Latest / The WritersWeekly Podcast / Episode 58: Publishers Who Have Been Sued, and Some of the Lawsuits Were INSANE!

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Episode 58: Publishers Who Have Been Sued, and Some of the Lawsuits Were INSANE! · The WritersWeekly Podcast

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to the Writers Weekly Podcast, a forum geared toward the writing enthusiast and those who want to make money from their writing.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_03: I'm Brian Winner, the managing editor of Writers Weekly, and I'll be your host along with Angela Hoy, the creator of Writers Weekly, and President and CEO of HookBucker.com, the service of the publishing company.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: How to find publishing.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: We'll be discussing the topics relating to the writing of the publishing industry.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_03: You can also click over to writersweekly.com.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: There you'll find not only thousands of articles about professional writing, you can also find current paying markets and job listings to help you boost your writing career and even your bottom line.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_03: But for now, let's get on to this episode of the Writers Weekly Podcast.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: Hello again and welcome to another episode of the Writers Weekly Podcast.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_03: I'm your host, Brian Widden, managing editor of Writers Weekly, and with me, as usual, Angela Hoy, president CEO of BookGlocker.com and the creator of Writers Weekly.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: We have some very interesting stories to share with everybody today.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: We want to hear some examples.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: Well, first we have somebody we have to introduce here.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, Clayton?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_03: Clayton's in with us again.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_03: Angie, take it away.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to give you a few little snippets before we get started on everything.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: Some teasers.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: Here's some teasers.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Which publisher sued Amazon, leading to a$300,000 settlement?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: A scammer sued Writers Weekly after getting exposed.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Guess who won that lawsuit?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Which Holocaust denier sued Penguin Books and what stupid thing did he do that resulted in losing him losing in court?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Which psychologist sued Doubleday and an author after his information about his nude therapy appeared in a novel?
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Anybody know what nude therapy is?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_03: I'm willing to check it out.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: Sounds interesting.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Which libel lawsuit led to the demise of the Saturday Evening Post?
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why did Authorhouse have to pay a plaintiff$230,000?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's a very interesting story.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: And Authorhouse is owned by Author Solutions.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, they recently sold it.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um why can't authors sue Amazon KDP?
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of authors are asking that question.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: Why is Ingram Spark currently facing investigations for potential class action lawsuit?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: And which two owners of a so-called Christian publishing company were arrested and later sued by their printer for two million dollars?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got others.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of good stuff today.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: So today's episode number 58, and we've titled it Publishers Who Have Been Sued, and some of the lawsuits were insane.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: We've got three examples today.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's just absolutely nuts.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Crazy lawsuits.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_03: And uh Clayton, once again, tell us a little bit about yourself.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm Clayton Jones.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: I teach uh writing at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and I'm an editor and uh screenwriter and writer and a podcast producer and a media specialist.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And a ghostwriter.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: And a ghostwriter.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do it.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit of everything.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I do a lot of things with writing.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: He's a busy man.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Clayton is booklocker author's favorite editor.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody loves Clayton.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And and they love his book marketing as well.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Very creative.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna we're gonna take off with publishers who have been sued, and which ones were insane.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: Angie, go for it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Booklocker years ago filed a lawsuit that actually impacted the entire publishing services and print-on-demand industries.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: We sued Amazon, the big one.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and this is according to Google.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: I actually Googled it to see what would pop up, and I learned a lot of things about that lawsuit that I was there.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: The white people talked about it, you know.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: The book surge controversy, book surge was the first name of the company.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Then Amazon changed the name to Create Space, and then they changed it to Amazon KDP, and we'll explain why in a minute.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_03: No, this this lawsuit took place back in 2008, long before I met you.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Went on for two years.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we won.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Teaser.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: Spoiler alert.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I meant.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: The book surge controversy and its eventual settlement with BookLocker fundamentally reshaped independent publishing, paving the way for the monolithic ecosystem we see today.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we did that.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: We did it.
• 4:44
  unknown: Cool.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: Now, um, before Create Space had had become the standard name for Amazon's print on demand division, uh, it largely operated under the brand of Book Surge.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: And in 2008, Booklocker.com, uh, an independent self-publishing company, that's our company, uh, filed a federal class action antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: Now, what was the dispute?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: Amazon issued an ultimatum to independent publishers that if they wanted their print-on-demand books to remain viable on Amazon, per so you could purchase it on Amazon there, um, they had to drop their existing third-party printers and force all printing to be done through Amazon's book search platform.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_03: So if you were, if if you were self-publishing, but you had, say, Lightning Source uh printing your books, what Amazon was trying to do was say, nope, they can't print your book anymore.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: We have to do the printing.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Or we're gonna remove your buy buttons from our website.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: And a big problem was that Amazon's printing quality was bad, um was inconsistent to say the least.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes you got a halfways decent book, sometimes you got a sucky book.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_03: Some examples, Andy.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_03: What kind of things did you see come out of Amazon?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we bought books that were printed by Amazon by BookSear and took them to court with us to show the judge the how bad they were.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Poorly cut.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: One had a bunch of pictures in it, and all the pictures look black, just like black boxes.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: You could barely see somebody in the picture.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: The printing quality was just really, really poor.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we weren't going to risk our reputation.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_03: They all line up nice and neat.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's like a flat surface.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_03: But some of the books coming out of uh uh book surge, uh Amazon's printing, the pages would be all cut different lengths, so you have this choppy edge to it.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so the outcome um was that Book Locker won the legal battle after two years.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: Amazon agreed to the settlement uh or to a settlement paying Book Locker's legal fees and dropping the forced restriction, allowing independent publishers to continue using external printers.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: Shortly after this legal firestorm, though, Amazon rebranded and reorganized its POD branch and call it create space.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um now the lawsuit um they had to pay our lawyers$300,000 and they offered us money as well, and we turned it down because we never wanted anybody to think that we sued Amazon to make a buck.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: We just wanted to, you know, them to not put us and all of our competitors out of business.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I think a real important um aspect to this story that a lot of people don't know is you tried to get a lot of other publishers on board to help you with this lawsuit, and everybody was scared or they had already acquiesced and signed the contracts uh agreeing to Amazon's terms.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they're still stuck with those today.