interests.
Running up against our desire to sell books are two main impediments, however.
First, there is the issue of piracy, both domestic and international. As we have all discovered, it becomes next to impossible to control your intellectual property once it gets into digital format. Even with DRM (digital rights management), it's not hard for the tech-savvy to turn a purchased ebook into a file illegally uploaded to a fileshare site, while publishers watch almost helplessly as thousands of people illegally download the property, thus depriving us of revenue and our authors of money. For this reason, in the early days of ebooks, I was very much in favor of releasing ebooks only after a period of time had elapsed - the way we typically see a paperback come a while after the hardcover. The huge growth in fiction sales on Kindle, Nook, etc., has changed my mind somewhat; but make no mistake, the piracy issue is very much there and costs the industry billions of dollars per year in lost revenue.
Even with the printed book, there are certain international markets where printed piracy is the coin of the realm. These include China and India. A publisher may decide to do everything it is power to prevent printed books from reaching these markets, where copyright laws are laxly enforced. People will scan the book, then print it cheaply and sell it on the street; and I don't think we can be blamed for not wanting to support the black market. Of course, it's a losing battle because any pirate can go on eBay, get a copy of the book, and still sell illegal copies of it. So why would we spend all that time, money, paper, and distribution in getting books into areas where we'll lose our shirts?
Second is the issue of negotiated rights. Nowadays there really is no such thing as "the publisher" of a work. Agents negotiate rights of different kinds to different publishers, going with the highest bidder. Rights can and do include: hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, ebook, serialization, and so on. And then add to that geographic rights: You can have U.S.rights, North American (U.S. & Canada rights), European rights, world rights, and so forth.
In the case of books written in English, an agent might decide that the best publisher in the U.S. is not the best publisher in another country with a sizable English-speaking population, such as Australia or the UK. Local/national publishers tend to be better with local marketing/publicity than the U.S. publisher, even though all the big houses have an international presence. We might be prevented from selling our book in Germany because the agent has a German publisher interested in bringing out both an English and a German version of the book simultaneously. And since the typical publishing contract is at its core an assignment of exclusive rights to sell the product, we may be prohibited from selling an eBook in markets to which we do not have the rights. This would explain why, for example, one of my books might not be available as an eBook in Australia.
Agents make their money by maximizing royalty revenue for authors, so they cannot be blamed for wanting to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of the granting of rights. But our industry is not predictable. The agent may not be able to sell any Australian rights at all; meanwhile, the U.S. publisher is prevented from selling books in Australia. Thus the Australian reader is left in the lurch. Unfortunately, there is nothing that publishers can do about this.
I have even heard stories recently about agents trying to sell print rights separately from ebook rights. Frankly, I think any editor who'd sign a contract like that should have his head examined. All of the work goes into the print product; why let some other publisher free-ride on the ebook sales? But, as I always say, we're in a new world with new technologies cropping up every day, and business models are changing, so we shall see what the future holds. At the end of the day, though, everyone needs to remember that publishing is a BUSINESS and publishers exist to make PROFIT. We're not nonprofit organizations, and we have the right to run our businesses in ways that minimize our costs and maximize our revenues.
As one who was involved in the exchange of comments that inspired this post, thanks for answering it from your perspective. I wonder, though, if there might be an unintended consequence for publishers and agents. Could authors, frustrated with not being able to get their books into the hands of willing readers, start holding onto some of their rights (digital, foreign distribution) and start turning more to self-publishing or placing their book with smaller, independent publishers. At least one crime writer has turned to self-publishing and is apparently doing well. I know of another whose latest book wasn't picked up by a US publisher who put it out as an ebook himself.
Posted by: www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawk7Ga6szUNMYVgjgfCR30gHCh-LhT_UNes | October 07, 2011 at 06:35 PM
I too left a comment on the earlier post that may have helped prompt this post and also appreciate hearing about the complexities of it all. I suppose 10 years or so ago readers like me weren't jumping up and down about geo-restrictions because we simply didn't have easy access to information about what was being published elsewhere and now we are armed with information and angry about it. So while your explanation makes sense I do still feel that "the publishing industry" (i.e. all the players you mentioned and probably book sellers as well) needs to address the issue more intelligently than it has done to date because the system in use still seems to be working on the basis of a world in which readers don't know what's going on elsewhere. The problem I can foresee developing for example is that even fewer books will be sold into small markets like Australia because by the time the rights are negotiated (often months or years after US or UK publications) half the people who would have bought the book have already done so from overseas shops. I buy two thirds of my books from outside the country (either in e or p format) and while price is a factor the main reason for this is that the books are available and I like reading a new book at the same time as the crime fiction readers I know from England and the UK so we can all discuss it together. I know I am not alone in doing this so I wonder what happens then when the book is finally on the shelves here...who's left to buy it? As for small publishing markets like Australia it is even more insane that global rights aren't sold at once...as an amateur reviewer with a website devoted to Australian crime fiction I know that most of our blog readers are from overseas and there are many books that I review that American and English readers can't buy locally (and they're not insane enough to pay ludicrous Australian prices)...for the most part these are lost sales as people have forgotten all about the reviews 12 months later when the books might be made available in their local markets.
