Who's Suing Me Today?
Publishing Company Screws the Pooch
Rookie Novelist left out in the Cold
When David Prior got word that the first printing of his novel The Yoke of the Horde had sold out before it even hit the shelves he was thrilled.
"I was very happy," Mr. Prior, who wears glasses, states.
It was only a few months later, after there were no subsequent sales when his enthusiasm started to wane.
"We accidentally sold the books as textbooks to middle school in Fair Oaks, Illinois," Steven Brindeman, the Mailroom Communications Chief at the publishing Corchester, Button, and Finkle states.
It was a mistake that Corchester immediately regretted.
"Prior sent in this hairbrained manuscript," CEO Kimberly Waitkus recalls. "I mean, literally hairbrained, as if he had hair for brains when he wrote it, or still has hair for brains for all I know. Anyways, this might seem like a bit of a tangent, but by way of explanation, what happened was when I was in high school, I was the shooting guard on the varsity basketball team at Winkler Tech and we went all the way to the state final where we faced St. Stanislaus of the Cross Regional High Scool, a powerhouse featuring three future NBA players (Elgin Baylor, Moses Malone, and Ron Artest). Game comes down to the wire. We're up by two and I got the ball. I can still hear goddamn crowd screaming and yelling to this day. All of the sudden out of nowhere I get a hard foul from Malone to stop the clock. Bastard hit me so hard that my arm was pulled out of its socket. Needless to say I was in so much pain that I missed the first of the one and one foul shots, St. Stanislaus of the cross gets the rebound, ties the game on the ensuing posession, and ends up winning the game in ten overtimes, all of which, mind you, I had to play with my arm in a sling. If only, right. I've put that all behind me now, but my point is that my arm has never been the same, although the desire to relive my hoops glory days burns like a goddamned Olympic torch on top of Mt. Moriah, and that's why, still to this day, whenever I get the chance to toss some piece of debris into a dustbin, I don't do so without relish. Course, with my arm, I often miss and such was the case with Mr. Prior's hairbrained manuscript. In and out as we used to say. Rattled back and forth about the rim and then plopped to the floor. Were I not such a busy woman, I maybe would have gone over to the manuscript, reached down, and officially just dropped the thing into the trash the way people who have never ever been basketball stars do. But, I was too busy, and I figured that when the janitor was pushing around his cart at the end of the day that he of all people would recognize a piece of trash when he saw it. Apparently not. I guess he "kinda thought it was funny" and the next thing you know that hairbrained manuscript is wrongly placed in the printing department's mail bin and two weeks later I get a call from an Iowa elementary school teacher complaining about "innacuracies" in her kids' new history book. This whole thing has been a headache for everyone involved."
A headache for everyone, including Prior.
"I really wanted to make it, you know. And when those books sold so quickly, like I said, I was very happy. I thought I'd finally arrived as a writer and that it wouldn't be long before I was hobknobbing with other famous authors like, you know, Ernest Hemingway and guys like that."
To complicate matters, Corchester, Button, and Finkle were so embarrassed by the slip up with the mailroom that they have buried the manuscript in a lead vault behind the dumpster in the back of their corporate headquarters.
"Technically that makes my book their property, which means I can't try to get it published by anybody else," Prior says. "I learned this from my dad, who's a lawyer."