hellbender said:
You know, I wouldn't really call it theft. If you were the last one to sign and holding the others up, what choice does the publisher have? Would you really hold up paying everyone else for a holdout if you were in the other person's shoes?
I wouldn't steal to pay someone else, no. I'd suck it up and pay out of pocket before stealing. Stealing is immoral.
This really amazes me. Someone who apparently styles themselves a freelancer is actually defending selling someone's work without asking them or paying them.
Perhaps I should use one of your pictures in a book. I won't tell you where or when, but i really need to sell this so I can pay somebody you don't know. Also, just for fun, I'll be like Neal and not make any attempt to contact you. You'll have to email me repeatedly over the course of the year with increasing agitation -- assuming you find out where I've stashed your art, that is.
Obviously, you wouldn't mind, right?
Doing art and illustration, waiting for payment is all part of the joy of freelancing and nothing new. Some big companies take a looooong time to pay. The product is out, the money is coming in, and you are sitting around waiting for a check.
If you didn't sign the contract, but didn't submit your final work (what would be the same as a preliminary sketch in illustration) then you are still technically in the negotiation stage.
Yes. That means that the work does not belong to the publisher. It belongs to the creator. The work belonged to me until I settled. I would like you to read that sentence, and then ask yourself what it means when somebody takes what belongs to you and not them and sells it for a profit.
In fact, it still belongs to me. I have shown considerable restraint in not simply providing the offending book for free, since I retain all rights, or by getting it removed from RPGNow.
You keep assuming that Neal Levin had the right to do what he did. He did not.
The product going to print is a necessity of the publisher to meet a deadline, satisfy customers and stay in business, and I seriously doubt it was done to wrong you in particular.
It doesn't matter whether it was done out of rank incompetence or a desire to decieve. Frankly, given that Neal did not admit that he could not pay me for several months, and that it took a previous public airing of grievance to get him to pay even a token fee (which he was late in doing, by the way), I have a feeling it was incompetence followed by deception. I cannot be sure.
Part of being professional is knowing and accepting that no matter what, you are part of a team. Everyone depends on others and all work must be done with a clear plan that everyone sticks to.
Given that Neal's justification was that I was the only one who had actually turned in material promptly, this is especially hilarious.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand the importance of a contract and it being signed,
No, you do not. This is not an insult. I mean that you literally do not appear to understand how the creator retains all rights to a work until he specifically authorized another person to use it. This means that without a contract, it is *against the law* for the publisher to do anything with the work.
but I don't fault the publisher in this case if you also hadn't turned in your final work, but he had to go to print.
No. What he had to do was notify me that he wished to publish and admit that he could not afford to pay me, in which case I would have settled for a reasonable sum or I would have made it clear that I wasn't interested. The choice was entirely mine. You keep speaking as if I was Neal's employee. Companies are our clients, not our employers. We provide a service for them. They pay for it.
I haven't worked with this publisher, but calling him a thief seems quite extreme and not a good way to get other publishers to look at your work.
For reasons that include liability I must correct you and say that I am not definitively claimning Neal Levin is a thief. I am claiming that had I not wrung some money out of him out of the principle of the thing after a year of nagging, that without paying me, he most certainly would be a thief. I leave what he was in the period where he sold my work without paying me or even telling me my product was being sold to your imagination.
Don't burn bridges, shake hands, learn from the experience and move on. Don't point fingers, every time you do, four are pointing back at you.
Instead of vague, homspun prose, I go by things like: Don't lie, cheat or steal. I had no idea that this was so controversial.
