No, really, you did not invent the genre. Genres are marketing labels invented by marketers for readers to help them group similar books and sell to readers by association. It’s the “You might also like…” function of book selling from pre-Amazon days.
Writers and authors being aware of their genre is the same as being aware of their audience. It’s a simple way to say “I know my audience”. Genres and audiences are tools of selling, not tools of writing.
You did not invent a genre any more than your editor invented a genre or your agent invented a genre.
And that goes for you “Teh genre is dying!!!” people too.
If, for some reason, you haven’t heard yet romance megalith Harlequin announced this week that they are opening a self-publishing branch of their company. This is so very wrong, but don’t just believe me. Here’s a short index of who is saying what:
1. The cheapest package is $499 and you still only get 50% of net profits. If I am going to pay someone to publish my work I am going to also get all the profits myself.
2. Harlequin is billing this as “Be published by Harlequin” which is deceptive, predatory and a slap in the face to the authors who fought through the slush pile to be “traditionally” published by Harlequin.
3. Harlequin has included in their announcement that when they send rejections they will include flyers for or special offers for their self publishing program. This skews the business to the point where Harlequin could easily make more money from rejecting and funneling would-be authors to the self publishing imprint than from publishing books as a legitimate book publisher (rather than just a book printer). This is the kind of BS that led to reading fees for agent being deemed scammy.
4. Harlequin has stated that the self publishing imprint won’t have Harlequin anywhere on it, and the distribution, book quality and such will depend on what you pay. This is a bait and switch as they are using the Harlequin name to draw in writers, but the people buying the books will NOT see Harlequin products. In fact, since most bookstores do not order or stock self published books consumers aren’t entirely likely to see products at all.
5. Harlequin hints that they *might* pick up a successful self published title for their normal lines. This preys on those people looking to circumvent the slush pile, or those who have well received but still unpublished novels. It gives them false hope and again Harlequin gets paid to reject people rather than getting paid to publish, market and sell books. And, because of #1 they also get paid TWICE to reject people.
This whole deal is like a strip club. Harlequin is selling the fantasy of being a published, Harlequin author but the price is high and in the end it’s just the fantasy they’re selling. They ain’t gonna sleep with you.
Does Harlequin, in this corporate age, have the right to do this? Well some of these things are a little fuzzy and definite fall into “Read the fine print and know what you’re getting” category, but yes, they have the right to do this. And MWA, SFWA, and RWA are all absolutely right in saying “If you want to go down that path you no longer qualify as a non-vanity publisher to us”.
I’ve also seen others say that the Apex readers are funding my ‘hobby’. I won’t lie. I *love* doing Apex Magazine. I love reading the great short fiction we publish. As do our editors. All of us are genre fans and love science fiction, fantasy, and horror. We are delighted that others enjoy the product we produce. But giving people the option to contribute monetarily to help us continue to publish a free product as ‘funding a hobby’ is, again, silly.
So here’s my two cents.
Dear Fuckos Poor misguided persons,
No. Donating to a magazine, buying a book from a small press, a huge press, a new author, an old favorite, Stephen King or Joe-fucking-Blow that you’ve never heard of is NOT fund their hobby. It’s funding YOUR hobby.
YOU are the fan. YOU are the reader. If YOU like the product be don’t be a goddamned leech, show the people involved in producing the product you love your approval by sending them money so they are encouraged to, and have spare time to produce more.
What the hell makes you think that a person or a group of people are not entitled to support from their readers? What makes you think that you have the right to read their hard work for free, to enjoy it (or else why would you keep reading?) but should have to support the project at all?
Now, I understand if you don’t have the money (Really though, a lot of places like Apex, GUD, Skullvines, etc try to meet you halfway by having sales, promos, reduced price opportunities and ebook editions available for less. I recently bought TWO of Apex’s books in ebook form for under $5 thanks to a combined promo.) and I understand if you don’t like Apex’s fiction. I would never expect anyone to hand over money for a product they don’t think they’ll enjoy.
But what the hell kind of community to we work/live in where it’s okay for people to send out messages saying “Please buy my book so I can feed my family” then dismiss supporting other authors and publishers.
