I keep up with news on publishing and writing. It’s a good habit for all writers to get into, and it’s pretty easy to set up a personalized Google News view. I saw an article today detailing a company called Blurb getting into ebooks. So I dug around on the site to see what was up. They claim to give you a higher profit margin than Amazon if you sell your book through them.
Blurb Direct Sell allows you to sell directly to your fans and friends through your own Personal Storefront at Blurb. You get to set the list price for your book and keep 100% of the markup over the book’s base price.
Wow, seems great, right? You get 70% less transfer fees from Amazon. Well, until you factor in the Paypal charges. And you have to get paid via Paypal, forget about being paid directly into your bank account.
The fee for PayPal transactions is USD $1 (or GBP £1 / EUR €1 / CAD $1 / AUD $1 depending on your preferred currency). Checks are available in U.S. funds only and have a processing fee of $5.
That seems high to me, considering so many indies make only “coffee money” per month. But it’s still not so bad, right?
And then I read the Terms of Service.
Here’s a clause that no writer, ever, should agree to:
1.6 License. In addition to the licenses granted in the Terms and Conditions, You grant Blurb a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, perform, display, distribute, adapt, modify, re-format, create derivative works of, and otherwise commercially or non-commercially exploit in any manner, any and all of Your Books, and to sublicense the foregoing rights to Distributor Channels, for the sole purposes of copying, printing, distributing, and making Your Books available via the Bookstore and the Distributor Channels pursuant to this Agreement. The foregoing license is limited for the purpose of making Your Book available through the Bookstore or Distributor Channels at your request and does not provide Blurb or any Distributor Channel the right to materially modify Your Book’s content in a manner inconsistent with your request that the book be printed and distributed through the Bookstore and the Distributor Channels.
See that last bit that I italicized and bolded? It’s the clause, I think, that gives their lawyers the ability to say that they are distributing your book as you requested, so shut up about anything else they did with it. I’m not a lawyer, perhaps one can weigh in on this for me.
Just in case you think that’s not evil enough, well, look at their survival clause:
3.4 Survival. The provisions of Sections 1, 2.6, 2.7, 2.9, 2.10, 3.3, 3.4, 4, and 5 of this Agreement will survive any termination of this Agreement.
See that bit that says “Sections 1”? That means even if you cancel your agreement with them, the clause quoted above–which is included in Section 1–is still in effect. When these guys say “in perpetuity,” baby, they mean in perpetuity.
Going on the TOS alone, I would recommend that no indie ever publish with Blurb. These are terrible terms of service, and a horrible rights grab designed to screw the author.
In perpetuity.