I’m in a literary situation where I can use some inexpensive online help.
The short version: I have a handful of short ebook titles for which the rights have formally reverted to me…but the books are still up for sale at major Web retailers. If I can demonstrate sales for those titles, I can use that as a lever to get them pulled off the Web so I can remarket them myself (and in the meantime, claim full retail price rather than a royalty for the unauthorized sales).
Here’s the more detailed story:
As some of you may recall, I sold a handful of short stories to a local e-publisher (Uncial Press, run by Judith Glad) some years back, and they’ve been available on Amazon and various other retail sites since then. Eventually Judith retired, and sold the business to a (slightly) larger e-publisher called Untreed Reads…which was also sold, rather abruptly thereafter, to yet a third e-publisher called Top of the World.
Not long after that, Top of the World sold itself to Histria Books, at that time a mostly print publisher whose primary focus has been academic and mainstream nonfiction, particularly history and various sorts of esoteric lore. Unfortunately, Histria evidently didn’t know what to do with what was by then a considerable quantity of commercial e-fiction, other than to send its authors newsletters full of opportunities to spend $$$ marketing and promoting their work (and assuming, for the most part, that their audience for these newsletters was promoting new work as opposed to backlist). As you may imagine, I was not particularly interested in spending $$$ promoting a Very Small Backlist….
After a somewhat eccentric chain of correspondence by a combination of email and certified postal mail – the rights to my three orphaned works are mine again. Histria quotes the date of reversion as this past June 30. I have some questions about that given a clause in the original contract, but for present purposes the June 30 date is what matters….
…because even as I type this on August 1st, those three ebooks are still right there on Amazon and at the Simon & Schuster Web site (S&S being Histria’s distributor for such), and probably at a variety of other ebook outlets scattered across the Web.
And this is a capital-P Problem, because right now, no one but me has the rights to be selling those ebooks anywhere online. The contract in place before June 30 required Histria to see that those works were withdrawn from circulation, and that simply hasn’t happened. This is pretty much the textbook definition of (literary) piracy – because without a contract in place, there’s no clear mechanism for the money from any sales that might happen to get from Amazon (or S&S, or anywhere else) to me, except possibly via Histria itself. And worse, until the newly piratical iterations of the books come down, I can’t as a practical matter market those ebooks anywhere else – I own the texts, but not the cover art or the ISBNs, et cetera.
This is where you come in…
…because if those piratical editions suddenly start selling, I have a lever that I can use to pry the revenue from those sales (not just a royalty, mind you, but the full retail price, because there’s no contract in place from which to calculate a royalty) out of Histria and/or Amazon and/or S&S, etc.
(I should note here that while the various online retailers still selling these titles are from a legal standpoint direct parties to piracy, it’s Histria – the final authorized publisher – that’s put them in that position by its failure to de-list the works involved in timely fashion.)
So: here are links to Amazon and to Simon & Schuster for the three titles in question:
Charmed, I’m Sure • Amazon • S&S
A couple of requests: if you are motivated to leave a review of any of these after you’ve read them (which I encourage you to do, as it will help document that there’s sales activity) , please don’t refer to the rights situation in what you post – as I’ve indicated above, the retailers are not the villains here, and the business issues involved are better kept between me, Histria, and the affected retailers.
You are also very welcome to point people in other parts of cyberspace to this post; it would please me mightily if the situation were to go sufficiently viral to cause general improvement in Histria’s treatment of the cadre of authors it acquired in the course of its purchasing spree (as I very much doubt I’m the only author in a similar situation just now). And if you find any of these for sale elsewhere on the Web, feel free to point *me* at the site in question.
