A petition for the readers

You may or may not be aware that there is currently a business dispute going on between Amazon and the French-backed publishing giant Hachette regarding ebook pricing. I’m not going to go over the details here as it is covered comprehensively in many other places.

What I am going to do is tell you that I have signed the Change.org petition in support of readers. Any decision that both forces artificially inflated ebook prices on readers and gives publisher-signed writers a smaller share from those sales than from their print books (both of which are vastly smaller than the share self-published writers get) is clearly unfair.

All this happens at the same time as a survey commissioned by the UK Authors’ Licencing and Collection Society (ALCS) shows that professional author’s annual income is around the £11,000 mark, and only 11.5% are generating their full living income from writing alone. (Futurebook.net)

The letter (co-written by Hugh Howey and J.A. Konrath) currently has just under 8000 signatures. Follow the link above to read it for yourself, and if you agree, I encourage you to sign it too.