Exclusive rights to do restricted act
Authors wish their works to be distributed or sold. As authors, they are the owners of the copyrights in their works. They have the exclusive right to do the following acts:
to copy the work;
to issue copies of the work to the public;
to rent copies of the work to the public;
to make available copies of the work to the public;
to perform, show or play the work in public;
to broadcast the work or include it in a cable programme service;
to make an adaptation of the work or do any of the above in relation to an adaptation.
Traditional publishing industry
Many of the authors have no expertise in those acts and other related activities. They choose and commission agents to look for and deal with publishers. They also sign agreements with publishing companies to publish and distribute their works.
By the agreements, authors forgo all copyrights. The copyrights then belong to the publishing companies. The authors do not decide when, where and how many copies to print and to sell.
Some people described the industry as traditional publishing industry. Authors concentrate on writing. The rest are left to the agents and the traditional publishers.
Traditional publishers set a threshold, X copies, for first sale of copies of the copyright works. They will pay the authors a royalty, when the number of copies sold, Y, exceeds X. The royalty is a percentage of the net sales revenues on Y minus X. The revenues from selling the first to the Xth copy are used to offset partially the costs for certain services provided by the traditional publishers. The services are:
editing and proof reading the manuscripts;
designing the page layout and book cover;
formatting the manuscripts;
assigning ISBN numbers to the book;
printing;
storage;
deciding the selling price;
marketing;
distribution; and
retailing.
Some well known traditional publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States are Bloomsbury, Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster (in alphabetical order).
Self-publishing industry
The publishing industry is changing by disruptive technologies. Authors have another option: self-publish e-books or print on-demand books. They retain their exclusive rights. Authors make decisions in relation to designing, formatting, revisions and marketing. They choose a platform to print and distribute their work. Some people called such industry, self-publishing industry. New companies are set up to provide such platforms. Traditional publishers change their business models. They are called self-publishing companies.
Examples of platforms that provide print on-demand service and distribution are:
Examples of platforms that provide creation of e-books and distribution are:
Self-publishing is expensive and time consuming. Authors have to do all the work previously done by traditional publishers, unless they pay others or the platform to do it for them. The royalties from self-publishing companies are higher than those from traditional publishers.
Epilogue
Professor Robert Ghrist teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches at the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Electrical/Systems Engineering. He had been experimenting with self-publishing for several years. He self-published a 276-page textbook entitled “Elementary Applied Topology”. The book is freely available on his webpage. The book is also sold via Amazon using Amazon’s Creatspace for print-on-demand.
On his university webpage “Why I Self-publlish my Mathematics Texts with Amazon”, he listed out pros and cons. He described the reasons, processes and outcomes.
References
Robert Ghrist. “Why I Self-publlish my Mathematics Texts with Amazon”.
Leah Schultz. Navigating the Minefield of Self-publishing E-textbooks. Information Systems Education Journal, (2017) 15(5):15 – 21.
Stuart Vyse. Publishing Outside the Box: Popular Press Books. Behaviour Analyst, (2014) 37:69–72.