Conservative authors sue the parent of Regnery Publishing over its deep-discount book club scheme.

The NYT reports. As if Regnery would have all those big best-sellers if they sold their tracts at full cover price in bookstores. Who are the plaintiffs? (They'd better not be scribes of the too-much-litigation genre.)

Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”...

“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”

A scam? A fraud? Did you not read the contract? Did you not see the structure of the business you were dealing with? Does this litigation demonstrate conservative principles?

Are you familar with the writings of Corsi, Gertz, Patterson, Mowbray and Miniter? Regnery made "best sellers" out of their books, but no doubt they're sad they haven't raked in as much as, say, Ann Coulter — who has published with Regnery and then gone on to other publishers and other contracts and is not among the plaintiffs.

[T]he publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book.

Suggested titles for new conservative books by Corsi, Gertz, Patterson, Mowbray and Miniter: "A Deal Is Not a Deal," "Contracts Are Theft," "How Courts Can Help Americans Get the Money They Deserve."

Miniter said:

“It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.”

Aw, what's a conservative to do? Get a new publisher — or litigate for the deal you forgot to negotiate for? Should you suffer — while someone else profits — just because it only — suddenly! — occurred to you much later that — if the book were a big seller — you'd be jealous of the money made by the publisher that made it a big seller for you?

[Miniter] added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

Why is Miniter sounding like a Marxist?