File under: ugh

Are you disappointed because your MFA will never lead to financial success? Well, here comes “controversial” New York Times best-selling author James Frey, with a business opportunity that simply can’t be passed up. You remember James Frey, right? He’s the guy who got in trouble with Oprah because he fabricated part of his memoir, initiating a completely debased public conversation about truth, in which most of the moralizing participants condemned Frey for deceiving his audience (and his publisher was sued by readers who felt defrauded!). Anyway, some of us at Harriet are sympathetic to the author as distorter of truth, but it’s much harder to be sympathetic to the author as ruthless profiteer.

A New York Magazine exposé by Suzanne Mozes details Frey’s new business venture: a company called Full Fathom Five, which hires young writers to “collaborate” with Frey and others in “high-concept” genre pieces which can be sold to publishers or to movie studios (Dreamworks is releasing the first Full Fathom Five production in February). The problem, as Mozes reveals, is that these young authors are paid a whopping $250 (!) for drafting the books, and promised a cut of the later profits - essentially a vague, unverifiable sum of money. Mozes asked publishing attorney Conrad Rippy to look over the contract she was offered, and:

He said he had never seen a contract like this in his sixteen years of negotiation. “It’s an agreement that says, ‘You’re going to write for me. I’m going to own it. I may or may not give you credit. If there is more than one book in the series, you are on the hook to write those too, for the exact same terms, but I don’t have to use you. In exchange for this, I’m going to pay you 40 percent of some amount you can’t verify—there’s no audit provision—and after the deduction of a whole bunch of expenses.” He described it as a Hollywood-style work-for-hire contract grafted onto the publishing industry—“although Hollywood writers in a work-for-hire contract are usually paid more than $250.”

Ok, back to adjuncting at community colleges!