[Catlady]

Originally Posted by cHex

They signed a contract (3 months after it was agreed to in principle) that laid out a specific timetable for paying portions of the advance, then paid the "immediately on signing of this contract" portion six weeks later.

Six weeks later, in my book, is darn well close to immediately. Did he think he'd get his money the second he signed the deal? Six months, that would be an issue; six weeks, not so much.

It's not just that they didn't use his ideas, but that they entertained them in the first place (taking hours of his time and implying some level of openness), then it turns out the cover designer never even knew he had any ideas and just designed something completely unrelated.

And if S&S had dismissed his ideas out of hand, he'd be complaining that they didn't even consider them, that they were closed-minded. But they paid him the courtesy of listening to his ideas, considering them, and then rejecting them. That sounds perfectly reasonable and tactful to me. That the ideas were not passed along to the actual cover designer shows only that the publisher didn't like the ideas and asked for something else. So what?

You miss the entire point here. If those people were not going to be immediately available, the author just wanted not to be required to submit something to them until they were available to receive what he was being required to submit. I know I feel disrespected when I am given a deadline, and meet that deadline, only to discover that the next step in the process has to wait while the people who set the deadline finish their vacation.

Stuff happens. Again, he's not the only author they're dealing with. Another
author misses a deadline or otherwise screws up, and everyone scrambles to put out the fire. Or something happens in house, the computers go down or somebody has a personal crisis to deal with, or whatever. I have deadlines when I work, and, yes, sometimes I knock myself out to meet one, and find out that the next person isn't available, and I could've had an extra few days. So what? I did my part, on time.

The author's point is well made; that the publishing industry has its head buried in the sand and that's going to come up and bite them if they don't shape up: "I think you really ought to speed up. It’s not so hard. Modern businesses run fast, there’s people who know how to make that happen. Three months from agreement in principle to contract, followed by a six week breaching-of-contract delay? Not okay. Amazon’s publishing wing doesn’t make mistakes like that."

Amazon's publishing wing? Just when did Amazon become a major publisher, from acquisitions to editorial oversight to production?

I'm not saying that publishers don't need to change. But this guy's specific complaints are all about how S&S didn't treat him as the center of the universe.