Karen Knows Best just alerted me to news that after two years, Millenia Black resolved her lawsuit against Penguin. At issue was that once Penguin bought her self-published The Great Pretender and discovered that Millenia was black, they wanted to market it as an African American title, even though her romance novel featured white characters.
According to Karen, “Millenia argued that being categorised as an AA author, would limit her sales potential, as her book would be shelved in the AA literature section, rather than the general lit section. Penguin ignored her, so she was left with no other choice, but to sue.”
On her blog, Black writes “I’m very pleased to share that the matter has now been resolved to my satisfaction through an agreement, the terms of which can never be discussed. In the interest of my blog’s archival integrity, I fully disclose that all previous discussions about the case have been removed. There will be no further information about the lawsuit on my blog.”
It appears two terms of the resolution were to purge all mentions of the suit on her blog, and never to discuss it again. This is an unfortunate side effect of the digital publishing age where you can erase a history, or even rewrite it. I would have liked to read this story from the beginning on her blog.