When asked by authors about the missing payments, Ms. Wills, 63, the chief executive, often called it an oversight or a glitch in the system. But several former employees said that delayed payments to authors were a result of Blushing\u2019s routine mismanagement of finances.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2021\/10\/03\/business\/01Romance-Publishing-wills\/merlin_195603723_c8c472fb-b154-4f09-956e-ec0a5e057b2f-articleLarge.jpg\")
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In December 2020, the Romance Writers of America, a trade group, announced that, following an ethics investigation, it had suspended the publisher\u2019s membership for three years and barred Blushing from attending its conferences. The Authors Guild, an advocacy group, is representing 30 writers seeking to reclaim rights to their work from Blushing. So far, one of those authors has stopped Blushing from selling her books after filing copyright-infringement notices with retailers, showing that Blushing did not hold contracts for them. Umair Kazi, director of policy and advocacy at the Authors Guild, said that some of Blushing\u2019s contract provisions and its treatment of some authors go against industry standards and raise \u201cmany red flags.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a statement to The Times, Ms. Wills declined to address specific allegations from authors, and said that her company\u2019s policy was not to speak publicly about any \u201cauthor\u2019s contractual obligation with Blushing.\u201d She also noted that Blushing had paid \u201cmillions of dollars in royalties just in the past five years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under pressure from authors, Blushing has offered more transparency, and says that it is now providing monthly royalty payments, and that since the first quarter of 2020, it has used an automated royalty tracking system to generate payments<\/p>\n
A lawyer for Ms. Wills said that she \u201cbelieves she has fulfilled her contractual duties to her authors and continues to do so\u201d and that \u201cBlushing wishes to move on from this small group of past authors and disgruntled past employees and put its energy into focusing on the talented and passionate authors they have the privilege to represent.\u201d<\/p>\n
The enormous appetite for erotica, a nearly $1.5 billion industry, has stoked a feeding frenzy among publishers for new content. Romance sales exploded in the past 15 years, following the rise of e-books and self-publishing, and the commercial and cultural juggernaut \u201cFifty Shades of Grey,\u201d which brought hard-core erotica from the fringes into the mainstream. Romance readers \u2014 a majority of them women \u2014 tend to be voracious consumers who buy dozens of books a year. Romance accounts for nearly 20 percent of the overall adult fiction market, drawing the largest audience of any genre, according to NPD BookScan. Around 60,000 romance and erotica books were published in 2020, up from nearly 35,000 a decade earlier, according to data from Bowker, which tracks publishing trends.<\/p>\n
On top of major companies like Harlequin, Avon and Berkley, which are owned by large multinational corporations, a constellation of smaller, independent romance publishers sometimes operate in a gray area between corporate publishers and vanity presses, which charge authors to publish their work. The independent presses tend to offer writers small advances of four to five figures but a higher cut of royalties, a share of profits. Often, they attract writers, mostly women, who have little professional publishing experience and aren\u2019t represented by lawyers or agents who can help them evaluate a contract.<\/p>\n
\u201cWriters who really want to get published are so easy to take advantage of, and there are more and more people out there to take advantage of,\u201d said Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild.<\/p>\n
While every creative field has horror stories about artists who are underpaid and exploited, the dynamics of the romance industry can be especially difficult to navigate. Despite the ascendance of erotica, there\u2019s a lingering stigma attached to the genre, which is written largely by and for women, and is still sometimes dismissed as shameful or unserious. Many romance authors publish under pen names and keep their professional and personal identities separate, and some write in secret for fear of being judged for writing about sex, and more particularly about women enjoying sex.<\/p>\n
Ms. LaPointe, 66, became disillusioned with Blushing after she discovered it had added clauses to her contracts without telling her. The additions included claiming rights to foreign editions, audiobooks, and film and television adaptations, according to contracts shared with The Times. Her royalty payments were erratic \u2014 she said she sometimes made $3,000 in a quarter, and other times Blushing would claim she owed the company money for advances that it hadn\u2019t made back in sales. She recently started self-publishing and is making far more on her own, but Blushing still has rights to 31 of her books.<\/p>\n
