Current Affairs

Romance Author Wins Libel Case Against Authorhouse

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Publishers Weekly reports that a Kansas court has ordered Authorhouse, the POD vanity press,  to pay $230,000 to romance author Rebecca Brandwynne, who was libeled by one of their books, which was written by her ex-husband.

According to court documents, AuthorHouse published Paperback Poison: the Romance Writer and the Hit Man by Gary D. Brock, with his current wife, Debbie Brock, in November, 2003. Some of the more incendiary claims in Paperback Poison
include allegations that Brandewyne broke laws, committed adultery,
plagiarized several of her books, and hired a hit man to kill her
ex-husband, the book’s author.

[…]The Kansas jury ruled for Brandewyne even though AuthorHouse’s
contracts state that the publisher assumes no legal responsibility or
liability “for any loss, damage, injury, or claim to any kind or
character to any person or property” in publishing the works of its
clients. Jay Fowler, an attorney for Brandewyne, maintained that the
“contract does not absolve AuthorHouse of their responsibility.
AuthorHouse published the book, put it on the Internet, did everything
a publisher does. They’re responsible for publishing this book without
vetting it first.”

One of the more interesting aspects of this story is what it reveals about the "success" of self-published POD titles.

Fowler said that AuthorHouse claims 74 copies of Paperback Poison
in total were printed, 21 were given to the author, three were sold,
and the company destroyed the 50 copies they had remaining in stock
after receiving complaints about the book from Brandewyne and others.
“But that book’s still out there,” Fowler said. “Sometimes, [the online
seller] says the book is published by Lightning Source, sometimes
1stBooks, sometimes AuthorHouse. But it all flows back to AuthorHouse.”

Seventy-four copies were printed. Twenty one of those were sold to the author. Only three copies were actually sold to readers. Wow.  No wonder so many aspiring authors flock to these vanity presses. Who wouldn’t pay hundreds — or even thousands — of dollars for a chance at that amazing print run and distribution?

This story just goes to prove what anyone with common sense already knows: that vanity presses make all their money from the authors, not from selling books to readers…and that there is no editorial oversight of any kind.

UPDATE: The folks over at POD-dy Mouth have another perspective on the story:

If in fact, Authorhouse loses on appeal (I’m not a lawyer; I’m just assuming), imagine what that would do to the world of POD?

S-l-o-w- i-t- d-o-w-n.

And
you thought regular publishing was slow! Guess what will happen if (for
lack of a better term) non-publishing professionals have to vet these
books? 

Eye on Dramas

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CBS has reportedly picked up 3LBs (about brain surgeons), WATERFRONT (about the crooked mayor of Providence RI), SHARK (with James Woods as a celebrity attorney-turned-prosecutor), SMITH (a crime drama from the POV of crook Ray Liotta), and JERICHO (about a small town that survives the apocalypse). The word is that KING OF QUEENS, NEW ADVENTURES OF OLD CHRISTINE,  and CLOSE TO HOME have also been renewed. Oddly, no mention yet on the fate of THE UNIT, though I assume it’s being picked up.

Otto Hates Cozies

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Ron Hogan posts a scathing "anti-cozy" quote from Otto Penzler that didn’t make the final cut in Sarah Weinman’s Publisher’s Weekly article on the "tension" between mysteries and thrillers:

"I think noir writers are writing the very best books they know how to write. They may fail; there are terrible noir
writers out there. But the cozy chick lit stories are cynical, in the
sense that an editor says, this is the guideline, this is what I want
you to write… Look at how many really good-selling female traditional
cozy writers there are, with cats solving crimes and people taking an
afternoon off during a murder investigation to shop at Prada. I don’t
think those are writers who are stretching. I don’t think they’re
trying to write anything of enduring quality. I think they’re writing
to sell books, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but you don’t have
to take it seriously as literature, and I don’t."

Also cut were quotes from yours truly about tie-ins.

A Brouhaha In Any Language

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Novelist John Connolly disagrees with the Crime Writers Association’s decision to disqualify "translated" crime novels from competing for the Silver Dagger, the UK equivalent of the MWA’s Edgar:

To those of us with a slightly cynical bent, it seemed that the main
reason why this decision was made was because translated novels have
been doing rather well in the Daggers in recent years, and ruffling
some feathers in the process. After all, it’s hard enough to win a
Dagger without Johnny Foreigner coming along and spoiling the party.
Lots of nice British and American authors, who speak and write proper
English, would rather like a dagger for themselves, not to mention the
whopping £20,000 cheque that will find its way into the pocket of the
victor in 2006.

He also takes a swipe at fellow crime writer Val McDermid’s stance in support of excluding translations:

Val McDermid – usually a fairly sensible type – offered her support for
exclusion by pointing out that if Peter Hoeg’s rather wonderful Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow had been read in its American version rather than its English version, then it might not have seemed so wonderful after all.

