Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Rights Available

Must be heartbreaking for an author, when the publisher courts them, leads them on, all the way to the steps of the altar and then...jilted. Where do you go after being abandoned at the last minute?

Having been rejected by HarperCollins only a week before the lay down, OJ has a completed manuscript and the attendant rights. There's no reason why he can't go looking for another publisher. Well, yes, there's the moral and ethical reasons, but those sorts of things don't seem to get written into contracts. His agent is perfectly free to take the manuscript, turned down by one imprint, and offer it to another one of the publishing houses.

Can't quite see that happening, though. Hard to picture the likes of Simon & Schuster or Knopf picking up such a thing. It's been a big money-loser for News Corp., since they were the ones doing the jilting. Legal minds believe that OJ will get something out of the failed enterprise, payment for his time and effort on manuscript and interview, but there'll be no royalty checks cut. Unless someone else will publish his confession, of course, but who would be willing to take a chance after News Corp. got burned so badly?

There's one house that can handle the task. Yes, this is a printing job for PublishAmerica, scam artists extraordinaire and ever so fitting for this situation. They put on paper anything sent to them, ripping off their clients and trading on illusions of writerly grandeur. Best of all, the brick and mortar book shops don't stock PA titles, so we'd never be subjected to the offending title. Sounds like a best case scenario for the reading public.

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