I would like to speak out on behalf of all of the unpaid and unanswered authors of Torquere Press LLC. You may say I am no longer a Torquere author, but as long as you owe me and my wife the nearly 4K combined you owe us, I am an unsatisfied author of your company.
Therefore, I take it on myself to speak for all the authors who have not been paid, some since 3rd qtr 2015, most since June 2016. I speak out for the author you still owe $18600.00 not including the 10K you paid for a bounced check, which also has not been received. I speak out for the author you owe $35.00 for an anthology story. I'm calling you out for all the authors who have requested payment, rights reversions, or just a simple update and have remained unanswered.
I'm also writing on behalf of your staff, some of whom I hired when I was the owner of Torquere Press Inc, and therefore I feel responsible for. Those staff who worked for you for free for too long while you made promises you didn't keep, then threw them under the bus by telling the authors you paid the staff rather than author royalties. Which is not true.
So, here's my challenge to you both.
Own up to your shit. Give the authors a reversion letter. Even if you do it the cowardly way like Ellora's Cave and put it up publicly for all the authors to grab. Then close the business. Stop stealing. Stop sitting on your butts and making income off the authors you refuse to answer. Clean out your emails and give people their books back. The money is gone. We get it. While it would be a decent thing to do to pay us, you're not going to. But this is people's lives. It's their copyright, their property.
Give it back. Answer for yourself, and for once, do the right thing.
Take down the websites and the distributor accounts and stop acting like you can just walk away. You can't, and doing the right thing now might stop some of the legal actions said authors and staff are already in the act of starting.
Sincerely,
Julia Talbot
