The success (and failure) of The Shack
I thought that today I would write about The Shack. (Do we need a link for that? You've probably heard of it already; it's only the best-selling new Christian book in decades, selling 12 million copies so far, and one of the fastest-selling books of the 2000s, Christian or not.) But then something interesting happened...
The Shack is an excellent example of how mainstream book production models can mess up: when you need to be sure you're going to sell in the tens of thousands, you have to commission "safe" books. You want work that is going to be easy for people to read, and that is written by authors that people have heard of - speaking circuit Christians.
William Paul Young's book was neither of those: although a lot of the elements (strong emphasis on the Trinity, feminist images of God, and so on) are pretty standard fare for anyone who's been through seminary, it's not exactly what you'll hear in the majority of Evangelical churches. And who was William Paul Young before The Shack? Who had heard of him?
Publishing material like that is a risk, however good it is, and that means that edgy, unusual stuff from an unknown author can so easily slip through the net.
At Wide Margin, we're designed for risk. Our whole business model is set up to allow us to commission good material and good ideas, not just "safe" material from well-known authors.
But then this morning I heard that the success of The Shack has brought with it serious legal difficulties - with the publishers and the author disagreeing about who owns the rights and what percentage of the royalties each should get.
Steve Laube has a great analysis of the problem from an author agent's point of view, although being an author agent, his recommended solution is that every author gets their own agent. But I think that while that's not bad advice, it's a solution to the wrong problem. The problem, as Steve clearly points out, is that the contract between author and publisher was not well-defined and well-understood at the start of publication. I don't think we can blame either the author or the publisher for this - they were making it up as they went along, and none of them could really have imagined what a sensation The Shack would become.
This is why we provide all of our authors with a simple, fair and well-defined contract. It's based roughly on the O'Reilly model contract, but with a few changes to make it more favorable to the author: our terms are non-exclusive and the author retains copyright, so if the author gets a big break they can take their book with them; we pay royalties based on the net receipts of a book, rather than profits; (that's actually easier for us to calculate too!) and being print-on-demand publishers means that we don't need to take returns, which means we don't saddle authors with a big reserve on their royalties.
(That last point is a little technical, but it means something like this: booksellers like Amazon and Powells have traditionally had a really darned good deal from publishers. They demand a hefty discount of the cover price, and, inexplicably, they demand to buy books sale-or-return - anything they can't sell goes back to the publisher for a refund. So publishers have to be a bit provisional when they make royalties payments, because the books that they sell to booksellers might end up coming back to them after a while! With print-on-demand technologies, this isn't necessary, because the booksellers don't hold stock and neither do we. If someone on Amazon orders ten books, we get ten books printed and send them out. If someone orders one book, we get one book printed and send it out. So every book we sell to a bookseller is produced as a result of a firm sale to a customer, and that means we can pay a royalty on every single book sold.)
So The Shack teaches us a lot. Yes, it teaches us the sad side of the business - that unless the legalities of publishing are firmly nailed down, then people with the best intentions can end up getting into trouble - but it also teaches us some wonderful things: that there are unknown authors out there with great ideas that the world needs to hear.
If you think you might be one of them, then why not get in touch?
