Dorchester was reportedly stealing Brian Keene's ebooks (see inside for more info)

Here's something new I just found out: Dorchester Publishing does not own the digital rights to Brian Keene's books. Yet for some period of time they continued to sell those same ebooks on their site.

That's right: Dorchester Publishing was selling things they didn't own, which would be theft by many (if not all) definitions of the word.

After several fruitless attempts to get Dorchester to pay him the money he's owed, Keene asked for the following:

"I negotiated a deal with Dorchester that allowed for: 1. The immediate reversion of all of my print rights, and 2. The reversion of all of my digital rights as of 11:59pm 12/31/10."

That was in December. Dorchester was still selling Keene's books in January and according to Dear Author's article, his attempts to get that stopped ended with the company trying to pass the blame off on to other companies. As the author himself said, "The first time, I allowed that it could indeed be a mistake. Four times later? It is no longer a “mistake”. It is theft, or at the very least, staggering incompetence."

This is just inexcusable for Dorchester to make excuses & pass the buck like this. It's also inexcusable that just like before, Keene hasn't seen a dime from the ebooks that were sold during this time period.

I'm absolutely horrified at the outright gall of this company. I'm most certainly upholding my personal boycott of this site- perhaps permanently. There is no excuse for Dorchester's actions except for pure greed. Even if by some stroke of incompetence they were unable to remove these books, there's no excuse for them not to pay Keene the money that the received from these sales.

I honestly can't believe that they were unable to get these books off of the various sites, especially the kindle. If you're familiar with the whole Penguin/Amazon Kindle fiasco then you'll remember how quickly Penguin was able to yank their books from Amazon's site. If you count the amount of time they spent warning Amazon, it was a far shorter amount of time than Dorchester had, that's for certain.

So remember, boycott any & all of Dorchester's labels, which includes Leisure & Love Spell. I'd tell you to go to their facebook page or forums & protest but they've been deleting any mention of this from their pages. Get out the word any way you can. Tweet, blog, post it as a status on your personal face book pages, or post in one of the various chat rooms or forums on the net. Do whatever you can to spread the word about this & the boycott.

(All info & quotes were taken from Dear Author's article entry here, which in turn was taken from Keene's twitter & other social sites.)

The Dorchester/Leisure Publishing Ban

I just got told something horrible. Seriously horrible. Imagine that you just did a huge amount of work. You're tired but proud of yourself for everything you've achieved. Payday finally rolls around, but instead of finding a paycheck in your mailbox you find nothing but air. ‘It must be late- I’ll give it another day or two,’ you think. When days turn into months turn into years you start to realize… you’re not getting paid anytime soon. You turn to your fellow workers to ask if they’ve gotten anything, only to discover that they haven’t either.

And there’s a lot of you.

This is currently what’s going with Dorchester Publishing & their Leisure imprint. Over 150 people (with more reporting in each day) have either had extremely late or no payments from Dorchester. Yet the publishing company is still selling copies of their books. Now some of you might think “but what if these are authors whose books really don’t sell? Well, the guy that started getting the word out about this is none other than Brian Keene, one of the bigger names in horror. He might not be as instantly recognizable to the non-horror savvy person as Stephen King’s might be, but trust me- he’s a pretty big deal & the bookstore I work in sells quite a few of his books. There’s no way that he wouldn’t have a paycheck. So what to do about a publishing company that isn’t paying the people who are the ones putting out the product & effort that keeps them in business?

WE BOYCOTT THEM.

That’s right, let’s hit them where it hurts: in their wallet. Don’t buy their products. This will show them that us the public support the people they are robbing of a paycheck & that we aren’t going to support the greedy fatcats who are refusing to pay these people the money they earned. This might mean that you’ll miss out on a few books, but trust me- it’ll be for the greater good.

For more information, check out Brian Keene’s site for the latest information on this topic.

(Click on the picture above for the current list of people & organizations that aren't being paid by Dorchester.)