Women On The Rise Among The World's Top-Earning Authors by Jeff Bercovici, Forbes Staff

Business 8/09/2012

Watch your back, James Patterson. Sleep with one eye open, Stephen King.

James Patterson: $94 million

Unlike many of the authors on this list, Patterson earns nearly all his money from his gargantuan book sales and relatively little from TV and film royalties. He published 14 new titles in 2011.

see photosDavid Levenson/Getty Images

Click for full photo gallery: The World's Top-Earning Authors

Men still top the list of the world’s highest-earning authors, but this year it’s the women on the list who’ve been making the boldest moves, led by a trio of genre phenoms: Suzanne Collins, E.L. James and J.K. Rowling.

With $20 million in earnings, almost all of it from sales of her “Hunger Games” books, Collins didn’t quite make the most recent edition of the FORBES Celebrity 100. But that was only because she had yet to see her full portion of the proceeds from the first “Hunger Games” film.

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Starring Jennifer Lawrence, the Lionsgate picture enjoyed the third-biggest opening weekend ever. To date, it has taken in more than $650 million worldwide.

Collins’s cut of that is believed to be upward of $5 million, not including the $1.5 million she was paid for the rights. That will rise still further with sales of the DVD, released this month. And the gusher is just getting going: The theatrical version of “Catching Fire,” the first of two sequels, is set for release in 2013.

The “Hunger Games” books sold more than 9 million copies in 2011, and sales got a fresh boost this year from the film’s release, but they’re not the trilogy of the year. That honor goes to the “Fifty Shades of Grey” series, which sold 20 million copies in their first four months in wide release.

At the height of “Fifty Shades” mania, the erotic novels were estimated to be generating as much as $1.3 million per week for their author, E.L. James. And that’s not counting the $5 million she received from Universal Pictures and Focus Films for the theatrical rights. Add it all up and James is assured of a place near the top of next year’s top authors list.

(Perhaps “Twilight” author Stephenie Meyer deserves a cut of that? James’s books originated as works of “Twilight” fan fiction.)

Genre fiction and young adult are clearly where the money’s at. But one author who’s conquered those realms as thoroughly as they can be conquered is moving upstream, toward the more challenging waters of adult literary fiction. That would be J.K. Rowling, author of the “Harry Potter” series and the first woman author to become a billionaire.

In September, Little, Brown will publish “The Casual Vacancy,” Rowling’s first novel for adults. The reported $8 million advance Rowling received for the book was enough to vault her back onto the Celebrity 100, with $17 million in estimated earnings.

It also helped that she found a new way to monetize the “Potter” books, selling digital copies via a proprietary online bookstore, Pottermore. Unlike most authors, Rowling never signed over the digital rights to her books. Her timing in launching Pottermore was excellent, with ebook sales surpassing hardcover sales for the first time in 2012. Pottermore sold more than $4 million worth of books in its first month of operation.

Most of the names on this year’s top authors list are familiar ones, from Patterson on down. The thriller maestro, whose young-adult fantasy and sci-fi franchises also do brisk business, took in an astonishing $94 million this year. There’s Stephen King ($39 million), Janet Evanovich ($33 million), John Grisham ($26 million), Jeff Kinney ($25 million), Nora Roberts ($23 million) and Danielle Steel ($23 million).

One newcomer is George R.R. Martin. HBO’s critically adored (and much-pirated) adaptation of his “Game of Thrones” series has turned on a mainstream audience to a fantasy universe that nerds have been raving about for years. Martin sold more than 8 million copies of his “Game of Thrones” books in 2011, including the newest, “A Dance With Dragons,” which sold 750,000 copies in hardcover.

To generate our earnings estimates, we talk to authors, agents, publishers and other experts and review data including Nielsen BookScan sales figures.

Jeff Bercovici, Forbes Staff: I cover media, technology and the intersection of the two.

Full list: The World’s Top-Earning Authors

A New Form of DRM: A Legal and Pragmatic Solution for Protection of E-Books

Categories: Expert Publishing Blog | Tags: DRM
July 12, 2012 | Dana Robinson | 19

For those in publishing, the current big issue in digital rights managements is pretty simple: How can we protect our ebooks with effective DRM while freeing them from being trapped in the closed ecosystems of specific reading devices?

