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So, I can imagine that it will take Jean a month to get the books off places like Sony and Amazon. But I seriously wonder if she even knows about all the smaller places where she apparently abandoned my books.
I intend to keep hunting and pointing out places she has missed until they are all down.
I need to spend today and tomorrow reading the entries I agreed to judge for the NTSFW contest. They are all short shorts, so I should be able to finish them in a reasonable time.
Then I have to jump onto the revisions of my Chimquar Collection for Cyberwizard Productions.
Most likely, I will not be blogging or commenting much until I am caught up on all of this.
Everything else is on hold until I finish them.
A major sea change is in the offing. Jean pulled all my books off Fictionwise in response to my demands for my rights back. It felt very strange looking at the site and no books. Now, push has come to shove and I have to take the next steps as soon as I can.
We will see what happens.
When I finally started writing again after a 15 year writers block, I was also taking college courses to get my degree in anthropology. I had an 11 year old child, and I was on welfare while I tried to get on my feet, and I was racing the clock to become better capable of earning a living before my worsening post polio syndrome made me unemployable.
I finished a novel in 97 and submitted it to agents. The first one was Ashley Grayson. Back when I was actively writing articles, and had had the two pieces in the Washington Post, Ashley had been all over me for favors and such. I had given a good review in the Post for a book by one of his clients. However, what I got back was a form rejection that showed clearly that Ashley had forgotten me.
I was then worried that EVERYONE had forgotten me. So it was with great trepidation that I phoned James Frenkel. Back then he still had his agency. I opened the conversation with, “You may have forgotten me….” and he replied “Of course, I haven’t.” and soon made it clear that he remembered me well and fondly.
So I sent him the manuscript and soon had my first fiction agent in 12 years. Jim was unable to sell the novel. I revised it a few times and then Jim sold his agency to Jack Byrne, who picked through the client list and kept those he liked. I happened to be one of them.
Jack could not sell the novel either. He tried and tried and tried.
Meantime I wrote a novel that Jack said was too long for the current market. God Box was 175,000 words long. I had been copy-edited for Renebooks for a year. Jean had been nagging me to send her something. So I sent her God Box out of desperation. She broke it up into three books: Blood Rites, Blood Heresy, and Blood Dawn. Her titles, not mine. She also stuck with my series title, Dark Brothers of the Light.
I figured that I had nothing to lose. Jean had been doing a large number of kindnesses for me, saying how much she wanted to make up for all the problems and suffering she had caused me during our marriage.
I believed her. She also told me that the sex change had altered her personality so much that she was ashamed of everything connected to Hank, the man she had been.
I stopped trying to sell my books to print and settled into a holding pattern. My books did fabulous numbers right off the bat. Then she brought out my collection.
She also told me that she has trouble remembering things. That explains a lot, but not everything.
I was desperate when I settled for ebooks. One of Blu Phier’s authors recently said to me in an email, “Yes, I knew it was a bad contract when I signed it. But I was desperate.”
We all get desperate.
I wanted to believe that Jean had finally gotten herself turned around and was doing right. I felt confident in Richard, most of all.
I also at times wondered if I had lost the magic, but the response to my writing and ebooks was so great as to help me back away from those fears.
As I have said before, until Richard’s death, things were great with Renebooks.
Then the old patterns started cropping up. To be honest, they scared me. I had this massive doubt in place that my books would ever come out from another company. Some told me it was the content that made them shy away, not the writing. My work was too gritty, too dark, too graphic. One told me that the problem was my questionable lifestyle.
I dug my heels in about content and kept writing where my heart was.
Self-publishing is a questionable path, even if the books are reprints. I have been told by several pros, including Lyn McConchie, that they can’t understand why I am not selling to the majors.
I intend to eventually try again. But not right now.
Meantime, I intend to try to get all the rights back to my various series from Jean. That ship is sinking and I am going to go overboard with the rats. Women, children, and curmudgeons over the side first. But at least I’m not going to sink with it.
I have a few more things to say once I am fully awake. I slept 12 hours once I managed to collapse into bed. I slept myself out, I think. It’s been months since I had an episode this bad.
