Category Archives: negotiation

November 14, 2014   Jessica   Amazon, authors, negotiation, subtitles  
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Amazon, Hachette and Happy Friday

First, the headline news from the industry that seldom makes them is that the long and acrimonious struggle between Amazon and Hachette is at an end. I feel certain that the piped in white noise in the new Hachette open plan offices  cannot drown out the collective sigh of relief.  The standoff has been hardest of all for Hachette authors, whose book sales were collateral damage in the negotiation.  The exact terms of the agreement have not been released, so it’s difficult to judge whether one party or the other prevailed, or if this is, as the press release declared “good news for authors” in the long run, but it’s good to be firing on all cylinders as we head into the holiday book-buying season.

On another happy note, I read this story in Publishing Perspectives   and it made me laugh aloud. That business books (and plenty of other nonfiction as well) have long-winded subtitles is a convention of the genre, one that I rarely question.  The idea is to be both specific and alluring; to define, entice and occasionally make outsize claims—this book will change your life, change the world, reorder the stars, etc.  But this article gives novels subtitles, and thus we have  Atonement: How Making up Stories Can Make Amends for Past Wrongs and Be a Force for Healing by Ian McEwan and Gone Girl: Why Your Marriage is Not What It Seems – And What You Can do About it by Gillian Flynn.

Care to subtitle your favorite novel?

March 15, 2010   DG&B   about us, advice, contracts, Jane, negotiation, publishers, selling  
4

What does negotiating look like?

by Jane

During Slush Week this question came up and I wanted to provide a brief description of how a publishing negotiation generally works. Undoubtedly, this will raise other questions which I would be happy to address.

When a publisher makes an offer, he or she does it either on the phone or by e-mail. I prefer the latter initially so that I can see all of the terms of the offer spelled out: advance, payout, royalties (including electronic royalties now), territory covered, rights splits and any special terms.

Once I have all offers in from publishers (hopefully there will be more than one), I take them to my client, explain what they are and which I think is best and why. We come to a decision on which publisher(s) to continue to negotiate with and I then go back to the publisher(s) by phone or by e-mail and ask for changes or additional terms. Often I will ask for a different, higher advance, a more favorable payout, different royalty splits, things like that. Sometimes I suggest that different rights be in play.

Most often, we come to an agreement in a very short time–usually a matter of a day, but sometimes, depending on what the project is, these do go on over a longer period.

If we arrive at a stalemate–that is, a point that we and our client will not accept and the publisher won’t budge on–we make that very clear. We call this a “deal breaker” and if we say something is a deal breaker we have to mean it. (Between you and me, most of the time these things can be worked out before we get to that point.)

Once this basic negotiation is completed, a deal memo is done–we send one to the publisher and often they send one back just to make sure we are all on the same page in terms of the basic terms of the deal.

We then go on to the contract where additional negotiation is done on boilerplate terms.

Negotiating a deal is one of my favorite parts of agenting; the process encourages creativity on all sides and often breaks new ground.