I am not saying this specifically happened. I don’t know who made this sort of remark about Apex. I just know that I am getting a lot of Facebook and GoodReads demands for my money. I have authors who instead of communicating with me as a reviewer take m email address off my BookLove site and add it to their list of people to hit up for money. I see people who I have read, and who I think are putting out substandard work shilling all over the net, in incredibly obnoxious volumes which reads as “Buy my book!!”
With Rot I have worked to raise awareness that it exists, and tell people what it is about and where they can get it if they are interested, but not to tell them they should buy it, not to guilt them or con them to pull the “support the genre” card. I have tried to make it easy on the consumer by convincing my own publisher to make the cheaper ebook version available (PS to you naysayers, the ebook version is outselling the print version.) I’ve made two excerpts of a 60 page book available. I’ve targeted independent reviewers to give neutral opinions on it, so people can decide if it’s the kind of thing they wish to read or not.
And every “Fan me!” request and message board post that is nothing of substance but a link to the person’s latest book and whine about “I need money and wanna be a successful writer so please buy my self published book is a stomp on the toes of the hard working writers out there trying to meet their audience’s needs.
Those of you out there who take everything for free that they can get, and can’t even bother to leave a good word or an Amazon review, who think you are entitled to free fiction because it’s the internet, or because you are a fan well you are not a fucking fan if your contribution is to suck down the efforts of authors and editors and publishers and cover artists and PR people and denounce requests for fiscal support as “funding someone’s hobby”.
Fuck that. Authors and publishers are funding YOUR hobby. You wouldn’t expect a hobby shop to just give you paints for miniatures, or puzzles, or coins to collect. So why the hell do you expect authors to give you all their work for free.
Stop being an entitled, greedy parasite and start being a fan. Start by admitting that good fiction (good meaning YOUR idea of good) deserves support. Believe me when I say we all understand if you can’t be a collector or can’t afford something right now. We even understand if you don’t like the work.
What we don’t understand is the horrible selfish attitude and the greed behind it.
I get their point that football is brutal and players end up suffering long term injuries thanks to a societal push to put the game over their own well being. Of course, we all face that kind of challenge, though perhaps not as severe as in the football job field. The article ignored some things for the effect of the argument, and I get that, but I think that these ignored factors are just too important to discount, even in trying to make the point that football itself is a brutal, damaging sport.
1. And yes, the most important: Consent. These dogs cannot consent to their training, their treatment or their fights. They never have the chance to say no because they have been manipulated. Their instincts have been twisted and cultivated to suit the needs of the humans. In fact, even fighters will tell you maybe one dog in a litter is a good fighter, because the rest simply don’t have the viciousness needed. That’s right, most pit bulls are too sweet to fight.
But, even if they were somehow not manipulated and trained into fight and if they were given the choice a dog, like a child, is not capable, mentally, of understanding the risks of fighting. Adult humans are capable of understanding that playing football will, very likely end up getting them hurt. You don’t start playing football at the NFL level. Many, many players have already had years of football experience which includes injuries.
Players can say “It’s not going to happen to me” all they want, but by playing they are consenting to take the risk that serious injuries in a way that a dog cannot understand and therefore cannot agree to.
2. The difference between the medical care NFL players receive and the dog receive is significant. There are college departments, careers and hospitals devoted to the health of athletes (I know, my cousin graduated from one of them after playing football for Ball State for four years and, last I heard, now studies and deals with athletic injuries professionally.) I’ll give you that long term effects are likely ignore and poorly documented, but when a player blows out a knew, breaks a leg, or gets a flipping scratch they are taken care of and supported.
When a fighting dog gets a gash it’s common for the owner to staple the wound closed with an ordinary office stapler, give it an injection of pain killer, once or twice, then the dog goes back to the kennel, or back on the chain and that’s it. Dog fighters cannot take their dogs to the vet because it’s clear they’re involved in illegal dog fighting. And even if they could most wouldn’t because the industry is about maximizing the profit which means only spending as much on a dog as you have to.
