Tag: publishing

Fascinating read by Cory Doctorow:

With a Kickstarter campaign now underway for the audio edition of his new book, ‘Red Team Blues,’ Cory Doctorow shares the mistakes of his past campaigns—and why it’s all worth it

It’s a mystery why this is all so complicated. And actually, it doesn’t have to be. You can skip all of this nonsense and just sell the files within an app that can handle all the downloading, unzipping, and playback behind the scenes. But every in-app purchase comes with a 30% commission to Apple or Google, which would explain why these two tech giants have completely enshittified direct downloading: the worse the direct download experience is, the better handing over a third of your gross revenue starts to look. It’s the mobile duopoly’s version of the airline industry continuously dreaming up new petty cruelties for their coach fares.

Reed sent couriers over to all of its Methuen authors who were being asked to novate their contracts—essentially to update their contracts, with the same terms and conditions, to the new legal entity. A motorbike courier duly went to the home of Lady Antonia Fraser, whose acclaimed historical biographies we had been publishing for many years, to get her signature, Unfortunately, the door was answered by her partner, the dramatist Harold Pinter, and in the course of the exchange with the courier an altercation arose. The notoriously short-tempered Pinter became extremely annoyed at what he saw as the impudence of the request. Shortly afterwards, not only did Pinter announce he was moving all of his copyrights from Methuen to Faber, but his great friend, the playwright Simon Gray, wrote to tell us he was doing the same. We never got to the bottom of exactly what happened on Lady Antonia’s doorstep, but it proved costly for us and was a lesson in how easily in the literary world one can wreck an author-publisher relationship.