Anyone who was trying to break into publishing before the ebook revolution should be familiar with Yog’s law, which states:
Money should always flow toward the writer.
The purpose of the law was to keep new writers from falling into one of the many writing scams. Places that charged writers to publish were almost all vanity presses, and those that weren’t didn’t give writers access to the distribution channels necessary to make their work widely available. If you wanted to have a career, you had to go with a publisher, and the best way to tell if a publisher was legitimate was to look at how the money flowed.
Nowadays, with self-publishing, the line between writer and publisher has been blurred. An indie writer can expect to contract out work, sometimes to the tune of several hundred or even thousand dollars, in order to produce a professional product. In these cases, money clearly is not flowing to the writer. So what does this mean for Yog’s Law?
Some people have attempted to reformulate Yog’s law by drawing a distinction between the writing side of the business and the publishing side. While I think that that’s instructive, I’m not convinced it’s entirely useful. The distinction is not always clear, and even where it is, in practical terms it’s basically meaningless. You can just as easily fall for a publishing scam with your publisher hat on as with your writer hat.
So is Yog’s Law obsolete? Is it a curious relic of a publishing era that is passing into the twilight of history? In its old formulation, perhaps, but I would like to propose a new formulation that is perhaps even more relevant to today’s publishing industry than the old one ever was. That formulation is as follows:
Control should always flow toward the writer.
In the old days of publishing, writers had virtually no control over their careers. Publishers decided which books would make it to readers, which writers would get the attention of the publishing establishment, and how many books those writers could publish in a year. Authors had almost no say in their cover art, marketing, or any other aspect of the production and distribution of their work. In such an environment, the only assurance they had that their publisher would do a reasonably competent job was by seeing whether they put their money where their mouth was–hence Yog’s Law.
But today, writers do have control. We have a variety of publishing options today, and money isn’t the only factor in determining whether a path is legitimate. In fact, it may be one of the worst factors. Not only have advances gotten worse in the last few years, but the rights grabs have gotten so bad that signing a traditional book deal today basically amounts to selling your birthright for a mess of pottage. Yes, money is flowing to the writer, but the writer is still getting screwed.
Control means being able to have the final say on the cover art, the editing, or on an other aspect of a book’s production. It means that important stuff like the metadata or book description is not left to an entry-level employee that the author has never met.
Control means that no contract should be one-sided. It means an end to non-compete clauses of any kind. It means that rights reversions should actually have meaning, and that no book should be tied up for the life of copyright.
Control means that the bulk of the revenue should go to the person who does the bulk of the work. Bringing a book to market is not a challenge in the digital age, but writing a book certainly is. Publishers exist to serve writers, not the other way around.
Control means that a writer should know exactly what services they are paying for. If they commission work from a freelance editor or cover designer, they should be the one who directs that work, not a third-party who doesn’t also assume some of the risk if the project doesn’t work out.
By the standard of control flowing to the writer, most of the contracts coming out of New York fail miserably. That is not acceptable in an age where the New York publishers aren’t the only game in town. If a writer can make a living by going it on their own, then anyone who pays less than a living wage is basically running a scam.
Control should always flow toward the writer. Money used to serve as a proxy for control, but now that we have the real thing it’s no longer the best measure. Control, not money, is what you need to build a career.
