*Fifth Update* Here's the deal. I took my blog down yesterday because I didn't want to waste my energy on this. All the folks at AW were screaming something be done to end all this.
Guess what? As soon as my blog went down, they all worked really hard to post it back up at the forums. Uh, hello???
So beyond that, now they're talking trash about me on the Echelon Press thread--saying FAR, FAR worse things than anything I ever did to get banned.
You want proof of nepotism? There ya go...
Hey, AW, thanks for proving ALL my points! Have a nice day :)
*And now back to your regularly scheduled programming!*
*Fourth Update* Apparently Echelon Press should fire me now, LOL :) At least Lynn Price of Behler Publishing would fire her editor, er...guess that means herself...if she made libelous personal attacks...
Oh wait, she did! I wonder what sort of severance pay her husband is going to offer her... Any guesses? :)
*Third Update* Well, it appears the folks over at AW are losing their collective minds--and tempers! LOL :) Apparently they've decided that asking a question about whether or not a publisher promotes their authors is considered "an attack" on said publisher. *SNORT* Also, they've turned the Echelon Press thread into a "Bash Jenny" thread because they're too cowardly to come here. What's funny is that I got banned for saying "thank you"--yet they're saying FAR worse things and being applauded.
Another sad, sad, day for AW. I feel like having an online moment of silence for the writing forum that once was. Naaa, they can't shut me up that easy, and it's driving them crazy! :)
*Second Update* There's a person named "Giant Baby* (lol, I couldn't make this stuff up) who is claiming she or he didn't have the guts to post here because that would be too "validating." I guess if you want to slunk off and talk behind someone's back, there's no better name for you than "Giant Baby." Aside from that, I know they're all reading my blog because the hits keeping jumping by the minute! Aw, shucks, AW, I didn't know you cared so much! :)
*UPDATE* It would appear that the WATB as my mother would call them, have decided to talk big where I can't respond. That makes them cowards. So here's a challenge all you big talkers over at AW--Come here and say it to my face. Or are you too afraid your ignorance will be challenged? It's easy to think you're all big and bad when you're hiding behind a Soccer Mom! Lol ;)
Okay, like many writers, I relied on Absolute Write Water Cooler for my information about the writing industry. Unfortunately, their reliability is no longer a certainty.
At one time, members I highly respected, were eager to find the negative aspects of a contract or a business model. Today, I find that “author farms” as Veinglory, the “Flying AW Mod Monkey!” with more than 16,000 posts, most certainly a knowledgeable member of the forums, calls them, are being touted as trusted “brands.” An author farm, if your as unfamiliar with the term as I was, is like an author mill in that a publisher simply contracts books at will, often doing a shoddy job of editing, or otherwise simply correcting typos and misspellings, except they don’t expect authors to buy their own books the way the mill would. An author farm, therefore, has a vast database of badly, poorly edited books.
Instead of AW warning aspiring authors about this however, they are using “Friendship” to determine what is acceptable and unacceptable. When all the reports for a particularly well-known massive epublishing house were all glowing and wonderful, I was surprised because frankly—I thought AW had higher standards than that. Of course, pointing this out didn’t win me any brownie points with those who are perpetuating this fraud on unsuspecting authors.
But here comes the absurd part of all this. They banned me for three days (so far) because I dared respond in-kind to snarky and often silly, accusations about my own publishing house. They claimed that my publisher was refusing to make money out of spite.
Now, if you’ve got any common sense, you realize how absurd that idea is. Still, it appears that someone complained they didn’t get a print run the publisher never promised, never contracted them for, and therefore, because of this absent imaginary print run, they didn’t have books for an event.
That’s right. It’s the old, “My publisher refuses to make money because they don’t like me!” argument.
As head-scratching as that may be to intelligent thinkers like you and me, it appears my response is just nutty:
“POD technology is used to keep books in print all the time. This means when a book is ordered from Amazon for print publication, the single copy is printed and mailed to the customer. This is not unusual with many traditional publishers.
A print run is where the publishing house forks over money and space to print a ton of books based on their projected sales for the author and the title.
If an author is great and the publisher believes that they have a quality book, they may not do a print run for quite a while, if at all, until the author and/or the title proves one is merited.
If an author stomps their feet and demands a print run, regardless of their sales or experience in the industry, it is not up to the publisher to give in to those demands. They can, however, continue to make the book available according to the contract the author signed.
If the author wants their rights back, then there are channels that author can go through to get them back.”
Nothing earth shattering there, right? That’s all fairly standard stuff and easily understood by anyone who has been in the industry.
But OMG—you should have seen the heads spinning and the chest pounding going on in there. It doesn’t take much to turn some of these AW fanatics into stalkers. In fact, one of them made sure to follow me across threads just so I wouldn’t miss how they had put me on “ignore.” So of course I respectfully offered a “thank you”—pleased to know this person would stop stalking me. That, I believe, was why Soccer Mom--the referee apparently, for all this--decided out of everyone exchanging barbs, I was the one who needed a 'time out' as she put it! LOL :)
So be warned, folks. AW is not the most reliable place to get your information anymore, and in fact, should you ask or answer questions with a fair amount of insight, they might just start spitting pea soup at you!
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