Check out Bob’s recent piece on PublishingPerspectives.com about why the relationship between Publisher and Author should be a collaboration, not a tug-of-war.

photo credit: Adrian Kinloch

I’ve just read M.J. Rose’s editorial from last Friday, “Publishers Must Change the Way Authors Get Paid,” and I couldn’t agree more that it’s time to re-think the publisher/author relationship.  M.J. deserves credit for moving this conversation forward; indeed, for years M.J. has shown by her own example how authors can and should be full partners in the marketing of their books. If anyone has earned the right to question author compensation, it’s M.J. Rose.

However, I don’t think that the solution is to have authors paid a higher royalty in exchange for their marketing efforts.

First of all, how would this be judged? What amount of marketing effort should be expected of the author before their royalty changes?  Shouldn’t author and publisher alike be doing everything possible to make a book succeed, without needing to count up who has gone beyond the call of duty and who hasn’t and trying to calculate how that should translate into how they share the proceeds of their success? What if the author and the publisher have both made herculean marketing efforts, but the book has lost money? Should the author get a higher royalty, even as the publisher is taking a loss? (Similarly, I don’t see how publishers and authors would know how to apply the author’s marketing expenses to their advances, as M.J. suggests here.)