She understands now how many questions she should have asked when she began publishing with Blushing in 2012.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the time you\u2019re so thankful that a publisher is going to take your book,\u201d she said. \u201cLooking back, you realize how incredibly na\u00efve you were,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u2018She was their savior\u2019<\/h2>\n
Since the early days of Blushing, Anne Wills designed many book covers herself, sometimes photoshopping images she found on the internet. So she was well-practiced in the skills necessary to photoshop a fake badge for a romance writers\u2019 conference.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe made it known several times that she could do it and she was really good at it and you wouldn\u2019t be able to know the difference,\u201d said Kimberly Dawn Lamon, who worked for Ms. Wills for about a decade as her housekeeper and personal assistant until she quit in February 2020. Ms. Lamon said that she accompanied Ms. Wills to a few romance conferences, carrying luggage and serving food at parties, and that Ms. Wills created fake badges for Ms. Lamon so she could go to the conventions without registering.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe liked to take people that had nothing and she was their savior,\u201d Ms. Lamon said. \u201cShe treated us good until we questioned her.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1998, long before \u201cFifty Shades of Grey\u201d brought literary sadomasochism to the masses, Ms. Wills started the subscription website Bethany\u2019s Woodshed and began publishing other writers.<\/p>\n
She was an early adopter of digital publishing and started selling e-books in 2001, well before Amazon came to dominate the marketplace, and expanded into a full-service publishing house, Blushing Books, which she ran from her home in her small town, Farmville, Va. Some of its titles, which usually sell for $2.99 to $4.99, were typical bodice rippers \u2014 historical romances about a dashing 17th-century earl and a lusty lady-in-waiting, or contemporary Westerns about lonely, rugged ranchers looking for companionship on the prairie. But most readers and writers flocked to Blushing for the edgier erotic categories \u2014 including stories that featured spanking and bondage.<\/p>\n
As she was building her erotica empire, Ms. Wills ran into legal trouble.<\/p>\n
Under her married name from her first marriage, Anne Briggs, Ms. Wills was charged with embezzlement in Charlottesville, according to court records. In 2000, she pleaded guilty to embezzling funds in 1998 from a cafe where she worked as a bookkeeper and to credit card fraud in 1997. Around the same time, she was accused of taking tens of thousands of dollars from a youth swim team, according to reports in The Daily Progress, a Charlottesville paper, but she was never prosecuted. (A lawyer for Ms. Wills said that \u201cthe allegations regarding criminal charges are false.\u201d)<\/p>\n
In her other life as Bethany, she had grand ambitions for her publishing business, and recruited a large stable of authors. \u201cShe would wine and dine you,\u201d said Victoria Rouch, a former editor in chief for Blushing, who writes under the name Ava Sinclair. \u201cShe always had this image of being extremely wealthy.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cShe would get new writers and they would be the flavor of the month. She would treat them like queens.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Wills bought many books outright as \u201cwork for hire,\u201d meaning Blushing bought them outright and no royalties would be owed. For others, she offered a seven-year term to license the work, but in some contracts, she claimed permanent and exclusive rights, meaning Blushing could sell the books forever. To attract new writers, Blushing promised some a large cut of royalties \u2014 50 percent, or 60 percent if authors agreed to publish exclusively with Blushing \u2014 far more than the typical 25 percent that most authors make for e-books with mainstream publishers. Those royalties were to be paid quarterly, but Blushing\u2019s most successful authors were offered monthly payments.<\/p>\n
By 2016, the company\u2019s operations and output had grown to some 200 authors and around 30 new releases a month. Ms. Wills had a handful of full-time employees who worked out of her basement. As the volume of books increased, she hired some writers who had published with Blushing to work as editors and cover designers.<\/p>\n
Some former employees said that they found her endearingly scatterbrained, and that they tried to create automated systems to keep track of royalties and to try make sure authors were paid on time. Former employees said that they had asked Ms. Wills to create an escrow account for author earnings to protect them until royalties were paid, but she declined. An informal policy was to make sure the best-selling authors, and the ones who frequently complained \u2014 called \u201cthe yappers\u201d by employees \u2014- were paid first, while others had to wait, according to former employees.<\/p>\n
