I can see how you read it like you did, but I'm pretty sure the "nominal fee" here is in reference to POOKA getting some small return on the purchases of the republished book, considering the latter portion of the statement referring to how, not only BCTS, but POOKA, would make some small earnings on it.

Despite being very small and highly specialized, knowing how Erin feels about things as I do, I would be surprised if she'd set up Doppler Press under Vanity Press structure rather than traditional, albeit small-scale, publishing.

Traditional publishing makes its revenue through percentages at POS, not up-front fees. This is a LARGE part of what drives the traditional publishers to seek a niche, fill it, and fill it well. If they accepted books which lacked a market, print up a bunch of copies, and then none of those copies sold? Well, shoot. Not only don't they get any revenue from any sales, they LOST all that money from the printing (and, often, they lose the advance they paid the author). Contrast to how the typical Vanity Press is structured: They charge a set fee to print a set number of copies. They get their revenue from selling print services to the writer and if no one buys that writers material? Sucks to be that writer, the publisher got their take.

In a Vanity Press environment, the author is the customer to the publisher. In the traditional publishing environment, the author and publisher are a team, and their customer is the portion of the public who'd be interested in the type of books they are producing.

I'm not going to argue one of these are necessarily better than the other, each have their own set of merits and demerits. In traditional publishing, you HAVE to have an independent agent representing you, ESPECIALLY if you're going to deal with larger publishing houses. In Vanity, you can easily represent yourself, but that means you're taking on all the responsibilities that an agent normally would, as well as taking on ALL the risk yourself, since the Vanity Press charges you per print, not per sale. In traditional publishing, if one of your books flop, you just walk away with your advance and don't ever see much in royalty. In Vanity, if one of your books flop, you lost EVERYTHING you invested in it. OTOH. Finding an agent can be hard. Getting traditional publishers interested in any one of your books can be even harder. Agents hear from HUNDREDS of authors EVERY DAY wanting to be represented. And traditional publishers see THOUSANDS of manuscripts enter their slush pile EVERY DAY wanting to be published. Breaking in can be hard, especially with larger publishing houses.

The benefit that Erin has with Doppler Press that makes me expect it to be able to be run as a traditional house, but without all the overhead normally associated, is that she serves a highly under served audience. People who read LGBTQI themed literature are willing to read sub-par work for free, heck, we hunt it down and read it voraciously, generally without too much regard to quality. We are hungry just to even be REPRESENTED in our literature choices. In other words, Doppler Press has a niche. A very very special niche that most publishers fear to even approach. Most likely, Erin can publish every single book that an author sends to Doppler Press. They may not necessarily make any money, but it's at least minimally self-sustaining. Though I suspect it's actually doing fairly well and is a large part of what's helping keep BCTS afloat. We all know Hatbox contributions don't usually help much.

In this particular instance, POOKA would be acting as Denise's agent posthumously. Thus POOKA gets a part of any revenues. It seems fair to me as long as Denise did, in fact, transfer rights to POOKA at her time of death. Since Denise left a note for POOKA of this particular instance, I suspect that POOKA got everything that was Denise's, or at the very least everything related to her writing.

So sure. If POOKA has the rights to send this along to individuals who were asking for it specially, I would suspect equally that POOKA has the rights to make it available publicly again as Denise's posthumous agent.

If Denise left no will whatsoever, then it would be a free-for-all in regards to who has what rights to what from Denise's property among whatever relations she left behind. That... would complicate things with long drawn out litigation and the possibility that some other relation may end up Denise' posthumous agent should any other relations get litigious only after something they thought valueless turned out to have value. POOKA could still do this anyways, even in that case... but... it would invite that sort of risk.

Alternately, in the case that POOKA does not have clear rights to Denise's writing, POOKA could contact through a lawyer the rest of the surviving relations of Denise and work out an estate trust arrangement for her writing. This is what had been done by Tolkien's family upon his death, for example.

In any case, I think a recurring theme is becoming evident here: unless POOKA has clear ownership of Denise' writings, POOKA needs to be proactive in getting a lawyer if POOKA is going to go about making Denise's writings public again. If POOKA DOES have clear ownership, meaning, Denise clearly wrote out in her will that all of her writing related property belongs to POOKA in the case of her death... Then POOKA can do whatever, and if another relative gets litigious, only then need to hire the services of a lawyer to defend what is already POOKA's by the will of the originator.

In any case... I may be way off in regards to how Doppler Press is organized, if so, forgive me and the person who originally proposed this. We meant well.