On Friday afternoon, Penguin issued to us a statement regarding the reported dozen separate lawsuits seeking to recover advances paid to authors the publishers says did not submit manuscripts: “Penguin invests in, nurtures and develops authors who write books that we publish and bring to readers. It devalues the hard work of the vast majority of our authors, and is unfair to our readers, if a few individuals can keep tens of thousands of dollars in advances without ever delivering anything to the publisher. For this reason, Penguin is asking these authors to repay the money they received for work […]