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The book publisher wants its money back from 12 writers who it says have not delivered. In separate suits filed last week, the Penguin Group is aiming to recover $417,333 plus interest and legal fees from the likes of Prozac Nation author Elisabeth Wurtzel (read suit here), The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead and political blogger Ann Marie Cox (read suit here). “If the Author fails to deliver the manuscript …the Publishers shall have the right to terminate this Agreement by notice to the Author, in which event the Author shall promptly repay to the Publisher any all sums paid to the author,” read the complaints, quoting from contracts the various writers signed. The Smoking Gun first reported the legal action. Another one of the authors being sued by Penguin is Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat. He actually did hand in his memoir Angel At The Fence on time in 2008, but the book was cancelled when it turned out the story about how he met first met his wife in a concentration camp was false. “Because of the Defendant’s breach of the representation and warranties, Defendant never delivered a manuscript of the Books as required under the Agreement,” states that complaint. Before Rosenblat’s deception was revealed in late 2008, Oprah Winfrey had praised his story and Atlantic Overseas Pictures had optioned the memoir for what is a yet-to-be-made film. Penguin is represented by John Pelosi of New York firm Pelosi Wolf Effron & Spates.
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Deadline's Dominic Patten - tip him here.
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The creative process is hard work; c’mon Penguin, give these folks more time!
Either be more selective with whom you choose for these bonuses or think of a new way to attract authors that is not so costly to your publishing house, but also your PR. $417,000 are you kidding me? how many authors are you suing? and how big are the bonuses. It almost sounds like a trap. We will go after every author we can then sue the ones that fail us so they can’t go to Amazon or another competitor.
Yo, yo, yo, why all the hate, Penguin? How ya’ll gonna make phat stacks if you file legal action against your writers? Now the only cats getting paid are the lawyers. How does that generate a muthaflippin’ profit?
Going after a Holocaust survivor? Classy!
When he takes money for writing a true story that turns out to be a fabrication, it really doesn’t matter if he’s an holocaust survivor or not.
How classy is faking a Holocaust story for profit?
They’re called “contracts”, jackasses.
They are binding legal agreements, not that that makes much difference nowadays.
You signed a contract to turn in a manuscript, turn in the manuscript. I know a lot of authors who would die for a book deal and would do their jobs.
Deadlines are deadlines, not “if you can get around to it”s. There are also negotiated extensions. Are you a pro or not?
I can understand why Penguin is chasing down delinquents, and I think writers need to understand it.
For every author that takes an advance and then fails to deliver a book, the publisher is not only out of the cash they paid out, they’re also denied something to put out and generate revenue, creating a little black hole of lost opportunity inside the company. Sure each individual black hole is small in relation to a company as big as Penguin, but all together they add up and can do damage to a publisher’s bottom line.
As for writers they need to understand that every advance paid out to an author who doesn’t deliver means that at least one other author, who could deliver a book, gets blocked from getting a publishing deal in the first place. This number of blocked writers per deadbeat author goes up exponentially if the delinquent author has some cachet as a “celebrity” and a bidding war results in an over-priced deal.
I’m afraid I just have to side with Penguin on this one.
Penguin is denying that this Rosenblatt’s experience of the Holocaust is true? Are the people at Penguin holocaust deniers?
From the sound of it, Penguin’s not the only one who’s denying it. He apparently admitted to his agent that he’d made up the love story element of the book, which was the main selling point and which constitutes a breach of contract due to misrepresentation.
Too many authors have that TV/movie image of writers and editors arguing over missed deadlines, and not having any consequences. Well, it’s real life, people, so honor your contracts or pay the price.
1. Robert Caro has blown deadlines. Should his books have been canceled and the money returned?
2. Too many authors make a HABIT of this; not just one advance from one publisher. Like Hollywood book publishing is a small town; everybody else knows what’s going on (and has gone on) elsewhere.
3. A lot of times writers get in over their heads with books that require a lot of reporting, especially first books, and they shut down out of fear/panic.
4. My guess is that virtually all the books on the list are non-fiction except the one that showed up as fiction. This seems to me to be the most egregious crime : deliberately falsifying non-fiction historical horror for commercial purposes. Such efforts embolden Iran’s Holocaust “thesis.”
5. Publishers often buy “trendy” as non-fiction. Sometimes they aren’t so trendy. But the culture moves on. The publisher, out of fear/panic, cancels the book. The problem is compounded by editors consistently moving on to greener pastures in one form or another.
6. If an author is cooperative, responsive, in contact, at least churning out some fresh new material – not re-working the original proposal as smoke and mirrors – all of which would require an editor who’s genuinely available (authors are often afraid of this power that publishers and editors have over them, through the boilerplate, so they bullshit everybody [especially themselves] or turn into children with “the dog ate my homework” excuses – I say give them a last chance re-worked contract. (Nikki Finke herself found herself in this position I believe.) There’s at least one author on this list who, ultimately, delivered books regularly and has sold many units at a number of different publishers.
7. The boilerplate book publishing contract is a mostly non-negotiable post-war antique. Between the fall of Borders and the rise of reading devices maybe it’s time (finally) for book publishers to look up.
8. Andrew Wylie tried to throw down the gauntlet with Penguin regarding E-book royalties. How well he fared is open to interpretation but at least he tried.
9. At the end of the day it’s the author alone in a room – it’s not some conspiracy to defraud Penguin.
10. I had an editor once tell me that it isn’t publishers’ responsibility to financially support book writers. Who’s is it?
11. There’s a reason why Dickens and Maugham are still in print and both ultimately (Dickens) lived well. They took their deadlines seriously and were rewarded in turn. When authors put or find themselves in this position they have to understand that it isn’t just their own careers that they’re sabotaging. Publishers, authors, agents, retail outlets – everybody feels the burn if not the blunt end of contractual systemic dysfunctional.
Self publishing and ebooks are the way to go. Big publishers are going the way of the old music labels. Writers will always write. Now there’s a new platform and the artist has more control over it.