A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

For previous installments in this series, click on VERY BAD PUBLISHERS.

The rest of these posts won’t make much sense unless you read the previous installments.

Finished?

Good.

OK, now I advise you to pop on over to John Green’s blog and read his comments about how the publishing world might be improved if authors took smaller advances up front. Something I did at the SECOND worst publisher I ever worked for, expecting a good return on royalties after I got some nice five figure midlist sales.

But as we see, creative accounting can make sure you don’t get those royalties. 10% or 20% of cover would be very nice, but my personal experience is that there are some publishers out there who will do everything in their power to make sure you never get that 10% of cover. One of my publishers even figured out a way to knock 10% down to 1.25%.

The comments section on Mr. Green’s blog is an essential read. Mediabistro linked to Green’s blog, and also has a couple of other links that may be of interest. Mediabistro should be a daily visit for you.

And now, back to my story.

My experiences with my ex- publisher began when they approached me about A Distant Soil when I was in high school. They decided I was too young to take a chance on, so I ended up doing a lot of work for a series of other unfortunate clients. A few of them were also Very Bad Publishers.

I’m not sure how instructive the experiences were, just creepy in a hedonistic 1980′s science fiction convention sort of way. The only good thing I got out of my contact with those jokers was a lot of squicky subtext in A Distant Soil. And some information and experience I was able to use to make some dough on my project. But more on that later.

It was 1986 before I went to work with the Very Bad Publisher in this series. The trade division was shut down in 1989, and a lawsuit was filed about a year later. Can’t recall exact dates anymore. It was about a year before that was all settled. But soon after, they were calling asking me to help sell their backlist in the direct market.

I think that’s a riot.

Anyway, flash forward ten years.

Another thing I have learned in publishing is that no matter how acrimonious your split with someone, no matter how much you hate each other, or how badly someone has treated you, or how hurtful they claim you have been to them, there is one thing you can always expect from your former adversary:

They’ll be back.

Years after The Woman was gone from our publisher, she approached me and tried to chat me up at a convention. This didn’t go over well with me and I gave her the cut direct. To put it mildly, she was furious.

Some ten years after I had last worked with her, she was still fuming. She sent me an 8 page letter threatening a lawsuit over about a half a dozen things, primarily over her extremely deluded belief that I had done an illegal reprint of the GN I had illustrated for her. (And let’s face it, a 64 page comic is a squarebound comic book, not a graphic novel. OK?) I had bought the books fair and square from my publisher for resale like any wholesaler.

In addition, she had been writing A Distant Soil fanfic and selling it, and was making extremely bizarre claims that I was plagiarizing her fanfic. Some may recall that I used to be extremely touchy about fanfic. Now you know why. One of my former editors was writing and selling fanfic of my work, and ten years later, was claiming I was getting all my ideas from her…and if that isn’t ballsy, I don’t know what is.

To make matters even stranger, she claimed she had not actually been reading the comic series.

Hunh?

Wow, that’s some amazing skill, to know what I am writing and drawing without having actually read it.

OK, IMHO this was just a pathetic attempt to get my attention, but only the infantile think bad attention is better than no attention.

I turned her letter over to my attorney just like you are supposed to with this sort of thing, and in the absence of a sufficient personal response from me, she began calling me on the phone.

I deduce she got my unlisted number from a fan in Texas. I dismissed The Woman with some choice swear words. She wailed, “At least I don’t have to call people names!” Holy cow, what, are we in elementary school?

I handed her back to my attorney again where this kind of nonsense belongs. I still recall her screaming “Why do you need an attorney? Why do you have an attorney on retainer? I bet you get sued all the time! You’re that kind of person!”

OK, that part was actually both funny and pathetic at once, so I laughed.

I don’t have an attorney on retainer, but if I was rich enough to afford one, I’d probably need one because where money is, lawsuits follow. And to be perfectly frank, I have been involved in exactly two publishing industry lawsuits in about a 25 year career, and both involved her.

After being turned back over to my attorney, and getting some more sad and weird mail from her, she finally made a noise like a hoop and rolled away. Later, she boo-hooed on message boards about how mean I was and how we had just had “a misunderstanding” and how I had “overreacted” to her fanfic. Actually, I had reacted appropriately to her outrageous claims and threat of a lawsuit by turning her over to my lawyer.

Mean, mean, Colleen! Being so mean to fanfic authors! Uh hunh.

Exit The Woman, who would at least have appeared to have had some class if she had exited a little more gracefully.

Reenter the ex-publisher.

Or, to be more precise, the ex-publisher’s ex-partner.

