The best-of-intentions book deal that just doesn’t work out is a common occupational hazard for both authors and publishers. But what happens when the publisher wants its advance back, and the author says he doesn’t have it? That’s the case of U.S. author Jervey Tervalon and Simon & Schuster imprint Atria Books, as detailed in this first-person piece by Tervalon from L.A. Weekly. “If I didn’t pay, she said, they’d sue me. Finally, I was offered a compromise: Pay Atria a thousand dollars every six months for the next 10 years, and they’d go away.”

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Click here for Jervey Tervalon’s L.A. Weekly piece