I sincerely thought that Jean had mended her old ways. When Richard was alive, he kept her on the straight and narrow. He was always one of the few people that Jean always listened to. I miss him.
You could not argue with Richard’s business sense. He knew too much about publishing, marketing, and all the ins and outs. When I first met Richard, he and Helene had decided to move to Virginia in search of a slower lifestyle. He had been the head of marketing at Doubleday. He taught me to write press releases, taught me about reps and jobbers, and how to talk to people in radio and televisioin to get interviews for the Donning/Starblaze authors. Over the thirty years that I knew Richard, he worked for publishers, large and small, and was at one point the central buyer for the Walden Books chain.
When Jean was working for Jeremy P. Tarcher Incorporated as their editor-in-chief (her last position with them before they were sold to Penguin Putnam), Shari Lewis used to say that Jean was a diamond in the rough and Richard agreed.
I smoke cigars. Richard and I used to sit on the front porch of my home and smoke them. Jean and Helene did not like us smoking them in the house. So we were always banished to the outdoors to smoke.
Seeing the full extent of the mistakes that Jean is making with Renebooks since Richard’s death bothers me greatly. But it is part of a pattern. I’ve written elsewhere about Jean’s patterns, but I was calling her ‘H’ for Hank.
In the past, if Jean was shaken up enough, she eventually pulled out of these irresponsible periods, but it is almost like dealing with an unmedicated manic depressive. Jean does not fit the usual pattern of the manic depressives because her cycle takes a couple of years to hit the point that she is at now.
At one point in the 1980s, Jean was the highest paid editor on the West Coast. And she blew it. She hit this point in her cycle (which used to frighten me) and the excesses caught up to her (as they always did) and she was fired. She continued to work for Jeremy freelance. Her brilliance as an editor could not be denied. Some of Jeremy Tarcher’s best books were the ones that Jean development edited, turning a collection of experts into fairly awesome writers with books that made the New York Times best seller lists.
But Jean’s mental instabilities (she promised me that she was in therapy and was going to stay there, but I begin to doubt it), always brought her and whatever company she was working for into problems and difficulties sooner or later.
With Richard gone, and the ship without the kind of rudder that Jean needs to stay on top of everything, she has let Renebooks slide into the mud.
I’m going to try to locate a phone number for her. I think she and Frankie are staying with Bill Mills until they find a place of their own.
Every time that she wore out her welcome in an area, she moved. Jean is getting too old to keep doing this. She’s ten years older than I am. She was the only older man I ever became involved with.
I need to think for a day and reassess what is happening and see what more can be done to rescue my own books and those of others. I don’t like the idea of going down with the ship and it is sinking.
I have gone 28 hours without sleep. Every time I put my head on the pillow I either get angry all over again, or I start having flashbacks. At Wednesday’s team meeting for Daverana Enterprises, we got off on a bitch session about Jean. The guys (Phil, Gustavo, and Niwi) went missing. In the course of it, we got off on the subject of my former step-son and that put me over the edge into flashbacks and nightmares.
I kept trying to leave the meeting as my stomach clenched up and another round of adrenaline hit me. I was shaking and sick to my stomach by the time I left. No one there meant to trigger those. They just happen. I’m as wired as I am on those night when I am trying to write myself into exhaustion so that I can lay down without having another round of memory noise.
The connections connect. The associations associate. I wish that my insurance covered more sessions with a cognitive therapist.
As I watch what is going down with Jean, I keep getting flooded with more memories. It is hard work to escape them. I’m hyper and nervous as a cat. But they won’t let me go. I have to just ride them out and keep going until I can let exhaustion release me.
So Jean Marie says that she’ll ask the distributors to take my books down.
That sounds okay, doesn’t it?
Except for one thing. Most distributors don’t control what the publisher has up.
Most ebook distributors have a back door that the publisher goes into using a password that was issued to them. The publisher uploads the books to the distributors site by a certain day of the week.
Then they are presented on a set day by the distributor.
Fictionwise is to have the books on by Thursday so they can be put out on Monday.
Most of this is automated.
I know this because there used to be a site called Ebookad. It fell behind in paying the publishers whose books it carried. Then it defaulted completely with a year’s worth of earnings lost to the publishers.
