We've just finished a website to sell an eBook (Kindle or EPUB) for an
author in town, Josh Gonze, see the streetsofsantafe.com
<http://streetsofsantafe.com>. Visitors buy the ebook ($11.95) via
PayPal and automatically receive an email with a digital download link
that's good for 2 days. This digital self publishing approach avoids
giving Amazon a chunk of the sales price.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
Robert Cordingley
www.cirrillian.com <http://www.cirrillian.com>
On 2/14/12 9:39 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Hi, everybody,
I have signed perhaps a dozen Publishers Agreements over my life time
and each one was more onerous, self-serving, and stupid than the one
before. My favorite was the publisher who asked me to "hold the
Publisher harmless for anything that might occur as a consequence of
the publishing of the work." I asked a lawyer if this meant I was
liable if a printer got his hand caught in the press while my book was
running and he answered, "Well, /probably/ not." And then he thought
for a moment and said, "Oh, they'ld never come after you for that!"
Early contracts limited my liability to the income from royalties, and
one publisher actually provided authors' insurance for a modest
premium. But no more.
Well today, I got an author's contract for a paper I am contributed to
an academic collection that asked me to warrant that the work had been
commissioned by the publisher and was "work for hire". Now, work
for hire means that one's surrenders ALL rights to the work including
the right to claim it as one's own work. It's the kind of contract
you sign when you write jacket copy for a publisher. ( The publisher
in this case was Oxford University Press, in case any of you are
thinking of doing business with them.) I am a wishy washy fellow, but
somehow I could not sign a document that said that my original work
was "work for hire." Couldn't do it.
It's too late for this work. I will have to sign the rights over to
my [young] collaborator, because she desperately needs the paper for
her career. But MAN! It got me to thinking. WHAT ABOUT self
publishing. With, say, Amazon" Does anybody on the list have any
experience with Amazon or other self publishing services that they
would like to share?
My Dad was a book publisher, and I grew up with conversations around
the dinner table about "developing authors" and trying to find new
authors, and how a few books might have to be published before a new
author caught on. They published Churchill's Memoires and Mein Kampf
(!) and the Peterson Field Guides, among many others. Now, it seems,
publishers do very little, and academic publishers, in particular, do
nothing but scavenge off the fetid bits coughed up the publish or
perish system. Is is it time to dump them? I am sure this is a party
I am late to. Where do I get invited.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
<http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://www.cusf.org <http://www.cusf.org/>
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
