Authors Guild warns members about Random House, HarperCollins e-royalty rate renegotiation
Mediabistro’s Galleycat makes note of a two-page letter sent by the Authors Guild to its members in reference to letters that Random House and HarperCollins have sent its authors.
It seems that those two publishers are trying to get their writers to lock into 25% royalty rates on e-books. While this might look better than the 15% going rate on hardcovers, the Authors Guild warns that the terms may not be entirely desirable:
Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We’re confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That’s beginning to change.
The Guild advises authors try to retain the right to renegotiate terms after a couple of years, stipulate a “royalty floor” in their contract (such that the amount of money they get for each e-book sale is at minimum equivalent to the amount they would get from a print sale), make sure the terms do not adversely affect their reversion of rights clauses, make sure they are not signing away rights they already control—and if all else fails, wait for a better offer to come along as the market develops.
The royalty percentage increase was in part a reaction to the new agency pricing model that Apple and Amazon are going to, to give the writer a bigger chunk of the smaller monetary amount coming in. But it is still too early to tell whether this increase will really be enough.
Related: Authors Guild repudiates Random House e-book rights grab
What’s in a name?
Yesterday we published a couple of 
The Bookseller.com reports on a study presented at the Book Marketing Limited conference that suggests 
Facebook is not only rapidly growing in numbers, it also keeps evolving from a mere social network to a full-scale marketplace. Only lately PayPal was added as a payment option, making in-app-shopping of physical or virtual goods still more easy. So why not start an E-Book-Store within the network service? Thanks to „
Canadian science-fiction author 
This is a question asked by 
In the first of a series of articles Michael Bhaskar 
Even though all my computers are Macs and I have an iPhone, I’m not much interested in the iPad. No multi-tasking, no Flash, etc. The HP Slate, however, looks like a far more promising and versatile machine. 
In my TOC reports I mentioned that one of the best presentations I hear was the one given my Michael Mace. You can find 
