Industry news
Kunati Books neglecting its authors
The three-year-old Kunati Books – an Ontario-based company that won acclaim in 2007 as ForeWord Magazine’s Publisher of the Year – has not been paying its authors. Furthermore, publisher Derek Armstrong – who operates the company out of a picturesque horse farm in Shelburne – has been unresponsive to authors’ phone calls and e-mails, and has failed to provide the financial statements due them.
According to several Kunati authors contacted by Q&Q Omni, no one in the Kunati stable – which includes more than 20 authors – has been paid in the last nine months. And at least two of those authors, Texan Beth Fehlbaum and Edmonton resident Cheryl Kaye Tardif, were so dismayed by the situation that they demanded to have rights to their titles returned to them. Tardif regained rights to her novel, Whale Song, earlier this year, but only after countless phone calls and e-mails to Armstrong. Fehlbaum, meanwhile, regained rights to her Courage in Patience just last week, after she and her agent considered taking legal action.
“I could not wait to get my rights back for Whale Song, and I celebrated when I did,” Tardif said in an e-mail to Q&Q Omni. “I wanted out because Derek Armstrong did not keep his word or pay us on time, and because I found him extremely difficult to work with.” Another Kunati author, who asked not to be named, said that it isn’t the lack of payment that bothers her most, it’s all the excuses from Armstrong. “He’s always saying, ‘Oh, the cheque’s in the mail. Oh, the statement’s in the mail. Oh, I sent statements out to everyone, I must have just forgot you,’” she explained.
Armstrong did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Q&Q Omni.
According to Tardif, things had been going downhill in her relations with Kunati for some time. Payments, when they came, were routinely two to three months late, and only arrived after much begging on her part. Financial statements, meanwhile, were even harder to come by. Another Kunati author told us that she has been asking Armstrong for sales figures for her book since last January, but to no avail. “If my book hasn’t been selling, then give me a statement and show me that,” she said. “That’s all I want.”
Kunati Books, which debuted in 2006, is Armstrong’s first publishing venture. He founded the company with editor James McKinnon, creative director Kam Wai Yu, and five silent partners. Prior to that, Armstrong, McKinnon, and Yu ran an advertising firm called Persona Corporation, which specializes in book promotion. (The company still exists, but hasn’t been taking new clients since Kunati launched.) In a 2007 feature profile in Q&Q, Armstrong explained that he created Kunati after taking issue with the way Simon & Schuster marketed his own 1996 book, The Persona Principle: How to Succeed in Business with Image Marketing. “I didn’t feel there was a lot of support beyond the first month,” he explained at the time. The idea behind Kunati, then, was to create a new home for his own books – he has written and published four titles in the company’s first three years – and to provide a home for other authors, offering stronger marketing and promotional assistance than traditional houses.
According to the Kunati authors we spoke with, however, the house reserves most of its marketing and promotional efforts for Armstrong’s titles alone. “I spent over $6,000 of my own money [on promotion] in the last year,” one author told us, “including paying for my own press releases and buying all of my own review copies…. Kunati did nothing to support my efforts, because Kunati does nothing to support anyone but Derek Armstrong.”
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