And we were trying to help with the stimulus bill. I remember standing on the floor, just looking at us losing tens of thousands of jobs a month and we wound up losing 8 million jobs. California was a mass. The real estate situation hit us. We were struggling. Families were distraught and im running for reelection in fee arena is blaming everything on me, even when it rains and shes blaming everything on me and its tight. He says hes have you seen her hair and he said it is so yesterday. And she starts laughing. Now the truth is about my hair, i have many bad hair days, but i thought that moment, everybody does. What is she doing . Its kind of an insult to everybody except if you are wealthy enough to have and are followed around every day and most of us do not. She got into trouble with that and i think in the end, people said we are in a hard time and i think they understood with you there, including up against the iraq war there are so many times that you were alone or maybe had a few people that you are willing to take those brave stance. What i love about about the art of the touch is it talks about through the low lands of history also that people even when they didnt agree with you understood that you are going to be tough and stood up for them. And it has been a remarkable thing. But again, some of these things that happen that shine a light on who the person is, and im going to go off or minute minute and just say that when donald trump for example said that he was excited when the Housing Market crashed because he thought he could make a lot of money. How do you make America Great when in your Business Life that is how your mind works west mark i know lot of business people, they may say i will buy something, but they do not think that way. That theyre that theyre going to profit off of somebodys misery. So now that i put in that word, truly there are things that happen in a campaign that show who the person really is inside and one thing may not be enough to teach it but there are a few things. So when people saw her making fun of me and not really caring about the issues when the cameras were off and they put it together with the fact that when she was ceo sheet shipped jobs overseas, they said no what, not a good person. With a minute left here and we look at the incredible career you have had in your written this book the art of tough and people understand that you can pass it on to others, what you really want to pass on . The people who are running for that supervisor seat in the county . What i want to pass on to you and i think i have already passed it on is how to stand up and be tough and know that you can win and dont worry about the slings and arrows. It doesnt matter. When i open the book i have quotes from the right wing media that say its the worst thing about you that you can imagine. So thats what i want to say to everybody. Is be empowered, stand up for what you believe in, and it will be a satisfying life. Thank you so much barbara. I recommend your book, the art of tough because i think it is meant to be fun to read and people will understand where you came from and it is going to give them a faith in politics. I hope so. Thank you in. Cspan, created by americas Cable Television companies and brought to you as a Public Public service by your cable or satellite provider. You are watching book tv on cspan two. One one of the things we like to do a book tv is look at different aspects of the publishing world and one of those aspects is the Authors Guild. Mary is the executive director of that group, what is the Authors Guild . The Authors Guild is an organization that goes back to 1912. It was formed to represent authors and represent their interests. Authors life, copyright, free speech, and we have been doing the same thing for over 100 years. We represent their interest to publishers and we just had a panel on our contract and we are looking at the standard trade Publishing Agreement and asked the question about whether the terms are fair theyre still still there today in the Digital World . We have about 9000 members, we provide services for our members. We do contract reviews, Legal Services for authors and we also have agents for members. We provide website services, we help others build their website, we cant do that without a website. We have some websites have very low costs. And we spent a lot of time also on advocacy for authors. Were the only group in the u. S. That represents all authors and what were trying to do is make sure that authors can make a living today and it is getting harder and harder. So we did a survey of our members about one year ago where he found that as we expected some anecdotal evidence that authors are making money and our surveys asked the mean income was down over 30 from a mean annual income of 24000. We are talking about low wages for book authors who tend to be very highly educated. It is getting to the point where its becoming unsustainable to become a book author. So so a lot of what were focusing on right now actually is very much ensuring that authors can make a living wage. Host before we get into some of those issues, 9000 members, with janes patterson and David Mccullough be a member of the authors go . Guest we have quite a number of wellknown author who are members of the authors note. We also have, we have all kinds of authors. To be a member you have to be and have a published book or you have to have certain levels of income. And we have a certain certain membership or income levels are lower, and so they were self published authors who now it was an opportunity for publishers to also publish themselves are very small publishers, some like to call themselves independently public. Host how did you get into this work . Guest i have been a copyright lawyer for about 25 years. I have who worked at copyright offices, the library of congress, i am a lawyer by training, i spend a lot of