Eating Their Own.

Shut up and finish your “Best Seller”. Comrade.

File under: “First they came for the textile workers. The steel workers. The air traffic controllers. The teachers, the press-operators, the service workers…”


This from the NYT with a large h/t to LowerManhattanite at the Group News Blog.

Conservative Authors Sue Publisher
By MOTOKO RICH

Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.

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.”

…

Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books,” Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

In an e-mail statement, Bruce W. Sanford, a lawyer with Baker Hostetler, a Washington firm representing Eagle and Regnery, said: “No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers.”
...

“You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away,” Mr. Patterson said in an interview.
…

Joel Mowbray, author of “Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security,” said he was particularly disappointed in Regnery and Eagle because they had so championed conservative authors. “These guys created the conservative book market,” Mr. Mowbray said. “Before them, conservatives were having to fight, generally unsuccessfully, to get books published.”
…

It is unpossible for me to consume enough beer to be able to piss myself laughing at a gallon-per-minute rate sufficient to convey how fucking funny this story is, for some obvious reasons, and for some less-than-obvious ones.

So, hero, what would John Galt do?

Fuck you, you unrugged, collectivist trial-lawyer-hiring spongers off of the honest labor of degenerate billionaires; you know exactly what he’d do.

He’d hew his own publishing company out of the raw Teton rock using only a hardback copy of "Anthem" he liberated from a damned socialist "free" public li'berry, and the stone-splitting Rand-rays that he can fire from his own glinty eyes.

Then he’d light it, heat it and surround it with an impenetrable death-ray/ cloaking-device shield wall using the ideologically-pure current he generated from a fantabulous electrification machine that somehow draws pinheaded self-righteousness directly from the air and converts it into electricity, invented entirely by he himself using only parts from a broken rheostat, various condiments, and an unlimited supply of unreadably turgid prose.

And, lastly, staff it with hottie Messiah College grads that happily accept their place as corporate cum-dumpsters in the great Objectivist food pyramid.

And if you are incapable of doing the same, Teh Rand Rules clearly state that you need to STFU and die off to make room for the Hedge Fund Ubermench To Come.

Those that created this industry -- who control the means of production -- have the inalienable right to skullfuck you to death and sell your remains for soap bones and pemmican. And if you don’t like it and refuse to start your own publishing empire, it’s obviously because you’re a whiny Stalinist loser who deserves nothing less than to be wiped from the face of the Earth by an army of stilted cardboard fictional capitalist protagonists.

Of course what has been generally missed in all of this is that cranking out wingnut hateporn in not the job of an artist or an artisan at all.

It is, in fact, a manufacturing job -- and a very 19th century one at that, since no actual skill seem to be required.

You issue your drone a bucket of adjectives – “traitor”, “surrender”, “Culture of Death” – that can be assembled as fast and cheap as a job-lot of Chinese lead-based, date-rape toys.

Drop in quotes and studies from wingnut welfare think-tanks or your circle-jerking fellow travelers.

Tack on a couple of breathless blurbs from Wingnuttia celebrities and -- yay! -- Thurston Howell VI is now a really, really, for-real “Author”

Finally Mommy can tell those neighbors who have been loudly speculating about why Hairless Junior doesn’t like girls to STFU (He’s not a self-hating, no-talent closet-case; he’s an “artist” for The Cause), and can put his magnum opus up on the fridge with those extra-super-powerful “Support Our Troops” ribbon magnets he gave her for Mother’s Day last year.

You think these clowns are pissed now?

Ha.

I predict you and I will live to see the day when the business of Conservative print-media bigotry and pop-up book hate is outsourced to the WalMarts of this world and those who have duped themselves into thinking they have actually been adding to the sum of human knowledge will have to radically


reconsider their rates.

We will live to see the day when Regnery starts offshoring the dirty, repetitive job of extruding and lathing wingnut hateporn to a million, English-fluent Indians.

And when the task of pooping out columns into the NRO is jobbed out to an army of eager Messicans.