“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday we received from Prentice-Hall the Dutch edition of Seth Speaks [Seth Spreekt], published by Ankh-Hermes. We saw at once that the book had been rather drastically cut—not only my own notes, which contain excerpts from Seth material at times—but Seth’s material itself. This is particularly obvious in the appendix, where only a few pages are left of all of that material. No greetings or responses are included except in isolated instances, nor any good-evenings and closing notes. Times are also left out, and no words are underlined. I suspect also that throughout the book, without my having checked yet, portions of the sessions have been cut whenever they were dependent upon notes that were cut. Some of the sessions, then, are only a page and a half, or two, long.

(Jane immediately called Tam, to learn that, ironically, all of the bigwigs at Prentice-Hall are in Europe, attending the book fair at Frankfurt, Germany, I believe is where it is. It appears that we can do little until the 22nd of October, although I plan to start writing letters before that. I bitterly resent the cutting in the first place, and the time that will be spent away from Mass Events, now, as I do all the work necessary to make our points. Jane finally agrees that we must take certain actions now in our professional lives, and we don’t know what will happen. I can only think at this writing [on the 14th] that we must do all we can to stop such practices by foreign publishers, or we’ll surely regret it deeply in the years to come. We definitely know we’ve been taken advantage of, but basically feel it is Prentice-Hall’s fault for not checking the work in progress.

(Jane also discussed with Tam a number of points growing out of our last royalty statements; some of these are quite legitimate gripes that we’ve kept quiet about for some time. Her implications to Tam were clear enough—we hope: that for the first time she was thinking of alternate courses of action to being published by Prentice-Hall, perhaps trying other publishers, Eleanor Friede among them. I was all for that, I told her. During the week after the Dutch edition arrived, we received from Tam the contracts for God of Jane and Mass Events, both of which contain phrases and clauses in an effort to get around Prentice-Hall’s habit of withholding percentages of earnings against returns. She told Tam she wouldn’t sign them, nor do I want her to. Prentice-Hall even wants to apply any losses for God of Jane against Mass Events after 18 months, in an effort to make one book pay for another! As it is, Prentice-Hall is now applying earnings from the paperback Politics against the hardcover losses—a method Tam says is common in the trade, but which I think is ethically dishonest, to say the least. They did the same thing with Adventures; in this case, that action wiped the board clean for the hardcover Adventures, and even showed a small profit from the paperback sales. But still, it costs us. I view such tactics as the publisher’s way of guaranteeing their publishing costs with no risk to themselves. Instead of charging hardcover losses against taxes as a business expense, say, they charge the author for them; this means they do not have to pay the author any royalties on paperback sales, for at least several years. I don’t think Jane yet grasps the implications here.

(In addition, I want to do what we can to get sales reports from Prentice-Hall re Bantam sales [which we know aren’t great], and from the Pocket Books/Fell fiasco. I plan to write the editor-in-chief at Pocket Books as soon as I find out his name and address, asking him for sales figures; we haven’t had a royalty report from Fell in a year. I want to ask Eleanor Friede for the name of a lawyer to see what can be done to get information from Fell. [She offered to help us that way several years ago, I think.] Perhaps Eleanor can advise us about Pocket Books names, also. Eleanor is also in Europe, by the way.

(The upshot of all of this at the moment is that Jane will not be signing any contracts at this time, and that we’ll be informing Prentice-Hall that we won’t be contracting for any work for them until our questions and assurances are amply demonstrated. I see no other way to head off lots of trouble in the future. I’m personally quite willing to let the chips fall where they may, to coin a phrase, but I’m not at all sure that Jane will agree to go along. My thoughts are that she’d be so terrified to find herself without a publisher that she’d stand for a lot more than what has happened, bad as that is. But we’ll see. I for one have to do or say something, or I’d spend my days thinking about what a fool and coward I was not to stand up for my rights. Our meek acceptance of the deal, I’m afraid, would only lead to more of the same. This would surely drive me out of publishing if I let that happen. As it is, my opinion of Prentice-Hall has sunk to a new low, and it was low enough to begin with.

(We didn’t ask that Seth discuss the Prentice-Hall affair this evening, but....)

(But not from me, I told Jane the other night. I think that here Seth referred to Jane’s and my upset over the small amount of her royalty check this fall, and the way Prentice-Hall has taken to withholding certain percentages of profits against returns.)