Terry Brooks’ Own Publisher Banned One of His Biggest Fans From the Terry Brooks Community, and Tried to Humiliate Him Doing It

Terry Brooks is one of modern fantasy’s foundational names, the author who kicked off the genre’s post-Tolkien commercial era with The Sword of Shannara in 1977 and has sold more than 25 million books since. His premium editions and collector releases run through Grim Oak Press, a specialty publisher co-owned by Shawn Speakman and Jeff Lawson. Speakman also administers the Terry Brooks Community, the primary Facebook group for Brooks fandom and the closest thing the author has to an official gathering place for his readers.

That control is what turned an unrelated Facebook argument into a public campaign against one of Brooks’s own biggest collectors. Rich Hilpert, a fan with an extensive Terry Brooks library that includes first editions and leatherbound copies, got into a political disagreement with Lawson on a third party’s personal Facebook page, nowhere near any Grim Oak or Terry Brooks community space. When Hilpert said he’d stop buying Grim Oak books over how he’d been treated, Speakman responded by banning him from every community Speakman controls, including the Terry Brooks Community itself, and posting the ban publicly for the entire group to see. A major fan of Terry Brooks was made an example of, in front of the largest audience of Terry Brooks fans that exists, over an argument that never touched Grim Oak Press to begin with.

We’ve found more information as to what actually occurred here, and it’s much worse than we initially thought.