Now there really are only three appropriate responses to this. The
first is “Huh?” The second is to enquire just where exactly she
acquired her degree in comparative literature. The third, meanwhile, is
to wonder exactly how much Danish she speaks and reads to enable her to
make this kind of judgement. Curiously, McDermid was also one of those
who provided approving quotes for Silence of the Grave.
She described it as “a fascinating window on an unfamiliar world”,
albeit the type of window that she and her colleagues were apparently
happy to see closed in order to facilitate the future marginalisation
of foreign authors.

I think it’s incredibly wrong-headed of the CWA to exclude translated works from award consideration. The Mystery Writers of America and even the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes regularly honor works of crime fiction from other countries that are published in English in the U.S.  The CWA’s literary xenophobia  doesn’t reflect well on their organization or the Silver Daggers.

Dueling Poseidons

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Screenwriter Bryce Zabel, who wrote the THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE mini-series, compares and contrasts all three film versions of Paul Gallico’s novel. Among his observations:

All I can say about that is that it’s a good thing that the original
film, my mini-series take and the current feature only used it as a
springboard. It’s not that great and some things in it are just nuts.
Like one of the characters gets raped and feels bad, after the ship
capsizes, for the man who raped her. I’m not sure how that was
acceptable in 1969, but it sure is out of the mainstream in 2006.

UPDATE 5-15-06:  The feature POSEIDON sunk at the boxoffice…and Bryce has some thoughts on that, too.

The Invaders Have Been Defeated

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It looks as though all three of the "aliens invading" series launched this season have died. CBS cancelled THRESHOLD at midseason, ABC has reportedly cancelled INVASION, and the buzz is that NBC is scrapping SURFACE.

If ABC cancels COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF (which is likely), then none of their new dramas from last fall will have survived. But not all the news is bad for ABC’s 2005-2006 dramas… the network has reportedly renewed WHAT ABOUT BRIAN, the mid-season show from JJ Abrams. 

ABC’s new dramas for next fall include TRAVELER (about college students framed for a terrorist plot),  BROTHERS AND SISTERS (a new Calista Flockhart show), and MEN IN TREES (about a lady shrink who moves to Alaska).

And 7th HEAVEN may not be in TV heaven just yet…the rumor is that the entire cast is returning for 13 more episodes on the CW, which pay 20th Century Fox a $20 million penalty for failing to honor the WB’s  full season pick-up of REBA, a sitcom that skews too old and rural for the new network.

Deadwood Dead?

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Variety reports that HBO has let their contractual options lapse on the cast of DEADWOOD, which begins airing its third season in a few weeks. This decision frees the cast to pursue jobs elsewhere,  which strongly suggests that HBO has lost interest in a fourth season of the show before the third season has even aired.

HBO insisted that conversations about future
cycles of "Deadwood" are ongoing, and Milch told the Boston Globe in
the April 30 issue that he had always planned to exit the series after
the fourth season; he has been reported as saying that he’d envisioned
each season as a year, and the actual Deadwood camp was destroyed at
the end of four.

"If a series is successful, the commercial
interest is in keeping it on, even after the creative interest is in
ending it," Milch told the Globe. "With ‘Deadwood,’ my intention is to
end at the end of the fourth season. I can’t speak for anyone else, but
that’s where I’m getting off the bus."

Meanwhile, Milch is busy developing his HBO "surf noir" series with author Kem Nunn. I’ll be sad to see DEADWOOD go…it’s one of my favorite shows.

Manuscript from Hell

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Novelist PJ Parrish agreed to read a manuscript as a favor to a friend of a friend. The book is awful and there are a few things she’d like to say to the author:

Get out, now, buddy. Get out of any notion that you could possibly ever
succeed as a writer. Because you are tone-deaf to dialog, blind to
characterization, and utterly and completely unable to tell a basic
linear-plot story. Worse, you didn’t bother to learn a damn thing about
the craft that goes into fiction writing before you tried. You had the brass balls to think you could shortcut all that.

God, this just rots my socks, this whole idea that anyone can just
write a novel these days. I have had it with professionals who write
and think that just because their printer spat out 200 double-spaced
pages of typing, they have made the leap to professional writer.

But instead of saying that, she simply told the author she was too busy to read his manuscript after all. I’ve done that, too.

It’s even trickier when you’re asked to blurb a book… and you start reading and discover, for whatever reason, that you just don’t like it.  That’s happened to me a few times over the years.  In that situation, I politely decline to offer a blurb, saying something like "this book just wasn’t my kind of thing" or something else vague and non-judgemental.  Only a handful of authors whose work I read and declined to blurb have pressed me for specifics. And when they do, I give them the reasons I didn’t like their book — but I resent being put in such an awkward position (ie trying to be honest without hurting their feelings) simply because I did them a favor. It’s a no-win situation for me and they should know that.