The answer to a broken leg or a serious injury is a bullet. We do not have anywhere near this attitude with football players who are idolized and given excellent medical care in the hopes they can be “fixed” and play again. And what happens if they can’t? They retire.
Fighting dogs don’t retire. Not to mention significantly more fighting dogs die each year from their “careers” than high school, college and pro football players combined.
3. The median salary in the NFL in 2009 is roughly $770,000. Meanwhile fighting dogs are kept often in vacant houses and hidden backyards, on heavy chains (keeping a dog on an increasingly large chain is a passive way to strengthen the dog’s muscles) by people who see them as disposable. NFL players are idolized, paid well (and yes, one would expect anyone who puts their body on the line like that to be paid well, but then the median pay for a cop is about $47,000 a year) and often considered celebrities. We put their faces on our T-shirt, we let them host Saturday Night Live, they get endorsement deals and have homes that can officially be deemed “cribs”.
Fighting dogs are beaten, sometimes even drugged, purposefully isolated from social interactions. The only affection many of these dogs get is when they are ripping into the flesh of another dog. The only approval these incredible social, pack-based creatures gets is by hurting something else. In fact the #1 way to keep a dog from striking out in a danger, aggressive way is to teach it how to interact with people, other animals and things in a variety of social situations, aka “socialize” it. So to keep a dog aggressive it must be sentenced to a life of solitary confinement except to fight and breed.
I agree that awareness needs to be raised about the long term impact of football, and the practices that endanger current players, but comparing NFL football to dog fighting is ignore some pretty obscene differences. Furthermore articles like this could be skewed and used (in people’s minds, not literally because the article never defended dog fighting) to defend dog fighting as a sport “no more cruel or dangerous than football”. The article also ignores the whole culture of dog fighting which commonly includes drug dealing and use, dealing in illegal firearms and sometimes even gang violence. I admire the New Yorker’s desire to raise awareness for those suffering from damage due to football or boxing, but let’s not even begin to pretend dog fighting is anything less than a brutal form of abuse on every level, and an extremely dangerous thing to allow within the community.
So I went to my internalist appointment today and without even inspecting me at all I was told that there is nothing wrong with me, I am overweight because I eat too much (an I was told to stop drinking too, and when informed that I don’t drink the doctor replied “Uh huh. Well Alcohol has calories too, you know.”) He told me to cut all dairy out of my diet, to eat 1500 calories a day if I want to maintain my weight and eat less to lose weight. He also said, among other things, that he wants to see me again in 6 months and I’m to be 30 lbs lighter.
It’s not going to happen. And by that I don’t mean the weight loss, I mean I am not going to deal with a person who thinks I’m lying about how much I eat. I keep track you know, I am quite aware of how much I eat and part of my damn damn problem is that when I start to feel frustrated, overwhelmed and pressured I start to play the “how little can I eat” math game. Part of my problem is that I’m look for a way to be healthy, and I know that in the past that 30 pound weight loss he wants from me was not enough so I started starving myself. I do not want to go down that path because the more weight I lost the worse I felt, not just because I was getting sick, but because I was incredibly hard on myself, pushing myself to lose more and more, and it was never enough. I was a frenzied cone of self hate, and skinnier or not, how the blue fuck is that healthy?
Side note, my grandmother also never cut dairy from her diet and still has bone loss problems. So how the hell is cutting dairy completely out of my diet healthy?
Anyway, this is just a perfect example of the battle I find waging inside me. I know this path leads to me being an unsatisfiable cunt to myself. I hated myself more at 200lbs by far than I do now, fifty pounds later. But there’s a complete disconnect between I feel good and feel happy about myself and my body and I weigh less. They are not lining up like logic says they should. My assumption then is that I must not be doing something good enough, so I push myself into that bad bad territory that I definitely want to never step in again.
I do not want to live a life where eating is the same as shitting, a perfunctory bodily function to be performed and ignored as quickly as possible. And especially so since the doctor said “There’s nothing wrong with you. Your blood work is excellent your blood pressure is perfect.” Then why do I have to risk fucking that up by losing weight?
