Territorial Book Rights - An Unnecessary Evil

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I have had a number of potential readers of Olives - A Violent Romance point out to me that they are unable to download the Kindle ebook, getting a message from Amazon that the book is not available to readers in the Middle East.

This answers one particular burning question for me. In the past, when I have asked why Amazon won't serve content to the Middle East, People Of Knowledge have sagely rubbed their chins and told me it's a question of rights. As the rights holder to Olives, I specifically checked the option on my Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard that opened up distribution to the entire world. There is no rights related reason why my book should be blocked from Middle East based readers. We can infer, therefore, that the reason Amazon is blocking other content from the Middle East - particularly self-published content - is also not necessarily related to rights.


Amazon, Apple and Google are effectively retarding the development of a vibrant and innovative content market in the Middle East. None of these three organisations support the distribution of paid content to the region. They are culturally bombing us back to the dark ages. While the US, UK, Europe and Asia are migrating to e-readers and reader-based content of increasing richness, the Middle East is unable to buy books, content or apps from any of the 'marketplaces' these companies operate.

However, while it's not about rights in my case, it certainly is with traditional publishers - they're holding on to the old territorial models with a tenacity that would almost be admirable if it weren't so fundamentally idiotic.

The idea of territorial rights in publishing comes from the 'old' model of print and distribution, with a little language slung into the mix and some price-fixing to boot. The world can be carved up into a number of relatively neat territories, for instance the US and Canada, UK and Commonwealth or Middle East. Each of these has a common language, can be served by a single print run and distribution/marketing push and network and each can be allocated a price tag that suits the market. (The print run stuff is subject to some cost dynamics - depending on the size of the run and shipping costs, it would likely make more sense to split the run, but it's not something set in stone. The broad target is a 'landed cost' of around 10% of cover price.)


So when, say, a US publisher buys the rights to a book, they take on the cost of print, distribution and marketing. Other markets will also take on translation costs, which are significant. This outlay on a book means that territorial rights are defended vigorously in the traditional publishing world. But it also means that rights have a value - and publishers will pay significant amounts of money to secure the rights to a successful book or a book they believe will be successful.

The Internet has, of course, blown that model wide apart. I can now write a book in Dubai and sell it in Boston, Beirut and Bogota. Interestingly, Amazon gives me the option to set different prices for my book in different markets - and, fascinatingly (well, to me at least) will change the displayed price I see where there are disparities in my pricing. For instance, Olives costs marginally less in the US than it does in the UK (blame the UK government's insane insistence on charging VAT on ebooks) but when I, as a UK customer, visit Amazon.com, the site displays a dollar equivalent of the UK price rather than the dollar price I set for the book in the US market.

Amazon's getting quite good at supporting this type of price fixing - you just need to look at how the Kindle costs $79 in the US and $133 in the UK. They say Amazon is subsidising the cost of Kindles in the US, but to me it looks more like the rest of the world is subsidising them.

So when a 'traditional' publisher creates an ebook and puts it up for sale on Amazon.com, two things happen. The first is the author only gets 20-25% of the price, even though Amazon pays a 70% royalty on Kindle books and there is virtually no cost of print and distribution (about 60% of the cost of a booky book goes on these two). The second is the traditional publisher applies the traditional idea of rights and won't put the book up for sale globally.

Which is insane. The very thing that makes the Internet tick as a platform for e-books is its scale. I can reach readers all over the world with a few clicks, I can sell my book to audiences based on their interests, not their location. The whole idea of the long tail, the concept that makes Amazon possible, is based on scale. Why would a publisher restrict sales of an e-book to a limited home market when it could reach all of humanity for not one penny more?*

The answer is rights - and the publisher's hope that one day it could sell rights to other world markets. And in order to keep that potential asset, the publisher will restrict the market an author can address whilst basing its decisions on arbitrary assessments of what a market will or won't buy based on little more than 'experience' and 'knowledge' rather than trusting us all as consumers and just letting us decide whether or not we want to buy a book about rubber planters in Malaya, geishas in Japan or bullfighters in Spain.

* I'm not factoring in translation, I know. But the opportunity is the same - an Italian book, say, can now be available to everyone in the world who speaks Italian.

Olives Book Pricing Thinks

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How do you put a price on a book these days? Many authors are selling Kindle books for $0.99, many others $2.99 but mainstream publishers are putting prices at $5.99 and more - all of Iain Banks' books will cost you $8.02, for instance, while Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche will set you back a cool $16.05 - his backlist is set at $8.02.


