{"id":623,"date":"2012-10-11T17:35:20","date_gmt":"2012-10-11T22:35:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=623"},"modified":"2012-10-10T18:27:05","modified_gmt":"2012-10-10T23:27:05","slug":"ixnay-on-the-awsuit-lay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=623","title":{"rendered":"Ixnay on the Awsuit-lay"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In my opinion, no one really comes out looking good with Penguin suing to recover advances from authors who haven’t produced books<\/a>.\u00a0 Obviously, the authors look a bit lazy.\u00a0 Elizabeth Wurtzel has said that she could have finished the book, but no one from Penguin was following up, so it is sort of their fault, and she also sort of played the “jeez, I’m just an author, I don’t understand this stuff” card.\u00a0 But really, should any adult just sort of shrug and figure that maybe the folks who gave her $33,000 didn’t really expect anything for it?<\/p>\n

Penguin doesn’t come off looking all that great either, though, in my opinion.\u00a0 For one thing, one of the people they’re suing is a holocaust survivor.\u00a0 It’s hard to look good suing a holocaust survivor, as a general rule.\u00a0 This may not seem fair to someone getting the short end of the stick from a holocaust survivor, but they should have known what they were getting into.\u00a0 At the very least, they could pass on trying to collect interest.<\/p>\n

Also, one of the big advantages Penguin always had going for it was their innocuous name.\u00a0 Tor<\/a>, for example, sounds like a villain from a 1980’s swords and sorcery movie, so anyone dealing with them is naturally going to be on their guard.\u00a0 It is well-known, however, that it is impossible to be angry while looking at a penguin, and I assume the very name is enough to make most people relax.\u00a0 If they get a reputation for litigiousness they might\u00a0 lose that advantage.<\/p>\n

Finally, as Robert Gottlieb<\/a> has pointed out, making a big deal out of this kind of points out that publishers are paying most authors a few thousand dollars for a year or two of work.\u00a0 So yeah, there’s that too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my opinion, no one really comes out looking good with Penguin suing to recover advances from authors who haven’t produced books.\u00a0 Obviously, the authors look a bit lazy.\u00a0 Elizabeth Wurtzel has said that she could have finished the book, but no one from Penguin was following up, so it is sort of their fault, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-writing-things"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}