I just checked and it appears to be back again, but all the books I could find were public domain works. Anyway, onto Ebookad and my story.
When Ebookad defaulted on payments, several publishers, including Renebooks, arranged a raid to remove their books from that distributor. We went in through that publisher’s back door and removed all the books. There were five of us from Renebooks who did it. We substituted fake copies that Jean had issued to us. The only thing in those ebooks was “[owner's name] is a thief.” And other insults
Within 24 hours Ebookad surrendered. All was fine.
But that’s how I learned about the back door.
When I needed to get something changed at Fictionwise on my books, I was informed that only the publisher could do that.
Back door.
What I wanted was a correction on the author bio.
When Jean reverted the rights on Mother Damnation and In The Darkness, Hunting, the books came down within an hour.
So why is this one dependent upon the distributor?
I will give Jean 24 hours and then start googling for those books.
Early Wednesday morning, I emailed Jean to ask for the rights back to my Journey of the Sacred King quartet.
On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Jean Marie Stine wrote:
you agreed to wait to see what sony and amazon did – sony is just about to report on june sales and we received amazon figures only yesterday
we won’t know till later this month when sony arrivres
i have yet to go over amazon as i was uploading books yesterday
_____________
Half an hour after that email, I get this one:
just looked at the Amazon figures for may and though there was 400 percent growth in overall sales in the six months since they opened, the sacred king books were not active. So sure, we will be glad to revert the rights and tell distributors to remove them from sale.
jmstine
_____________________
Back in 2004, I had a collection come out from Wildside called In the Darkness, Hunting: Tales of Chimquar the Lionhawk.
Jean made me an offer for them and so did Sean Wallace at Wildside.
I compromised by giving Jean the ebook rights and Sean the print rights.
A few months later, Jean asked me to help broker a deal between Renebooks and Wildside to bring out print editions of the best selling titles in the Renebooks lines. I did so. I also got a finder’s fee for doing it.
For reasons I will probably never know, the deal got canceled. My impression was that it had something to do with the covers that Jean insisted upon using. Since back then Jean was using shoddy porno covers and had not yet begun to buy original covers (with the exception of the cover to my collection), I was not surprised at all by it.
My books were selling in big numbers, so I asked Jean to allow an artist of my choice to do the covers for my books. That was Kaolin Fire. He did the covers for the lycan series, the Sacred King books, and the last three books of my Dark Brothers series.
Then she asked me to find her more artists. I brought her Joel Wideman who still does erotica covers for her and the team of Tabitha Brown (line artist) and Phil Smith (colorist).
Payments to her artists were always late. And they got later and later, just as all the other payments did.
Susie Hawes sold Jean four volumes in a series called Dragon Creed. The first two covers matched the book properly. Then Jean sent Tabi the fourth book to do a cover for without having first sent her the third book.
Guess what?
The cover for the third book was the cover for the fourth book.
Who got the blame?
Me.
Why? Well, I still have not figured that one out yet.
Karen Taylor has never been paid for editing Serpent’s Quest.
When I mentioned that Blood Harvest and Blood Arcane were flawed and needed a new version, Jean blamed Karen and tried to foist off on me an editor who only edited porno. I threw a fit and managed to talk her into hiring Steven Beeho.
It took me from February to mid-July to get Steven paid by Jean. Every time I complained, she told me that the vouchers had gone in to Helene and Helene was messing up.
Finally I got very ugly with her and Steven had his money within an hour via paypal. Odd how that works.
But Karen has still not been paid.
Now, let’s talk about print editions.
After the Wildside deal fell through, Jean told me that there would be print editions of my work out within six months. She told me that Renebooks was going to do PoD through Lightning Source. A new contract would be issued for the print rights.
She told me and others that those print editions were just around the corner. She gave me an inflated cost for doing them with LSI, but I was not aware of just how inflated they were until last February. She told me that it took hours to produce each book in Adobe Pro (she said ‘the software’) and that I should not attempt to do it myself.
Needless to say, I believed her.
In March, Crystalwizard showed me how to typeset the books, load them to lulu, (which creates an Adobe Pro pdf like LSI wants), and then take that lulu pdf and upload it to LSI. Minutes.
