(H/t Oliver Willis) The New York Times has an article entitled Conservative Authors Sue Regnery Publishing Over Royalties. Some authors who publish through Regenery Press are mad because they get little to no royalties for books sold through at steep discounts. Regenery, which is an arm of the right-wing noise machine, moves a ton of books in this fashion. That helps them to get some of their crap listed on the New York Times bestseller lists.
Some of the authors’ books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, including “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,†by Mr. Corsi and John E. O’Neill (who is not a plaintiff in the suit), Mr. Patterson’s “Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security†and Mr. Miniter’s “Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror.â€
I’ve gotta think Regenery is going to get the better end of this. I imagine they have contracts that allow them to distribute the books as they see fit. And, I imagine it will be tough for Corsi, et al, to prove that people who received the books at a deep discount would have otherwise paid retail for the books.
In a perfect (to me) world, the authors lose, Regenery Press loses, and their lawyers win.
Yeah, that one’s pretty much like the annual ND/Michigan game, where I root for “earthquake”.
That said, I gotta go with Regnery, too. It’s their canny marketing that makes a lot of that stuff New York Times bestsellers and puts them on the table just inside Barnes & Noble’s front door. Drop by the B&N Current Events section from time to time. See how much of the Michael Barone (e.g.) catalogue is there vs. whether it ever gets any smaller–excepting when whole titles go back to the publisher (for full credit, by the way). Now see if you can find a single copy of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City. They’ve done an outstanding job, and if selling half those titles to themselves is the answer then congratulations are in order. Plus, any other publisher would have to pay smaller royalties in the first place, since most of them employ fact checkers.