Amazon pays publishers/authors either a 35% or a 70% share on sales. The 70% share only applies to books priced between $0.99 and $9.99. So the mad thing is that while you pay double for Deaver's Carte Blanche compared to his back list, the publisher only gets the same as selling it for $8.02. Go figure.


So how do I price Olives the novel wot I have writ? I decided on $5.99 for the e-book, equivalent to £3.99, which is the UK price (and €3.99 for Europe). I actually make less from a US sale than a UK or European one because of the withholding tax. How did I decide on that price? Purely on an average price of novels I scanned that were from published authors. I can't really say that I'm in this for the money, although it'll be nice to break even. But I'm not selling my work for less than the cost of a couple of pints or a t-shirt. It's worth more than that. And this is really where my pricing strategy is at.


Other writers have proper strategies. Poster child for Kindle success Amanda Hocking, for instance, sells each book in her trilogies for different prices with a low entry level, typically $0.99 rising to $2.99. Interestingly, now she's signed to a publisher, her new books seem to be priced at $8.99 - I've seen no sign of any great outcry about that yet, but would expect one to come!



Finding out book prices in the Yankee Dollar isn't as easy as it first appears, BTW. Amazon works out you're an Amazon UK customer and 'games' the dollar prices to make them equivalent to the Sterling prices - super sneaky, huh? This must at least in part be due to the appalling disparity in Kindle prices - the entry level Kindle in the USA costs $79, while in the UK it's an unjustifiable £89 ($133!!!).


The same is true of the international print edition of Olives- the amazon.com price for the printed book is $15.99, which is about equivalent to average book prices for this type of work as far as I can tell. With the Amazon edition of Olives the booky book, I make varying amounts of money from each copy sold depending on the platform its sold across. And again, I lose 30% to Uncle Sam. This is painful to me as a resident of the gloriously Tax Free UAE even though, as I say (and will keep saying until everyone believes me), it's not about the wonga.


The Middle East Olives book price is based on the Amazon price and again is based on an average price on the back of books, with slight reductions for Jordan and Lebanon based on anecdotal evidence of street prices for books there (I asked pals on Twitter, in other words).


And that's it. The whole brilliant Olives the book pricing strategy laid bare.

So You've Written A Book. What's It About?

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The first question anyone asks you when they find out you've written a book is 'What's it about?'. This is a natural byproduct of human curiosity, but comes with a built-in conundrum. You have about fifteen seconds before their eyes glaze over and they suddenly remember they had to be somewhere else like really fast.

How do you sum up your 80,000 words of lovingly crafted prose in a few seconds? You can't just read them the blurb (you could maybe have it printed onto index cards to give to people. Hmmm, that might be an idea), but you need to find a way of getting the scheme across to them because if writing books does nothing else, it transforms us from thieves into salesmen.

Thieves? Yes, everyone wot writes books steals moments, traits, expressions and gestures from the people around them. The biggest act of thievery in Olives, for instance, is Northern Irish spy Gerald Lynch. He's got a hangup about being called 'Gerry', it's always Gerald. He's spent twenty years escaping from being Gerry Lynch. That, for instance, was stolen. Someone said it to me in a meeting and I couldn't wait to get away and make that phrase into a new character. Believe it or not, the spy in Olives used to be a fiftyish, gingery fellow called Nigel Soames. Gerald Lynch, born of a theft, replaced him that very evening and has gone on to be the central character in my two subsequent books.

Salesman because all I want to do is sell you my book now. When you ask me what it's about, I'm going to take the chance to tell you enough to make you want to pick it up when you see it in the bookshop, beguiled by Naeema Zarif's stunning cover art, and take it to the cash counter. I want you to click on the book cover on the right, go to the the Kindle store and send the data flying over Whispernet to populate your reader.And I want you to be curious enough to click the 'Olives - A Violent Romance' link on my blog and find out more about it so you can be ready to buy it when it comes out in December. At least you know what's deep in my black little heart now, the next time we meet. And don't think it stops there, by the way. I want to talk you into reviewing it on Amazon and GoodReads too. I've become quite shameless.

And, as you ask, Olives is about a young British journalist called Paul Stokes who goes to Jordan to live and work who becomes attracted to a Jordanian girl. He's blackmailed into spying on her family by British intelligence, who claim the family's involved in funding terrorism and he has to try to work out quite who the good guys and bad guys are as a series of massive bombings go off around him that seem somehow tied to his movements. With each decision he makes, things just get worse until he finds he has to betray everyone around him to survive.

