Loss of Your Company

18^th January 2018

Dear (Book Geek),

My condolences on the loss of your company as it would appear it has gone under. This isn’t the first book publisher I’ve seen that fell to the bad economy, but with the world turning more and more to used books and books about politics coming more and more into the public eye you can hardly be surprised.

However, with nothing left to lose or gain I do have two questions to ask. The first is ‘may I publish the correspondence between myself and your company’, and the second being ‘what was the real truth behind what happened to my work’?

I publish almost every letter I write or receive of a page length or longer on my blog, and so I think it would be helpful to other writers to publish at least one of the letters you sent me. I will remove your name and the name of your company, not that it would make a difference, and I will never speak of who wrote them. I simply believe that the advice I was given may be of help to others.

As for my second question, there is no secret to the fact that I was feuding with another author and that it was him and his friends who gave my book bad reviews. You asked for harsh criticism, and I gave it to you, but everything I wrote was honest. This fellow took it personally and got his friends to gang up on me. Then you took both of our books down.

I know this to be a major outlier, because there were books that sat for more than a year with no reviews and still were left on the site, but the two of us got the ax without a definitive number of reviews. I also noted that I could still access my book on your page but that, unlike other books that had been taken down, moderation had been removed.

If I offended you I’m sorry, if I caused you trouble you have my apologies, but it still looks as if there is more to the story, and I would like to know. It may even do you well to tell.

Best,

Richard Leland Neal