Well that answer is easy, because we are raised, trained, to want to be skinny rather than healthy. Because skinny=pretty and somehow it means we’re honest and worthy too, but fat people, well they are just lazy liars that are racking up the health care bills for the rest of the populace.
I live with fear and self hate because I should be allowed to enjoy life, because I’m fat and clearly not worthy. Talking to the behavioralist the other day she asked “Well what’s the worst that would happen if you stopped counting the calories and stopped watching everything you ate and just enjoyed your life?”
And I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. My clothes would fit worse. Okay, buy new ones. None of my friends or loved ones would give a damn, because out relationships aren’t based on my waist size. Would my readers, editors, publishers care? Well how does being fat=not a good writer?
But emotion seized up in my chest, because clearly I am not doing a good enough job if I am still overweight. Clearly I am failing if I’m not skinny. But I’m not unhealthy, and I’m not at risk of anything right now. I’m not suffering from my choices, I’m thriving from them. So where is this obscene pressure coming from and how the hell did it get inside of me?
Because I am a healthy person. I have two years of bloodwork to prove it. And I’m happy too unless I’m sitting here thinking about how I can lose weight. So how do we develop a good sense of worth and self health bombarded not just by media, entertainment and multi billion dollar nutrition industries that guilt us into hating ourselves when we have no reason to, how do we combat medial professionals who we are supposed to be able to trust, who are supposed to trust us, when they do nothing but imply we must be lying, either to them or ourselves, and despite being perfectly healthy we’re still inferior because we’re the weight they want us to be.
How do you combat people who are supposed to help you and who are supposed to know better who look at you and say healthy isn’t enough, now get skinny any way you can?
Long story short a lesbian women, with legal documentation of Power of Attorney and Living Will directive was blatantly kept from the bedside of her dying partner. As were the kids, who had both mothers on the birth certificate. Jackson Memorial Hospital in Florida blatantly told the woman they were an anti-gay city, then ignored her legally established rights as the LEGAL, pre-established, documented adult put in charge of a person’s medical choices.
What’s worse is that the legal system threw the lawsuit out.
Now, it’s one of the facts we have to face as parents, but especially as the parents of a special needs child that something might happen to us and we will need someone else to make those decisions for us. Furthermore, I’ve attended several support group meetings where getting Power of Attorney or Financial Power of Attorney, etc is discussed. It is a system designed not to be a political agenda (not even a “gay agenda”) thing, but to let a person be protected and get the decisions they want or need when they cannot fight for themselves.
Legally I can arrange for almost anyone to have Medical Power of Attorney of myself or my children. I can serve as theirs, through them being minors, being declared incapable, or their choice. Or my sister can do it. Or Jason can do it, or when they are 18 their significant others, their siblings, etc can be named.
It is not a fucking political agenda it is a legal process and I do not understand how this judge can toss out a blatant violation of a person’s legally established right just because they are a lesbian.
How the hell is it that I could name a stranger to be my medical power of attorney but some asshole homophobic douche at a hospital can decide that this legal document doesn’t really need to be followed because the women are OMG! Lesbians! And the judge can say the same thing.
WTF people? How can you possibly see case like this, which are the foundation for same sex marriage rights movement and deny that these people deserve basic legal, human rights established in this country? How can you look at this and think that that family had no right to be together at the end of their mother’s life, just because she loved another woman?
Get the fuck out of other people’s bedrooms asshats and start paying attention to the important things, like this blatant manipulation of the legal system that we depend on to make sure we have equal rights. How can you trust a judge, or a doctor or anyone who is so willing to put their own fucking fear and opinion over your well being?
And don’t even get me started on this racist asshole justice of the peace who refused to marry an interracial couple. So you would prefer that they live unmarried and having sex and kids than to make a symbolic, lifetime commitment of fidelity to one another? Excellent way to make your point about the sanctity of marriage dickwad, keep marriage pure by not letting people make the commitment and forcing them to live an immoral life of sin.
Despite the hubub my last two posts on abuse have caused here I am again, talking about it again.Here’s your chance to skip it if you don’t want to hear it. (It’s a long post.)
