Kameron Hurley on the conspiracy of silence about NSB that let to the current situation

[james_davis_nicoll]

Everything authors knew about the rotten abuse at Night Shade was shared in private. With a few exceptions (Moon and Williams, most notably) no one was talking out loud about what was happening. The SFWA was accomodating and gracious and gave them chance after chance. We should have spoken up. All of us.

But we didn’t. Because these guys were “nice guys” we knew, not “big megacorp unknown entity.”

Comments

[thejeopardymaze]

I'm almost reminded of the death of the Hyperium label, except I don't think the artists were able to salvage as much. I'll have to ask the grapevine about more details about that.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

The whole thing reminds me of countless stories about indie rock labels in the 80's, a lot of which formed out of zines and around friends-of-friends and so on. Well-meaning labels crashed and burned. Some albums disappeared for years. Supposedly the members of Hüsker Dü are still convinced SST owes them each tens of thousands of dollars, but nobody can tell because SST didn't issue a single financial statement for a decade or so.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Testify. I'm a lot farther from the music scene now than I was during that time, but yeah, the parallels are alarmingly similar and I did rather think of that. It also rather reminded me of the stories around Wizards of the Coast in those halcyon days when they were getting more money than God (from Magic, one presumes) and Peter Adkison and other boffins at the top were learning what it meant to be responsible employers and owners-of-businesses...

[seawasp]

Difference being that WotC survived, and they even paid people when they left the RPG industry. (I know, I was one of those that they gave severance pay to, so to speak).

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Yep -- that's certainly true.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough this shit never happens in rap music, I supposed an armed community is a more professional community.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Nobody cheated 2Pac, they just shot him.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

yeah but biggie never asked that everyone consider how hard it was for him to have tupac shot, and stressed the importance of the few remaining independent dope MCs in an industry where the good ones are dying young and the rest are increasingly just about making short term profits for record companies owned by rich white men.

Hell no, Biggie gave and took his bullets like a professional, calmly and with minimum fuss.

That's The Game; you can choose to play it or not but nobody takes you seriously if you whine about, and no one is about to cover your ass if you play it badly.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

Fair enough. Passive-aggressive whining is a white-boy rock thing.

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think there are plenty of corners on this globe where passive agressive whining is a tool of choice that have nothing to do with "white-boy rock"...

[sanskritabelt.livejournal.com]

I remember listening to rap music in the late 80s/early 90s and people were complaining that someone (Russell Simmons?) cheated them out of money, also weren't there allegations of this in the Ice Cube/NWA breakup?

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Our Cuban music label office's suite was next to a rap label's suite. We haven't forgotten the day a couple of that label's boys with a beef came in and pistol whipped everybody.

They still didn't get paid.

But their asses went to prison.

This was in NYC.

In New Orleans, man, not paying the musicians is an ancient art that went to levels hardly imagined by white boys.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

I don't know about fridgepunk, but I myself was thinking more of the "we're nice guys, everybody likes us, we love the music and sincerely want to get it out there except whoops it turns out we're incompetent at business so I guess we'll just lie about it for years" angle.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Did Roger Zelazny actually die in poverty? I hadn't heard that before.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I was kind of wondering that myself. Or rather, did he die in poverty that was not caused by the fact that he died of cancer in the US's sucky medical system? Possibly combined with the fact that he ran off with a girlfriend and left his wife with their teenage kids and presumably owed child support?

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Whaaaat?!?!?!? If true, this certainly lowers my estimation of the man.

[timill]

Wiki says: "Zelazny was married twice, first to Sharon Steberl in 1964 (divorced, no children), and then to Judith Alene Callahan in 1966 (he had also been engaged to folk singer Hedy West for six months in 1961/62[2]). Roger and Judy had two sons, Devin and Trent (an author of crime fiction) and a daughter, Shannon. At the time of his death, Roger and Judy were separated and he was living with author Jane Lindskold.[4]"

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Maybe this is what tavella meant to say, but 'ran off with a girlfriend' isn't the same thing as 'separated and living with another woman.'

[tavella.livejournal.com]

It may be a nicer way of saying it, but to my understanding it was not a mutually decided on breakup, so it's the same thing; they were 'separated' because he had left her and the kids for Jane Lindskold. Which y'know, I'm not going to tell anyone they have to stay with their spouse if they don't want to, but there were kids involved and he was damn well still responsible for them.

So if 'living in poverty' translates to 'it costs more to maintain two households than one and the courts were not interested in the children being the ones taking the resultant hit in living standards', that's a little different than 'dying in poverty because publishers are assholes'.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Though honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it was simply that he was never more than a middle-market author (though a well-regarded one) and the market in the 90s had become less and less friendly to full-time authors in that class. I remember Spider Robinson having trouble dealing with the same collapse, and he lived in Canada where you have an actual medical system.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I certainly didn't intend to suggest that I believed he was rich. His books never crossed over to mainstream bestsellers, AFAIK.

