Image Quests
RSSAn author chronicles the daunting task of taking on the archive giants
By Marc Aronson -- School Library Journal, 02/01/2004
I was talking with a knowledgeable librarian recently about a big conundrum: Young people seem to be fascinated with written information—especially on the Web and in magazines—but when someone offers them a nonfiction book on a similar subject, their first reaction is often one of boredom. They expect the book to be a snooze, or, at best, useful for an assignment. Why is that, I asked? "Perhaps they want more pictures," she answered. Those of us who write for children and teens want our books to be as visually appealing as possible. We don't hold out for the design-heavy, visual splendor of the "Eyewitness" books, especially when writing for young adults, but we do want each chapter, ideally each page, to have images that catch the eye of casual browsers, and reward real readers, and provide the extra knowledge that comes from seeing as well as reading a description. That is what we wish for, but we simply cannot afford it.
I am writing this piece for SLJ, dear librarians, because the difficulties we face in creating and publishing illustrated nonfiction books affect you all. They raise the price of books, they impoverish the content, and they deprive readers of visual appeal and visual insight. And, in the end, this is really all about the use, and misuse, of copyright. Let me explain.
I've never written a picture book, nor have I edited or written a nature book that relies on color photography, so I'll leave them out of this story. As an author, when I sign the contract for a history book, such as John Winthrop, Oliver Cromwell, and the Land of Promise (Clarion, 2004), I agree that I will supply the text, as well as the art, with all of the permissions cleared. This is the first challenge. The amount of money a publisher is willing to give me as an advance is based on two considerations: how much they think the book will earn, and what I think is needed to get the job done. No matter how well known a nonfiction author is, it is extremely unlikely that the publisher will give him or her an advance that will actually cover all of the permissions costs.
Having worked in publishing for many years, I understand why. How is that money going to be repaid? If you keep adding to the advance, you reach a point where you are paying out sums that you are sure will never be recouped. I should explain that the "advance" an author gets is "earned out" by the royalties, say 10 percent of the cover price, that accrue to him from each book sold. If a book sells for $20, that's $2 a book. If an author believes it will cost $10,000 for all permissions, then the house has to expect to sell 5000 books just to cover permissions costs, and nothing else. So here's the author's rub: Are you willing to commit your entire advance, and perhaps some of your own money, just to make the book look good? That is a good investment, you might say—the better it looks, the more kids will like it, the more copies it will sell. But that also means you may work for a year on a book for nothing, and have to wait a year or two until the permissions advance is covered. Not all authors have the financial freedom to make that kind of investment.
I should interrupt here to say that $10,000 is a rather high advance for middle grade or YA nonfiction; most authors get less. There is a second alternative for publishers: they can agree to pay the permission fee or fees up to a certain amount. The author then does not need to spend the advance. But the publisher then treats this as a so-called "plant" cost—an expense in creating the book, like choosing better-quality paper, or a sturdier binding, or colored endpapers, or a jacket as well as a preprinted case. The problem is that the same $10,000 in plant costs spread over a print run of say 5000 copies adds $2 a book to the cost of creating it, which, in turn, drives up the cover price. I am sure the readers of this magazine will have no difficulty thinking of attractive titles with high cover prices—you are seeing the plant cost trade-off in action.
Why are authors and publishers in this bind? And why have things gotten so bad? The simple answer is that more and more institutions have decided to treat the sale of intellectual property—the right to reproduce an image, a lyric, a map—as a profit center. And in order to handle this efficiently, they turn the management and sale of rights over to companies, such as Bridgeman or Art Resources. At the same time, Corbis has purchased many privately held archives, such as Bettmann, which were sometimes willing to negotiate on price with authors writing for younger readers. The net effect of the privatization and management of permissions is to alter the price scale to a radical degree. An image that one could, at one time, get from an archive for a nominal payment and a copy of the book when published will now certainly cost at least $100.
That may not sound horrible until you realize that $100 is the starting price—it is only if you use the image on one quarter of a page, or less. Half page can take you to $150, full page $200 or more. Have you been disappointed with books that squeeze wonderful images into tiny quarter-of-a-page slots? That is the direct result of the new fee schedules.
Do the math. One tiny image—$100; one large image—$200. That $10,000 is now 100 small images or 50 nice ones. So if the book is, say, 192 printed pages, instead of being lavishly illustrated, it only has one disappointingly cramped picture on every second page, or a decent one every fourth.
Being forced to use images in ridiculously small spaces is not just visually disappointing, it also defeats one of the main reasons for having authentic, archival images in historical nonfiction. When we can show images from the time period, we can use captions or text to help readers to see things that would otherwise be invisible. For example, in Sir Walter Ralegh and the Quest for El Dorado (Clarion, 2000), having a full-page portrait of him allowed me to draw attention to how he spread out his hand, and to explain that both he and his queen were vain about the appearance of their hands. With the image squeezed down, you could not see enough for it to be worth the time to guide you through it.
The turning of images from archives into a profit center is certainly understandable from the point of view of cash-strapped institutions. But it is especially harmful to serious authors who care about using visuals selected for their accuracy and relevance to their texts. There are thousands of clip-art images available on the Internet, and, with clever digital work, an able designer can bend and stretch them so they sort of seem to go with the text—one often sees this type of image as a background on the kind of illustrated book that also features many colored sidebars. This is visual as wallpaper, not as an opportunity for insight. When you take a historical subject seriously, there are frequently only very, very few images you can use. And when one or two archives hold them, you are in the financial trap.
I feel that we who write trade books for young people, you who bring those books to readers, and the young people themselves are being victimized, trapped in a system not designed for us. Certainly ad agencies can and should pay market rates. Textbook publishers use innumerable images, but also can count on adoption sales that are several orders of magnitude larger than any single-author book can expect. We are paying prices established for other kinds of use, other kinds of texts, and there is very little we can do about it.
Pleading that the books are educational, have small print runs, or have low (compared to adult titles) prices can still work when you are dealing directly with an archive that handles its own rights and permissions. They may respect your earnestness and the nature of your project, and want the images to be seen by young people. But we cannot choose what books to write based on which topics come with friendly foundations with good picture collections.
The one great resource we all have is the Library of Congress, and some of the very best authors who write nonfiction for young people, such as Russell Freedman and Jim Giblin, make pilgrimages there. LOC images are essentially free. These authors, as well as other stars, such as Jim Murphy, Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Ilene Cooper, and Elizabeth Partridge, have also made pilgrimages to other archives devoted to their topics, and, by scouring through the images and getting to know the staff, have come back with affordable treasures.
So here is the problem we need to face together: good, accurate, relevant images for nonfiction books are becoming so expensive that authors cannot afford to use as many as they would like, or in the fashion they would prefer. Copyright laws are not protecting intellectual property; they are hoarding it. Please join me in working to change the rules of use, so that young people can get the books they deserve.
But if you are not of a protesting temperament, you can still make a difference by coming to understand the very difficult situation authors and publishers are in, and giving due regard to those who find a way out of the bind. When authors have managed to bring young people wonderful images—by finding a great archive, through doggedness and persuasion, through a liberal pocketbook—we need to recognize the achievement. They have wrested images from the lairs of dragons, and brought readers real treasures. And believe me, it is a heroic effort.
| Author Information |
| Marc Aronson is publisher of Cricket Books at Carus Publishing and the author of several nonfiction titles for young people. |