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_03: Against Amazon, this this little publishing company called Booklocker, all by themselves, be it Amazon.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Amazon's initial aggressive tactics, followed by tactical rebranding and platform merges, directly built the modern self-publishing pipeline.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so And that's because of you.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, and and my team, yeah.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so while the booklocker lawsuit was still unfolding, the book surge name had accumulated significant negative press and a reputation for corporate bullying, of course.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we are responsible for Amazon changing the name of that division.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, Amazon's responsible for it.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And in late 2009, Amazon quietly folded BookSearch's print-on-demand infrastructure into another multimedia subsidiary it called Custom Flicks, and then they rebranded themselves.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: The combined entity was named Create Space by retiring the toxic BookSurge brand.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Amazon successfully reset its public imp image while retaining the exact same back-end print-on-demand quality.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: But that didn't last.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: So um though BookLocker won its individual settlement ensuring that Amazon couldn't touch their buy buttons uh on on the book pages, the the class action aspect didn't permanently halt um uh Amazon's leverage over the wider industry.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um most large self-publishing platforms and mid-list publisher publishers uh ultimately surrendered to Amazon's logistical terms.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like I said before, everybody kind of just went along to get along and left you out there by yourselves.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we were featured in the Wall Street Journal after we publicized it on writersweekly.com.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then I started getting phone calls from our competitors.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody wanted to put anything in writing, but they would say, Hey, can I have your phone number?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I would talk to them on the phone and I would say, Look, join on.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: Here's my law, my lawyer wants to talk to you.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: And every single one of them was too afraid to do it.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: And many of them had already signed the contract with Amazon.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we're talking multi-million dollar companies way bigger than we were.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: They they called it David versus Goliath back then.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_03: And we won.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: And because so many publishers fell for those illegal tactics, competing uh digital printers lost a massive chunk of direct to Amazon self-publishing traffic.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: So um, so then then there was another big, big merge, big change here in 2018.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, Amazon streamlined operations by completely absorbing CreateSpace into Amazon KDP, which is Kindle Direct Publishing.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, this also is your name again.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: This also helped Amazon distance itself from the bad reputations of Book Surge and Create Space.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, however, they didn't change their practices, and Amazon KDP uh still has countless complaints about it posted online by its authors, and we talked about some of those practices that people complain about from KDP.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: But you wonder how long it will be before another name change.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_03: Or there's another name change.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_03: Just keep changing the name.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: Time for time for a rebrand.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: And and unfortunately, people are too stupid to figure it out, I guess.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I mean, what are you gonna do?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: They've done a good job burying that.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean Amazon's still the biggest seller of books anywhere, so people still have to go to them.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't matter what the name is, right?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_03: So uh it's kind of a waste of time.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Just well, it's it's they're using Amazon's publishing arm, which we've talked about this before, is terminating authors left and right and keeping two months of their unpaid royalties.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: But so they can use other companies like Book Locker, and Book Locker has thousands of books on Amazon, and Amazon doesn't mess with us because we have thousands of books on their website, and because we sued them before in one.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so the booklocker versus book surge fight was the first major alarm bell warning um the publishing world about Amazon's retail dominance.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh Writers Weekly got sued one time.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: We've talked about this on an episode before.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was a scammer we exposed.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: That person claimed to publish books.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: He would hire writers to write chapters and he wouldn't pay them.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I started getting this is back in the day when we had whispers and warnings, and I was contacting publishers and magazines that weren't paying their writers.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: So here's how his scam worked he would approach a university and say, I'm gonna have a book written about your university.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he would hire these writers and they would each write a chapter about this university.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: He would print one copy of the book, send it to the university, and say, How many copies do you want to buy?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's how the scam ran.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: So we expose him.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: He was declared a vexatious litigator in California.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: He would sue all these people pro se, meaning he would represent himself.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: So he wasn't allowed to file any more lawsuits in California.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: So then he moved to Arizona and he kept filing frivolous lawsuits.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now, before suing Writers Weekly, he threatened to kidnap my kids and hire someone to quote take care of me.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Hitman.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: So uh he at one point sent us an email from his attorney and that person didn't exist.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_03: Which was yeah, which was him.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: He used some guy's name and some in a Gmail email address.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: We contacted the state bar.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: There was no attorney by that name in that state.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh his case was, of course, against Rogers Weekly was thrown out of court.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: He was ordered to pay 10,000 legal fees to us, but we never collected because shortly after that, I mean like weeks later, yeah, he was arrested and charged with aggravated DUI because he had his kids in the car with him.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: After so his his his scam must have been working for a while, right?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, we shut him down.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I mean, that's why he was so angry.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: He couldn't get anybody right for him anymore.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of scammers are pissed off at us.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_03: We start exposing them, and then all of a sudden their money dries up.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they they've got stakes in the game, and yeah.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's a violins, yeah.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now, after all that, after he lost in court and everything, he posted a YouTube video claiming he'd won the lawsuit against us.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's about 10 seconds long, and all it says is I won the lawsuit against Writers Weekly.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it he's it's uh like I can like I said, like a 10-second video showing what looks like a pile of paper, yeah, except and sitting on top of a box, and the pile of paper, it's it's all um fuzzy.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's out of focus.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you can't see what it is, yeah.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Why not?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um we and we looked this guy up this week.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he was involved in a lawsuit against his landlord, and we're we're quoting here, uh, but we're move removing the names and uh quoted here.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: The defendant entered into a residential lease agreement with the landlord, and the tenant used his father's name and identity on the lease agreement without his father's permission.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_03: The tenant fell delinquent in rent payments due each month.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: In addition, police were called to the residence on more than two dozen occasions, primarily for large gatherings, noise, and other disturbance-related issues.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds like a great neighbor, right?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_03: On on two occasions, uh police responded to an assault on the property, and he lost that lawsuit too.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: This guy just seems like a general dirtbag.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is this that same guy I saw on on that reality show the other day that that was stealing people's houses?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like he'd just move in.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Squatters, yeah.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, squat yeah.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think I think it's this guy.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So so what the the there's another one that's that's crazy.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: The the draft draft to digital lawsuit.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and and actually they they're they were sued this year, and uh it's it's absolutely insane.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is this is a crazy one.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, so so go pop your popcorn and get ready for this one.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Just click the pause button.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be right here when you get back.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:11
