If you’ve perused the selection of right-wing political books at a bookstore, you’ve no doubt seen titles from Regnery Publishing, a major part of the conservative movement. The publishing house has become a darling of the right by churning out one right-wing hatchet job after another, most of which real publishers would never touch. Conservative “authors” who would otherwise have to self-publish suddenly have wide distribution and marketing.
It’s been a fairly successful venture for years, but it might not last. As of now, the right’s biggest book publisher is having legal trouble with some of the right’s biggest authors. It could get ugly — and for some of us, entertaining.
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.”
It’s quite a little scheme, actually. When some sucker buys Jerome Corsi’s “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” or Richard Miniter’s “Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror,” at full price at Barnes & Noble, the right-wing authors get decent royalties of a few bucks per book. But Regnery also sells — or in some cases, gives away — those same books through Regnery-owned book clubs, newsletters, and conservative organizations. And wouldn’t you know it, those “sales” produce almost no royalties to the authors at all.
“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Miniter told the NYT, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”
Just what the conservative movement needed — another rift.
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?” […]
The authors also say in the lawsuit that Regnery donates books to nonprofit groups affiliated with Eagle Publishing and gives the books as incentives to subscribers to newsletters published by Eagle. The authors say they do not receive royalties for these books.
“You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away,” Mr. Patterson said in an interview. […]
The authors, who say in the lawsuit that Eagle has been “unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars,” are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, “We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice.”
As Kevin Drum put it, “[I]f a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?”
It couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate group of folks.