The first obvious question is, would publishers see major losses due to copying and distributing of ebooks that do not have DRM?

Many would argue no. First, DRM is easily cracked. Anyone bent on making a copy and sending it to a third-party will do so regardless of DRM. Second, Apple has demonstrated that publishers don’t need DRM. When iTunes first launched, all files contained DRM. Sometime in the past few years Apple quietly dropped DRM. Rather than diminishing, the market for music through legitimate channels continues to climb.

Thus, there is a good argument that the ebook publishing world can go “non-DRM” without suffering any major losses. Pottormore is famously doing so. In January of this year, Anobii CEO Matteo Berlucchi gave a speech at Digital Book World suggesting that major book publishers should abandon the use DRM.

On the other hand, publishers have a legitimate concern for how they might protect works from copying en masse by counterfeiters or distribution through resale, rental or other aftermarkets. In order to protect their works in this class of infringement, publishers will need to rely on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). In order to rely on the DMCA, the publisher must have either technology that is circumvented or copyright management information that is removed. And therein lies my solution.

A Legal Solution

What ebook publishers really want to prevent is large-scale file sharing. This is not stopped by DRM. In fact, DRM is futile against large scale file sharing. So, ebook publishers should look for enforcement mechanisms against the intermediaries of large scale file sharing.

There are legal mechanisms for permitting enforcement against used ebook stores, as well as other forms of sharing, renting and reselling of ebooks. The solution that I propose is to use a combination of the existing DMCA rules in order to give a level of protection that is minimally necessary to enforce against used ebook stores, resellers and rental markets.

Publishers need not be afraid of stepping outside of book reader software and devices. In fact, the insistence on heavy DRM by publishers has unwittingly given Amazon power over the ebook market that publishers now regret. Customized DRM on Kindle devices creates a closed system that locks readers in to one retailer, which is potentially far more dangerous to the ebook publishing industry than the threat of piracy, in my opinion. We can free ebooks from DRM software and corresponding hardware and use existing legal mechanisms for enforcement against the worst copyright breakers.

The solution proposed is to create ebooks (in ePub or even PDF) with a watermark randomly placed throughout the book (visible and invisible). The watermark would contain the personal information of the customer who purchased the ebook and a warning not to resell, or distribute the book in any way. The user who purchases such a book will agree to terms and conditions (i.e. a “clickwrap”) that prohibit copying and distribution, as well as a statement that the consumer’s personal information will be prominently displayed on the book as a deterrent from distributing or copying in violation of the agreement.

The point of making a watermark that shows the user’s personal information is to create a disincentive for the user to pass the book along to unknown third parties, deputizing the user to act as a gatekeeper, protecting the book from wrongful distribution. If a file-sharing service or ebook reseller removed the watermark, it could be a violation of the DMCA Section 1201.

The watermark of the personal information could also have the publisher’s serial number embedded. Doing this creates an additional remedy under the DMCA Section 1202, which prohibits the removal of “publisher information” such as serial numbers. (Hat-tip to Cory Verner, who came up with this part of the mechanism. Verner is president of eChristian, Inc., an Escondido, Calif.-based Christian audio-book retailer. He has filed a patent application for the idea.)

The DMCA provides a variety of protections for digital works, such as Section 1201, which prohibits the “circumvention” of “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” The DMCA also prohibits the removal of copyright management information (“CMI”) under Section 1202, which includes the work’s title, author, and the copyright owner, as well as certain other “publisher information.”

What makes this “DRM” unique is that the removal of the watermark would likely violate the DMCA’s prohibition on circumventing a technological measure as well as the removal of “publisher information.” While the case law is not clear that this would be considered a circumvention, I present a novel rationale for applying Section 1201 of the DMCA to removal of a watermark.

In previous cases, technologies that are “passive” are generally not considered to “prevent access” under Section 1201. However, I believe that making the user an active participant in the protection of the book, the technology does not operate as a “pass through” the way a username and password would. But, the technology deputizes the user as the means of preventing access to the work by unauthorized third-parties.

