Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

Is this a branch of Racefail, or is it just outright race & gender failure?


Justine Larbalestier wrote a YA book called Liar, about a mixed-race, dark-skinned, short-haired character--a book where the character's race and appearance factor heavily into the storyline. Publisher Bloomsbury Press decided the best cover to put on this book was a shot of a long-haired white girl.

Now, plenty of covers fuck up character descriptions--but when official people from the publishing house defend their choices with things like this:

“The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar,” said Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers, who worked on Liar. “Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?”

And tell the author things like this:

Since I've told publishing friends how upset I am with my Liar cover, I have been hearing anecdotes from every single house about how hard it is to push through covers with people of colour on them. Editors have told me that their sales departments say black covers don't sell. Sales reps have told me that many of their accounts won't take books with black covers. Booksellers have told me that they can't give away YAs with black covers. Authors have told me that their books with black covers are frequently not shelved in the same part of the library as other YA-they're exiled to the Urban Fiction section-and many bookshops simply don't stock them at all.

Yeah, not cool. Seems it's too strange a thing to have people of color on book covers, and no one wants to try to acclimate the general public to the novel idea of integration.

At least, not if a potential monetary loss is involved.

~~

And while we're at it . . . An anthology is coming out entitled The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Sci-Fi. People checking out the book noticed that the list of included "mind-blowing" authors contains no women or people of color.

Not only has at least one of the authors come charging out of the woodwork to make an ass of himself:

Every single commenter here seems to me to be committing a logical fallacy of tremendous dimension, one so big it distorts entire worldviews:

DEMANDING THAT EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE OF EVERYTHING COMPOSITE SHOULD BE ABSOLUTELY STATISTICALLY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE COMPOSITION OF THE ENTIRE COSMOS

You know what: a potato field is not likely to contain corn plants. A pine forest might feature an oak or three, but be 99% pine trees. The Beatles were 4 white guys. Sonic Youth has no people of color! My ream of copy paper is all white, with no sheets of lettuce included!

(...)

But I have to say that when ANY WRITER (not just female writers or writers of color) complains about being excluded from a venue and cites issues of platonic principle and idealism, I always first posit underlying jealousy and a desire for status underneath all the lofty hypothetical talk.

(To which I said, "What the hell?")

Then the editor, Mike Ashley, came in to help make things worse.

That probably has something to do with my concept of "mind-blowing". Women are every bit as capable of writing mindblowing sf as men are, but with women the stories concentrate far more on people, life, society and not the hard-scientific concepts I was looking for.

Mike Ashley also notes that he did ask for stories from women, too. Two of them. Even though all we're capable of writing about is people and society, not science.

(Also, as an editor I want to bite him.)

Fires need set. I think The Angry Black Woman just set that fire for me. I like her. :D

Eta: Another bit of WTF has come to my attention: that of a male author with a feminine name, who wrote a story from a male's POV and had it rejected--brutally--because the editor says he, as a woman writer, doesn't know how to write a convincing male character.

Dragging this out again because it's suddenly become more pertinent . . . ( Hideously unoriginal YA authors are sandbagging each other! I mean, sticking together! )


The question remains, though: Is this flood of irony uproariously hilarious, or stupendously depressing? I'm leaning towards the latter.

One of the things on the new releases cart, to be put out tomorrow, was a new Dean Koontz hardcover--a graphic novel version of his wanna-be-trilogy-stuck-at-pair Frankenstein novels. If you remember, I once picked one of the novels up out of curiosity and have yet to unsee the official God-Awful Worst Sentence Ever . . . So like anyone else who suffers from acute trainwreck syndrome, I grabbed one of the graphic novels and started flipping through.

Then I paused: I knew this art style. The hair was out to eat someone's head, the musculature was worse, characters' torsos were extremely stretched, all the faces looked the same, there were about a billion perfect profiles and Stop-watching-Labyrinth you're-gettin'-a-yeast-infection-thar-sonny crotch-bulges . . .

I flipped a little further and found 'em--BOOM! Gigantic thighs! Smugglin' turkeys thighs! THIGHS of CAPS-LOCKED DOOM!

