Letter from a reader:

No sooner did my book reach the editing stage at Haworth than I heard through the grapevine that Taylor and Francis has merged with Haworth, and that fiction will not be a part of Haworth's new direction. I spoke with my editor at Haworth and she confirmed that news. So... after all the struggle of many years to find a publisher, I'm out in the cold again.

What do I do now? I'm so discouraged that I've decided to write a screenplay.

Dear ————, I'm sorry to hear about the Haworth buyout, since it affects so many fiction writers that I know personally.

This buyout is a sign of the times. As you are aware, the book business is not generally in good shape. Brick and mortar bookstore sales were down in 2006. The 2006 holiday book-sales season was soft — even the chain stores did not do very well. Borders Book Group is actually re-organizing, closing some of their stores, and there are rumors that they will merge with Barnes & Noble. Yet another big distributor, Publishers Group West, went chapter 11 towards the end of 2006, joining the long list of bankrupt jobbers since 1995.

Early in 2007 the American Association of Publishers happily insisted that sales were up in some categoriesand in June Publishers Weekly predicted a rise of 4.1% in 2007. But that was before the big panic hit the lending industry, followed by the dip in home sales market and general shakiness of the stock market...which my friends on Wall Street told me was going to come. As I write this, predictions for the 2007 holiday season don't look too bright.

Within this context of a struggling and volatile industry, it's significant that Haworth has gone into buyout with a UK academic publisher. They, and Kensington, were the last two sizeable independent publishers left in the U.S. The sale caps an ongoing flight of major U.S. publishers into overseas comglomeratesincluding the biggest, Random House, which is now owned by Bertelsman in Germany. What will be the effect on American life and GLBT life, with editorial decisions on so many books being made by people sitting at desks in the EU or the UK or Australiapeople who are not necessarily informed or concerned about the fate of democracy in the U.S? Not many people are asking these questions.

Now and then a struggling publisher axes a bunch of upcoming titles in an effort to downsize or cut costs. In 1997 Harper Collins sent a chill through the industry when it massacred publication of no less than 100 books. For some time after that, authors and agents were leery about even submitting to Harper Collins.

Anywayon to your situation. A number of questions need to be asked.

Do you have a contract with Haworth yet? If you do, your attorney can best advise you on your legal situation, since it looks like your book is about to be orphaned.

The important thing is, that you emerge from the buyout without any legal or financial encumbrances that can come back and bite you later on. It all depends on the terms in your contract. If you were already paid an advance, what does your contract say about a situation where the publisher makes their own unilateral decision not to publish? Did they copyright the book already? Are all publishing rights automatically reverted to you without cost? Must you refund the advance? Did they sell any of the subsidiary rights (book club, etc.)? If so, to whom, and how will Haworth's decision not to publish affect another publisher's ongoing process?

If Haworth already copy-edited the book, would they be willing to let you have the edited version? This would be the kind thing to doyour manuscript would now be in better shape.

If you don't have a contract, then you pick up and go on. It might help your publishability elsewhere to be able to say that Haworth had accepted the book. It is a tough situation to be in, so you have my sympathies. I got orphaned in the late 1980s while at Ballantine/Random House (when it was still a U.S. company). My editor went to work for a competing company, and unfortunately my contract didn't include a "walking clause" that would have allowed me to follow my editor to Simon & Schuster. So I got handed off to another Ballantine editor who didn't care about the book. "One Is the Sun" got published all right, but I had a big war with Ballantine, who wanted to steamroll me on several terms of the contract. I finally compelled them to comply, but we weren't very friendly when publication day finally arrived. When they let the book go out of print, they did revert the publishing rights without cost to me, and agreed to sell me the production materials (meaning the offset film for the text) so I could have Wildcat Press do a 2nd edition of the book.

Way more complicated is the situation when orphaned books get caught in a federal anti-trust investigation. Textbook author Christopher Scanlan worked for many years on his opus "Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century," that was finally published in 2000 by textbook giant Harcourt Brace. Suddenly Scanlan found his book caught up in the spinning tornado of Harcourt General's acquisition by Reed Elsevier, a Dutch-English conglomerate. Reed Elsevier spun off the textbook division, Harcourt Brace, to Canadian publisher Thompson. The Justice Department jumped in to see if Thomson, which had a textbook arm of its own, would have an illegal monopoly if it bought Harcourt's entire list. The feds combed through the list title by title, and for some reason they put Scanlon's title list of titles that were disallowed for Thomson and had to be sold by Harcourt.

Scanlan wrote in Poynter Online, "I confess that when I first heard the news about the takeover, I briefly considered giving up book writing. Why bother when something that consumed thousands of hours of your life can be swallowed up by a corporate shark and spit out like a bone?" After many months of extreme anxiety, Scanlan finally learned that his book had been bought by Oxford University Press. Buyout dramas shouldn't happen to a dogbut they do happen to us authors.

Keep me posted on your situation — I would like to know what happens. Oh, and good luck with the screenplay. The movie business is pretty squirrely too.

Best,
Patricia Nell Warren

Helpful links:

A good site about current trends in publishing
StephanieSelahProj.pdf

Story of an orphaned Harcourt Brace title
www.poynter.org