It is now 2008. I have been waiting for three years for her to do print editions. She always had another excuse. She always changed her figures for cost and her date for doing it. Some of her authors left Renebooks over the fact that she did not come through with the print editions.
Now, let’s look at another set of lies. Roughly 18 months ago, she told me they had a deal with Sony and that it was going to cost them $50 per book to get them transferred to the Sony Reader format. Later she told me it was $100. Then she told me it was $75. Then she told me it was $35. Then she told me it was $50. And, that my books would not earn royalties from the Sony site until that money had earned out. Per book.
The books were uploaded to Sony in March. Long time. No see.
As for these blogs posts, all I can say when/if Jean finds them is: the beatings will continue until morale improves.
When I first married Jean, she was still Hank Stine, male. How else could I have married her?
She was the senior editor (later promoted to editor in chief, except that she was already working in that capacity. The title changed, but the job remained the same) at Donning/Starblaze. That was the third place I submitted my trilogy, The Moonstone of Reyanon, to. She negotiated the contract and then she negotiated me.
She had an assistant of sorts. Kay Reynolds was the bookkeeper at Donning/Starblaze. It cannot be denied that Kay wanted to be an editor. She was extremely tall, auburn-haired, and obese, but not unattractive despite that. Jean despised Kay. Donning/Starblaze brought out the original full color graphic novel version of Elfquest. Kay was the one who brought Elfquest to the attention of Donning. Jean took the credit.
Jean was so paranoid that she thought the only reason Kay had brought up Elfquest was to steal her job with Donning. That may or may not have been true. In fact, it was Kay who replaced Jean after she lost her job with Donning. However, that was three years later.
I had been a long time fan of the black and white Elfquest comic and I threw in with Kay on that. Jean capitulated and Donning acquired Elfquest. As everyone knows, the color edition was an instant success story.
Everything that went wrong was blamed on Kay and Jean grew increasingly paranoid about her. Now, this last bit I can’t prove. Robert Adams, whose horseclans novels were initially coming out from Donning, threw his weight into the fray and Kay was made an assistant editor. Jean told me that the reason Bob had done this was because he and Kay were sleeping together and that Bob admitted it to him. Like I said, I can’t prove it because all I have is Jean’s word on it and Jean is not a reliable source of anything.
A pattern was established here. It would take me many years and many changes of jobs for Jean before I began to see it. It was always someone else’s fault.
First Kay, later me, later others. Always Jean fucked up and someone else was to blame for her lack of self-discipline, lack of professionalism.
When things started going wrong with Renebooks, first it was Helene’s fault, then it was Jane Letty’s fault, and then it was my fault. Finally she took to blaming her SO, Frankie, for it. And then she returned to blaming me for it. Blaming Helene is a repeat performance. Every time I turned around she was blaming Helene for something.
However, here’s the thing. She would blame Helene for things being late, and then at the last minute, after supposedly turning everything into Helene several weeks before, Jean would double check with me to figure out who was owed what. Now, if the figures had already gone to Helene, why was Jean asking me these questions?
(Continued from The Trouble With Renebooks and Symptoms of Trouble with Renebooks)
This occurred to me early this year. Then it was proven out.
First I must talk about the flaws in my Dark Brothers books. I had intended for all of the paths to cross in Dark Brothers. All the various storylines. However, I was getting burned out and not really thinking. For two years I had tried to do too many things. And the last two books suffered because of it. Blood Harvest, and to a lesser extent, Blood Arcane are flawed.
I did not realize that I was cramming several novels into one book. It was when the computer died and I had gotten a few things printed out that I began to realize what I had done wrong. An editor should have caught it. But really, the PUBLISHER should have caught it. Jean Marie should have caught it.
I had Lukasz’s storyline, Kynyr’s storyline, and at the end, Amberlin’s storyline as well as Isranon’s in the pages of two books. I was alternating the chapters.
Someone should have caught it.
That’s what editors are for.
They are supposed to see what the authorial blindspot is missing.
I managed to get Blood Hope printed out before the computer died and as I went through it, I recognized what I had done. I immediately ripped it apart and moved each storyline into a separate binder.