As an avalanche of self-published erotica arrived after \u201cFifty Shades of Grey\u201d came out in 2011, the dark, edgy category Blushing once thrived in was flooded. Ms. Wills looked for ways to stay visible in a cutthroat online marketplace.<\/p>\n
Latest Updates<\/h2>\n
One of her workarounds was risky. Several former employees said that Ms. Wills had set up multiple Kindle publishing accounts on Amazon, around 10 at one point, a violation of Amazon\u2019s one-account-per-publisher policy. Ms. Wills told employees that books performed better with Amazon\u2019s algorithm when they came from accounts with fewer new releases. She also told them not to talk about the accounts \u2014 if Amazon learned of it, Blushing\u2019s account could potentially be shut down, taking authors\u2019 sales and careers with it. <\/p>\n
But some former employees grew suspicious when they saw accounts opened in authors\u2019 names, or when Ms. Wills used employee names, addresses and tax IDs to open an account, including Alta Hensley, a former editor in chief who quit after Ms. Wills tried to open an account in Nevada under her tax ID and address without Ms. Hensley\u2019s permission. Ms. Hensley refused to sign the paperwork and later quit. Ms. Wills threatened to sue her if she said anything negative about the company, she said.<\/p>\n
\u2018Oh we forgot to pay you\u2019<\/h2>\n
At first, Wendy Weston, a clinical social worker who lives in Texas and writes as Alyssa Bailey, was ecstatic to see her books in print. \u201cShe published me first and I will always be thankful that she took a chance on me,\u201d she said of Ms. Wills.<\/p>\n
But now <\/strong>she fears she has signed away rights to her books forever. The company holds permanent and exclusive rights to 22 of her titles, including her historical romance series, \u201cLords and Little Ladies,\u201d and her contemporary Western spanking romances. In 2019, her royalties fell to half what they once were. Once, when she received no royalties for eight months, she asked Ms. Wills why she hadn\u2019t been paid.<\/p>\n \u201cShe said, \u2018Oh we forgot to pay you,\u2019\u201d Ms. Weston said.<\/p>\n Some authors signed contracts that gave Blushing permanent rights to their pen names and series names, making it all but impossible for them to leave without sacrificing their careers and audience.<\/p>\n Ms. Wills also added a clause giving the company \u201cpermanent and exclusive rights\u201d to titles, often without informing authors of the change, and instructed an employee to revert to the previous term of seven years only if authors noticed and asked for it, emails reviewed by The Times showed. \u201cBased on what I\u2019ve seen, some of these clauses read as predatory and not standard,\u201d said the literary agent Kimberly Brower, who reviewed language in Blushing\u2019s contracts at The Times\u2019s request. \u201cSome of these publishers count on the fact that authors do not have agents or cannot afford a lawyer.\u201d<\/p>\n Maren Wilson, 48, who lives in Utah and often writes under the name Maren Smith, has published around 40 books with Blushing over the last 15 years, and developed a following for her \u201cMasters of the Castle\u201d s series about an underground sex club catering to enthusiasts of bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism \u2014 B.D.S.M. She and Ms. Wills had been friendly, and she never worried about her royalties until a few years ago, when she started studying her payments more closely and saw that some titles were missing, including her book \u201cMeeting Marshall,\u201d for which she said she received no payments for five years.<\/p>\n In 2019, Ms. Wilson learned that Ms. Wills had registered a trademark for \u201cMasters of the Castle\u201d under the company\u2019s name, with no mention of Ms. Wilson as the series creator. When Ms. Wilson confronted Ms. Wills, she said she was planning to transfer it to Ms. Wilson\u2019s name, and later dropped the trademark.<\/p>\n Ms. Wilson is now trying to recover the rights to her remaining books with Blushing. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not stopping until I get my books back from her,\u201d Ms. Wilson said. \u201cThis is my entire life. I support my family off of this.\u201d<\/p>\n Trying to branch out could elicit a threat.<\/p>\n Anya Summers, whose real name is Margaret Huth, is a former music teacher who lives in St. Louis and now writes romance full time. She started publishing her \u201cDungeon Fantasy Club\u201d series, about a secret B.D.S.M. sex club, with Blushing in 2016. Her relationship with the company soured last year, when she ended her exclusive agreement with it and began self-publishing books on the side. Ms. Huth was alarmed when her royalty payments from Blushing subsequently plummeted, even though many of her latest Blushing books were ranking higher on Amazon than they had in the previous quarter, suggesting sales remained strong. Royalty statements from Blushing said one of her books had not sold a single copy, when Amazon reviews showed verified purchases.