A Liberal Is A Conservative Who's Seen Their Royalties Stolen By Corporate Conglomerates

Oh, is this funny.

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.”

These frivolous lawsuits are what's undermining American capitalism, I tell you! Constraining private enterprise with all these silly regulations will destroy our markets! But that's what libs like the guys who wrote the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth book want! They want us to live in some Marxist dystopia!!!1!

The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.

What, do you guys have a problem with PROFIT?

The hilarious thing is that this is actually an outgrowth of the wingnut publishing scheme which artificially increases sales by pawning them off on book clubs where they're probably converted back into pulp:

Traditionally, authors receive a 15 percent royalty based on the cover price of a hardcover title after they have sold enough copies to cover the cost of the advance they receive upon signing a contract with a publisher. (Authors whose books are sold at steep discounts or to companies that handle remaindered copies receive lower royalties.)

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?”

Because nobody wants to buy your shitty books in a bookstore, is why. They're sent out to nonprofits so it looks like you have a platform, raising your profile and your rank on the bestseller list and your speaking fees. And further, corporate Marxism of this type exists in practically every American industry. You're only discovering this one because it impacts you.

Why do conservative book authors hate capitalism?