So Much for the Industry’s Famed Collegiality

In yersterday’s item on Ravenous, Sterling‘s line of B&N-friendly erotica, I touched upon the tensions that were reported between the founders of Hollan Publishing, which creates books for the Ravenous imprint, and their former employers at Quayside Publishing Group, where they were involved in the production a line of sex-themed books called Quiver. According to the Boston magazine article, Quayside’s marketing and publicity director, Mary Aarons, accused Hollan cofounders Holly Schmidt and Allan Penn of publishing “titles that were brought to publishing meetings here… concepts developed on our company dollar.” To which Schmidt replied that “the allegedly purloined ideas had been rejected by higher-ups at Quiver—and had been hers or Penn’s in the first place.”

Aarons, having spotted the GalleyCat item, wishes to clear up any ambiguities in all that information—in that none of what she had to tell us contradicts what has been reported before;it just thrusts the knife in a little deeper. “Sex Drive was developed by Holly Schmidt while she was on the Quayside staff as Quiver’s publisher,” she emailed us this morning. “It was pitched at a Quiver acquisitions meeting almost a year ago. The Quiver acquisitions panel rejected the book because it lacked solid editorial focus and didn’t live up to our mission statement, as was often the case with the book concepts that Schmidt pitched.” Ouch! At this rate, this dispute is going to get settled after work in the parking lot of the office complex where both companies are based.

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