This solution will not prevent a user from sharing a book with the user’s family or close friends. But publishers probably don’t want to sue their customers for sharing ebooks with their aunt or sister. Traditional printed books are often shared with family and friends. What ebook publishers need is a way to distribute ebooks with as little hassle as possible, while ensuring that the publisher can sue pirates and stop ebook resale, rental and large scale sharing.

To accomplish this, we don’t need heavy DRM, but something lighter. Why not use a form of DRM that lets the market grow, and reap the rewards of the next technological revolution as the ebook wave brings a massive new volume of sales and sweeps printed books to the side?

Thus, I propose using personal information as a deterrent against wrongful distribution of the book. We can deputize our customers to prevent wrongful distribution. The customer agrees not to distribute the book. If they do, the next reader will see the personal information of the original owner placed throughout the book, both visibly and invisibly. As such, not many users will violate their agreement because they will not want to have their personal information shared with unknown third-parties. Further, if they strip the information, they’re in clear violation of the DMCA.

Readers might “share” book with family and friends who already have their personal information; but they would have been free to do that with a non-digital book in the printed book business. The watermark is likely to confine file sharing to the close family; those with whom the original purchaser has a personal relationship, which is the very type of person with whom paper books are typically shared.

These are the abridged version of my conclusions. I will be publishing a much longer, more detailed piece on the topic titled Digital Rights Management Lite: Freeing ebooks from Reader Devices and Software. Can Digital Visible Watermarks in ebooks Qualify for Anti-circumvention Protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? (Virginia Journal of Law & Technology, volume 17, Issue 2 (Summer 2012, forthcoming).

About Dana Robinson

Dana Robinson is a partner with Techlaw LLP, an intellectual property law firm in San Diego, where he handles copyright, trademark and new media. He is adjunct professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law.

View all posts by Dana Robinson →

Legal Battles Over E-Book Rights to Older Books

By MOTOKO RICH

Published: December 12, 2009

William Styron may have been one of the leading literary lions of recent decades, but his books are not selling much these days. Now his family has a plan to lure digital-age readers with e-book versions of titles like “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Mr. Styron’s memoir of depression, “Darkness Visible.”

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William Styron in 1983.

Related

The Letter From Mr. Dohle (pdf)

But the question of exactly who owns the electronic rights to such older titles is in dispute, making it a rising source of conflict in one of the publishing industry’s last remaining areas of growth.

Mr. Styron’s family believes it retains the rights, since the books were first published before e-books existed. Random House, Mr. Styron’s longtime publisher, says it owns those rights, and it is determined to secure its place — and continuing profits — in the Kindle era.

The discussions about the digital fate of Mr. Styron’s work are similar to the negotiations playing out across the book industry as publishers hustle to capture the rights to release e-book versions of so-called backlist books. Indeed, the same new e-book venture Mr. Styron’s family hopes to use has run into similar resistance from the print publisher of “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller.

On Friday, Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, sent a letter to dozens of literary agents, writing that the company’s older agreements gave it “the exclusive right to publish in electronic book publishing formats.”

Backlist titles, which continue to be reprinted long after their initial release, are crucial to publishing houses because of their promise of lucrative revenue year after year. But authors and agents are particularly concerned that traditional publishers are not offering sufficient royalties on e-book editions, which they point out are cheaper for publishers to produce. Some are considering taking their digital rights elsewhere, which could deal a financial blow to the hobbled publishing industry.

The tussle over who owns the electronic rights — and how much the authors should earn in digital royalties — potentially puts into play works by authors like Ralph Ellison and John Updike.

Some publishers have already made agreements with authors or their estates to release digital editions. All of Ernest Hemingway’s books, for example, are available in electronic versions from his print publisher, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster.

But with only a small fraction of the thousands of books in print available in e-book form, there are many titles to be fought over.

“This is a wide open frontier.....[more at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/business/media/13ebooks.html#]

A version of this article appeared in print on December 13, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.
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And people ask why I publish my own works. Yes, it's work and like a voice crying in the wilderness all alone; but, it's my voice. And autonomy and independence and knowing my titles aren't ignored or pulled out of rotation for no apparent reason except boredom in waiting for the BIG NUMBERS by "my publisher" for a huge, star customer other than myself--I'm my own star!--is worth the sleep at night.--Neale Sourna