It seems I wasn't mistaken: The artist is Brett Booth, a twenty-some year comic field veteran who used to draw for the Anita Blake comic (see: The Annotated Anita Blake, 3 4 5 6 7-3 . . . oh fuck, there's no method to this madness.). I'm told the wide and wild mockery of his particular art style is the reason the Anita Blake creators & writers--a batshit insane woman not exactly known for her quality control and the editorially-challenged sycophants surrounding/enabling her--traded him in for a less OH HOLY WTF model. sorta kinda

But Koontz & co. still picked him up/got saddled with him for this adventure.



I wonder if anyone's informed Chris of Chris's Invincible Super Blog.

You'd think someone would've learned after the dismal failure exemplified at NYAF--where Random House's imprint Del Rey tried to give away copies of Koontz-as-manga and failed. (If they couldn't give the shit away, imagine how well it sold. Then again, the market for novels-to-manga seems to be pretty evenly awful. It might be in part because most of the novels being turned are . . . awful. Hmm.) It's still kinda sad, in a way: It looks like this guy's trying to get his art style under control a little, but really--it still all looks the same.

Oprah's not doing so well with these authors of real-life sob stories . . . The latest person caught lying about their life story is Herman Rosenblat, who's been telling whoever'd listen that he first met his wife through the fence of a concentration camp, and that she threw him food every day to keep him alive. Oprah loved the story. Publishers loved the story; two different books were written about it, one for children (Angel Girl, by Laurie Friedman), one an autobiography. Sappy sentimentalists loved it: IIRC, the thing made its rounds through a handful of email forwards and also into a Chicken Soup collection. Even movie-makers loved the story--the movie was in the works.

Researchers debunked Mr. Rosenblat's story. Despite fighting an uphill battle with Berkley Books and the guy who wanted to make the movie, they eventually prevailed--and the movie was nixed, the kids' book was pulled from the shelves, and the (juvenile, terribly-written) autobiography shall never see the inside of a commercial publisher. (Indeed, it looks like Rosenblat's aimed straight for a DIY/vanity press.)

The question remaining for most people, it seems, is "Why?" Why do something like this, when it just gives ammunition to Holocaust deniers like David Irving--or more locally, the douchebag who named his kids Adolph Hitler and JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honszlynn Hinler (because he wanted them to have "good German names.") Was it greed? Was it all about the money, the attention? Was it that he just really, really wanted to meet Oprah?

Nope. It's because the guy's bugfuck crazy. He went under anesthesia for surgery and his dead mother told him to share his love story--so while recovering, he made one up.


Do I need to talk about why we don't pay attention to crazy people without doing our damned research? Really?

Didn't think so.


Maybe instead I need to consider why so many people were so willing to ignore historians and facts in favor of a wildly, unbelievably improbable love story.

For those of you who may have looked to Tokyopop as a possible publisher for your manga or comic--don't. A thousand times, don't. Hold onto your submission, read this, and then spread the link around.

Long post short: Tokyopop's contract for their Manga Pilot Solo deal comes with ultra-"accessible" language, Frenchie-hatin', and the biggest rights grab I've ever seen. They "test" installments of your comic (without necessarily having to pay you), they claim any adaptation rights (read: they could make a billboard or an anime or really anything else of it and not owe you a dime), they can change your series if they want and they don't even have to put your name on it. Oh, and they own it (and claim co-copyright holding status--which means they own 50% rights to your characters) forever.

(Also note the number of commenters who've had problems with Tokyopop and are voicing their unhappiness.)


This is outright predatory. The only way to slow this beast down is to tell as many people as possible what they're up to. If enough of a fuss is made and enough negative attention is brought about, Tokyopop will have to reconsider their methods.

But then again, this is the company that brought us the BotI-plagiarist finalist for the Rising Stars of Manga contest. Perhaps this is just an example of things going from bad to worse.

ETA: And a big list of professionals weigh in. Oh, glee. There's a few people, of course, who are doing intentional misreadings--but there's really no other way to get around "We own the rights to your work forever and might not feel like attaching your digital signature to anything."

