Posted on 11/06/2007 3:13:59 PM PST by americanflyer1234
Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.
In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hanky Panky at Regnery?
This could constitute criminal fraud.
Be worth someone check this out.
Hmmmm!
Any update on this?
These guys call themselves conservatives? Give me a break. If they didn’t like the contract, they shouldn’t have signed it. If they were too stupid to understand the terms of the contract - well, guess what, the market rewards smart people and punishes dumb ones. Just like it should. Now they are whining to the lawyers and the government to bail them out. Next they’ll vote for Hillary. I say good riddance.
Actually read the article and now I’m really angry these guys claim to be conservatives. The reason they get low payments on some of the books is because they are being sold at steeply discounted prices and the publisher isn’t making anything either!!
If they want to get paid a fixed amount per book, write that into the contract! If the publisher won’t agree, go find a different one. In the America I live in, a man sticks by the contract that he signs, and whiners only hang out with the Dems.
Whether they have a case depends on whether the publisher made an honest effort to sell the books at full price, and whether the book-club sales were conducted at arms-length
I couldn’t agree with you more, Mr. Regnery.
Uh, why would the publisher purposely sell the book for cheap if they could sell it at full price? The publisher would be losing even more money than the authors - it's not in their self-interest. Hello, free markets?
Regardless, the whiners took a gamble that they'd be able to sell tons and tons of books at full price. It didn't pay off. Now they're running to the government to get bailed out.
From the article: "Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company"
Let's say I owe you 20% of every book I sell. If I sell the book for $20, I owe you $4. If I sell the book to my wife for $1, I owe you 0.20, even if she turns around and sells it for the full list price and hands me the money under the table
I only see one set of conservatives here. And it's not the authors. (In fact, could be no conservatives at all - I have no evidence one way or the other whether the publisher is truly conservative. All that's clear is the authors definitely are not.)
Regnery Publishing has been the major conservative publisher for 50 years. Eagle Publishing owns the Conservative Book Club and Human Events, which has been a conservative (and way back when an isolationist) newsletter for around 70 years. Members of the Regnery family have held office in organizations like Young Americans for Freedom since they helped write The Sharon Statement.
Nice try Mr. Miniter. If you read the article you'll see it says,
"In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book."
In other words, the books are not being sold to anyone at anywhere near full price. It's not like you sold it to your wife for $1 and she sells it for $20. You sold it to your wife for $1 and she sells it for $1. You get 20 cents, just like you signed on for.
Seriously, I can't believe anyone here is defending these weasels. (Though I'm really beginning to wonder if some of the posts are from these authors themselves.) The Miniter book is the #507,529th selling book on Amazon. Just how bad is that? Well, I found some random 20 year old book about basket weaving to compare it to (figured I'd choose the kind of subject libs love to put into college curricula). That book is #88,087 - some 420,000 spots better. There's just zero demand for these books, and the authors want the govt to come to their rescue. Gee, maybe the market is trying to tell them to get a new job instead, you think?
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