What Happens to Authors When a Publisher Implodes
15 October 2011
Passive Guy received a tip about a blog post describing the self-destruction of a small publisher and its effect on the lives of authors and staff.
PG will caution that he’s not familiar with the publisher or any of the people involved and can’t vouch for the accuracy of the blog. It might be a complete fabrication.
From long experience as an attorney who sometimes saw people’s lives fall apart, he will say the account carries the scent of authenticity. If it is a work of fiction, the author is quite talented.
I remember looking at Aspen Mountain Press when I was still considering that kind of thing. I’ve always been kind of skeptical of those little publishers, wondering how stable they were. But even big companies can go under, and books can be lost during editorial changes, etc. Right now, I’m so glad I self-published. What a mess.
Ouch. Triskelion and Dorchester all over again.
The problems at Aspen Mountain Press were discussed in a post on Writers Beware last month. It also had a link to the discussion on Absoluted Write, a major writers’ forum.
My friend had been considering going with them and was acquainted with one of their authors. The author told her of troubles brewing over there, including not being able to get a hold of the owner, emails not returned, royalties late or never received etc. She was also told that a lot of the people were leaving and starting their own company. At that time, my friend was in talks with them about publishing, but soon backed away and self pubbed on Amazon instead. Now she feels she dodged a bullet.
That makes me nauseous. And the comment section – wow. My heart goes out to all the people tangled up in this mess.
It’s real. I’m one of the many authors caught in this mess. You can see many blog posts from the authors sharing their own stories of what’s been happening. Please wish us luck as we untangle ourselves from this train wreck.
Good luck to you, Grace, and all the others caught up in the Aspen Mountain Press fiasco. And keep writing. Don’t let them take that away from you.
Tori
What an ugly, unfair mess over there. It truly is criminal. I hope those authors can eventually recover the rights to their work so they can move on.
Wow. This is, literally, criminal.
How come no one has gone to the DA, US Attorney, the FTC, or the IRS? If this has been going for as long as it seems, there’s no way I would have the patience many of these people seem to have.
Agreed, Michael. Longsuffering seems to be a common thread among the mistreated writers.
I was the author of that blog.
And I think ‘longsuffering’ is an inappropriate term to place upon the writers and staff of AMP. Over the course of a month, these authors banded together, served DMCA notices to third party sites demanding their books come down, got the AMP website taken down and reversion of rights letters are starting to come in the mail. Instead of lying around and whining about their misfortunes, this group of authors took action. Any legal options, obviously, we won’t discuss online. So while the implosion of AMP is horrific, the authors aren’t sitting meekly back. The group is working together, daily, to extract ALL these books and unpaid monies from the publisher.