Recall the last part of my massive epic about my adventures with my ex-publisher. They had been operating under the mistaken belief that my fellow authors and I were engaged in some kind of conspiracy with the publisher’s ex-partner to take all of our books to his New Age publishing company. As I said, I barely knew the ex-partner, had no idea he was starting up a new company, and couldn’t have cared less. I was self publishing A Distant Soil, at the time, and later moved to Image. I had no contact with the ex-partner in at least 15 years. We’ll call him Tom.

Tom’s New Age small press had a trade division line that looked to be set up a lot like the old publisher. I’d never heard of his company nor seen any of his books in stores, but I did some research when this all came up again. They appeared to have one hit book that sold very well and a lot of books that didn’t. They were adding a line of unauthorized celebrity biographies as well as insta-books about other people’s books: fan-service pop bios and info-tainment. None of it could even be considered close to academic quality, but then, it didn’t claim to be. They were out to make a buck. Authors who didn’t even know the material were instant experts after a quick read of whatever popular novel was being made into a movie. A few weeks research on the internet, add some reprints of previously published articles, bind it, and you’ve got a quickee dollar riding the coattails of someone else’s success.

I’d done some articles and art for books like this, but usually as favors for colleagues. I think my grand total income on about 1/2 dozen books of this kind was $500 combined. Usually, I didn’t get paid at all. I took most of these sorts of gigs because I was a fan of the source material. If someone wanted to interview me about what I thought of Anne Rice, or they wanted me to write an article about Clive Barker, it was a pleasure.

Over time, these sorts of books made me uncomfortable, especially after someone wrote an unauthorized bio about me. I steer away from these kinds of assignments now. Especially the ones that don’t pay…

Anyway, some years ago, I was contacted with news about Tom and his new publishing venture. I hadn’t given Tom a thought in almost two decades because I never gave Tom a thought even when I was in the same room with him. He may have been a publishing partner at my old company, but I hardly ever spoke to him and he never worked directly with me. He was gone before the lawsuit came along. I had very few memories of Tom.

Now I was being told that Tom was just the greatest guy. Some of the people at my old publisher had gone on to work for Tom, including staff and authors. My contacts were telling me Tom was not behind any of the ex-publisher’s weirdness. Tom was doing well with his new company and they were in serious need of decent artists. Wouldn’t I consider doing a new book cover for one of Tom’s celebrity bios?

Despite the glowing recommendation, I had reservations.

First, I did not believe for one second that Tom was not behind anything that had happened at the old publishing house. He was still there when I was the unpaid office drudge, and I don’t recall him stepping forward to say, “But my friends and colleagues! At the very least, she should have health insurance!” I don’t recall him stepping forward to say, “Dudes, these contracts of ours, they really suck. Can’t we give the authors a better deal?” I do recall nice houses and cars for the publishers, and a barely mobile Toyota with no front left end for me. I recall getting a ticket for having an expired sticker on my car because I couldn’t come up with $22 to pay my taxes, and a loaf of banana bread to eat that was supposed to last a week.

That’s what I recall.

Second, I’ve pretty much had it with the small press. Few of them are small because they want to be. The pay is usually lousy. Now I was making very good money as an artist at good publishers. I had a series at Marvel going on, and GN’s at other publishers, as well as various illustration assignments. I was making the best income of my career. The A Distant Soil GN’s were even earning decent money at Image. Even though they weren’t selling nearly as well as I would like, the superior Image contract enabled me to make enough money to continue my series. Go, Image!

My contacts at Tom’s new publishing house assured me over and over that not only was this locale simply a jolly place to be, but they would pay me very good money to do a cover for an unauthorized book about JK Rowling.

My fangirl sense was tingling. JK Rowling! Harry Potter! Oh, boy!

OK, what to do? Take the chance? Grapple with the ex-publisher’s ex-partner? Was he a rat or not? And when would I get another chance to even get near the glory that was HARRY POTTER? I sure as heck wasn’t likely to get a shot at illustrating the real books, but this would be cool by proxy.

Against my better judgement, I agreed to the job and the price they offered (not nearly as good pay as I was told it would be) and I whipped up a color sketch.

Before I even turned in my doodle, I knew I had made a mistake.

The art director called. She did not want to work with me. This she made very clear. The publisher usually worked with in-house artists and she was not happy to work with some stranger. She was clearly not familiar with terms of art or my work. I later learned she had no art training at all. One thing was for sure, she wanted me off the assignment, and yet she couldn’t just fire me. The publisher had told her to work with me.

So, she was going to make things difficult.

The first difficult thing she was going to do was she was going to cut my pay. By a full third.

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