Throw the book at co-author for $tiffing me: suit
They toiled over tales of car dealers turned drug dealers, a randy choir and beautiful assassins, but a California ghostwriter claims the real drama began when a best-selling New York novelist failed to pay up.
Stephanie Covington Armstrong says she helped New York Times best-selling author Carl Weber write a dozen novels and screenplays but was paid “a mere fraction of what she was entitled to,” according to a Brooklyn federal court suit.
Covington Armstrong says she helped create “nearly half ” of each of the potboilers, including volumes 2 and 3 of “Family Business,” the story of the high-powered Duncan clan, who “by day . . . are upstanding citizens running one of New York’s most respected car dealerships; but by night, they’re criminals who control most of the East Coast drug traffic.”
Sometimes the Brooklyn native wrote under her pseudonym, “Treasure Hernandez,” and other times she was uncredited, but she says she “never agreed to forfeit her rights as a co-author.”
While she got some royalties, she “never agreed that these payments would be all of the compensation she would receive,” papers state.
She’s seeking unspecified damages and a declaration that she’s co-author of several of Weber’s works.
But the Long Island-based Weber, who runs publishing house Urban Books and is turning several of his novels into self-produced movies, says Covington Armstrong was merely a typist who only co-authored one book.
“I’m not a typer, I’m more of an ideas person,” he said. “I’ve always had someone I talked to and basically tell them what I want in my chapter, and they would type it out and send it to me and I would clean it up. I hired Stephanie as my assistant and she was working with us for years.
“I’m sad that a friendship has gone this way,” he said.