  unknown: Yeah.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: Now um hang on the plaintiff, yeah.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: Just just a second, Angie, explain what giraffe to digital is.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: One of our competitors.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: They they publish ebooks and print on demand books.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and lots of complaints about them online as well, but this lawsuit was filed against them is absolutely ridiculous.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about it, Clayton.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: So so the plaintiff, his name is Kareem Abdullah Teef Hilton.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Good job on that.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is self-described as an A-list CEO, franchise owner, and author.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: So he sued drafted digital, but he also sued Oklahoma University, the the computer science department.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he sued the Democratic National Committee.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Ah.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: So according to Trellis Doctor.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of a wide net.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: It really is.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think he was trying to see what would stick.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so he he alleged that his book series was sold on drafted digital, but but that it was illegally distributed to the DNC and other vendors without his authorization.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: And said that this caused him all kinds of financial harm.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: So last I checked, you don't have to get the author's permission to sell their book to anybody.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's why it's so ridiculous.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: So so but so so it gets better.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: He said that despite the fact that he reported this to the Better Business Bureau, and are you ready for this?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: The United Nations.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: He reported that to the United Nations.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that that I mean that seems logical, doesn't it?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's the chain of command.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: You you go from the BBB to the United Nations.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what I would have done.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: Does the UN have a a Bureau of Publishing?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: Or uh, you know, the the the the uh General Assembly of Publishing or diplomats, Brian.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: Publishing diplomats.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: How do I get that gig?
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: So so uh I mean none of them responded, obviously.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: The defendants didn't respond, right?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't respond to the United Nations and the better business.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, they didn't respond.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, I mean, why why would you?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: So so, anyways, uh Kareem Hilton estimated that his damages, all of his damages, were hundreds of millions of dollars, and he wanted billions in punitive damages.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there were all kinds of other ridiculous allegations.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but ultimately uh he he demanded that drafted digital be disbanded and you know, probation for business and jail time and all that kind of stuff.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Man, you can't make this stuff anyways.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: No, no.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, draft I wonder how much money Draft to Digital had to pay for that to defend themselves in that ridiculous lawsuit.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: But probably there are lots of complaints about drafted digital online, but when I read that story, I felt very sorry for them.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: All right, I've got one um that that uh Penguin uh Penguin Random House got sued.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: Uh this was back in 1996 when they were Penguin Books Limited.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: The case is Irving versus Penguin Books Limited.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um and in 1996, a Holocaust denier named David Irving sued another sued sued an author, Deborah.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I gotta be careful how I pronounce this.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: Lipstot.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_03: I could try.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Lipstot.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: That sounds good.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: Deborah Libstott and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in the UK.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: He claimed that Libstot's book, denying the Holocaust, uh, defamed his reputation.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Penguin and Libstot famously won the case in 2000 by providing that Irving had deliberately manipulated historical evidence.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think they proved, yeah, that that he uh manipulated it.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, go ahead.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_03: And um what it came down to was that the plaintiff had historically misrepresented facts in the past, and he admitted to doing so before filing the lawsuit.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: So if you're gonna if you're gonna go ahead and admit to what your defendant's gonna bring up in court, prove in court, why even go forward with it?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: I know that's kind of stupid.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's uh a lot of stupid lawsuits.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then then there's the one with uh with Viking and Penguin.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Vik Viking, which is part of Penguin.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and they they got the the lawsuit that totaled 49 million by South Dakota governor and an FBI agent over Peter Matt Hyson's book in the spirit of crazy horse, which uh that that was the investigation of the 1975 shootout at the Indian Reservation.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was Pine Pine Ridge.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Pine Ridge, right.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um so the publisher stood by the book, and after years and years of of being in court, it got dismissed.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it did establish protections for authors that uh were were doing investigative reporting on public officials.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: So great.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, neither defendant could prove any malice, and it went on for years and years and years.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then I did pull up a quote here from the New York Times that says this the prolonged legal battles served as a major literary cause celeb celebre celebra.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm great at Latin today, uh ultimately reinforcing the rights of authors and journalists to publish critical historical interpretations and one sided perspectives on public officials without consent.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Without constant fear of harassing litigation.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's good.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_03: That's great.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: Let's see.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Doubleday and Company.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: This is a juicy one.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: So the the case is called uh Bendram and uh Bendram v.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_03: Mitchell.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um so psychologist Paul Bendram uh sued author Gwen Davis Mitchell and her publisher Doubleday for libel.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um Mitchell attended the plaintiff's nude therapy program and agreed not to photograph or write about what went on.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um however, after the workshop was over, she did go and write a novel based upon the so-called therapy technique.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um why you would admit to having gone to nude therapy, I don't know.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, but I'm gonna have to check that book out.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um so the plaintiff claimed that a character in Mitchell's novel Touching, it's a good name for a novel, I guess.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um the character therapy book.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: For a nude therapy book, yeah.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um he says that the character who conducted nude therapy sessions was a defamatory caricature of him.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um now, despite the book being marketed as fiction, a California court ruled that the caricature was recognizable enough to constitute libel, forcing Doubleday and the author to pay damages.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: And the publisher and author were ordered to pay fifty thousand dollars in compensatory damages as well as punitive damage.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is a lesson to authors.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's something we talk to really carefully if you talk about a mechanic under a fake name, that's one thing, but a dude author offering nude therapy, there's probably not a whole lot of those.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them, yeah.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, but what about the second book in the series?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was called Not Touching.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: So there's one that happened happened here in Georgia, Supreme Court case.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Curtis Publishing Company versus Butts.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so Wally Wally Butts at all with the right.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Wally Butts was uh was getting nude therapy.
