The revenge of Red Rose Publishing
Previously, on OTF_wank...

Dear Author posts about Red Rose publishing, reproducing a report from Kat Holmes, a former RRP author, and the ridiculous response of the head of the publishing house. Wank ensues in the comments. In fact, more wank than was even included in the original post!

Shortly after I made the previous post, one "not impressed" posts one ridiculous teal deer about how the post is "slander" and improper and generally not very nice. A choice quote, carefully extracted from the continuous stream of babble:

Bad mouthing someone in public, impacting their business and revenue can be a chargeable offence. It would be wise to conduct yourselves accordingly and keep your b**&$ fests private, where it belongs.

Kat's mother Lin responds with her own teal deer barrage. Not impressed fires back (with actual paragraph breaks, thank heaven), including statements like:

The comments about self promotion, is a direct observation from my own personal results, of not making significant and repeated efforts to boost my own personal sales.

...I uh. What? Anyways. Lin fires back again, and Kat even adds a pithy two cents. I really do feel bad for the girl, between the crazy screaming at her and the crazy screaming from her mother, and she just has these quiet, reasonable responses. There's another hundred or so comments I don't have time to go through right now, but there's a lot of anonymous RRP people in there. I might go back and add some gems later, but oh boy is it a doozy.

Some additional background on RRP also emerged from the comments of the earlier report. It seems, in restrospect, that there were some warning signs about RRP. That absolute write thread has a lot of opinions one way or the other, but bottom line there were some flags up about RRP for a while, including one notable one from Piers Anthony (search for "Red Rose" on the page).

All well and good, but you didn't come here for a history lesson. No, this is for the new, juicy developments. How juicy? Empty legal threats juicy! A couple of choice quotes from the Dear Author post, made last Saturday:

On Friday, I received a phone call from a lawyer in Utica, New York who represents Red Rose Publishing. RRP is claiming that I defamed them in this post here wherein I summarized the reported complaints of RRP authors and posted the president and owner’s email regarding her displeasure with RRP authors. The lawyer wanted my address so he could send me some correspondence that “laypeople may call a cease and desist” letter. At the time of the phone call, I don’t believe the lawyer had read the post in question as he kept referring to “blog postings.” I urged him to read the post and explain to me where I had been defamatory. I reminded him that truth is always a defense to defamation.

I relayed to RRP’s attorney that I would not remove the post unless he could convince me I engaged in a legal wrong. As there is nothing defamatory in the post, I refused to take it down, gave my address, and told him I would await his correspondence.

I think this is what could be called in technical terms an "ice burn." A (former) RRP author makes an interesting comment on that entry about her Red Rose works suddenly vanishing from Amazon. Another, anonymous Red Rose author states that provides some info on the RRP NDA: The RRP NDA say that authors may not discuss RRP in a negative way on blogs, forums etc. It is pretty broad.

Yesterday, shit gets real, as Dear Author recieves an official-looking letter ...with no actual legal content to speak of.

We are writing in regard to recent statements which you have made concerning Red Rose Publishing on an internet blog entitled “Dear Author.” Your blog entry of September 2, 2010 and the statements contained therein are false and misleading and have damaged the reputation of Red Rose Publishing. We hereby request that you remove the blog posting entitled “Red Rose Publishing Having Problems Internally?” and all related threads and/or comments, and that you refrain from future posts regarding Red Rose Publishing.

This letter is not submitted to you for publication and we do not want the same published nor the matter to receive any further attention. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please contact our office if you have any questions.

****

My response:

Thank you for your letter regarding my blog post titled “Red Rose Publishing Having Problems Internally?“. Before I can take any action, I will need for you to please articulate the legal basis for your letter.

Sincerely,

****

The rest of the post is a point-by-point summary of exactly what was asserted in the DA post, and evidence supporting each statement. I won't bother copypasting the whole thing here, but it's worth reading if you like smart bloggers smacking down legal scare tactics.

Of course, a smackdown post is best accompanied by wanky comments, and we have a few wanky comments. Most of them are just written versions of the MJ popcorn GIF, but then we get this one comment by "Interested in Maintaining standards".

There’s something shifty here that no one seems to be catching. I find it hard to take any information seriously when writers or bloggers refuse to stand behind their real names. In journalism school a reporter’s name is his or her badge of honor.

Just saying…

Followed by at least a dozen smackdown comments. My favorite of the bunch is, quite simply: So what's your name?

So that's where things stand now. I'll be keeping an eye on DA and various other blogs to see where it goes from here (after Yom Kippur of course, l'shanah tovah to you all), but yeah, this could just be the beginning.