time advocating for authors rights and is a lawyer in a private practice i represent a number of authors and other states as well as publishers. I have been very much a part of this world and also i was an author, my husband is an author, my stepdaughter is another. Many of my dear friends are authors. So im very empathetic to authors. Host over the years and particularly with the electronic aspect has contracts for authors change . Guest thats a good question cause part of our Fair Contract Initiative is that they have not changed enough. Things are really shaking up in the industry. We would expect to see more types of models of the Publishing Agreements. You would expect and other Digital Media the deals are sort of up for grabs. There is more diversity. So part of our Fair Contract Initiative is that we want to take a step back and have publishers do the same and say what still make sense today. Then in this environment and do it in a way that ensures that authors are Real Partners to the Publishing Agreement. There has been recent changes in Publishing Agreements and they have largely favored publishers to the detriment of authors. For instance, things like advances to be paid out into transactions. Then it went to three, but still most of the advance came before the book was completed or before it was published. Now authors are having to wait until after the book is finished and even after its published to to see a big chunk of their advanced and the authors are going down. Used to be the advanced is what you lived off of and use it for research and travel while you are writing the book, now are seen authors who are taking on other work to write a book which makes it harder to write the book that you want to write, or they are having to take credit and so thats what we like to see change. But if we go back to advances, there are other things like option clauses then got much more stringent so where an author wants complete discretion, we say and they deliver the book that was promised you need to accept it. So, these are sort of issues around the edges that were talking to publishers about right now. A couple of recent court cases if you could go through, amazon, apple, google, where is the Authors Guild . Guest that is a broad question. That may start with where we are with the electronic distribution. We are neutral as to how books are published and in what format we want books want books to be written, read and soul. So therefore matt format, but that Digital Media has caused some friction and how authors get paid. How books to pay for. This is a huge issue for us right now because wire others making less money now, one of them is we see that amazon pushed down the price of ebooks to 9. 99 cents, they created a standard and in many cases many lower. That is had the effect of causing and devaluing books. Now consumers expect that 9099 cents expect that 9. 99 is a threshold for what youre going to spend on a book. That means theres less money for the publisher and guess where, the one budget line where they can actually is somewhat negotiable is what they pay the author. So the author ends up losing out. There are also, there the whole information that is something is online it should be for free. And were starting starting to see this impact books. One impact is piracy, in recent years there is an increasing amount of books available for free or lowcost that are actually made available by real criminals copyright infringements. People were trying to make money off of your book through advertising or charging 2. 99 instead of 9. 99. So that cause disruption and theres a sense of devaluation and now anybody can do it so i should we be paying for. There is a real difference between what i or you, i dont dont know of your book right or not, the person who even spent a lot of their time writing in their job as do, its real different from what i will write converter professional book author. Those that we want and web and honing their skill their whole life they can be extremely good with words and we want to encourage them and allow them to be able to make a living writing books. The the reason why is because the benefit of society. Host but the court cases. Guest youre referring to google books, so that comes from the information free movement. This is going back over ten years, google what to major academic librarys and scan the books, they never bought a never but a single copy of the book, not one. They just went in and scanned them and exchange the library will give you a free digital copy of that. Then they use these books to help them for Research Purposes to help improve their algorithms and to basically teach their computers natural language. They have a huge database of language now. So the authors use the content to figure out how to improve their business and make more money. So they make copies for themselves and for the, they made many many copies and trying to use these books to improve their search and then they created google books for any book that they scan a searchable and then they can find the book and you can put in a search term, lets lets say you want to research hummingbirds. You put in hummingbirds and all the books about hummingbirds come up and he gets a particular book and it will bring up all the places in the book that term appears with the text surrounding it. So actually we bought the case on behalf of authors who owned the rights to their books. Publishers also separately settle. Our case only involve books that the authors own. The fact of the matter is that people will go through the book is not actually buy the book and just at dinner the other night my daughter was in college said, i hate to tell you this but actually we dont sit around i just dumped to the book and type in a search term and i can get what i need. Enough to add a citation. And that we heard from many of our authors who use google books that way. But the