• 24:29
  unknown: I'm just kidding.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he the guy's real name is Wally Butts, and that's a very unfortunate name.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is, it is.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he he uh he was the athletic director at University of Georgia, and he sued Curtis Publishing, which publishes the Saturday Evening Post, and uh the because the magazine had published an unverified article saying that that Butts fixed a football game.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I remember this.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the Supreme Court ruled against Curtis Publishing, and they established that public figures could recover liable damages if if a publisher exhibited a reckless disregard for the truth.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so the result was that uh the the the demise of the Saturday evening post.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it was a massive financial blow.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, when they lost that lawsuit.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, if if you're gonna accuse somebody of something, you better have really good evidence of it, you know, to prove it.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um just saying you think that's what happened, and here's why I think, but it didn't happen.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: That's a big especially, you know, as big a as big a college football state as Georgia is, right?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: For you to accuse uh a coach of throwing a football game.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's yeah, you don't accuse Wally Butts of anything.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, stay away from Wally Butts.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_03: We could go on and on.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: We could.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: We could.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Royal versus Main and Encounter Books.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_03: Uh or maybe that's Royale.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_03: No, Royal, yeah, with two L's.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's gonna so there's a Texas real estate developer, and he files a lawsuit, a libel lawsuit against author Carla Main and her conservative publishing house encounter books, uh, over a book um called Bulldozed, Kelo, Eminent Domain, and the American Lust for a Land.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's that's a mouthful.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_03: Quite a title.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so let's just call the book Bulldozed.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, oddly enough, they also sued a law professor um who simply wrote a blurb for the book.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's ridiculous.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_03: The real estate developer attempted to force the publisher to sell or to pull the books off the shelves, leading to a major free speech battle in Texas appellate courts.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: The professor was dismissed from the suit.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: Good.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: Uh later, the Texas Fifth Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the author and encounter books, uh, dismissing the claims and affirming that the First Amendment fully protects critical reporting on government land use and imminent domain.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this sounds to me like some rich real estate developer who just wants to just set somebody up.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that that's that was when imminent domain was was getting pretty hot.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I mean that's what that is.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: They they were they were afraid of losing their development.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: That that's right.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, uh, Harper Collins was involved in a lawsuit, but they were the plaintiff.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: For decades, they only had to print, they only had print books listed on their contracts because back then there were no ebooks.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: So when ebooks came around, they started publishing their author's works as ebooks as well.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: The contract verbiage in the original version, it stated the exclusive right to publish the work in book form.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: In book form.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't say what specific again, there weren't e-books back then.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: So in one case, a company called Open Road offered to publish the ebook for one of HarperCollins' bestselling authors and offered to pay her 50% royalties.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, she said, sure, okay.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: HarperCollins sued Open Road and won.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: The judge ruled that the language and the contract at that time applied to future versions of the book as well.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because all it says is book form.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_03: Book form.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_03: And ebook is a type of book.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_03: It's just electronics.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: So so what about Author House?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Oh man.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Authorhouse.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Our nemesis.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: There.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Tell you.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: So many complaints over the years.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: And they've been purchased like three or four times now.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: They now fall under the umbrella of author solutions.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead, Clayton.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: The they're they're author solutions.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: They've got uh they they face major defamation and class action lawsuits regarding publishing liability and business practices.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um so here's here's a few different examples here.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's one that's a defamation and libel, where a Kansas jury found that Authorhouse was guilty and ordered them to pay$230,000 in actual damages.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that that was a case that involved a book called Paperback Poison, The Romance Writer and the Hitman, um, by an author about best selling romance writer, Rebecca Brandewine.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so even though Author House's contracts included liability waiver provisions, the court still held them accountable because the author had specifically alerted the company to the defamatory content prior to publication.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we've had authors alert us in the past, hey, you know, when I publish this book, you might hear from my brother-in-law or my dad or something.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: Or someone's law.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I'm like, hey, okay, I check out the book, and I'm and if I see a lawsuit coming, I say, I'm gonna give you your money back, you need to go publish your book through one of our competitors and get them sued instead.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: So so yeah, uh Author Solutions is also involved in a couple of different class action lawsuits.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if you get online, you can you can check this out uh because they they own man, they own all kinds of of different websites, other companies, iUniverse, Trafford, uh, XLibri, all kinds of them.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: But the the the major class action litigation was filed by by uh some authors, and the lawsuits uh alleged deceptive marketing practices.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Hang on to your hats for that, right?
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: Loyalty miscalculations, poor customer service, and heavy upselling pressure for expensive packages.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it sounds uh sounds just like like a scammer, doesn't it?
