[howyoudoin]

This sort of thing happens all the time.

My first job was at a Medical Clinic.

However my contract on joining there was with "XYZ petroleum company", who were my employers on paper, and who would be paying me. This seemed strange to me, but apparently XYZ Petroleum company owned the chain of clinic I was joining.

Of course, an easy way to discount the relevance of this tactic to the case at hand would be confirmation by the authors that were indeed contracted directly to Simon and Schuster, and that S&S had directly the agency contract with Amazon and the leasor-leasee relationship with the end-consumer, thus putting S&S on shaky ground.