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, if that's what actually happened, you're right. But my mom and dad are separated and there was never any hint of another man or woman and it was mutually agreed-upon as well (well, that's the official line. The truth is that as soon as the kids were all out of the house my mom let it be known she was not happy with the way he had been conducting himself for the last 25 years or so.)

And the wiki article doesn't clear this up. Not that I'm saying you're wrong. It's just that this is a pretty stiff accusation to make and I'd like to see some independent corroboration. Running out on the kids is not cool.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

As I said to jamesenge, it's entirely possible I have it wrong; the version I know was picked up from Amber gaming circles in the 90s, and while there were people who had contact with Zelazny none of them were close friends. So it's possible that the "fell in love with Jane Lindskold and eventually left his wife for her" version I heard is incorrect.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

...though there's a certain 'draw the veil over the timing' quality to this reminisce by Lindskold. And I ran into a comment by the late Marilee Layman about being at the convention where RZ and Lindskold "met and started their affair."

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Although it seems to me that much of the vagueness in that account is aimed at her own marriage, not Zelazny's. So it goes.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

As I understand the situation (I have no direct knowledge), Judith Callahan left Roger Zelazny, not vice versa. But, however they parted company, I think one needs to demonstrate that someone is a deadbeat; it's unfair to presume it.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Possibly! My knowledge is entirely third-hand and a decade and a half old, so I could be entirely wrong. And I certainly wasn't presuming he was a deadbeat, just that if he was taking a hit in living standards because he had child support to pay I didn't blame that on his publishers.

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

Sorry--I misconstrued what you meant by "owed". But I'm not sure who was the custodial parent in this breakup, either. My vague memory (from the "..And Call Me Roger" sections of the Collected Zelazny) is that Callahan moved out. But I don't have them at hand to check.

[melita66.livejournal.com]

Let's have some birth dates on his children:

Devin: b 1971
Trent: b 1976
Shannon: b ? but called to IL bar in 2004

Zelazny died in 1995.

[ckovacs.livejournal.com]

No. Absolutely not. Zelazny did not die in poverty; that's a cruel urban myth.

I researched and wrote Zelazny's biography ("...And Call Me Conrad": The Literary Life of Roger Zelazny) which is contained within the six-volume THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ROGER ZELAZNY from NESFA Press. And to answer the other speculation below, Zelazny moved out to join Jane Lindskold. He separated but did not divorce. He was well off at the time of his death and had, for example, full medical insurance coverage, unlike many sf writers who cannot afford it and have to make use of the SFWA Medical Emergency fund. Just a few years before he'd had what David Hartwell termed an extraordinarily high advance for a trilogy of Amber novels; those books were so commercially successful that they became the five Merlin books. He was well off and supporting his family at the time of his death.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

According to Hurley, we should still keep buying Night Shade books?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

Better Bookscan numbers make either a reissue or subsequent sales of other novels more likely.

But, of course, were people buying most NSB books in numbers to make Bookscan numbers attractive, there wouldn't be a problem!

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Also, while authors are unsecured creditors, I have no idea if NSB had any secured creditors. Which is to say, if it does go to Chapter 7, authors might at least get a nickel on the dollar of royalties or something like that. Which is better than no nickel of a non-sale.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

In past publisher bankruptcies, distributors who have given loans to publishers and even printers have been secured creditors. Who knows if this is the case with NSB.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Okay. So Night Shade is a little like a bad bank.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

I don't think our political class would consider any publisher "too big to fail", though.

[brett-dunbar.livejournal.com]

The problem with banking wasn't really size it was interconnectedness, a large bank is definitely too interconnected to be allowed to fail, however a fairly small bank can be as well and you might not realise it. In 1933 the USA had a devastating series of bank runs wiping out about 40% of the sector, almost all smaller banks, triggered by the failure of Bank of the United States which was only the 14th largest bank. The problem is a large proportion of a banks liquid assets are liabilities of other banks. One bank failing and its assets being suspended pending liquidation puts a bunch of other banks in difficulty potentially causing further failures. The danger of this kind of chain reaction is the reason for staging rescues and dealing with a problem very quickly. There is also the point that rescuing banks is usually profitable as it tends to be a liquidity problem rather than solvency. Outside finance neither really applies.

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

I bought Hurley's first two books from Night Shade, and her third as an e-book via Baen (dunno if Baen's still offering that deal). I hope she at least got the $ from "Rapture".

What utter jerks!

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

I met a traveller from an antique land who said, "There's this writer who has some terrible stories about the Night Shade people, not just about money stuff," and I says to this guy, I says, "Why doesn't he or she go public with these stories?" and the guy says to me, he says, "I don't know, but it can't help that SFWA had Night Shade under probation and let them off the hook--obviously prematurely. There might be a sense that the people who should listen to these problems weren't listening," and I says, "That is messed up!" and he says, "Yes."

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Nothing besides remains.
'Round the decay
Triumphant smug from Konrath
(one J. A.).