Writers Get Sued

I suppose if you get no meaningful advance on your work you don’t have to worry about this.

The Smoking Gun, the investigative American website that unveiled James Frey as a liar in 2006, has found that Penguin filed lawsuits against five authors who have not delivered books for which they were paid significant advances. As well as Wurtzel, the blogger Ana Marie Cox is being asked to return her $81,250 advance (and at least $50,000 in interest) for not writing a “humorous examination of the next generation of political activists”, signed in 2006, and Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor whose story of how he met his wife turned out to be a fabrication, is being chased for a $30,000 advance (and at least $10,000 in interest).

The Wurtzel lawsuit makes clear that the bestselling author signed a $100,000 deal in 2003 to write “a book for teenagers to help them cope with depression”, of approximately 250 pages, by 2004. She received a $33,300 advance, with the rest of the money to follow on delivery and publication. But “despite repeated and frequent demand by Plaintiff … Defendant has refused or failed to repay the advance and remains indebted to Plaintiff in the amount of $33,000″, writes Penguin in its lawsuit. The publisher has now taken to the courts to recoup the $33,000 from Wurtzel, “as well as interest of not less than $7,500″. “[Wurtzel is] in possession of the sum of $33,000 that is the rightful property of Plaintiff,” writes Penguin. “As a result, [she has] been unjustly enriched by [her] activities and Plaintiffs have suffered a detriment.”

Interesting to note that Wurtzel is David Foster Wallace’s “Depressed Person.”

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