Trade authors will want to watch the lead taken this week in the UK by the Society of Authors (SoA) in crying foul on the deep-discount deals many publishing contracts carry, which operate to the disadvantage of authors.
The SoA is calling on publishers to provide authors with an opt-out, or the right to say no, to these contract clauses.
Triggering the controversy is an SoA opinion piece by author and illustrator James Mayhew. The case he describes is summed up in an article (subscription required) by the staff of the Bookseller: “Mayhew had been offered a promotion by his publisher (Hachette Children’s) to place 10,000 sets of 10 books ‘from a successful series’ into a ‘well-known discount catalogue.’ The books (regularly priced at £6.99) would be sold to the retailer at a discount and would be sold for £1 each. Mayhew stood to pocket 3p per title (£3,000 in total).”
The defense offered for such clauses is that they get an author’s work in front of readers who “might not have the opportunity, inclination, or budget to buy books”—that explanation coming from Hachette Children’s Group’s Hilary Murray Hill.
SoA chief Nicola Solomon is asking authors to check their contracts. Mayhew was one of the lucky authors with the option to say no to the discounted promotion. (And he did.) “If you have a headline rate of, say, 10 percent of [regular retail price],” Solomon tells the Bookseller, “you expect most of your books will be sold at that price [and] that they won’t be sold at some sneaky little sub-clause [price] which, in some cases, can be where the majority of the sales are made.”
As we’ve written before (see our Nov. 2 item), the SoA sees promise in the European Commission’s call in its Digital Single Market initiative for the right to renegotiate author contracts when payment is “disproportionately low.”
In the States, the issue is one of the main pillars of the Authors Guild’s Fair Contract Initiative. The Guild’s white paper on deep discounting explains it this way: “so-called ‘deep discount’ clauses let publishers offer titles to booksellers and wholesalers at big markdowns. They stipulate that [with] a publisher’s sale at a discount of over 55 percent, for example (a number that appears to be the new standard), the author’s royalty suddenly drops from, say, 15 percent of list price to 15 percent of the far smaller amount the publisher actually receives.”
Bottom line: If publishers feel enough pressure from the coordinated contract-reform lobbies mounted by author advocacy organizations in the UK, the US, and other countries, adjusting these clauses to at least offer the opt-out is likely more easily done than, say, a revamp of the entire royalty structure.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