I had six months of relative downtime, as the memory continued to die on the motherboard, the last thing to go was my ability to get my IMs up. I discussed it with a few people.
During the months that I was writing Serpent’s Quest longhand instead of having a computer to put it into, I had plenty of uninterrupted time to consider matters.
At first I thought the editor should have caught it. Yet, I can’t blame Karen Taylor for not remarking upon it. She did a good job copy-editing the books. However, I am certain now that she labored under the misconception that it had been approved by the publisher.
Whatever flaws Jean Marie has, she’s not stupid. Had she read the book, she would have caught the problems. But she had stopped reading my books.
I know that she read the first ones because we discussed them. Later she told me that she was too busy and therefore begged off discussing the later books with me.
I am forced to wonder if she read them at all.
Maybe she would have bought a shopping list from me and published it?
You never know.
Jean has not had the full surgery. She’s had her balls removed. She could not afford the rest.
There are times when I wonder if my life would have improved had I cut them off myself with a pair of scissors while we were still married. She had an impressive set of male equipment. The largest I ever encountered in a long and varied sex life. A few of her ex’s and I got together just after she announced her sex change and bemoaned what a waste it was that she was doing this because of her impressive equipment.
[cue Spider Jerusalem saying "show us your penis, Mr. Sweeney]
I started getting odd complaints from our daughter Sovay. Jean was insisting on discussing sex with her. At first, I did not take it too seriously. Sovay has always been squeamish on the subject of sex.
Then about three months ago, I got a taste of what Jean was doing to Sovay. Jean called me up and spent two hours describing her sex life in graphic detail. I kept trying to change the subject, trying to bring it back to talking about the issues I was having with Renebooks, and she ignored me. Now I know a lot more about transsexual orgies than I ever wanted to know. And my issues with Renebooks have not been solved.
I finally hung up on her after she tried to invite me to one of her orgies.
(Continued from The Trouble With Renebooks and Symptoms of Trouble with Renebooks)
I lost six months of work at the end of 06 because my old computer decided to die. It was obsolete, which made finding new parts impossible, and I went with trying to fix it using used parts. During that time, I worked on my novel long hand. Toward the end, I could not post on most blogs and messageboards without the computer dying. I had a large number of rough drafts that I printed out to go over later and eventually I could not access the printer either. It turned out to be the motherboard that was causing trouble. The only choice was to build a new machine. Despite decent advances, I was not able to get all the parts to build the new one before the old one died. A concerned fan, desperate for the next book, heard about my problems, went to New Egg and ordered everything on my wish list to be sent to me.
Natalie and I put it together and I was soon back on the road to catching up on all the books and other projects I was behind on.
That year, using this machine, I was able to turn seven of those rough drafts into finished novels.
I thought, “Gee, I’m way ahead and I can relax.” Wrong.
Here’s what happened.
When Richard was in charge, Renebooks had a policy of just doing one book by an author each quarter to allow the other books time to sell. The exception to this was erotica and porn. Those were slammed out as fast as they came in.
I thought Jean would wait on bringing each book out. But she told me to turn them in for editing as soon as they were finished. I did so. And Jean brought them all out so fast that I could not keep up with it. In the end, I was exhausted and I was behind in getting books finished, instead of ahead.
This year I put my foot down and she’s only gotten two books from me. Now she will not get any more.
Here’s the interesting thing. She never sent me a contract for the Lycan Blood series. She kept insisting that they were covered by the previous contract. I had a look at that contract a few hours ago, and guess what? They are not covered.
I have contracts for the Journey of the Sacred King series. I have contracts for the Dark Brothers series. I have contracts for Mother Damnation and In the Darkness, Hunting, (I have since gotten the rights reverted on MD and ItDH), but nada for the lycan novels.
That means that all rights are mine.
But I wondered why she would bring them out so fast. Her answer was that I write fast. Uhm, well, sometimes I do. I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner. I have only finished one book this year: Blood Hope.
Jean normally sends out sales reports each month, but sometimes she would miss a month or three. Then she would play catch up. I did not get copies of the statements AT ALL from the first month that Blood Hope came out until a few weeks ago.
I asked her about them and I asked her to send them to me.
Guess what? She does not retain copies of them. She sends them out and then deletes the files.
