Hello, my name is Daniel Gilbert, and I am excited to announce that I’ve joined the team here at the Author’s Interest Project. I’m shadowed by my unofficial research assistant, Butter – who will be facilitating meetings and enforcing minimum standards of vitamin D absorption across the team. As for me, my work focuses on … Continue reading The Public Lending Right and its Role in a Modern Australia

Book authors are (almost always) the first owners of their copyrights. They typically licence or transfer their rights to publishers to get their books to market. 'Reversion' refers to the return of those rights to authors - for example, after a certain period of time, or where a book has gone out of print, or … Continue reading Are authors’ rights ‘all taken care of’ by their contracts? Our new research suggests not.

I'll be on the road for the next two months speaking about and working on the Author's Interest project. Here's some key events - come along and say hi if you'll be in the neighbourhood: August 26, Nashville (ATRIP conference) August 29, Lexington (University of Kentucky) September 3, Washington DC (American University) September 10, NYC … Continue reading The Author’s Interest project hits the road

They say everyone has a book in them, but can everyone afford to write it? Authors Annabel Smith, and Morris Gleitzman, and ASA CEO Juliet Rogers joined me in Perth last month to pull back the curtain on the taboo topic of the economics of independent publishing and the realities of Australian author incomes. You can watch the panel via the link below: … Continue reading #disruptedfestival: The truth about making a living as a writer

Writers and readers take note! I'll be at the Disrupted Festival In Perth on Saturday 27 July on a panel with Australian Children's Laureate Morris Gleitzman, Annabel Smith (who you might know from marvelous novels like Whiskey Charley Foxtrot, or her taboo smashing blog series 'How writers earn money') and the CEO of the Australian … Continue reading The Author’s Interest Project @ Disrupted Festival

We've previously blogged about various author earnings data out of countries including Australia, the US, the UK and Canada. That data is really important for providing a snapshot of who's earning what, where it comes from and how it's changing over time. There is now a new report out of the UK, commissioned by ALCS … Continue reading 2018 UK author earnings data: full report now available

I was recently interviewed by Canada's Michael Geist for the LawBytes podcast. We had an energetic conversation about problems with existing approaches to copyright, how they fail authors, and how rethinking them could help us reclaim lost culture and get authors paid. Check out the recording here (and for those of you who aren't pod … Continue reading New podcast: Rebecca Giblin on the need for author rights

In countries like Australia and the UK, authors' rights are governed almost entirely by publishing contracts. But what do those contracts actually say? As part of the Author's Interest Project, Joshua Yuvaraj and I have gone through the Australian Society of Authors' archive, spanning almost 60 years of publishing contracts. In this keynote for the … Continue reading #notallpublishers

[Article by Rebecca Giblin, originally published on Overland] Authors are always put at the centre of Australia’s copyright debates, grounding claims for more rights or fewer exceptions. Despite that, our law has no explicit rights to protect authors in the case of unfair, unclear or outdated contacts. I criticised this state of affairs in the last … Continue reading Does Australia really need author rights? A response to industry pushback