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: Usually the plaintiffs invoked the Indiana Senior Conn Consumer Sales Act, explicitly accusing the firm of exploiting senior citizens.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: These federal cases were ultimately resolved without a class-wide judgment, and both major class action lawsuits against Author Solutions were resolved through private settlements.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, doesn't surprise me.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yep.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, Author House and Author Solutions, there's there's so many subsidiaries under things partnerships, yeah.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: And in March of 2025, uh Authorhouse.com was sold to Center Street Ventures, but Author Solutions still has that company listed on their website.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if you go to Authorsolutions.com and you click on our imprints, and which their imprints, um, Authorhouse is still listed there, but they got sold last year.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_03: So it's weird.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder if that was a little agreement between uh Center Street Ventures and and Author Solutions to keep Author House under visible under Author Solutions.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know what it is.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: Which is crazy because there are so many complaints about them online, and there have been for years and years and years.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: I keep thinking they're offloading it because they don't want to be associated with anymore, but maybe somebody just forgot to remove it from their website.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know, but Author Solutions is included in the science fiction and fantasy writers of America's thumbs down publishers list.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_03: Thumbs down.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they have multiple watchdog advisories from the Alliance of Independent Authors and numerous alerts from Writers Beware.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: And also on Writers Week Beware.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_03: That's a popular website.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: Rider Beware, yeah.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: And our website as well.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_03: We we've talked a lot about authors.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um they've also uh been featured prominently, uh meaning negatively uh on writersweekly.com over the years.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, it's fine.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and we will include a list of all of their imprints under this episode at writersleaking.com slash podcast, episode 58.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: So there's uh there's another one that that's uh very very important, the the ebook pricing fix.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: All kinds of companies get in trouble for that.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's that's where you had the big five, uh Penguin, Random House, Hatchet, HarperCollins, McMillan, and Simon and Schuster.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: They they were they were accused of of uh ebook price fixing.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the lawsuit called them all co-conspirators.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds about right.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh according to The Guardian, Amazon and the publishers use a clause known as most favored nations, the MFN, to keep ebook prices artificially high by agreeing to price restraints that force consumers to pay more for ebooks purchased on retail platforms that are not Amazon.com.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: And three of those publishers opted to settle rather than go to court.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that that that tells you something, doesn't it?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's also a a similar case where the same law firm sued uh Apple and the big five for uh fixing e ebook prices in in 2011.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they just got sued all over again.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, all over again.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that case uh eventually led to lawsuits from several U.S.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: states and the Department of Justice, which accused Apple of colluding in order to break up Amazon's dominance in the ebook market.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in that case, the publishers settled for$166 million while Apple lost at trial and was ordered to pay out four hundred and fifty million.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: Should have settled like the publishers.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sorry.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and yeah, they there was a lengthy legal process that ended when the U.S.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: Supreme Court declined to hear the company's challenge.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: I can't believe they took that all the way to the Supreme Court.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_03: And if if I'm not mistaken, Amazon still requires that your book not be priced any less on other uh marketing platforms than on Amazon.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: On other retailers, yeah.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_03: So if if your if your book is$5.99 on Amazon, it can't be$4.99 anywhere else.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise they'll take it, they'll threaten to take it off their website.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: I believe Amazon is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with the federal government over that.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_03: I don't yeah, I don't think they should be able to do that.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_03: No, me neither.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, yeah.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_03: Uh let's talk about book baby.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is a this is a really bizarre story as well.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_03: Book baby is one that we've we've exposed many times on writers week.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's a lot of complaints about them, but this is another case of they got involved in this lawsuit, and and I've and then I felt sorry for our competitor, so go ahead.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_03: So the case is DCG Arts Holdings LLC versus DIY Media Group Incorporated, and DIY Media Group is the parent company of BookBaby.com.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: DCG Arts Holdings sued BookBaby's parent company for alleged breach of contract.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, we found the details on PACER Monitor.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_03: I had to pay for this.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh seriously, there's some of them in order to get the actual court paperwork, you gotta pay 20 cents.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the amount in controversy exceeds$75,000, but keep listening here.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: In March of 2025, DCG Arts Holdings paid Book Baby$2,649.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, now there's there's two different amounts in the complaint.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_03: They paid that to publish a book called Monty Moves to Honeytown Beach, and they paid an additional six hundred and fifty dollars for marketing services.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_03: DCG Arts Holdings in the lawsuit claims that there were significant delays, uh, but it was actually only three months before the book was finally put on the market.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_03: They claimed that the book wasn't listed correctly on Amazon, it was listed as out of print after a while, and accused Book Baby of false, misleading, and deceptive practices.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now I have specific knowledge about Amazon's inner workings and how they how the book pages work.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: No publisher can force Amazon or any other retailer to list their books.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm pretty sure that no publishing services company or publisher guarantees that in their contracts because you can't you can't promise your authors you're going to do something with a third party unless you've got a contract with that third party to to force them to do it.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: So and Book Baby's response to the lawsuit, they pointed out that the plaintiff had included a screenshot from Book Baby's website, and I saw the screenshot.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't have any wording on it with promises about Amazon listings.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: I honestly, seriously, cannot believe a law firm took this case on.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: Just ridiculous.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know who the author of that book is, but DCG Arts Holdings sounds like a LLC or something set up by an individual or something.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: DCG is probably the initials of the author's name.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_03: Probably, yeah.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: I don't get that one either.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it it's what, a little over three thousand bucks?
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so uh DCG uh voluntarily dismissed the case on May 4th of this year after Book Baby's lawyers showed that spending$3,300 to get the book published was far below the$75,000 that the play played if uh claimed they deserved in damages for that particular type of lawsuit.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Boy, that sounds like a frivolous lawsuit if I ever seen one.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I bet they dropped it.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: Their lawyers finally figured it out.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-oh.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: So so Angie, book BookLocker wasn't the only company that sued Create Space and Book Surge and Amazon, isn't that right?
