Knowing how many books an author has sold is essential to know how a book is doing, of course, but sometimes the access of the authors –writers, translators or illustrators– to the figures is not easy. They depend on the information supplied to them by the publisher. Knowing the data directly was –and is– a historical claim of writers and illustrators. To try to remedy this, the Spanish Confederation of Booksellers Guilds and Associations (Cegal) has signed agreements with the Collegiate Association of Writers (ACE) and with the Federation of Associations of Professional Illustrators of Spain (Fadip) so that authors can have the sales figures through your LibriRed tool.
The only way for the authors to know the books sold was the annual settlements they make to the publishers, a fact that has often raised suspicions: the sales figure is held by the publisher, an interested party, and the author's profit comes from here. , around 10%, depending on how the contract has been negotiated. But the operation of the book chain does not make it easy to know the exact number of books sold.
Let's go in parts. The author delivers the original to the publisher, who makes the book and sends it to the distributor, who sends it to the bookstore, which sells it to the reader. Easy right? Not exactly, because, as we can assume, not all copies are sold. They can be returned, of course. Thus, the bookseller returns them to the distributor, who does not return the money directly, but remains on credit, as it were, while the publisher does not pay the distributor either, but instead incurs a debt. And so, both are used for the following books. Then, when that book that the publisher and author had placed returns, the money they had earned is subtracted: it is common for a book to have a positive sale the first year and the following two years to be negative, due to returns. Thus, the book-sold data really remains a nebula, and the money the author receives is often earned from an approximation.
The bookstores communicate the sales they make, of course, data that is collected and offered with market studies and projections by the companies Nielsen and GfK, on the one hand, and on the other, LibriRed. This is a tool owned by Cegal, which obtains its data from the bookstores themselves, which at the same time serve to compose many of the best-seller lists. Yes, like the ones we will see tomorrow.
Publishers pay to have information on competitors' sales and market trends, and LibriRed offers concrete sales data recorded in bookstores (a data system that bookstores themselves find useful to work with). With the agreements they have signed, Álvaro Manso, Cegal's spokesperson, assures that what they want is to "offer more transparency to the book chain", especially considering that it is a collective project, which makes it complex and rich when it comes to Same time.
However, LibriRed is missing important players, such as El Corte Inglés and Fnac, as well as one of the most important in recent years: Amazon. According to Cegal, of all kinds, 70% is covered from the more than a thousand bookstores that work.
"I would not pay for 30% uncertainty," says Bernat Ruiz Domènech, editor of Apostroph and an expert in the world of books. For him, what would be needed is to "liberate the tools", which "have been financed, at least partially, with public money, and would have to be public, free and even compulsory" because, if not, those who are harmed are the small publishers, who in the case of LibriRed, he says, "pay the big ones for the party, since the former are many and on their scale it is not so cheap."
Some publishers have been surprised by the uproar over Cegal's announcement, partly because they feel as though they are being accused of malpractice. "It's an urban legend," says José Ángel Martos emphatically, editor of Diëresis, who assures that "today the author is very well protected, the Intellectual Property law protects him a lot." For him, he says, if the authors know the sales first-hand, the trust between the author and the publisher is strengthened. But, in addition, "fooling an author would be more complicated than it seems, it wouldn't even pay off", because today information flows more than decades ago. He also explains that in his case, as other publishers also do -Ruiz Domènech corroborates this-, if the interested party wants to see their data they will not put any trouble: "With the author you have to be a partner, who today also has to be much more involved As a personal brand, it's not like before when you gave the original and it was all the editor's work. We have to go together."
Manuel Rico, president of ACE, justifies the need for agreements in the fact that each year they receive more than a thousand legal inquiries from their partners about doubtful settlements. In any case, he explains that it is a paid service in which the author has to request an annual report – for which he will pay about €10, because €15 of the cost is assumed by the ACE – on the titles he wants to know. Rico also points out that transparency is now a requirement of European directives, and defends that other associations could also negotiate similar agreements.
And it is that neither the Association of Writers in the Catalan Language (AELC) nor the Collegiate Association of Writers of Catalonia (ACEC) –nor the Galician or Basque– have an agreement. “If they really wanted transparency, no agreement was necessary, they could have opened it directly to the authors”, says Ruiz Domènech.
For the president of AELC, Sebastià Portell, "the relationship between author and publisher has to be one of trust, because if it isn't, it doesn't make any sense." David Castillo, president of the ACEC, acknowledges that some authors "think they are being deceived because some publishers have tended towards obscurantism", and after all, he says, writers are the weak link in the chain: "Publishers publish and they sell more books by more authors, and each author sells less.” "It is a perverse and harmful system for authors, especially those who want to earn a living" and beyond knowing the information, he calls for a more equitable distribution of the percentages.
Will it change anything, for the writers? “It doesn't enter my head that a publisher has an interest in deceiving you, because everything ends up being known,” says Adrià Pujol Cruells, who has more than fifteen current books with various publishers. "It doesn't matter to me, if it helps any author to have a clear account, go ahead."
Catalan version, here
