The Immorality of the Immoral

I want to open this discussion with a link to the Writer Beware post about Tony G. (Anthony Giangregorio).

Writer Beware

As you can see there,  Tony G. had this to say to Mandy DeGeit.

“on the contract, it clearly says publisher has the right to EDIT work. you signed it. are you saying you are a dishonest and immoral person and will now try to deny you signed the contract? well i have a copy right here
and as for the story. the editor had a hard time with it, it was very rough and he did alot to make it readable. despite what you think, your writing has a long way to go before its worthy of being printed professionally.
we did what we had to do to make the story printable. you should be thankful, not complaining. ah, the ungrateful writer, gotta love it”

Somehow he wants to construe that complaining about having your work altered without your knowledge or consent is immoral. The publisher never owns the copyright to an author’s work. The author owns the copyright. The author licenses the publisher to publish the book in exchange for royalties.

Here is Mandy’s own account of it.

Editing is not and never will be wholesale alterations. Those need to be made by the author themselves. Ideally, a good publisher uses track changes and the author accepts or rejects the changes. Back in 1981, I got my author copy of a TSR anthology, Dragontales, which included my story In The Darkness, Hunting.  Kim Mohan had added paragraphs to my story (I took them out for the version published by Wildside) without informing me. I hit the ceiling and refused to continue selling to him.

Here is Tim Leider’s account of his face to face with Tony G.

Mandy’s troubles date to a year ago. Tim’s is from 2011. Do you see a pattern here?

Johnathan Maberry had a similar account of his interactions with Tony G.  This blog is a good resource for Tony G’s misdeeds. I would love to see the blogger update it with all the news that is coming out about the more recent misadventures of this arse for brains.

Richard Salter has similar things to say about Tony G.

This situation has been going on for years now, yet all that Tony G. does is open another publishing house.  So far we have Open Casket Press, Living Dead press, and Undead Press. Just enough changes to try and hoodwink the unsuspecting  into ‘selling’ a book to him.

People like Tony G. bank on relatives and friends of the authors buying the overpriced books. This is the Publish America tactics. Then he attempts to intimidate any author who complains. He is especially nasty with women, thinking them to be more easily frightened by him. WRONG, BOZO! WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF YOU.

Now we come to the particulars that involve me personally. A longtime friend of mine sold Tony G. a book in a moment of desperation and self doubt. Tony tossed the book together like throwing mud at a wall. The first several pages of the book were just advertising for his poorly edited anthologies. The book was filled with typos and additions that the author did not make. When the author, Paul Johnson-Jovanivic complained, Tony told him that he would have to pay him to make the corrections. These were not corrections of errors that Paul had made, but that Tony had made.

Back in the days when we went through the process of galleys and then page proofs, it became expensive to correct things. Everything was supposed to be found in the galleys. Any errors made by the publisher were fixed at the publisher’s expense. Mistakes made by the author were corrected at the author’s expense. Part of the reason for this was to reduce instances of the author deciding to make wholesale alterations of the book at a late date. Nowadays, with PoD and ebooks, there exists no reason to charge an author for anything. It’s easy to do and easy to upload another interior with no charge.

I will be next posting Paul’s account of what happened.

PS: Tabetha, your account of your company on Jennifer’s blog sounds trite and ridiculous. Your word choices are like a bubbling adolescent. Learn to write. A professional never says “legit,” they say “legitimate.”