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: You're right.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's because Amazon KDP has an arbitration only clause in the contract, which means you can't sue them.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can't sue Amazon KDP if you're an author.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: However, other companies can sue them for like we did.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if you if you look online, there's there's countless uh complaints about Amazon terminating books and banning authors of those books from their platforms.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we hear about it all the time.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the the they'll then keep the authors unpaid royalties and they don't tell the authors why they were banned.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and I I remember I remember this, you you told me this not too long ago, that that uh there was one author that contacted Rider's Weekly saying he was banned and that he was owed what like 33,000.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: 33 grand.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he he's actually located in Europe and he was trying to find a government agency over there that would help him because he can't sue them because the KDP contract says arbitration only.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: You can't sue them.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: But he was gonna go higher to the government to try to get help.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: He was also asking other authors to contact him.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, why didn't he call the United Nations is what I want to know.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, either way, it he he's he wouldn't get that back because he signed the contract, right?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: And doesn't it doesn't it say that the withholding of royalties is I mean it's in the contract?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they can terminate your account for any reason, you know, accuse you of violating their terms.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, they don't they usually don't tell authors what term they violated, and a lot of authors haven't violated anything.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a bot doing all that.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: But the contract says if they terminate your contract, they get to keep your unpaid royalties, which is about 60 days worth of money.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh-huh.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, uh that that's covered in another podcast.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think it's what, episode 43.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: Reasons why Amazon KDP permanently closed your account, but they won't tell you why you were banned.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: We will put a link to that.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we'll put a link to that under this episode at writersweekly.com slash podcast episode 58.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: So there's also uh the case of John Rowe uh before Create Space became Amazon KDP, Amazon and and an author were sued by John Rowe after an unauthorized personal engagement photo was used on the cover of a self-published novel.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oops.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: So ding ding, copyright infringement.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Writers Weekly covered that in the in another article.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: What might get you sued using real people on the cover of your book, regardless of the source.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, it's just common sense.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you kind of gotta think about that one.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: But but there's also uh the plaintiff Shelton Meriwether claimed that defendants, Amazon.com and KDP and CreateSpace sold copies of the book without permission, infringed his copyright, and violated unspecif unspecified state laws.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the judge ruled in favor of Amazon's motion to compel arbitration.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the court found that when Meriwether created his Create Space account, he had accepted a mandatory terms of service agreement requiring all disputes to be handled through arbitration rather than federal court.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: So there you have it.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure you read the fine print, everybody.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, because it's all in there.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: So Brian W.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: Kelly is somebody I know.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um he sued Amazon, he self-published 262 books through Create Space and KDP over the years.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: So Create Space is old, so we're going way back, you know.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh let's see, almost 20 years.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: So then Amazon suddenly terminated his account and withheld his royalties.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: He attempted to sue them pro se, meaning representing himself.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's always a mistake.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: I love Brian Kelly, but that's always a mistake.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: You never represent yourself in court.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: And like many others, his case was redirected out of the public court system and into private arbitration panel, uh, where he ultimately lost.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he wrote about his experience for Writers Weekly, and we'll include a link to that article under this episode as well.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_03: Let's see, uh Ingram Content Group, the parent company of Ingram Spark, is facing legal investigations for a potential class action lawsuit regarding a data breach.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, I don't recall getting Ingram is owned by Ingram owns R Printer, Ingram Spark, etc.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: etc.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: I don't recall getting any notification from Ingram that their system had been had.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Experience a data breach.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so now people are upset.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: Even if you do notify your customers, you can still get sued for data breach.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: We we get those in the mail all the time.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so and so got hacked, and you're a part of the class action, and I usually just chunk those in the garbage because stay tuned for more information on that.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sounds like someone's pushing it.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you get I I get those kinds of emails all the time, and you you know, respond here and you'll get your your three dollars for us stealing your identity.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, best one was I lived in Texas, I was very young, and I got my check in the mail.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: I was part of a class action, it was 25 cents.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was less than the cost of the stamp, I kid you not.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: So there's also uh the writer and comedian Art Bushwald, he he he sued Paramount, saying they stole his ideas from a previous project.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: And Paramount said their gross revenue from the film was 288 million, but they didn't make any profit.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so the judge decided in favor of Bushwald and awarded him 900k.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: So he had a movie idea, they decided not to make it, then they did make it without telling him, and then they tried to claim they didn't owe him any money because they didn't make a profit on the movie.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm glad the judge ruled in the writer's favor.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's kind of ridiculous.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, you can always show that on paper in the movie business.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, movies they they never make money.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_03: Are they really that expensive to make$288 million just to make the movie?
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: That's just nuts.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Clayton is involved in the movie industry as well.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_03: So um we we did a lot of stories on on this one.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um there was a publishing group, it was it was it was they marketed themselves as a Christian publishing company company, uh-huh.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_03: Tate publishing.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um their owners uh they were a father and son team.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_03: They pled guilty to criminal charges after ripping out off uh countless authors, and their printers sued them and won a default judgment of over$2 million against Tate Publishing and Enterprises, LLC, and for unpaid printing services and broken distribution contracts.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_03: And if you go into writersweekly.com, uh we've got a we got a search bar.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_03: Uh if you search for Tate Publishing, you'll see a lot of articles.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: We were warning people years before they got handcuffed and taken away.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think this is one of the reasons that that printer, it's the largest print-on-demand printer, now requires their customers to use a credit card for every purchase instead of they don't give credit.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: No longer give credit.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_03: Credit, credit, yeah, it's kind of a bad idea in our industry anyway.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_03: But uh save the best for last.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_03: Writers weekly will be publishing publishing an expose on these guys next month.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_03: And next month starts tomorrow.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_03: And what what are what are we going to be publishing about, Andrew?
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_01: Publishing.com.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: Man, I wish I'd bought that name way back in the day.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh this information is available at ftc.gov, and we'll post a link to that under this episode as well.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: Writersweekly.com podcast, episode 58.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, publishing.com LLC, formerly known as publishinglife.com.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, we're talking about companies changing names?
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: So formerly known as publishinglife.com operates privately and previously went through names like Audiobook Income Academy.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: They also own publishing.ai, AI Publishing Academy, Publishing Accelerator, and they have a variety of community portals where people can talk about, you know, did you get ripped off?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, did you get ripped off?
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: In July of this year, publishing.com and its co-founders agreed to pay a$1.5 million settlement to the Federal Trade Commission over deceptive online self-publishing income claims.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: In marketing their programs to authors, the company used free online videos to entice consumers to purchase what it describes as a foolproof passive income system.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds like Amway.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_03: Start sounding like a multi-level marketing thing here.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember the Mickelson twins?
