After author Sherry Argov won a $209,000 arbitration judgment as compensation for withheld royalties and “deceptive accounting practices” on her book Why Men Love Bitches from F+W Publishing, the Authors Guild is now looking into the company’s accounting practices, as well as the admission that there is “no system in place for tracking inbound Royalty Statements from translation rights deals.” PWAG statement
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The Pros and Cons of Newsworthy Books
On the one hand, when a book like Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World or Jonathan Mahler’s The Challenge is published with juicy details or inadvertently timed to a breaking story, it gets them a great deal of attention and keeps them in the news cycle. But as the Observer’s Leon Neyfakh discovers, the other hand contains a double-edged sword – one where the meat of the book can get lost underneath a news break’s tidal wave. “Copies may sell, of course. But the seriousness of the project, and the commitment of the undertaking, will be forever eclipsed.“ Take […]
Audible Launches Indie Imprint
Audible and the Center for Independent Publishing are joining forces to publish work from independent publishers.Their first selection is Joe Meno’s Demons from the Spring (Akashic) next month under the Audible IndieFirst banner, released first on audiobook format, one month ahead of print release via Audible.com and iTunes. Bookseller
Miramax Latest to Sue for Breach of Contract
After Simon & Schuster launched lawsuits to recover advance money from rappers L’il Kim and Foxy Brown, Miramax is trying the same thing with Alison Pearson, the Daily Mail columnist and author of the 2003 bestseller I Don’t Know How She Does It. They allege Pearson signed a contract five years for an unpublished novel titled I Think I Love You, accepting a $700,000 advance. The suit, filed on Friday in Manhattan federal court, said although Pearson accepted the money in August 2003 under a two-year contract she failed to deliver the novel and ignored requests by Miramax since 2006 […]
Spellberg Rationalizes Position
Since academics generally don’t stand for the repression of writing and inciting of violence, University of Texas at Austin professor Denise Spellberg writes to the WSJ to insist the paper’s op-ed last week “falsely asserts that I am the ‘instigator'” of the cancellation by Random House of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina. But her clarification makes her position pretty clear: “As an expert on Aisha’s life, I felt it was my professional responsibility to counter this novel’s fallacious representation of a very real woman’s life…. It was in that same professional capacity that I felt it my duty […]
Boys Books? Gross
Boys are increasingly left out of reading. As the WSJ puts it, “Scholastic and other publishers are heeding the research of such academics as Jeffrey Wilhelm, an education professor at Boise State University. Prof. Wilhelm tracked boys’ reading habits for five years ending in 2005 and found that schools failed to meet their ‘motivational needs.’ Teachers assigned novels about relationships, such as marriage, that appealed to girls but bored boys. His survey of academic research found boys more likely to read nonfiction, especially about sports and other activities they enjoy, as well as funny, edgy fiction.” The paper uses the […]