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Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Dogs, fleas, etc.
Posted by Jill | 6:27 AM
I love when wingnuts eat their own. After all, why should Democrats have the only circular firing squad?

It's hard to feel sorry for the authors who have their screeds published by Regnery Press. Without this wingnut purveyor of the printed word, these swill-peddlers would probably be either selling their mimeographed screeds on street corners or toiling away at dawn every day like the rest of us. Instead, they get published and their books are bought in bulk by wingnut organizations, and those bulk purchases push them onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Except that when Regnery plays fast and loose with the royalty structure and it affects THEIR OWN POCKETS, suddenly these so-called "conservatives" are no longer singing the praise of maximization of corporate profits:

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.”

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.” In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.

“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”

Traditionally, authors receive a 15 percent royalty based on the cover price of a hardcover title after they have sold enough copies to cover the cost of the advance they receive upon signing a contract with a publisher. (Authors whose books are sold at steep discounts or to companies that handle remaindered copies receive lower royalties.)

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.


Of course that's what bumps up sales of these books, which appeal primarily to the twenty-eight percenter crowd. The reason these people end up on the Today show and on evening news shows is BECAUSE of the tactics Regnery uses to pump up sales numbers.

The John Birch Society used to publish books. They were more like pamphlets, but they were publications. There was a John Birch Society bookstore at a particular location on Route 22 in New Jersey that I won't mention because I can't find a link to corroborate this recollection. So wingnut screeds have always been published in one form or another. It wasn't until Regnery came on the scene, turned what is essentially vanity publishing into something that at least looke like "real" trade publishing, and by selling huge quantities of its books at discount to wingnut groups managed to inflate the sales numbers to the point of credibility.

So excuse me if I don't sit up tonight crying for the put-upon authors in the Regnery stable; people who sing the praises of unfettered capitalism -- until that unfettered capitalism affects their own wallets.

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