bigger issue with the google books case and im so sad the court didnt take the case because it sets a very bad precedence that everything that google did, every copy copy they made his fair use because of the service they provide google book which is such a Wonderful Service that we want them to be able to provided so work in a call this. I think the court was convinced that it would be too hard for people to try to get the rights from authors which is untrue because actually there was a Settlement Agreement earlier where google has agreed to pay the rights which a settlement was not approved by the district court. So thats why the litigation continued and when the case was but nobody thought that was fair use. They said yes, yes, its fair use. The problem is that ashe moved further into the digital age and we are just at the beginning of the changes that were going to see and distribution, the way with the books is more more through search, more more of an exit basis and we want to protect those sources of revenue in the future for authors and for publishers. Otherwise were to see less money in the Book Business which means less ability to pay authors and less books to sell and we will see fewer professional others, fewer the kinds of books that take a while to write. The highly Research Research books. Thats not a good thing for us for the country. Host you reference this, but there is a whole generation growing up thinking everything is free. Music,books, the music world seems to have settled a little bit, where is this going to end up with the book world . Guest we are really trying to prevent this to the Music Industry happening to the book industry. The music i think the Music Industry is 25 of what it was ten years ago, they, they really lost their shirt because the idea that music should be free, now we see services was spotted by where you pay a monthly fee of the music business is getting back back on its feet. Is is still much smaller than it was in the past. So we have been able to learn from that. So we are trying to prevent that same mindset from entering the public spirit. And we do have less of a problem but by and large a book by her readers are not teenagers looking for things for free, they tend to be more more mature type citizens, however it is starting to happen that it so a context that their free online that people are in fact finding them and reading them. In fact one of our authors told me recently that shes a scholar but also writes for a novel and her fans will come up to her and said i read your book for free, sorry about that but i cant afford them. So youre seeing that start to happen. One of the things that we want to do over the next years start a campaign that is directed toward the public which is writing is work. Writers need to be paid for their work. And readers, we know know you love the authors support them, because then you make it impossible for them to make a living. Host you reference that were on the cutting edge of how books will be distributed in the future, what are some of the changes that we will see . Guest i think well see more reading online and i am thinking very longterm. I think it would go back to in the Printing Press was first invented, it was 100 years before the Publishing Industry really became the Publishing Industry today. Initially they were doing books that were eliminating manuscripts. So were very much at the paradigm of physical books. People will will always love physical books, but therell be more more reading done online, so what im talking about is the way people read, the, the distribution of the way they find books. I dont know exactly what that will be. I just know with how much things change in last years that we are going to see a lot more change. Host currently does the Authors Guild have any court cases in some states that they are pursuing . Guest currently know. We do not have any court cases right now. Host to have plans to pursue any . Guest no, not currently. If we are in this fermenting state i dont think i could talk about it anyway. But right now we have just finished the google books case because the Supreme Court did not take it and so were taking a deep breath and we have a lot of other advocacy programs that were working on right now, one thing were launching is a campaign to get your life back in how people and authors learn to exploit their books themselves, how to publish them, how to sell them to publishers, were concerned about elder writers. Just remember authors get no pension, no retirements, no benefits even. So they often live, and even you be surprised very famous writers who are now elderly, they never made a lot of money, they never never made that kind of money you think they did and they are not doing well now. So theres that group that we feel like we have to help them find new sources of income. We also have a new membership for student writers and emerging writers to help them understand the business, get into the business, understand how to become a professional writer, and then we continue to have all sorts of issues that were helping professional writers with. We continue to educate them about the changes that are going on right now because if you been in the business for 20 or 30 years, ask for the same for long time and all of a sudden youre having to learn new ways of marketing, now they all have to do some kind of social platform. Where helping them negotiate that some of course we do a lot of advocacy right now and we are very focused on copyright law in washington. The Judiciary Committee of the house has been looking at doing a big revision of the copyright law for several years now and there are number of issues that we think will be particularly important authors. We are working very actively in washington right now. Host has the consolidation in the Publishing Industry affected what you do . Guest it hasnt directly affected the Authors Guild