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I didn't know they were named that.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_03: I I think I remember that, yeah.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the old the old Mickelson twins.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what happened.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: The FTC alleged that publishing.com and uh the CEO, Christian Mickelson, and his and and his and his twin brother, the the chief product officer, Rasmus Mickelson.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they claimed that they had personally used their program to obtain significant wealth through online self-publishing.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so here's an example from a promotional email where uh Christian Mickelson claimed can consumers can, and I quote, copy the exact system hundreds of my students use to make one thousand to three thousand dollars a month in passive income.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta interrupt here.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um but sounds like they weren't making money self-publishing their books.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: No, they were making self-published.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: They were making money on their on their victims.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so most of the folks that bought publishing.com's products and services never got that level of income, of course.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: Of course not.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um and according to the FTC's complaint, uh, customers who sought refunds under the company's no questions asked guarantee allegedly discovered that publishing.com imposed many additional conditions, which were often buried in the fine print, uh, or the company's lengthy terms of service and made it difficult or for or impossible to get their money back.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what?
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: There are there are some of the right now.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I mean they they make it they make it impossible to get your money back.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_00: There was there there's one or two out there that I have seen recently that do that.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, another thing is an old scam.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: All the almost all of the scam publishing websites, prominent display, 100% satisfaction guarantee.
• 50:25
  unknown: Yeah.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: They don't honor it.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: Either they just don't pay it or there's something in a contract that says you're not really gonna get that money.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, do you know how many authors have said I signed up with them because I saw that 100% guarantee on their website?
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: And scammers are gonna lie about everything, including that.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the company also failed to disclose that some of the positive testimonials were incentivized, meaning they paid.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, they offered various prizes, cash, and additional services in exchange for providing positive testimonials.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, it's fraud right there.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_03: It uh the complaint says that at times publishing.com even uh conditioned refunds on consumers providing positive testimonials.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_01: Geez, so we'll give you your money back if you post a five-star review somewhere about us.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can't trust any of the reviews about that company.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Again, we're gonna be publishing an expose on them in October.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: So that'll be fun.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: So so there's also the thing where publishers, the publishers are suing others.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like uh back in May, uh El Severe Incorporated, Singage Learning, Hatchet Book Group, McMillan, uh, McGraw Hill, you know, the the academic publishers, and the best-selling author Scott Turo filed a class action lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg for copyright infringement.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they alleged that Meta illegally used the publisher's books to train its Lama AI models.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, there and there's there's a bunch of those lawsuits going on.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think we talked about that not too long ago.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: Anthropic settled for 1.5 billion recently after using illegally obtained ebooks from ebook pirate websites to train its AI systems.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the first lawsuit you mentioned right before Anthropic, those were the holdouts.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't sign up, but they they opted out of the Anthropic settlement, and they're going to end up getting far more money than individual authors did through the Anthropic settlement, which I think was$3,000 a book.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: The people that branched off by themselves, they're gonna end up making a lot more money.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is we're gonna have to talk about Amazon impersonators.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, right before we start a recording today, and Clayton, I said you got I said, Clayton, remind me afterward to share the conversation I had with Allie.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: One of our authors got into our author system and copied and pasted an email he received from Amazon KDP, and it said, We see that you're publishing your book through somebody else.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: He is publishing a new edition of his book through BookLocker, but they don't know that yet we're still working on the files.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's no way they could know that, okay?
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a violation of our terms of service, and we've terminated your account.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: In order to reactivate your account, we need to republish your book.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, they were going to charge you money and everything.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't Amazon KDP.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: And even Ali thought it was real.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: So Amazon has sued individuals who were scamming authors by falsely claiming an affiliation with Amazon Publishing and Kindle Direct Publishing.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at our list of scammers on our website, tons of them use the word Amazon, KDP, even Prime.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: All kinds of these specific words to make you think they're Amazon.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they're not.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they're by about everything.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they're over in Pakistan and they don't care.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_03: Happily using Amazon's name.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: There were four websites.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: James, attorney James and Walsh and I about a year ago were talking one day back and forth, and there were four websites that were using Amazon's name.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: And Amazon, because of James, Amazon reached out to me.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I shared all the information I dug up on these count these websites with Amazon, with a lawyer at Amazon.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: Within four hours, those websites were gone.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they got the power.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's for sure.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so the scammers run fake Amazon KDP knockoff websites designed to lure would-be authors into paying a fee to publish, and then deliver deliver either substandard or no service at all.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: In most cases, they take your money and run, or they'll do one little thing and then convince you to pay them more and more money, but you never end up with a real book.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_03: So everybody's heard of Hulu.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: That's the that's the um streaming service.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_03: There was a streaming service created by NBC Universal and News Corporation.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um well they were they were sued by a publisher called Lulu.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_03: Hulu?
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_03: Lulu.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Lulu argued, and uh this looks this just seems like a shot in the dark.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody oh yeah, somebody sitting at the at the at the uh conference table at Lulu said, Hey, let's try this.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah so they sued um NBC Universal and News Corporation, uh, arguing that the closely similar name created market confusion and encroached upon the digital publishing brand equity that they built with a$10 million investment.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Lulu.com, not a fan.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: Again, lots of complaints about them online.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: They're uh also called Lulu Publishing.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they needed$10 million investment in that company.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_03: I started this company pocket change.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, on my lap desk in the living room.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: We have had numerous people offer to invest in our company over the years.
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: We we we run on a shoestring, we'd like to save authors money.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we never got into this to get rich, you know.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: We have you know a regular size house.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: Don't even drive a Ferrari, yeah.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: You drive an F-150 that's getting up there in age, and I I drive a Jeep, and you know, we got a dog that's to go to vet all the time and everything.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh we we never I never got into this business to get rich.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I could have.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: If I'd taken those investments and given myself huge salary raises, you know, raise my salary all the time and then, you know, basically retire, keep getting paid, but maybe paying other people to do my job.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: I could have, man, I could have made it out so easy.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: The reason we didn't take any investors is because I never wanted any other person or company to tell me how to run this company.
