After hearing from dozens of authors about the poor business practices of TouchPoint Press, the Authors Guild said Friday that it has reached a deal with TouchPoint founder Sheri Williams, under which Williams agreed to pay authors overdue royalties and revert rights back to any author who has not yet received them. In addition, according to Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger, Williams has agreed to close the press, which bills itself as a "traditional royalty-paying publisher" of adult and children's books.
Rasenberger said that, over the last two years, 35 to 40 authors have contacted the Guild with concerns about TouchPoint’s failure to fulfill its contractual obligations and that, as of last week, there were 26 open cases. Problems about TouchPoint had also been raised by Writer Beware, whose Victoria Strauss who says she started receiving “a handful of complaints” as far back as 2015.
Noting that the Guild issued a warning to its membership on March 29 to steer clear of both TouchPoint and Adelaide Books, Rasenberger said that the Guild's legal services team and a law firm it hired started working with Williams a few months ago to find a way to get authors paid. In Friday's Zoom meeting between the Guild and Williams, Rasenberger said that Williams agreed to set up a viable payment plan "that will be court enforced."
Disclosing that Williams owes authors “just shy of $40,000, by her accounting,” Rasenberger told PW that Williams agreed to set up an escrow account and is self-garnishing her wages from her day job. Those funds, Rasenberger explained, “will go into a pot and be distributed to authors based on what they are owed.”
In addition, TouchPoint "will cease publishing and all activities,” Rasenberger said. She explained that the 22 TouchPoint titles now on Amazon’s website are books that had been previously signed, and that Williams maintains that she has not signed on any new authors since July 2023. Williams has promised to shut down TouchPoint's website and social media, leaving up only a notice of the press's demise, Rasenberger said. Rasenberger also said that Williams promised to contact all authors who have not yet had the rights reverted to inform them that the press is closing and that their rights will be reverted.
At time of publication, the main TouchPoint website has been removed. Other sections of the site are still accessible. While the publisher's Instagram page has been removed, its Facebook page remains up.
Broken promises
Last week, 15 authors reached out to PW to accuse TouchPoint of sabotaging their writing careers and withholding royalties and advances. Of the authors PW spoke to, only one is still under contract to TouchPoint; the others have succeeded in having the rights to their books reverted to them because of the publisher’s inability to pay royalties, refusal to maintain open lines of communication, and other deal-breaking issues. (Williams did not respond to several requests by PW for an interview.)
“Williams's unprofessionalism is not a new occurrence,” maintained an author requesting anonymity, whose first novel was published by TouchPoint in 2017; a second was published in 2023. “It’s a longstanding way of running her publishing—if you can call it—business.”
“The best I can say about the company is that it is riddled with incompetence,” said Bruce Leonard, whose debut novel, Quilt City Murders, was published in February 2022; he is owed more than $4,000 in royalties. “From my first interaction to my last with various people associated with this disorganization, I was introduced to new kinds of frustrations, disappointments, and breaches of contract.”
“The whole situation is incredibly frustrating, as commitments to authors were not honored and money is owed,” added author S.M. Stevens. “One of our main goals in speaking out is to warn other authors to beware of TouchPoint, lest they too fall into that void.”
Stevens said that her first novel, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades, was published by TouchPoint in 2019, and “it was generally a smooth process, although there were minor concerns.” By 2021, when she submitted her second novel, Beautiful and Terrible Things, “they seemed to be signing authors left and right, and I worried that they had bitten off more than they could chew. As time went on, it did appear they were overtaxed, incompetent or worse.” TouchPoint, she added, had 18 months to publish her second novel per the contract, but by the summer of 2023, “nothing had moved, so I cut ties for that book.”
Williams, who was a literary agent when she founded TouchPoint in 2013, “lied and cheated me out of thousands of dollars,” alleged Ruthie Marlenée, whose novel Agave Blues was published in 2022. Not only has Marlenée never received any royalties, she added, but Williams retained the advance paid by Scribd for audiobook rights.
“From the beginning, there were delays and excuses from and about my editor, who was offshore and always having trouble with family and wifi coverage,” Marlenée said. “I was patient as I knew we were all navigating the effects of Covid. The launch date was delayed, and when it finally did launch, it was a month premature and full of mistakes and no blurbs—which I had worked so hard and paid a publicist $10,000 to get. It took a month to correct the problems, so I lost momentum and sales.”
Another author, who asked to remain anonymous, noted that his memoir was published in 2022 but he has also yet to receive any royalties, even though he filed complaints with the Arkansas Attorney General’s office and the Authors Guild. He alleges that the earnings statements TouchPoint sent him have been falsified, as they indicate that he “never met the threshold for payment”—even though Amazon “has sold hundreds of books,” and the book was a finalist for an Eric Hoffer Award. Tantor Media also paid $2,500 for the audio rights, which he said he never received. “Do you think Tantor Media would pay a $2,500 advance for a book that sold less than 10 copies?” he asked.
Yet another author who asked to remain anonymous said that her novel was published in February of this year, and that “everything was great” in the publishing process “until it wasn’t.” Although a local bookstore scheduled the author for an event and ordered books, TouchPoint apparently never fulfilled that order. After the author contacted Williams, the publisher promised to send out the copies, but never did. “The event had to be scrapped and that was my last communication with Sheri until I asked for and received my ‘reversal of rights’ confirmation, thanks to the help of other TouchPoint authors and the legal advisor from the Authors Guild,” the author said.
With the TouchPoint matter hopefully now settled, Rasenberger emphasized that the Authors Guild intends to develop a plan for more effectively steering authors away from such companies as TouchPoint and Adelaide Books. (The Guild has been fighting with Adelaide for a number of years to address a host of grievances.)
Both companies, Rasenberger said, “aren’t real publishers,” but, rather, “individuals who present themselves as publishers, using self-publishing services and contract workers. You can’t take on dozens and dozens of authors and think you can get the work done. It’s not feasible. We’ve got to do a better job of warning authors not to publish with these people [who] have no real criteria for what they publish or full-time staff [and] cannot keep up financially or with the workload."