<\/p>\n When she emailed Ms. Wills last October to ask why her royalties fell, Ms. Wills replied that her Blushing sales fell because she was self-publishing, and said that unless Ms. Huth agreed to publish exclusively with Blushing, her payments would shrink even more, according to an email reviewed by The Times. Ms. Huth wouldn\u2019t agree to the terms, and subsequently, she said her payments fell by nearly 70 percent, amounting to thousands of dollars a month.<\/p>\n Ms. Huth recently learned that in 2017, the publisher registered a limited liability corporation under her pen name, Anya Summers, and that it also opened a Kindle publishing account in her name without her knowledge or permission.<\/p>\n Ms. Huth stopped writing for Blushing, but the publisher holds rights to 35 of her books, and has the right of first refusal on any new books in two of Ms. Huth\u2019s series, which led her to abandon them.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like starting over,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In a way, Blushing\u2019s vast and growing catalog of erotica was itself something of an illusion, a fantasy in more ways than one. Blushing often treated its writers and their work as interchangeable, another kinky story to feed the bottomless appetite of Amazon\u2019s algorithm.<\/p>\n To keep pumping out new releases, Ms. Wills padded inventory by taking older books and repacking them with new covers, sometimes under a different title and pen name, according to several former employees. One former Blushing author said Ms. Wills often rehashed older books as new titles and asked her to lightly rewrite some. \u201cShe had thousands of books by all kinds of authors that she claims she just owns and she can put other people\u2019s names on,\u201d the author, who writes as RJ Gray, said.<\/p>\n While Blushing can legally recycle books it bought as work for hire, the practice <\/span>can trick readers into buying the same story twice.<\/p>\n That\u2019s what happened to some fans of JoAnn Kinder, who started writing for Ms. Wills in 2001 and published more than 200 books with Blushing. When she died suddenly in June 2018, at age 67, many of her books did not have formal contracts.,<\/p>\n She was in the process of finalizing agreements that specified that in the event of her passing, her royalties would go to her surviving family, including her husband, her two children and her grandchildren, according to her daughter, Christina Boes.<\/p>\n Ms. Wills told Ms. Kinder\u2019s family that her books hadn\u2019t been making much money and promised to send them a share of royalties, Ms. Boes said. \u201cTo say that she wasn\u2019t making any money on her books is a complete falsehood,\u201d said Ms. Boes, a home health nurse in Colorado, who added that her mother used to make $3,000 to $5,000 in royalties every quarter, though payments often arrived late.<\/p>\n Two former employees confirmed that Ms. Kinder\u2019s books, which were written under 10 pen names, including Joannie Kay, still sold steadily.<\/p>\n Nearly two years after Ms. Kinder\u2019s death, the company sent a contract to her husband, promising the family 10 percent of profits for her titles and claiming the right to revise and republish her work under new titles and pseudonyms. On the advice of a lawyer, Mr. Kinder signed the contract, a decision the family now regrets.<\/p>\n Ms. Boes said the family has not received royalties for her mother\u2019s works, apart from $200 that Blushing sent for a chapter she submitted right before she died. The family and Blushing dispute the status of royalty payments. Beyond that, Ms. Boes is upset that her mother\u2019s work is being revised and released, and that her mother would have been appalled by readers feeling deceived.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re still selling all of these books and rewriting them,\u201d Ms. Boes said.<\/p>\n RJ Gray said that in 2019, after Ms. Kinder\u2019s death, Ms. Wills had asked her to add more explicit scenes to Ms. Kinder\u2019s books, something Ms. Kinder had opposed, according to her family.<\/p>\n \u201cShe told me that she had access to Joanie\u2019s material and she wanted me to rewrite it,\u201d Ms. Gray said. \u201cJoanie wrote clean, and she wanted to spice up her work and resell it.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Gray said no, but Blushing pressed ahead with plans to keep Ms. Kinder\u2019s books coming out posthumously.<\/p>\n In 2020, Blushing published a collection of her novellas with \u201c2,000 words of new material\u201d and republished older works by Ms. Kinder with new titles, including \u201cChosen by the Viking,\u201d a historical romance that bills itself as the story of a \u201cbrash\u201d Viking and his \u201cfeisty\u201d bride.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew these stories seemed familiar \u2014 they are republished from about 10 years ago,\u201d one reader wrote in an Amazon review of \u201cChosen by the Viking.