Graham Swift Quotes

The e-book does seem at the moment to threaten the livelihood of writers, because the way in which writers are paid for their work in the form of e-books is very much up in the air.

I doubt I'll ever have another traditional print deal.

Authors need to decide if they want to keep forever to themselves, or share forever with a publisher who takes over half the cover price.

We are forced by the major publishers to include electronic rights in the contracts we make with publishers for new books. And there's very little we can do about that.

The moment somebody is making money off the recipes, that's when you'll see digital rights management around it.

I'm very intrigued by e-books, the topic du jour in the industry today. As a number one bestselling Kindle author, I love the way e-books make an author's backlist accessible to new readers. Of course, price point remains a source of concern. Personally, I don't have any of the answers, but I'm intrigued by the questions.

Authors will make far more on those ebooks through direct sales than publishers are offering. There is no incentive for authors to sell those rights to traditional publishers which means, in the fairly short term, publishers run out of material to sell.

Sure, the labels and publishers get the rights for songs to be remade into a ringtone. So part of what we do is to work with those content owners to make sure that there are rights in place for every piece of content to be made into a ringtone.

People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don't have to keep using them.

I oppose piracy and want to see intellectual property protected because that is what fosters and rewards innovation. But SOPA won't accomplish a meaningful reduction in piracy and causes massive collateral damage to the Internet ecosystem.

I love giving people advice on what to do with their books, but I don't really know how a Kindle Single gets covered.

The best way to really make the VPN issue a completely nonissue is through global licensing that we are continuing to pursue with our partners.

Prior to 2009, when publishers scoffed at the ebook market, they offered writers contracts which gave us half of the money they made off ebook sales.

I don't sign contracts for my books.

I know dozens of authors who have had a lot of books published by New York, and they won't ever take another Big 6 contract since they've gotten a taste of the freedom, control, and money self-publishing offers.

Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.

Unfortunately for me, most of the books I'd want to reprint were written for savvy publishers like Harlequin and Berkley who have held on to electronic rights. But I do have another option: Publish new e-books myself.

Somebody will be able to crack ebook files in the same way that people cracked music files a decade ago. An author could have worked for three years on his book, have someone buy it for their Kindle for £6.99 and then see it shared with everyone in the world for free.

Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don't own.

Think about when you listen to a song on the radio. You are not paying for it; it's not illegal to do it, because the rights have been paid for on top, beforehand, by the radio station, by the network. We have to find exactly the same kind of system with the Internet.

If we don't give the authors of music, film, literature, and journalism a way to control the distribution of their goods, the quality of all of these creative efforts will decline.

Don't sell your publishing.

I don't know what will happen to the physical book and what it will mean for authors. I worry whether it will mean people can still make their careers this way. Will whatever comes next allow people to be able to own their ideas and be able to take time to develop them?

I know there's a lot of talk about self-publishing right now. Everyone's giddy with the possibilities. And I'll admit that it looks good on paper: sell your books directly and keep a bigger chunk of the profit for yourself. No rejection letters. No hassle with agents. Sounds good, right?

I recognise that the whole issue of downloading and intellectual property rights is not an easy one, but on the whole, I'm a fan of downloading, both legal and illegal, and the open-source ethos that it harbours for the future is a good one.