Ben W. Pesta, Attorney at Law - About Ben W. Pesta

BEN W. PESTA, Attorney at Law

“The market for writers is tough and getting tougher,” says attorney
Ben W. Pesta. “In the Fifties and Sixties, the big-paying fiction markets disappeared, the magazines that kept Fitzgerald and O’Hara going through the Depression. Now the book publishers are disappearing. Most of them are still around in name, but each is owned by one of the same three or four conglomerates. They’re no longer independent entities, just divisions within those conglomerates, and they don’t bid against each other competitively. That effectively reduces the size of the market, even though the absolute number of publishing houses is about the same as before.

“Today a writer needs a good agent and a good lawyer. And a sense of humor. And maybe a gun.”

Ben W. Pesta grew up in Southern California. He studied political science, philosophy and history at UCLA. He was awarded his juris doctor degree in 1972 from Boalt Hall, the University of California’s law school at Berkeley. At Boalt he was John Woodman Ayer Fellow and Gerald N. Hager Scholar.

After graduating from law school, Ben left Berkeley for New York to become an associate editor of Esquire Magazine. He quit to write full-time, but was lured back into the job world by increasingly more administrative-level jobs. He eventually became associate publisher at Weider Health and Fitness. He was also (in his spare time) a roving editor of the award-winning Pushcart Prize anthology series. But for most of his adult life until he began practicing law, he earned his living as a freelance writer. It is safe to say that certain of his experiences as a freelancer have shaped his attitude and his approach to practicing law.

“You know the writer’s place on the food chain,” he says. “They’re what the pond scum eats for that healthy, green color. Think of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth or George Gissing’s New Grub Street. Because writers are so disenfranchised, so economically weak, so kicked-around, they develop this colonized-people mentality that Fanon wrote about. They become conditioned to accept virtually any sort of maltreatment. When you suggest that they should behave in an assertive and possibly even unmannerly fashion, they say, ‘Ooh, I don’t want to jeopardize my relationship with the publisher!’

“At this stage, I gently point out that the relationship consists of their working hard to meet deadlines, and the publisher paying them when or if he gets around to it. Did Moses and the Israelites worry about their relationship with the pharaoh?"

What writers must remember, says Ben, is that “all excuses for not paying you are lies. Either the editor is lying to you because the publisher told him to, or the publisher is lying to him, and he’s repeating the lie to you. But it doesn’t matter either way. The publisher always has more money than the writer. Someone just doesn’t want to give the writer any of it.”

Ben taught short story-writing in the University of Southern California’s highly-regarded graduate professional writing program. Novelists William Relling, Jr. and Ellen Akins were among his students. “I gave them both A’s,” he laughs.

In 1987 Ben married novelist Monique Raphel High. Monique has published six novels: The Four Winds of Heaven (a roman à clef based on her own grandmother’s life), Encore, The Keeper of the Walls, Thy Father’s House, The Eleventh Year and Between Two Worlds. She is also well known as a writing coach, editor and teacher through her website, WriteHigh.com. Her WriteHigh stable consists of both novelists and nonfiction writers across the U.S. and in Europe. Monique works with agents, book consultants and others to match her writers with publishers. Ben does the legal work for WriteHigh.

Ben’s credits include such magazines (past and present) as Esquire, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Self, TV Guide, The Saturday Evening Post, Writer’s Digest, Shape, California, Los Angeles, High Times, Oui, Sport, and professional publications, including The American Bar Association Journal. His newspaper credits include the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, San Francisco Examiner, SoHo Weekly, L.A. Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter.

Ben W. Pesta is a member of the State Bar of California, and is admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and United States district courts in various states. He invites readers to look up his entry and rating on martindale.com. He is a member of the Authors Guild. He is from time to time a guest commentator on Court TV. He served in the Air Force as a deputy staff judge advocate with the 438^th Military Airlift Wing. He has been listed in Who’s Who® in American Law, and is currently listed in Who’s Who® in America.