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Discovered Authors responds to critics

29.04.08 Jo Young

Struggling publishing firm Discovered Authors, the subject of a series of complaints to the Society of Authors last month, has called for its detractors to contact the company directly to resolve their disputes. Following complaints by its members, the Society of Authors published a warning about Discovered Authors on its website in late February, in which it stated that "some authors have experienced difficulties" with the company. The issue, which was covered by The Bookseller online, prompted a flurry of accusatory postings from authors on this magazine's website.

Many correspondents – some apparently former employees of the publishing company – anonymously alleged that Discovered Authors owed sums in unpaid wages and royalties and suggested the company had not emerged from its "accounting black hole" as Discovered Authors' founder, former Random House director Graham Miller, had stated.

Miller said that he "refused to get drawn into" a debate with anyone choosing to criticise his company publicly and anonymously. "Anyone who has experienced problems can contact us directly. I know that remarks have been made in public, but that's not something I've bothered to enter into. If people are only prepared to write anonymously, I feel their remarks must be treated accordingly. We're not hiding from anything, and I urge people to speak to us directly," he said.

Miller insisted that the problems the company had experienced with former staff have also been concluded. "We have a very good team of staff here, who have been working extremely hard to cope with the problems that we have been left with," he said.

The company's problems began in spring last year, when the Austrian firm Dialog Group, sponsor of Discovered Authors' sister competition Undiscovered Authors and provider of its accounting systems, went into liquidation, leaving the business £100,000 in the red and with its accounting administration in disarray.

Miller admitted, however, that the company's financial and administrative woes were not over. "I can't guarantee that things will get sorted, or will be sorted in a fixed period. Given the problems that we have had, it is taking time for us to get things sorted. I've worked flat out to get things up to date and get a lot of titles into print that have been sitting around for months. It was in quite a considerable mess, and it won't get sorted overnight," he said.

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