Posted by: Bernadette | October 07, 2011 at 07:35 PM
Ditto what Bernadette said.
The time lag between publishing a book in foreign market and its availability in the US is a serious hinderance. You are losing the immediacy of a new publication. I once went so far as to have a book sent to the hotel of a friend who was visiting the UK so that the friend could bring it back to me in the states.
What also happens is that I sometimes turn to used book sources and even book swap sites to get titles not otherwise accessible. I want to and am willing to support authors but it isn't often easy for the niche in which I am interested.
I'm with Bernadette, publishers need to think globally.
Posted by: www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawk7Ga6szUNMYVgjgfCR30gHCh-LhT_UNes | October 07, 2011 at 08:40 PM
I've been thinking more about what I wrote earlier and I'm not sure I was that clear. I certainly think publishers and agents and authors are well within their rights to make as much money as they can and don't expect anyone to 'give' me anything as a reader. But I do strongly believe that the system of discrete geographical based markets is no longer the best way to generate sales as we (the readers) are not the same isolated clumps we once were. And whereas thousands ( or even millions) of pirated copies of a book in China or India are unlikely to represent significant lost sales ( those people would not have bought the full price legal book at all) I can foresee that continuing on with the outdated country-by-country rights sales could lead to increased piracy by people who otherwisw would have bought the book legitimately but are frustrated at not being able to. I can appreciate that authors, agents etc might not want this to be true but the genie is out of the bottle. We, especially the 'we' who are avid readers who read dozens of books a year are well informed and accessing sites like Amazon and Good Reads daily and we know what books are available somewhere in the world and we're going to get our hands on the books we want regardless of arbitrary lines on a map. I am certain I'm not the only reader who would prefer to do this legally but who will consider illegal options as the risk of doing so reduces and the ease of accessing them increases.
Posted by: Bernadette | October 08, 2011 at 12:14 AM
I understand the reasons for "rights". By the way, many authors do hold their "e" rights because their books were published in the print era before ebooks were known. There is quite a healthy business now in publishers or others offering to publish the eforms of these books for authors, or indeed authors doing it themselves (which means they have to do a lot of work in production, marketing etc of course, hence these new business models from publishers offering to do it for them - you may have seen the Amazon suggestion on the product entries for OOP books now that they have entered the epublishing business with their various imprints).
But to return to the main point. For readers, it is very frustrating not to be able to read a book when it is published "somewhere". Publishers are presumably doing their sums re piracy, etc, and when the tipping point comes where piracy is economically costly, I suppose they will tend to make the e-versions of their books available globally earlier.
Though you are correct about print piracy being common in China, India and elsewhere (eg many African countries), this has always been the case since long before the internet. Ebooks have just created another type of piracy for publishers to contend with, in addition. Publishers must be aware of what has happened to the music industry and what will probably soon happen to the TV/movie content industry if companies like Google and (we now hear via Steve Jobs's legacy) Apple have their way -- all that is stopping them are rights!!
Book publishers do need to wake up, and change their business models. As far as authors are concerned, the publisher does have a strong bargaining position - if the author wants the service and honour of being independently published rather than self-published, I am sure he/she and her agents will be prepared to negotiate a simple "one world" right, ultimately.
Posted by: Maxine | October 08, 2011 at 12:48 PM
I just wanted to add - the reason we need a "one world" right is because readers themselves are not limited to their "own" market any more. As more bookstores go out of business and people buy online, the country they are in is increasingly insignificant to them and to the publisher. (Translations are different, but once a book is translated, on the "one world" model it, too, should be available everywhere eg for Germans living in Canada to read, not just Germans in Germany).
The sooner the publishing industry gets on with doing this, the more likely it is that publishers will stay in business, rather than falling more and more behind the real world and what people (customers) in it do/want.
Posted by: Maxine | October 09, 2011 at 11:27 AM
There are a number of epresses (not self-publishing services) where world English rights are part of the contract. They're usually small enough that publisher and author both know limiting themselves to only one country/region would be financial suicide.
Posted by: Pepper Smith | October 09, 2011 at 02:05 PM