Vera Nazarian

In 2014 controversy erupted when she started an Indiegogo campaign to try to raise money for her authors; although the campaign was canceled after three days. As a result of "personal misfortunes", she had stopped paying royalties to the authors publishing books with Norilana Books, and hoped to raise enough money to pay what she owed them through the crowdfunding campaign. This generated discussion and criticism questioning to which extent small businesses should use Indiegogo or other similar crowdfunding sites to pay off business debt, and also resulted in criticism against her handling of the matter. A similar fundraiser was carried out successfully in 2008 for the same reasons, which resulted in donations of $19,000 to cover the debt she owed her authors, as well as to support herself.

Vera Nazarian (born 1966 in Moscow, Soviet Union) is an Armenian-Russian (by ethnicity) American writer of fantasy, science fiction and other "wonder fiction" including Mythpunk, an artist, and the publisher of Norilana Books. She is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and the author of ten novels, including Dreams of the Compass Rose, a "collage" novel structured as a series of related and interlinked stories similar in Arabesque flavor to The One Thousand and One Nights, Lords of Rainbow, a standalone epic fantasy about a world without color, the Cobweb Bride trilogy, and the Atlantis Grail books.