Under the terms of a typical 360 deal (which the record company representatives would prefer to call by the more innocuous phrase “multiple rights deal”), labels are demanding a portion of an artist’s income from touring, publishing, endorsements, and sale of merchandise, in addition to the vast majority of the record sale income that labels have always enjoyed. And when you read the fine print, you’ll also discover that the labels want to make money from the books that artists write, the Hollywood movies in which they act, and the fan clubs they create. In fact the labels want to share in absolutely everything.
Out there, right now, is some slack-jawed idiot tasked with wringing more shekels out of the existing — and dying — system of book publishing. Let me warn you now: Don’t even think of pulling that shit with writers.
And:
Richard Nash on Publishing Past, Present and Future
The publishers are saying, “We can’t make money if e-books are ten bucks.” And I’m thinking, a) we have to figure out a way, and b) if you think it’s gonna stay at ten bucks you’ve got another thing coming; it’s going to be cheaper than ten bucks.
Yeah, here comes a transfer of wealth I look forward to witnessing in my lifetime: from fat-salaried Suits back to writers.
And the words that made my day today I quoted earlier:
Apple agreed to the agency model for just one year
Steve Jobs thinks he was a friend of publishing doing that, the agency model.
Hey, Steve. Wake up. Writers do the books, not publishers.
