I've very new to this thread. Can anybody encapsulate what's happened with EC? Is it a matter of non-royalty payments or a full tilt meltdown going on here?
Just curious and, of course, concerned.
tri
Aside from royalty disputes, there are many other issues:
key members of staff have been let go, including pretty much the entire editorial team as it was. When you receive an email explaining that your publisher is letting go of nearly the entire editing staff in one broad stroke, it doesn't incite feelings of faith in that company's solvency. It didn't help that said email attempted (ineffectually, I might add) to convince the authors that having a smaller editorial staff and no longer having editors assigned to each author is actually a good thing for the authors.
Other staff members,
like the social media associate, disappeared from staff as well. Now, the person who runs the EC Twitter account types weird, nonsensical things like
"S.H.I.T --- So Happy Its Thursday smile emoticon," and
"Good Morning. Is there anything y'all would like new from use book genre, calendars, etc? We love your input readers smile 
" not to mention the use of misspelled hashtags like
"#yourwelcome". If you publish books, you should not be littering your social media accounts with typos and misspellings. It looks highly unprofessional.
The person in charge of distributing EC titles for reviews is also long gone, with EC directing authors to now handle this process on their own in another email that basically said "she realized she's obsolete, it was her own choice, this is really for the best, etc."
And EC is inexplicably
selling random trinkets on their website while their
list of new releases, once multiple pages long, now yields only 11 results. Regardless of the reason for the shocking lack of upcoming releases, it's not a good sign.
Add to this the way EC management--Jaid Black in particular--has conducted itself in the wake of all these troubling developments. Ms. Black et al began a public campaign of finger-pointing, putting the blame for the company's weak sales and other issues on the
new royalty software,
lying authors, lying and/or disgruntled former employees,
Amazon,
Dear Author, and pretty much everyone else they can think of other than themselves. There have been numerous rants about gossips, haters,
"witch hunts,", disloyal authors, etc. posted all over social media accounts and blogs for anyone to read. Again, not the way any company should behave in a public forum, least of all a company going through so much turmoil.
As an aside, to be fair, I do think that some of what Ms. Black has said/done has been misrepresented (notably the Dear Author post about her "security detail" Facebook rant, which I believe to have been sarcastic and not at all threatening). But the evidence of her bad behavior is strewn all over the internet, written exclusively by her.
In my opinion, EC is a company that is led by management incapable of accepting any part in their failure, which is ultimately its biggest downfall of all. Contacting the royalty department results in an auto reply something along the lines of "We're really busy but we hope to get back to you in 2-3 weeks." Checks are getting smaller and smaller and again, whatever the reason for this, it's not a good sign.
So yeah, this is the long way of saying full tilt meltdown.
