Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Bizarre All The Way Around

There's been a discussion lately at AbsoluteWrite.com regarding Objective Entertainment. It seems the agency has been sending letters to those rejected months ago, suggesting that they consider self-publishing. There's money in it for Objective Entertainment if their recommendation to use AuthorHouse, a vanity publisher, is taken up by someone who doesn't know any better.

What kind of agency would stoop so low?

The kind that would represent Illinois's disgraced former governor when he's pitching his memoirs, that's what kind.

Jarred Weisfeld started up the agency, and he's the man who hoped to convince St. Martin's Press that Rod Blagojevich was as fuckin' golden as an open Senate seat.

Mr. Weisfeld is up in arms because he believes that St. Martin's Press misled him. They were going to pay his client in the neighborhood of $350,000 for a book, but then they changed their mind and took all that money off the table. Maybe a profit-share arrangement, St. Martin's Press suggested, and isn't that the biggest insult ever?

Where else was the agent to go but up? He complained mightily to Macmillan, parent of St. Martin's, and he got no satisfaction. Could it be the lawsuit he filed against the publisher for a different book? Would they hold it against him when he had such a hot commodity as the man who shook down a children's hospital?

In the end, the best Mr. Weisfeld could do was secure a deal for Mr. Blagojevich with Phoenix Books. They're noted for printing Jayson Blair's memoirs, and it's more than fitting that they'd pick up on the former governor's tale. Jayson Blair made up stories for the New York Times, and even the dogs in the street expect Mr. Blagojevich's book to be equally fictitious.

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