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none PUBLISHER COMPLAINTS

Small Press Storm Warnings: Lethe Press, Seventh Star Press

Header image: dark, stormy sky with lightning flash (credit: Den Rozhnovsky / Shutterstock.com)
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Founded by Steve Berman in 2001, Lethe Press is an LGBTQ-focused independent publisher "specializing in the strange, the eerie, and the uncanny". In a publishing environment where small presses come and go like mushrooms, it has been in business for nearly two decades, and has garnered awards and starred reviews for its books.

Unfortunately, it has recently also been garnering complaints.

Writer Beware has heard from multiple individuals who cite a variety of problems at Lethe, including contract breaches in the form of unpaid royalties (for both authors and editors) and late royalty payments and statements. Contractors (such as audio narrators) have also gone unpaid. Royalty reports I've seen are seriously lacking; among other things, they fail to state sales numbers for ebooks, showing only gross income.

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none LITERARY AGENTS AND AGENCIES

Agencies in Turmoil: Red Sofa Literary Threatens Legal Action, Mass Firings At Corvisiero Literary Agency

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On May 30, following blowback she received for her tweeted responses to the protests in her hometown of St. Paul, MN, Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary posted a note of apology on the agency's website.

Between then and now, Frederick seems to have changed her mind--at least, about her critics.

Today, three of the people who responded critically on social media to Frederick's tweets--agents Beth Phelan and Kelly Van Sant and author Isabel Sterling--received a letter from Frederick's lawyers threatening legal action unless they remove and retract their responses, which the lawyers allege are "false, harm [Frederick's] reputation and are defamatory".

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none COPYRIGHT

Four Major Publishers Sue the Internet Archive Over Unauthorized Book Scanning

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This past March, I wrote about the Internet Archive's National Emergency Library--a spinoff from the IA's massive Open Library project, which makes scanned print books available to the public for free in various digital formats.

While many of these books are in the public domain, many are not: they are in-copyright and commercially available, and have been scanned and uploaded without authors' or publishers' permission, violating copyright law and potentially interfering with authors' income. To create the National Emergency Library, the IA has used the figleaf of the coronavirus pandemic as justification to remove even the minimal restrictions on borrowing that governed the Open Library--abandoning one of the key provisions of the legal theory that it and others created to justify what amounts to massive copyright violation.

Though controversy erupted over the Open Library a few years ago, with the IA's actions condemned by authors, publishers, and authors' groups, and many authors contacting the IA to have their books removed, no legal action followed. Given the outcome of the Authors' Guild's long legal fight against Google's book scanning project, I'm guessing it might never have done, had the IA not thrown down the gauntlet of the National Emergency Library. Now, four publishers have called the IA's bluff.

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none BUSINESS OF WRITING

Evaluating Publishing Contracts: Six Ways You May Be Sabotaging Yourself

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(A version of this post was originally published in 2014.)

Several years ago, a now-defunct literary magazine called The Toast gained notoriety by demanding that its writers surrender copyright. In the widespread discussion that followed exposure of this author-unfriendly policy, I was struck by the number of comments from writers who seemed to think that a bad contract clause was not so very awful if (pick one) the publication was great; the people who run it were great; the bad contract clause was not always enforced. (See especially the comments thread on The Toast's still-surviving post about the controversy.)

That's all very well. But this kind of thinking is exactly how writers get screwed: by making assumptions about a publisher's intentions, by letting their emotions overrule their business sense, and by forgetting that, in the author-publisher relationship, the publishing contract is the bottom line.

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