Ellora's Cave, Dear Author & Lawsuits - Oh My!

One upon a time, as a younger but still voracious reader, I stumbled upon Ellora's Cave, an Indie publishing company, and so my love of both ebooks and erotica was born. Back then they only offered PDF, and I STILL have some of those. But over the past few years EC has become stranger and stranger. All I can say is I'm way past disappointed and right into appalled. EC actually has the temerity to SUE a blogger for posting things that by all accounts seem to be true. I don't know what the goal is, but for me, all I can say is they've lost a reader.

The post that spawned the lawsuit can be found here.

"But the problems within Ellora’s Cave are deep and broad and should be brought into the light of day, not only for those existing authors and creators but for future ones. In internal emails, the CEO admits that “the drastic drop in sales has resulted in large net short term variable production losses and slow and often negative return on investment for ECon almost every new book we publish, with the exception of a handful of the highest sellers.”
There is a set of authors who have not received royalty payments in over six months. EC has blamed this repeatedly on a new accounting system installed in December of 2013.
CEO Marks admits that “already submitted finished books” will be paid but that “payment may be delayed.”
For editors, any partial work would not be paid, only finished work and that by finishing the work, they must accept the terms of the late payment.
Partial work that is completed should be sent in to be finished by an in house editor and no partial work will be paid for.
Failure to turn in either partial work or finished work will result in a 25% deduction of overall payment for that project.
The author portal has been shut down where a select few authors could check their royalties.
Authors request for return of their rights have been rejected and some are told that their books will be published with or without their approval.
The total sum of unpaid royalties, editor fees, cover artist fees is in the several thousands, perhaps approaching six figures.
EC has held warehouse sales advertised via online forums and through eBay.

Authors are now asking readers to not buy EC books. See Avril Ashton and Cat Grant."

(Formatting issues in this excerpt are my own and not the results of DA)

And here's the link for Dear Author's response about the lawsuit.

All I can say is that Dear Author has shown a lot of class, I wouldn't have been as nice, and I think EC is behaving childishly and throwing a whining tantrum. I hate to wish ill on someone, and I'm sad for the authors, editors, cover artists et al who are being hurt by this, but Tina/Jaid needs to be stopped.