Swiftboat, Anti-Obama Author Bites Hand that Feeds Him

This is not new news, (it's from Nov 7th last year) but it's new to me, and perhaps to others. Seems that Jerome R. Corsi, late of Unfit For Command defame, decided along with other conservative writers that his publishing house was avoiding royalty payouts.  How one may ask?

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.”

Now, ordinarily I'd have an issue with someone not getting their due for distribution of intellectual .... whatever you want to call what these guys write.  It's not cool to deprive these guys of royalties.

But consider something:  The point of the publication here is not really to get the truth into millions of hands, it's to get an editorial point of view into the public dialog.  It's to get a piece of red meat out to the Bill-O's and pill-popping hate jockeys, so they can drone the contents into the lizard brains that listen to them.

In short: their reward is not of this earth.  It is of the airwaves.  The sales numbers these guys achieve to make the best-seller lists would be impossible without the massive dumping of books into book clubs, remainder tables, and recycling centers that is routinely done by the conservative masters they serve.  So why should they get royalties for books no one reads?

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?”

Waaaaaaah.  But not all of these authors are completely disingenuous about the way things are:

“You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away,” Mr. Patterson said in an interview.

Ohhhhh.  Guess you gotta put something in those books to make folks wanna read 'em!