Down with Royalties, 2004 (original) (raw)
LITERARY AGENT GILES GORDON PUTS THE CASE FOR NOT PAYING AUTHORS A PERCENTAGE
Article by literary agent Giles Gordon published posthumously in The Author, Winter 2003/4 Vol. CXIV No.4.
We are very sorry to record Giles Gordon's untimely death in November. He will be greatly missed, both personally and professionally.
Caedmon, in his cowshed, had a vision. Now I've had one. It's to do with how and what authors are paid.
Cast your minds back. Under the Net Book Agreement, if a book was priced at £16.99 the bookseller was obliged to sell it at £16.99 and was, on the whole, delighted to do so. Generally speaking, the author - the onlie begetter - would receive a royalty on that price of 10% on the first 2,500 copies sold, 12.5% on the next 2,500, 15% thereafter. Decades before, best-selling authors such as A. J. Cronin and Daphne du Maurier (remembering my young days at Victor Gollancz) were paid higher royalties; and rightly so because they, the authors, not only made the show possible but kept the show on the road. I mean, made it possible for publishing to be an industry (even if a cottage one) for tens of thousands of people - including of course booksellers - to be in employment and make a living. It was never - never, never - suggested then, and we aren't talking about more than twenty years ago, that authors somehow owed their superiority to the commercial or other (more obscure) genius of the publishers.
Then, roughly speaking fifteen years ago, with the snatching up of the great indigenous imprints by what became known, pejoratively, as the conglomerates, a few authors were paid gargantuan advances whereas the majority were paid a pittance. And as the conglomerates purported to wield a monopoly of power, the new chain booksellers bullied or blackmailed the major publishers into granting them huge discounts if they agreed to stock and display vast piles of new titles. The chain booksellers were suddenly mesmerised by their power in the country of the book, and abused that power, ordering far more copies than they knew they could sell, but also knowing that they could return all unsold copies to the publishers' warehouses. The new chain bookshops couldn't lose and they haven't, even if shareholders may sometimes be grumpy.
The assumption by publishers and agents now seems to be that royalties are irrelevant. The obligation of the literary agent is to persuade the publisher's editor to pay as large an advance as possible and then let the publisher's back office argue with the agent over royalty percentages, all of which, with everyone involved going excitedly through the motions, is quite irrelevant as the advance will never be earned. And everyone knows that. As publishers readily (it would seem) grant the bookselling chains - not to mention the supermarkets and the Ted Smarts - larger and larger discounts, the minutiae of authors' contracts become increasingly irrelevant and even surreal.
This is, to put it politely, borne out by royalty statements. Twice a year, my accounts colleagues at Curtis Brown show me a mountain of unearned royalty statements which they have checked against the terms negotiated in the original contracts.
Construed simply, publishers have either overpaid for the books in question, or they have undersold them (which they invariably deny), or they have yielded to the nagging of the bookselling chains and allowed them so much exotic discount. Yet the books in question frequently will have contributed a considerable amount of income to the publisher's turnover.
Anthony Cheetham once philosophised that figures can be massaged in such a way that any publisher can show that any book has made a profit, even if the advance is significantly unearned.
How can this be? It can be because the author is now guaranteed a sum of money on each copy sold but a lousy percentage of the cost of the book as paid for by the bookseller. It might shock, or at least embarrass, publishers, wholesalers and retailers and even some literary agents to know, if they think about it, that book buyers - I'm talking about customers in bookshops, those none of us can do without - would like to feel, if they pay say £16.99 for a book, that most or much of that sum will go to the author whereas he or she wot wrote the book will be lucky to receive £1.69 less 10% or 15% agent's commission. Who gets most by far? The retailer. Why? Because even if he or she isn't very inspired at selling books, he or she has mammoth rent to pay for high street premises. Shome mishtake here shurely? as Private Eye might say.
The Sunday Telegraph a few years ago published a piece on literary agents. Andrew 'the Jackal' Wylie was quoted as saying he was appalled if he ever received, with a royalty statement, a cheque for one of his authors. In other words, the book had earned out, and thus Mr. Wylie had sold it for too little money. I, on the other hand, was quoted next to him as saying that if I didn't receive a cheque with a royalty statement six or twelve months after a book was published I felt I'd done an inadequate job for the author - which is not to suggest that I believe publishers should offer authors minuscule advances. Quite the contrary. The more they pay, the more likely they are to try to sell a book. But the advance should be earnable.
If an advance is exotically unearned, will the publisher in question, let alone other publishers who are all too aware of what is going on (and booksellers able to access EPOS), want to know about the poor author's next book, whatever its quality and potential saleability?
It might reasonably be construed, leaving publishers and booksellers to flatter each other, that everyone makes, or stands to make, money out of 'the book' - other than the author. Publishers' contracts departments seem to see it as their job (whether they articulate it or not) to ensure that the writers receive as tiny percentages as permissible so that the publishers can make as large profits as possible, particularly when they are giving more and more away to the booksellers. This in turn has led to the expansion of literary agencies, to provide worthy opponents to these tedious and frankly unnecessary (but socially delightful) contracts people. And the accounts departments of both publishers and agents have had to be steadily and expensively increased to deal with the endless different payment permutations which now pertain.
Decades ago in The Bookseller I predicted, with the amalgamation of independent publishing houses, the gradual demise of the rep. I was derided at the time as being unrealistic: how could the trade function without regular visits to bookshops by well-briefed reps? It has substantially come about because the expensive conglomerates and the office bureaucracy of the chains cannot accommodate or afford them in their structures.
Now the financial squeeze is being put on the writers. As the few no doubt overpaid best-sellers receive more and more, the vast majority of authors - as we all know - receive less and less. Let us, if we must, negotiate lower advances (well, not much lower) if it means on each book sold the author receives more.
Since the demise of the NBA, the cost of baking and selling the cake - the book - has considerably increased, while the price of the book (three for two everywhere) has diminished so that it sometimes hardly seems worth the paper it is printed on. Agents, and by extension of course their clients the authors, have no control whatsoever, and nor really should they have, as to what discounts publishers concede to booksellers. The answer? Authors should henceforth be paid an actual sum of money per book sold, irrespective of the discount.
Surely no book sold should be worth less than say £1 to its author. Publishers might (would) sneer and say how then do they make the figures work? The answer is that the figures can be made to work - given that most books are retailed far too cheaply, thus devaluing the product - if the remuneration to the author is taken as a basic rather than an optional percentage which can, at the whim of a production manager or sales director, be enlarged or diminished by a slide-rule.
X's latest book is a hardback retailing at £l5.99. It sells 19,228 copies: 3,000 to W H Smith, 2,500 to Borders, 1,500 to Ottakars, 1,500 to Asda, 500 to Tesco, 6,000 to The Book People, 2,000 to a bookclub, the rest to a handful of independents. Under the present system, it takes lots of people lots of time to calculate and check and counter-check what the author should be paid. Under my proposal, with the author paid say £1.50 on each and every copy sold (that figure always to be negotiated subject to the size, nature and potential of the book), he or his agent will receive a cheque for £28,842, or at least that sum will be set against the advance.
The time-honoured device of royalties to an author being expressed as a percentage of different discounts worked well in a different era. It has become a wildly unfair anachronism.
GILES GORDON was a literary agent with Curtis Brown. This article expresses his personal views.
Click for a collation of tributes to Giles Gordon. See also An Ultra Short Run (Print-on-Demand publishing) and Blood on the Sheets (sheet-dealing).
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