Right Wing Regenry Press Cheats Authors Out of Royalties

It appears that Regenry Press, incubator of right wing nutjobs who can't write^*, is getting sued for cheating authors out of royalties. The claim is that Regenry, "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."

In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book.

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?”

I love that last quote. FWIW, they are not acting like a "Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company", they are acting like a Harvard Business School professor.

As a matter of law, I am not a lawyer. As a matter of the facts, this is rather complicated. Regenery has a long history of basically giving its books away to boost numbers, you see it all the time at places like Newsmax, where if you subscribe, they'll throw in a bloody library of conservative hardcover tripe. This way, someone who writes a book that might sell 3,000 copies gets to do the pundit circuit as a someone who has sold 100,000 copies,

I'd love to be a part of the legal discovery process, but right now I'm basking in the Schadenfreude.

^*Yeah, like I'm one to talk, but at least I don't think that I'm the next Hemingway.