Warning: When I’m pissed off, I cuss like a drunk sailor
on a weekend pass so this post will be riddled with profanity.
My penchant for wanting to believe the best in people
has bitten me in the ass one too many times. So, I’m breaking my silence on the
Ellora’s Cave debacle. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to contract my first
book with EC. At the time, they had a great reputation for not only paying
royalties on time but paying early. Fuck yeah! I thought I finally got my foot
in the door with a legitimately successful publishing company. My unabashed
glee was short-lived when that first book was published. I started hearing
grumblings about late royalties. I didn’t want to believe that voice whispering
in my ear that I was probably about to get fucked three ways from Sunday. In
the interim, I’d sold them more books.
When my first round of royalties came in, I did a
little fist pump. Maybe the rumors were unfounded. Maybe these other authors
were just unhappy that they weren’t getting paid every month anymore when the
contracts provided for *quarterly payments. Maybe Ellora’s Cave wasn’t really
abdicating the provisions of the contracts. See the opening line of this post.
I wanted to believe things weren’t as they were. But wait, why is this check
dated November 3, 2014, while the postmark on the envelope is dated December
26, 2014? What the hell?
After the myriad excuses sent by email blaming the
late royalties on faulty software and sick relatives, I finally came to terms
with the fact that I was being bent over the barrel along with many others.
When I reconciled that in my mind, I sent an email demanding my rights be
reverted on all titles because EC had breached all my contracts by not paying
royalties on time. The canned reply I got was this:
“I'm
sorry, you have misinterpreted the contract you signed. Breach of clause 16
regarding royalties payments (or any other contract clause) does not void the
contract nor revert book rights to you. When a contract is breached, the party
claiming breach has the option of waiting for the other party to correct the
situation or may pursue legal action to gain correction of the situation. In
such case, the court would typically set a deadline by which time the situation
must be corrected ("cured"), and if not corrected the court would
decide on further action.”
So, basically, to paraphrase, I was told
that it didn’t really matter that they weren’t paying me. If I didn’t want to
wait for them to remedy the situation, I could sue them to enforce the contracts.
Motherfuckers. Not only were they not paying me, but now my books were being
held hostage by contracts they clearly breached and they were telling me to go
fuck myself in a very polite way. By the way, my EC books have never been big
sellers and hiring an intellectual property attorney to sue on my behalf would
have cost a shit ton more than they owed me. I simply wasn’t, and still am not,
in the position to spend thousands of dollars to sue them. And I shouldn’t have
to.
My last check was in December 2015 for **March-June 2105 royalties. I’ve put in requests for reversion of rights based on low
sales for a couple of my titles. However, without any royalty statements beyond June 2015, it’s a little hard to figure that shit out. With a heavy heart, I
removed all my EC titles from my website and don’t promote them anymore. That’s
what hurts even more than the money…the fact that I have to tell my readers not
to buy some of the books I poured my god damned heart and soul into. That’s
just seriously fucked up. I still have a contract for one more book in my
series but when all this started rolling downhill, I couldn’t write it. It was
just too painful. For a while, I couldn’t write anything. You have to be a
creative to really grasp how much shit like this will fuck with your head and
shut you down. So, that next book in my series…I’ll tell Ellora’s Cave what
they told me. If you want it, sue me.
There’s no damned witch hunt aimed at EC despite the
claims being made on a certain nonsensical and insane website. We’re just
pissed off and tired of being jerked around. I stand with all the other authors
who are in the same boat that I am. I was wrong to give EC the benefit of the doubt. I’m sorry it took me so long to speak out.
I hope you all will forgive my initial optimism. My hope now is that we’ll all get
our rights back and we can close this chapter of our writing careers and move
on to bigger, better things.
Blessings to all.
Alyssa #NotChilled
* I'm including this note for clarity. I paraphrased what the contract says for brevity purposes. It does not say "quarterly." What it does say is this: "Publisher shall pay Author royalties in accordance with a schedule to be determined at Publisher's discretion but in no event shall payment be me made less frequently than every three (3) calendar months,..."
** Corrected to include royalties from March-June 2015 for the December 2015 check I received. I erroneously wrote just March 2015 initially.
