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Originally Posted by Catlady
I think he's a narcissistic jerk.
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Agreed.
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S&S was somewhat slow to pay his advance.
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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.
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S&S didn't use his cover ideas.
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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.
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Oh, but apparently there were times when people at S&S were not immediately available to him--because of course HE is the only author anyone at the publishing house needs to deal with and should be everyone's priority.
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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.
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."