Tawny Taylor is reporting on her blog that Siren Publishing has won the bid for the rights to Triskelion’s contracts, but no official word has been posted on Siren’s website. As per her entry, which cites an unnamed author loop, “All the contractual rights that were included in the bid are now returned to the former Triskelion authors, unencumbered.”
Anyone out there got confirmation or details?
Here you go:
http://www.sirenpublishing.com/inthenews/triskelion/#status
I wish!
Siren bought the contracts that were on offer. They did all they could and I thank them for that.
However, the schedule contained some contracts that were no longer with Triskelion and hadn’t been for some time at the time of closure and omitted others (such as 3 of my titles) that were still with Triskelion when the company closed.
The whole thing is a mess. They should have issued a blanket statement freeing all the authors’ rights, if only because of the mess the papers seemed to have been in.
What really needs to happen is for the court to have upheld the bankruptcy clause in the original contracts. Much though I’d like to, I can’t blame Triskelion for what has happened since the bankruptcy, except that Triskelion’s records seem to have been in a complete mess.
But if the bankruptcy clause in all our contracts, a fairly standard one that said in effect that if the company went bankrupt the authors got their rights back, if that was upheld, then the writers could have walked away and produced their old contracts to new publishers to show them they had their rights back.
This is going to affect all authors with companies that go bankrupt. Triskelion was a small company – imagine the mess if one of the biggies goes under.
I have to thank Siren, and Loose Id too, for helping us all in this awful situation but some of the authors are still tangled up. And the whole thing is a godawful mess.
The Feds have a pretty good site on the bankruptcy system, including a relatively readable PDF document explaining the bankruptcy process. For anyone interested, you can find it here:
http://www.uscourts.gov/bankruptcycourts/bankruptcybasics.html