Dorchester going under

[Doug Pardee]

It looks like Dorchester Publishing is down for the count. As of Tuesday they don't have any editors left, and from the sounds of it, they don't have any funds left.

For a couple of years, authors have been complaining that Dorchester hasn't been paying them their royalties, hasn't reverted rights as agreed upon, and has continued to sell those books where they did revert the rights to the author. Since then, many of Dorchester's authors have been promoting a boycott against their own publisher. This situation apparently remains, and on Wednesday the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) delisted Dorchester as a qualifying market following a year of probation. Not that Dorchester published a lot of SF, but the point is that SFWA wasn't convinced that Dorchester was square with its authors.

[Margo]

Ugly. And probably not the last casualty.

[Mira]

Doug, thanks for sharing this!

I'm sorry - it's sad - but I agree with Margo. This is just the first start of the casualties. Sometimes, I think people think that because things go quiet for awhile, that change isn't happening. But I think that it's fairly inevitable. Could be wrong, but all signs seem to point that way.

A technology change can be brutal to those in the old technology. I hope people are looking ahead and preparing for it.