JOPLIN, Mo. — Writing a book, hard as that may be, often turns out to be the easy part. What comes next frequently comes as an ugly shock. Hawaiian author Kiana Davenport is a case in point.

She’s written “internationally best-selling novels” including “Shark Dialogues,” “Song of the Exile,” and more, plus the forthcoming novel “The Chinese Soldier’s Daughter.” Her short stories have won numerous O. Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and the Best American Short Story Award, 2000.

Her problem: Eight months ago she decided to self-publish “backlogs” of her writing.

“I did this in innocence and exuberance, and a need for income,” she writes in a blog. “And yes, I did it out of ignorance, never dreaming that the reverberations of that decision would cost me my credibility in whatever is left of the world of print publishing.”

In January 2010, she signed a contract with one of the Big Six publishers in New York for her next novel.

“I understood then that I, like every writer in the business, was being coerced into giving up more than 75 percent of the profits from electronic sales of that novel, for the life of the novel,” she wrote. “But I was debt-ridden and needed upfront money that an advance would provide.”

The book was scheduled for hardback publication in August 2012, and paperback publication a year later.

Then the publisher discovered she had self-published two of her story collections as electronic books and “they went ballistic. The editor shouted at me repeatedly on the phone. I was accused of breaching my contract (which I did not) but worse, of ‘blatantly betraying them with Amazon,’ their biggest and most intimidating competitor. I was not trustworthy. I was sleeping with the enemy.”

My blood runs cold reading this. Those great big publishers have had it all their own way since forever, but now that’s changing and they are, as she reported, “going ballistic.” They’re also manipulating the meanings of old contracts, but that’s another story.

Getting back to Kiana Davenport, she e-pubbed her first collection of stories before she signed the contract with the publisher so they zeroed in on the second collection, published in July of this year. The short stories in both collections had been previously published and when pulled together into anthologies, had been rejected by Big Six publishers in New York.

“I still have their rejection letters, including one from the house I was now under contract with,” she wrote. “So you might say these stories were, in a sense, recycled, sitting in my files rejected. Yet, as published collections, this Big Six publisher suddenly found them threatening. “

That publisher demanded that she immediately and totally delete the collection called “Cannibal Nights” from Amazon, iNook, iPad and all other e-platforms and delete all Google hits mentioning her and the book Ñ currently, about 600,000 hits. She must also “guarantee in writing I would not self-publish another e-book of any of my backlog of works until my novel with them was published in hardback and paperback.

“In other words they were demanding that I agree to be muzzled for the next two years, to sit silent and impotent as a writer, in a state of acquiescence and, consequently, utter self-loathing.”

She turned them down and that, folks, took all kinds of guts.

The result: She received an official letter from their lawyers terminating her contract with them “for permitting Amazon to publish ‘Cannibal Nights’” and demanding that she return the $20,000 paid as part of their advance. Until then, the publisher will hold her novel as hostage, a work that took her five years to write.

“This is not a tale of woe,” she concludes. “It’s a cautionary tale, a warning to other writers.”

I don’t know this author but I know quite a bit about the publishing business and I believe every single word she wrote. Writers have been at the mercy of publishers for so many years that changes in the industry are catching the big boys flat footed.

I expect some new accord to be reached eventually because more and more writers are starting to realize their growing strength. Let’s hear it for Kiana Davenport.





Shift in strategy

Editing errors happen but rarely are they as lethal as this one. Author Susan Andersen was horrified to discover an unfortunate typo in the e-book edition of her new novel, “Baby, I’m Yours.”

Said Anderson, “I apologize to anyone who bought my on-sale e-book of ‘Baby, I’m Yours’ and read on page 293: ‘He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he s****ed on the ground’ Shifted Ñ  he SHIFTED! I just cringe when I think of the readers who have read this.”

The mistake (after I stopped laughing) reminded me of the Three Armed Woman on a romance cover some years back on a book by Christina Dodd.

Wrote Dodd: “Every writer faces a moment in her career when she realizes that a good part of success has nothing to do with skill or planning, and everything to do with pure, dumb luck. For me, that moment arrived at a party at the Romance Writers of America conference in St Louis in 1993, when a colleague came to me and asked, ‘Did you know the heroine on the cover of your newest release has three arms?’”

Ah, a famous moment in romance history now joined by Anderson’s “shifting” hero.