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to, our our excellent reputation is our most valuable asset, and I wanted to keep it that way.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: I watched good companies that were competing with me sell out to the big publishers, and then their reputations became toast, just like the people at the bottom.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: That I guarantee you that's what happened with Lulu because I remember them from the late 90s.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: They they they they popped up not too long after you did, right?
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so so what I guarantee you that's what happened.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: They they they took the money.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that because I I I remember I remember when Lulu was the only self-publishing outlet that anyone would consider.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: But then it it quickly it quickly became a joke.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: It is it is what it is, yeah.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: I have a similar story.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, ex Libris, I knew the owner of X Libris when it was just owned by one die, one guy.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the funny story wasn't funny that day, but it was funny later.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: He and I were on a uh we were at a writer's conference together and we were both on the stage with a bunch of other competitors, and I was pregnant, and I got up to speak, and he was he had his microphone and said in front of this entire auditorium of people, you're pregnant again?
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I liked him until then.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: Then a couple weeks later, I thought it was funny, so I liked him again.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: That was a good company.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: Then it was sold to Author Solutions.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: And now if you look up XleBurst.com complaints online, man, you just yeah, you won't run out.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: So Lulu.com, also called Lulu Publishing, sought an injunction and monetary damages to block the launch of the video site, Hulu.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: However, federal judge and Raleigh dismissed Lulu's request for restraining order in October of 2007, and the video platform successfully moved forward with its public launch.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now, again, like it like many other ones we mentioned, there's tons of complaints about Lulu, but that was a really stupid lawsuit.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: Movie streaming, book publishing, completely different.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: Completely different companies.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: And just because the names rhymed, that was a stupid lawsuit.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Clayton, I think this is this is right up your your roadway here.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well I mean Academic the peer-reviewed journals.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, I mean, they they actually bring in multi-millions of to to billions per year.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and and so you know, these these scholarly publications require submitted research articles to be checked.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's peer-reviewed.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: They get all their their buddies in the field, their colleagues, to evaluate the the uh the research before it can be printed, hence the word peer-reviewed.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_00: So according to Hiredive.com, in September of 2024, a college professor in California filed a class action complaint against six different publishers El Elsevier, Walters Cluer, Wiley, Sage Publications, Taylor and Francis, and Springer Nature.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_00: The previous year those publishers had brought in ten billion dollars from their peer-reviewed journals.
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you're not sure.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh that that that's a huge red flag.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the peer-reviewed journals are not designed to make money.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're not supposed to be, but they are.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: So the the lawsuit alleged that several of their policies violated ant antitrust laws and impeded academic research.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, obviously.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_00: The publishers allegedly agreed to make peer review, peer reviewing an unpaid job, prevent academics from submitting manuscripts to more than one journal at a time, and bar them from freely sharing their findings during the lengthy peer review process.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_01: Sounds like a back backdoor handshake agreement, doesn't it?
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: They're all doing the exact same thing.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh updoor handshake.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the lawsuits proposed class included U.S.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: residents who have reviewed for or submitted a manuscript to any of the named journals since 2020, a group potentially numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh earlier this year um a judge dismissed the case saying the plaintiff failed to prove there was a conspiracy among those publishers.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because they didn't put anything in writing.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, yep.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: So well, we've learned a lot today, haven't we?
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was pretty interesting.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: Doing I spent two days doing research for all this and it was it was I never got bored.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of lawsuits going on in the publishing world.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of juicy stuff and a lot of stupid people.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if uh if you want to uh hook up with a publisher that doesn't have a bunch of legal problems, come on over and cbooklocker.com.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_03: We'll uh we'll take care of you.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh we've been around for 27 years, got a great reputation, uh A plus rating at the Better Business Bureau and the UN.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_03: Um as well as uh five stars in many of us.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_03: Um our our uh our UN publishing ambassador just just contacted me today and let me know everything's good.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, yep, UN likes us.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_03: And don't forget to use the podcast 200 discount code.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_03: That's podcast200 to get$200 off of our top uh publishing packages.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: Top three publishing packages, yeah.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's booklocker.com, booklocker.com.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_03: Clayton, you'll do anything uh interesting recently?
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm I'm always doing interesting things.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, things you can talk about on this podcast.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, I I'll I'll go ahead and share this.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm working on a screenplay, which is an adaptation of one of our authors' books.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Wayne Wayne Theodore.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm working on working on his movie.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: His his book is great.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's wonderful.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Wayne Wayne, Wayne has a wonderful story.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he it's still to this day the Massachusetts uh courts consider the case with him and his his siblings the worst case of child abuse in in history.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: And Wayne Wayne is Wayne is not just he's not just a survivor.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: He's Wayne Wayne Wayne is uh Wayne's a genius, I think.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_00: He's just a wonderful person.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that's what I'm working on right now.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_03: Wayne Theodore.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_03: Wayne Theodore, yeah.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh oh yeah, the the the name of the book is Wayne.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: A story of courage.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_01: We will put a link to that under this episode as well.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: Writersweekly.com slash podcast episode 58.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's a wonderful book.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's well, it's kind of painful to read, but it's a wonderful book.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: The author's a wonderful guy.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, really sweet guy.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're we're also uh we're also working on a podcast based on the book, as well as uh Wayne's uh Wayne's got a a nonprofit uh that that supports abused children.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's called the Safe Place Foundation.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: Safe Place Foundation.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's gonna wrap it up for us.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_03: We appreciate y'all uh joining us and listening to our tales of lawsuits in the publishing industry.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_03: Hopefully you got something out of this.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: And uh either either entertainment or shock.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_00: Are you not entertained?
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: Are you not entertained?
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_02: Is this not why you're here?
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_03: Be careful out there what you're right about.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_03: But um, okay, that'll do it for us.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_03: We uh we'll see y'all again on the next episode of the Writers Weekly Podcast.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: See you later, everybody.