\u201d \u201cUnfortunately, the author doesn\u2019t state that, nor did she revise them.\u201d<\/p>\n For a while, Ms. Wills was able to keep authors from speaking about the company through nondisclosure agreements in their contracts. But in 2019, a group of writers rebelled. The author organizing the uprising was Addison Cain, one of Blushing\u2019s top sellers. Ms. Cain had gotten into a copyright dispute with another author after Ms. Cain claimed that her books had been plagiarized, and then discovered that Blushing had never copyrighted her books, a standard service that many publishers provide and that Blushing\u2019s contracts said they would cover. (The accused author filed a lawsuit against Ms. Cain and Blushing, and received a judgment against Blushing, but the suit against Ms. Cain was dismissed after the plaintiff liquidated her company and missed court deadlines.)<\/p>\n Ms. Cain told some other authors, who learned that their books, too, had never been copyrighted. Some found their books on piracy sites but Blushing said it couldn\u2019t do anything and discouraged authors from seeking to have them removed.<\/p>\n \u201cBlushing was risking the livelihood of all of their authors,\u201d Ms. Cain said.<\/p>\n The group, seven authors, hired a lawyer to send a demand letter to Blushing for breach of contract and reached a settlement with Blushing to get their rights reverted, but some had to file copyright-infringement notices with retailers to get Blushing to take their books down.<\/p>\n The departure of many of Blushing\u2019s best-selling authors was disastrous for Ms. Wills, who faced mounting legal bills and shrinking profits, and had just spent <\/strong>$135,000 on an office building in Farmville, which was later sold at a $20,000 loss. She worried that other authors might defect, and she registered trademarks for successful series that she thought she might lose in her company\u2019s name, not the author\u2019s, according to trademark filings.<\/p>\n The conflict escalated in February 2020, when some routine financial paperwork caused everything to unravel.<\/p>\n That month, the seven authors who got their rights back received tax documents from Blushing. One of them, Zoe Blake, said she believed the form incorrectly labeled her earnings. In seeking to have it corrected, she was sent email correspondence that Blushing said was from an accountant, explaining no error had occurred. In fact, the email had been altered by Ms. Wills, according to email records and interviews.<\/p>\n Ms. Wills acknowledged in a phone call that she had changed the accountant\u2019s email, but claimed she had only done so to make his meaning more clear, according to Ms. Lamon, who was on the call with two other employees. (In a statement to the Times, Ms. Wills said she had \u201cnever been contacted once by the I.R.S. informing us of any issues with tax documents.\u201d)<\/p>\n Blushing\u2019s production manager, accounts manager and editor in chief all promptly resigned. Before they left, the production manager paid herself and other employees their salaries and paid out royalties, including some that had been delayed, and she listed these payments in her resignation letter.<\/p>\n The next day, Ms. Wills filed a police report claiming that her production manager had embezzled from the company. A few weeks later, the former employee was arrested in her home in front of her husband, the deputy chief of police, and her children, and taken before the magistrate. A group of Blushing authors raised money for her legal fees, and Ms. Wills\u2019s estranged husband and one of her children also offered to help.<\/p>\n Ms. Wills never provided any forensic accounting evidence of embezzlement, a lawyer representing the former employee said, and the charge, which was filed in the wrong jurisdiction, was later expunged, according to the Albemarle County Commonwealth\u2019s Attorney\u2019s Office. Ms. Wills filed a new complaint against the former employee, but no charges have been filed. (The woman spoke to The Times about the events that led to her arrest on the condition that her name not be printed.)<\/p>\n As news of her arrest spread, it became a breaking point for some Blushing authors. They had, for the most part, been honoring their contractual agreement not to talk publicly or with each other about their financial arrangements with Blushing.<\/p>\n After the arrest, many joined a private Facebook group for current and former Blushing authors where they could share information. Some of them had built their careers because of Ms. Wills, getting their start on Bethany\u2019s Woodshed, that early subscription spanking site. But they were ready to move on. They named the group \u201cOut of the Woodshed,\u201d and it now has nearly 70 members.<\/p>\n Kate Andrews contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research.<\/p>\n\u2018I knew these stories seemed familiar\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Out of the Woodshed\u2019
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