author sued by publisher for self publishing

[guess]

The first link is to a slashdot.org story about Amazon signing authors directly. In there, there is a link to a blog by an author being sued by her publisher. She e-published some older short stories with Amazon that were rejected by the major publishers. I have never heard of this author. Publishers seem to be getting desperate.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/17/1821244/amazon-bypassing-publishers-by-signing-authors-directly

http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html

[Eerongal he/him]

Wow, that's pretty messed up. It sounds like Penguin interpretation of a non-compete clause requires her to live on NOTHING other than their up front payment of $20,000 for well over a year. Personally, i went ahead and purchased her self published book, not because i have any particular interest in it, but because i wanted to help support the author because of this.

[Kuri Shardweaver he/him]

Wow, that's pretty messed up. It sounds like Penguin interpretation of a non-compete clause requires her to live on NOTHING other than their up front payment of $20,000 for well over a year. Personally, i went ahead and purchased her self published book, not because i have any particular interest in it, but because i wanted to help support the author because of this.

You get a rep for this, just so you know.

[guess]

If there are any published authors who read this, I would be interested in your take.

There is also a link on the slashdot page to a New York Times article about Amazon's new strategy.

Writers don't work for publishers. They are self employed. They have a business relationship. It makes no sense whatsoever for a small business owner to non-compete with a publisher or anyone. As a small business owner it is not your responsibility to worry about your publishers business model. From what I have read, publishers will drop authors right away if you don't produce.. So you have to worry about yourself.

Penguin knows that their non-compete claims are not legal. However, under civil law your legal rights are dependent on how much money you are capable of spending. So Penguin wins since the author cannot afford to defend herself.

This is very common. If Amazon was smart at all, they would buy this authors book immediately and market it heavily and then put up interviews with the author on the site where she discusses what happened with Penguin. Since they want to sign more authors and essentially get into publishing it could work as marketing to lure more writers to them.

Then again, signing with Amazon is locking yourself into only selling on Amazon and only selling on the Kindle. Amazon requires that all contract information remain silent. This typically means that they have severe non-compete penalties if you sell through anyone else. That being said, if the author can get a larger share of the sale prices it may be worth it.

I would be concerned about Amazon in the long run if I was an author. They have a track record of making deals like this to gain market share and then being a bully when they have the market share. Several years ago, Amazon raised prices on their best customers. People only found out about when they discussed prices on message boards. Since when you log into Amazon you get personalized responses.

Plus last year they hurt authors by pulling buy buttons.

[Eerongal he/him]

as far as i know, there aren't any publishers that really visit the forums here, but i personally would be interested to hear tor's (brandon's publisher) opinion on the subject. They've always seemed like a super open, really easy publisher to work with, and my guess is that they'd probably find it distasteful at best.

[PeterAhlstrom he/him]

I'm flabbergasted.

I don't know what exactly the contract says, so I don't know if what they've done is legal.

Anyway, a number of Tor authors and authors from other SF/F publishers (including Penguin/Ace/Roc; the story above is about a different genre) sell smaller projects by themselves on the side. It doesn't seem to be an issue.

The types of contracts Brandon gets generally have right of first refusal clauses. He couldn't sell Scribbler to another publisher because Scholastic had first refusal rights for his next children's novel (and YA counts as children's). So he eventually sent them a proposal for Steelheart, which they turned down mostly due to them knowing they wouldn't be able to satisfy Brandon as a publisher due to the Alcatraz problems. That freed up Scribbler to go to Tor (as THE RITHMATIST).

[guess]

I have not heard of the new Rithmatist project. Did I miss it in his blog or is this the first time its being mentioned?

As far as the contract really having a non-compete. It doesn't have to. With civil law, you can't file a complaint to the police. You have to enforce contracts with your checkbook by paying lawyers. So a publishing house(or any business) has more money to throw around so you lose. It would cost the author more than the $20,000 advance to defend herself. So she loses by default. This is not uncommon.

There was an article recently on Slashdot. There is 1 guy who runs a centralized timezone database for everyone who uses Linux. He runs it on a government website at NIH. The guy who ran the site didn't make any money off of it. Alot of techies will do stuff like this since they enjoy being part of the community. He is being sued for patent violation by a patent troll. So he took it down since he can't afford to defend himself. They want to win a ruling against him because he has no money to defend himself. Then they will take that ruling and sue the people who have money (Oracle, IBM, HP,the US Federal Government, etc...).

[lordofsoup]

I have not heard of the new Rithmatist project. Did I miss it in his blog or is this the first time its being mentioned?

As far as the contract really having a non-compete. It doesn't have to. With civil law, you can't file a complaint to the police. You have to enforce contracts with your checkbook by paying lawyers. So a publishing house(or any business) has more money to throw around so you lose. It would cost the author more than the $20,000 advance to defend herself. So she loses by default. This is not uncommon.

There was an article recently on Slashdot. There is 1 guy who runs a centralized timezone database for everyone who uses Linux. He runs it on a government website at NIH. The guy who ran the site didn't make any money off of it. Alot of techies will do stuff like this since they enjoy being part of the community. He is being sued for patent violation by a patent troll. So he took it down since he can't afford to defend himself. They want to win a ruling against him because he has no money to defend himself. Then they will take that ruling and sue the people who have money (Oracle, IBM, HP,the US Federal Government, etc...).

Sorry to say it but people like this should be taken out and shot. They do no legitimate work, but one steal from others who have done work through loop holes in our law system.

[Joe ST he/him]

Sorry to say it but people like this should be taken out and shot. They do no legitimate work, but one steal from others who have done work through loop holes in our law system.

indeed, copyright and patent trolls and those like them do not deserve to be legal. All they do is extort those that do interesting and useful work and profit from it. Especially with the TZ stuff, which has been running since ~'86 Luckilly the ICANN were asked and have taken over control, since it basically IS the source for timezone info basically everywhere.

[guess]

indeed, copyright and patent trolls and those like them do not deserve to be legal. All they do is extort those that do interesting and useful work and profit from it. Especially with the TZ stuff, which has been running since ~'86 Luckilly the ICANN were asked and have taken over control, since it basically IS the source for timezone info basically everywhere.

Large businesses play patent troll with each other too. Apple is suing Samsung in Australia to prevent their smart phone device. So samsung is suing apple in japan and another country. Apple is actually trying to patent the app store. So no other device can have an app store. Oracle is suing Google since the Android operating system using Java. Oracle inherited java when it bought Sun Microsystems. So they want a cut of every android device sold. They tend to complain when they are sued, but then go ahead and do it to each other.

The most notorious case of this was the company SCO. They claimed to own the patent on Unix. So they sued any company that used Unix. This includes Sun Microsystem, IBM, HP, etc... I am not even sure if SCO really has any products. All they do is sue. They just had a website. I don't know what kind of staff they had. These large companies would settle with them since its cheap to pay off patent trolls than fight them. The patent trolls could scare away their customers. After years of this, a judge finally ruled that SCO could not sue anyone anymore. They went out of business immediately.