Actually, to clarify, what Prime’s executive editor told me was this: “Our royalty statements are accurate and truthful and easily verified. [Michael Cisco] has now seen his statement and knows that his royalty payment is accurate.” Cisco didn’t get paid what he was expecting because what he was expecting was simply, as Nielsen Bookscan can verify, unrealistic. As the editor noted, it’s one thing to suggest that Prime could have published Cisco a lot better, quite another to accuse them of cheating him out of his royalties.

Authors can and should demand reliability from the companies they choose to publish their books, and transparency can be an effective way to secure that reliability. And, yes, “every other publisher drops the ball on these issues” (Poppy Z. Brite, in the comments to Cisco’s post, made similar complaints about a division of Random House, so it’s not just an indie press problem) is a lousy defense. All that said, the point of my post was that authors might not find venting on their blogs to be the best strategy for resolving problems with their publishers, especially if they don’t have their facts straight before they start kicking up dust.