I just learned that a fairly proficient author named Vera
Nazarian has started one of those crowdfunding campaigns for a purpose that is drawn some controversy.
She
was the sole proprietor of a small press called Norilana, which printed
some pretty good books and some very good authors — but a few years ago she
went through a period of incredibly bad health and stopped paying royalties. She went through bankruptcy couple of years
ago.
Her funding drive is to pay royalties she still owes to
authors. By her own accounting she owes over $20,000. This is drawn a lot of
flak, because people feel since she spent the money herself somewhere along the
line she should pay the money back herself.
As someone who went through a disagreeable business failure
a number of years ago – a small newspaper rather than of a small press – I
understand how agonizing the whole process is. Sole proprietorships are dangerous creatures; they are often the best way for a small business to start, but when they implode there
is usually no place to go for funding.
You end up robbing Peter to pay Paul, co-mingling funds and
hoping that eventually you’ll get caught up. When you run out of time, your
bookkeeping can look like a pot of spaghetti someone dropped on the kitchen
floor.
My newspaper ran into difficulties because of a confluence
of politics, demographics, and some health issues on my part. Apparently in the
case of Vera, it was all health and very severe. A wise man once said “Sometimes
you can die of bad luck” and from what I can tell, Vera was fighting for her
life.
I think like any average genre writer, the odds of her coming
up $20,000 out-of-pocket would be difficult under any circumstances. I think it’s
interesting that she is still trying to do something about this; the average schmuck
would just blow it off and go on.
The people the lambasting her, I think, need to remember those
sayings about walking a mile in someone’s shoes, or throwing the first stone.
That’s not to say what she did was wasn’t wrong, but we all make mistakes in
life. We don’t have debtors prisons in the United States – yet – and despite
what some people think, you can’t put someone to death for owing you money.
My experience in the speculative fiction publishing field is that a lot
of people do it for love and/or fun. They consider themselves fortunate if they
simply don’t go in the hole. As in the case of a marriage or a relationship, it’s
difficult to admit things have not worked out. We all know how often people
stay in marriages and relationships past the time when they should have broken
up; this also happens to in businesses that are labors of love.
In marriages the financial fallout is that you owe alimony.
In a business failure, you owe creditors. When my newspaper was going under, someone
came to my office and smashed it up, and knocked me around a bit. They got away
with it, because of collusion between law enforcement and the courts. Well as
Kurt Vonnegut used to say, “and so it goes.”
So I find it hard to work up ahead of steam of righteous
indignation over the Vera Nazarian’s plight. I may very well toss in a few
dollars myself. Some people have suggested looking up the authors she still owes money to and paying them directly. Which is not a bad idea. But at the very least, I think people should at least try to
imagine what circumstances led to her financial difficulties as well as her
decision to go public in a project that has subjected her to public humiliation.
We are all human, and at any given time most of us are
broke.
