Eldritch Press - Some Words of Warning

You get good experiences and bad experiences in this trade, just as in any other.  Yet still the bad experiences always surprise me a little.  Stupid I know, but there's always a naive part of me that insists that people get into publishing - be they writers, editors or whatever - because it's something they basically love, an even more naive part determined to believe that because of that fact people will be more inclined to behave with a degree of decency and respect.  No matter how often I'm proved wrong on this front - and this year, I've been proved wrong a lot - I still find myself feeling shocked.

The minor bad experiences, the rude e-mails, late payments and such, I invariably let slide.  When people behave in a spectacularly crappy fashion, however, that I try to flag up here.  Because it's safe to assume that a publisher that's acted unprofessionally towards me will do so to other people too, and as writers we have little enough defense against that sort of thing.

Which brings us around to Eldritch Press.

In late June of last year, I submitted a story called Br(other) to an anthology Eldritch had opened for, Our World of Horror, and to my immense surprise it was accepted that same day.  This seemed like hugely good news, since Eldritch were paying good money, and things only looked more positive when the contract came through a prompt four days later.  That was tarnished ever so slightly when the table of contents went up the month after and I noticed they'd managed to misspell the one-word title of my story but, hey, no biggie, and they got it fixed quickly enough.

Four or so months went by.  2014 rolled on into 2015.  With no recent news and half of the twelve month contract period elapsed, it seemed like a good time to check on progress.  I was told that edits were in progress and that they were "waiting on a couple of high profile authors" to send stories.

Five more months passed.  In that time, Eldritch had revamped their website and Our World of Horror had vanished from it.  I wrote again pointing this out and got a form acknowledgement but no reply.  May became June, the last month of the contact exclusivity period, and I had little doubt that something had gone badly wrong.  I wrote once more, highlighting the fact that my story would soon be out of contract and this time got an apology.  I was told I was welcome to withdraw my work but that the book would definitely be out in July.  I suggested a three month contract extension to cover the additional delay and was advised that it would be along shortly.  It never materialized, but about a week later I did get copied in on a mass e-mail announcing the addition of a story by a 'big name' author to the collection.  It was late July by this point, and I was gobsmacked that Eldritch would use the one and only mass e-mail they'd sent out to point out that they were still adding material mere days before their promised release date.  Had they really kept eighteen authors waiting for over a year, just for this?

Apparently not, since things then went quiet once again.  Finally, a few days ago, I got a second mass e-mail, this one announcing that Eldritch were pulling the plug on Our World of Horror.  It didn't come as much of a shock.  Despite the protestations to the contrary, I'd been confident for about six months that the anthology would never see the light of day.  The tone of that e-mail did, however, annoy me to no end.  There was a deal of self-pity in there, yet no apparent awareness that they'd just screwed twenty or so authors around for well over a year and failed to honour payments that surely totaled somewhere in the thousands of dollars.  (I'd illustrate with quotes here, but wouldn't you know, they stuck a confidentiality clause on it.)  I wrote back and pointed out that no part of that e-mail contained an apology of any kind; I further suggested that, having tied up the work of so many writers for well over a year they should probably be thinking about some compensation.  Needless to say, I didn't get a reply.

Now this is hardly an atypical story, and it's not the first sale I've had collapse from under me.  There's no question but that the quality of communication was atrocious, but if it had been that alone then I wouldn't have taken the time to write it up here.  What bothers me particularly is the suspicion that Eldritch tied up stories for this book for a period of months when they had a fairly good idea that it wasn't going to happen.  I mean, why else do you disappear a project from your website?  Why hold off on the edits, except because the contract stipulated payment on their completion?  Why else keep authors so in the dark?  My impression is that they thoughtlessly jerked a bunch of writers around because it suited them and they could get away with it, and - having had my work purchased and sat on for fifteen months and having seen not a dime for the privilege - I consider that reason enough to warn other writers to be careful around these guys.

Though frankly, I doubt that any of this will be an issue.  Reading between the lines of that last e-mail, it seems likely that Eldritch are in the process of folding.  If this is how they do business then, frankly, it's difficult to imagine any other scenario.  Still, I would personally much rather see them get their problems resolved and learn from their mistakes, because the world surely does need more small presses willing to pay decent money.  And if anyone else has had experiences with Eldritch, whether positive or negative, then in the interests of fairness please do take a minute to share them in the comments.