Night Shade Books in Trouble
This is amazing to me. Night Shade has been one of the models of small publisher success. I saw a few panels at WorldCon that featured their authors or owners. They’ve been the toast of the town. Now, they’re in deep trouble and in need of bailing out.
iO9 did an amazing write-up of the situation. The only thing I don’t get is the deal made about their royalty structure. The 8/10/12 of retail is fairly standard, unless the escalators were set quite low. That is, where a major publisher might have the 12% rate kick in at hundreds of thousands of books, maybe they set it to thousands, but I seriously doubt that.
The e-book royalties sound slightly more generous, but not extravagant. So why are they going under? Are all publishers this tenuous? It might explain why the terms for authors haven’t improved much; there might not be any room to improve them! Which means very-not-good-news for trad. authors and publishers going forward, because they’ll have to compete with the 70% of retail rates that self-pubbed authors enjoy.
My heart goes out to the authors and staff of Night Shade. Good people. Let’s hope this is resolved in the best manner possible.
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Unfortunately, it sounds like they were very good at their job - finding and publishing great new authors - and very bad at their business. Those two things come in conflict more often than you'd think.
So, FWIW, I've owned my houses and cars because I was practical enough to accumulate cash first. Even now, I see large Corps. fail because they can't borrow enough or thy can't repay their obligations. But they have fancy offices and highly paid CEOs and top heavy management.
Just look at how YOU (Hugh) succeeded. From the bottom up.