Taking The Self Publishing Plunge

It's been a long road. I first set out to write a full-length novel in 2002 odd, the result being the highly amusing but - in my opinion - unpublishable novel Space. This was to be the start of a very nasty writing habit indeed - I had decided, for reasons I have mostly forgotten, that I wanted in print and that was to that. I'd keep slamming into the brick wall until I got what I wanted.

It doesn't quite work like that, of course.

Space was undoubtedly funny, but agents kept saying things like 'We don't get humour' and 'Humour is a hard sell', whilst universally acknowledging they found it highly amusing. Which is, you have to admit, funny. So I set out to write a serious book and that became Olives, my first 'real' book. Olives is about being a foreigner, a tourist who becomes embroiled in the events we all see on the TV when we're sitting down comfortably. It's about love and betrayal and it's set in Jordan, a Jordan where the good guys and bad guys are really hard to tell apart and where the next lie is just around the corner.

Olives is a book very close to my heart indeed. I followed it by writing Beirut, a testosterone-soaked spy thriller with thousands of sizzling gypsies, which landed me an agent (after something like 250 rejections) and a chance to get my work slid under 24 of London's most editorially respected eyeballs at the London Book Fair this year. They all came back with variations on 'no' - a process that took an incredible, destructive seven months to wrap up. No the British reader doesn't understand the Middle East, no we don't feel this will sell in supermarkets, no it'll take investment to break, no it's not quite for us, no we don't do war zones (Jad, get that certificate ready!) and so on.

All of this has been happening as the world of publishing is being not only transformed, but torn apart by the Internet. The Kindle alone has driven a stake right into the heart of 'traditional' publishing and I have long resisted the blandishments of friends like revolutionary barricade-manning author Dan Holloway even as I watched authors turning to new formats to find their audiences as traditional publishing invested minimally in supermarket-friendly romcom slapped out in trays of 3 for 2 deals. I held out. I wanted the validation and scale traditional publishing could give me.

Except as I have travelled further down this road, I have come to realise not only do I not need either of those from traditional publishing - they're not on offer in any case. On the validation front, getting an agent to sign me up was validation enough - but it goes further than that. Today, self publishing isn't vanity publishing, it's not the exclusive preserve of unreadable memoirs and books by nutters (although, let us be clear, there are plenty of those out there). It's not only part of the mainstream, it's driving millions of sales. There has never been so much choice for consumers, so much so it's actually a challenge to work out what's good, bad or ugly out there. Validation comes not from being picked by the gatekeeper (let us not forget, over 98% of books in print sell less than 500 copies) but from selling books to people who like them. If I'm truthful with myself, I don't need a publisher to do that any more. I can do it, as Celine Dion tells us (repeatedly and to my invariable irritation) all by myself.

As for scale, I now know enough published authors who have found they are forced to market themselves because their publishers are putting them on the backburner, who have trudged weary miles to earn back their paltry advances and who are bitter, dejected and generally pissed off with the whole demeaning and disempowering experience that publishing in the Age of Fear has become. I know authors who have been completely disassociated from their work, who have given up any ownership of the look and feel of their hard graft only to find the result, crass and unimaginative, has been shunned by the book sales team because there's something sexier in that month's basket. And the book sales team is what puts you on shelves, not editors.

And, actually, when it comes down to it, I want my cover to be designed by Naeema Zarif. I don't want to give that up. And I want that 'difficult' scene left in. And I want to let my work speak for people, not pander to their vanities.

So Olives is finally (seven years after it was first written) going to be a tale that gets told, not a manuscript locked in a dusty filing cabinet. Whoever buys it, however many people read it, it'll at least get the public airing traditional publishing denied it. And if just two people read it, that's two more than would have read it otherwise.

I'll be documenting the road to self publishing as we limber up to the launch of the book, just because it's been quite fun to self publish in the UAE. Olives, a violent romance, launches at the Sharjah International Book Fair on the 20th November 2011 with an evening event at the Fair. More on that later. For now, I'm busy working to try and get multiple editions ready for multiple platforms, including a 'booky book' print edition for the Middle East which has been made necessary by the fact Amazon et al won't sell us content online. That alone has been a story worth dining out on, I can tell you.

Oddly, this has all meant that I have once again become a publisher, having joyfully escaped the world of publishing some fifteen years ago...