I have to ask why?
Blood Hope was my most awaited novel. It had been over a year since I had written a Dark Brothers novel. It was the one that I got the most inquiries about.
I can’t compare the sales figures to what I received in royalties, but it landed on the Fictionwise Best Seller list, and yet my royalties were less than half of what I normally receive.
I started investigating. That’s a bad habit from my days as a journalist.
I found my books on dozens of sites that sell ebooks, but here’s the interesting thing. Except for Fictionwise, none of the places selling them had had a complete set of my books uploaded. Some places would have one or two from each series and not a complete series among them. Then I checked the Renebooks site and found that she was not keeping that current with what I had out. In some cases, the middle book from a series would be missing. Just enough to make the reader wonder what was going on.
Basically, she had abandoned my books.
I’m her top seller in fantasy/dark fantasy. In fact, I’m her top seller in all of the speculative fiction genres.
The only people who outsell me with Renebooks are writing erotica and porn.
So what happened?
(continued from The Trouble with Renebooks)
I started working for Renaissance Ebooks back in 03 as a copy-editor. I was paid on time, and all was great. The original owner had simply wanted to publish pornography. When he was diagnosed with cancer, he sold the company to a fellow named Karl, with shares issued to Jean Marie Stine and Richard F. X. O’Connor.
They expanded the company to include genre fiction and non-fiction on a variety of topics. I had worked with both Jean and Richard many times over the years and had a great deal of confidence in Richard to compensate for Jean’s flaws. They swiftly expanded Renebooks to become one of the largest Indie ebook companies out there.
Royalties were always on time and so was my money for editing.
Richard died of lung cancer a few days before Christmas in 06. I first noticed the problems developing in 07 when my checks for editing and my royalties kept sliding later and later.
Jean blamed the problems on Richard’s widow, Helene, who was the bookkeeper for the company. Matters came to an ugly state when the royalties that should have been sent out in June of 07, were not sent until August. A loud swell of protest was made by their top authors and many of them moved to other companies.
My initial contract with them was very author friendly and short. I did not learn about their contract changes until early this year, although some remarks made by friends who had signed with them started prickling my attention. They spoke of a First Right of Refusal clause.
I phoned Jean and threw a fit about it, because it could be used to tie up the rights to my entire world of Daverana. I was promised that it would not be in my next contract.
I also sent a copy of the new contract to Preditors and Editors.
They had no problems with it, but it still bothered me.
My final book in the Lycan Blood series came out in February. Several things went wrong from the start.
Jean gave Shadowed Princes the same blurb that had been on Kady’s Vengeance. And the sample was simply the poems at the opening, and not the first chapter. Sales went nowhere. I complained. Jean and I had heated words over it and she blamed me for the mistakes. Supposedly I had sent her the wrong information. Except that I had put it all into the same email that contained both a copy of the cover and the manuscript itself.
That was the last straw for me. So I took my little company I had created to provide promotional materials for my ebooks, and I opened it up to include books by other authors and turn it into a real publishing company. I considered that to be self-defense and an opportunity to make things up to the authors I had recommended to Jean.
Then more things started to come out from friends. One author had their last book in a series mislabeled dark fantasy instead of humor and sales crashed. Jean had sent me the book to edit and I did so. It was the last book I edited for Jean as I quit the company shortly afterward. A year later, she sent the book to another friend of mine to edit, having forgotten that she had already given it to me. Now, six months later, the book is still not out.
Otter posted at Rusty Nail in comments that he had never been paid royalties or gotten a royalty statement. His book outsold my book that month and made it onto the dark fantasy best-seller list at fictionwise. My guess is that it probably sold around 500 copies.
I started investigating and discovered that Jean had not sent out press releases or review copies in nearly two years. I suspect that was the first casualty of Richard’s death.
I kept taking Jean to task about the problems. Sometimes I won the round and sometimes I didn’t. Whenever I heard that someone was not being treated right, I phoned her.
But matters did not improve. If anything, they got steadily worse.
Here’s the kicker that some of you might not be aware of, Jean Marie Stine is a transsexual. She’s my ex-husband. We’ll go more into that in the next post, as there is far too much to say in a single post here.