So Tamora Pierce and Julie Holderman want to start a con specifically for authors specializing in Young Adult (henceforth YA) and children's sci-fi/fantasy. Part of their reason for doing this is how other people see them.

Often kidlit writers are treated by members of adult F&SF cons in a manner that is patronizing at best, snubbing or scornful at worst.

I know what attitude this is. I grouched over the trainwrecked plot in a YA book to a coworker and her response was this: "What do you expect? It's young adult lit."

And I understand. I hate the YA section because if the back ad copies and hooks don't make me want to eat a kitten, the stories themselves almost invariably do.

But instead of asking why so many look at the younger kids' works with such scorn, they're taking their ball and going to play in their own damned backyard, thanks.

Seriously now. Let's think about this.

We don't have many Philip Pullmans in YA/Intermediate reader. We don't have many Lois Lowrys or Diane Wynn Joneses. What we do have--and what the average browser can readily see--are a metric assload of writers who hammer out the same damned story ten thousand times over.

Check out the SF/F section of Intermediate Reader (age group 8-12) at your local bookstore. You'll find buckets of magical school stories, interspersed with fairies and dragons and very few others. Check out the fantasy/horror part of the YA section--or, as named by a coworker of mine today, the Kiddie Sex Section. You'll find fairies, emo fucking vampires, and werewolves, with a terribly sparse spattering of sword&sorcery and almost nothing else.

This makes people scornful. It's writers who either don't care to think outside the bounds of what's been done already, or ones who aren't capable of doing so--or worse, ones who see the success of one venture and hurriedly squeeze off their imitation. It's the authors who hack out recognizable gobbets of someone else's plots or concepts, who write the same damned story four and five times over, who turn out half-assed characterization, invariably predictable plots, or wildly unbelievable dialog, or who beat the hell out of every single storyline cliché, then expect people to shell out money for it--actions that wibble between sheer authorial laziness, ineptitude, and flat-out taking advantage of the readers' inexperience.

A young reader doesn't analyze the book as they go. They don't know how. They don't get stuck on the plotholes. They don't say "Hey, you bastards, get your own imagination. I liked this the first time it was done." They may say something along the lines of "Well, this part didn't really make sense," or "It was like (fill in name of other, similar work)," but they don't know how to show their displeasure with narrative problems by penning a snarky review or refusing to buy more of that author's work. (And especially with the IR works, the buying power is frequently out of their hands anyway. When R. L. Stein killed the main character of a series halfway through one of their books, it threw me hard--and I was ten at most. But my parents kept buying Stein books for me, just because I'd liked 'em before.)

One would assume that the mentioned cranky congoers have seen this (if not also understood the implications), and have formed their opinions accordingly. It sucks if people who actually do try to write something original get pigeonholed along with mimics, metaphor-maulers, cliché-beaters, plothole-hoppers, collage artists, and bad fanficcers in disguise Clare? Paolini? I'm STILL looking at you., yeah--but that becomes a problem with the genre; one that requires a lot of cooperation to fix. Some people don't care, and won't care, and won't change. Far easier to take your ball to your own playground than it is to convince everyone involved that you should make a new game.

Next up on Random's Batshit Author Watch: Patricia Cornwell shows Anne Rice how crazy is done this day & age. It's not that her book is bad, it's that the government is out to get her. That's why she's getting those bad reviews at Amazon & B&N.com.


As found on the front page of patriciacornwell.com, reprinted on crimefictionblog.com, and screencapped by fandom_wank:

We have reason to suspect that someone (or a group of someones) might be mobilizing people to attack me through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, etc., to hurt my sales and reputation.

So here is what I’m asking. Would you please encourage your friends and those you have contact with that if they like Book of the Dead, to please spread the word, and if so inclined, to please post their reviews on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

It’s easy to do. For Amazon.com, if you already have an account, you can post a review. Otherwise, open an account by buying a book. You can also check the boxes of other reviews to say you disagree or did not find their review helpful, if this is so. Barnes and Noble does not appear to require any account for posting reviews.

