Source: The Washington Post, 12 June 1994, pX15

THE DAILY TAX REPORT issued by the Bureau of National Affairs recently offered an intriguing look at some sordid doings in the publishing world. An 11-page article in the May 23 issue detailed a recent U.S. Tax Court ruling on the value of the late horror writer V.C. Andrews's name upon her death: $703,500, to be exact. It's apparently the first time that a writer's mere name was considered a taxable asset.

Some background: Andrews's first novel, Flowers in the Attic, virtually created the "children-in-jeopardy" genre. These books are avidly consumed by teenage girls, to whom they offer reassurance that there are some parents much worse than their own. By the time of Andrews's death in 1986, she was a multimillionaire.

Neither the estate nor the publisher, a division of Simon and Schuster, saw any reason to stop issuing Andrews's books merely because she was no longer alive to write them. They hired a ghostwriter, who is still cranking them out. By this time, there are as many ersatz Andrews books as real ones.

The IRS didn't have any ethical objections to this, but when it audited the estate it did decide that Andrews's name was an asset to the tune of $1,244,910.84. After all, readers were persuaded to buy the new books merely because they thought she had written them. The IRS demanded an additional $649,201.77 in back taxes. The estate disagreed and sued.

In court, the estate argued that it was a risky enterprise to publish ghostwritten books, with a large possibility of failure. That meant, it said, the name should be worth very little. The government attorneys, however, pointed out that Simon and Schuster sharply minimized the risk of failure by neglecting to inform readers that Andrews was dead. (With some of the subsequent books, a note was inserted that admitted she was dead but which falsely stated she had left a bunch of manuscripts behind.)

The valuation given by the Tax Court splits the difference between the IRS's estimate and the estate's, something I am told the court does often. The estate is now eligible for a partial tax refund. Meanwhile, V.C. Andrews continues to be as prolific as ever.

I still think there's something despicable about a publisher refusing to acknowledge an author was dead for as many ghost-written books as possible and then, when that game ran out, lying about a closetful of manuscripts.

V.C. Andrews took herself seriously as a writer. If she knew she was going to be exploited like this after her death, I bet she'd quickly have found herself a different publisher -- not to mention a different set of heirs.

Full text © The Washington Post, 12 June 1994