Oh boy. Fasten your seat belt for a twisted story. I’ll let Publisher’s Weekly present the introduction:
After months of claims and counter claims about its financial situation, erotic romance publisher Ellora’s Cave has filed suit in Summit County, Ohio, against Jennifer Gerrish-Lampe, aka Jane Litte, and her blog, Dear Author, claiming libel and defamation. The suit asks for injunctive relief from the blog for posts regarding Ellora’s Cave, and its owners. Ellora’s Cave is asking for “no less than” $25,000 in damages.
Woah. Details are rather interesting, starting with this:
Ellora’s Cave has been plagued by financial problems since late 2013. Among other issues, authors began complaining about late, or missed, royalty payments. More recently, complaints have surfaced about a decline in authors’ book sales and the layoffs of many of the house’s editors. Marks has blamed the royalty payment problems on the implementation of new accounting software. Addressing the decline in sales, Marks has acknowledged that the publisher has been moving fewer titles through Amazon, but she has not been able to identify why this is happening.
Yeah… I can see why a publishing house would downsize. Publishing has gotten rather tight these past few years. I know, after my cancer diagnosis, I made a point to be super careful with all my publishing duties, always mindful to make sure I got all our core activities done. The last thing I needed was to lose my business, the trust of my authors, and reputation.
It’s really not that hard. You sell books, you pay the author. Pay everybody who works on the prepub activities up front. If you don’t have the money to put a book on the market, you don’t do it. That’s been the secret to keeping Filbert Publishing afloat. That’s also why we’re small. It’s by design.
But, I guess not all publishing houses work that way.
I’ll dismount my high horse now.
You can get updates on this situation from Writer Beware.
