In early 2021, as part of a post about several troubled small presses, I wrote about mounting problems at New York-based Adelaide Books, as evidenced by an increasing number of author complaints about delays, poor editing, terrible communication on the part of Adelaide's owner, Stevan Nikolic, and lagging royalty payments.

Also problematic: Adelaide's extra-contractual demand for a book purchase as a condition of publication, royalties paid on net profit, and a seriously overstuffed publishing schedule that even a large house with a big staff (neither of which describes Adelaide) might have trouble managing.

The problems at Adelaide have only expanded since, leading to a Watchdog warning from the Alliance of Independent Authors and the establishment of an Adelaide authors' group on Facebook where authors have been sharing their experiences, including their largely fruitless efforts to get Nikolic to respond to questions about delays and mistakes, queries about royalties, requests for rights reversion, and more. Most recently, Adelaide authors have been enraged to discover that Nikolic and his wife (for whom Adelaide Books is named) are living not in the US, as they believed, but in Portugal, where they run a large and well-stocked bookstore that was the subject of several glowing news articles in 2022 (the articles, which describe Adelaide Books as having "expanded" to Lisbon, do not mention any of the publisher's difficulties).