Over the past week there were about fifty bad reviews posted for a book that has gotten the highest reviews for any book I have ever written. If you see what I am saying. Interstingly [sic], this all started right after a Pentagon high official tried to get me to make a pro Bush, pro war appearance on an aircraft carrier and I refused, politely, a photo opportunity to contradict what is in my novel! Not to mention my battle over Ruth Graham’s burial. Suddenly, I am getting a barage [sic] of reviews discouraging people from buying my book, though there are some good ones as of today because my supporters are chiming in.

Right now I need my supporters. I am not asking you to write anything you do not mean. But why should hateful people be the only ones heard?

You and your friends can help by reading the book, encouraging others to read it, and posting their feelings about it - honest feelings.

With appreciation, Patricia.

Guys, please. If I EVER start doing some shit like this when I grow up, I need you to hunt me down and beat sense into me with whatever well-written hardcovers are available.

As if fandom hasn't seen enough hell this year in the forms of Fanlib & Strikethrough . . .

So there's this massive Harry Potter Lexicon wank going down now. One Steve Vander Ark, the maintainer of the Harry Potter Lexicon, once wanted to be a part of Rowling's planned HP encyclopedia if not write one of his own. JKR turned him down. SVA got his panties in a twist and decided to publish his own encyclopedia anyway, made up of material from the Lexicon's website--which is composed mainly of quotes & lists from the HP books (that he has no legal right to publish for profit) and critical essays that are not his (which he has no legal right to publish for profit). JKR turned that down too. SVA and his moronic publisher RDR Books decided to try to publish anyway. Cue massive wank to crush all other wanks, complete with RDR's refusal to hand over a copy of the book to Rowling/WB, RDR's uncooperative stance towards the entire proceedings (including but not limited to them telling the WB that if they wanted to see the book, go look at the website--which backfired just a little bit), the hiring-on of RDR Books's owner's cousin as an intellectual property lawyer even though he had no background in intellectual property law (NO. SERIOUSLY.), and such heavy-duty self-righteous flailings that it makes my brain hurt.

Fandom_wank brings it in extremely long-winded chronological order: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7


Overall? As a fandom member, I'm scared. This is the push that might force everyday authors to crack down on fanworks. How do they know that some jackass with an entitlement complex isn't gonna turn around, create a website, and decide this makes them a partial owner of the author's work? Yeah, Rowling won't lose a meal or miss a rent payment if this book goes to print. Another author might. Another author might not have the time and ample legal funds to fight a case like this. And some might not have the patience or mettle to deal with the kind of flak Rowling's getting from this; from the idiots who try to say her work is in the public domain to the people who call her greedy and a bitch and a lesbian for defending her intellectual property. It'd be far easier to just shut things down before a problematic person or group could start getting ideas.

This means fansites. This means fanfics. This means everything.

Which brings me to the next point--as an aspiring professional author, I'm even more scared. Am I gonna have to worry about cracking down on fan sites for fear that some jackass is gonna think that a list of quotes, a plot summary or two, and some essays he didn't even write warrants enough work that he should get a payout? Or that the same jackass will get up in front of a crowd and tell them that since they've contributed so much to the series (by being fans and all) that it no longer belongs to me? ("Jo has quit. She is done. We're taking over now." [@ 3:12]) I like fandom. I like fandom a lot. I think it's a great place to grow as a writer. But I don't want to have to worry.

Seinfeld's wife went on Oprah to promote her cookbook Deceptively Delicious. We got four calls within five minutes of people wanting this damned cookbook. People who'd seen the show were going nuts over it: It's supposed to be healthy, it's supposed to be a way to get kids to eat vegetables, kids are supposed to be saying that it's great, blah blah blah . . . So I was curious and started flipping through it.


I am fairly certain that if I ever pureed half a cup of cauliflower and mixed it into zen_of_nihilism's scrambled eggs, or put spinach in his brownies, that he wouldn't speak to me for a week.


Amazon.com's review boards have brought up that Deceptively Delicious shares the same idea and a number of the same recipes as a previously published book, The Sneaky Chef. Doesn't matter--Oprah's pimping it. We've been told the book's completely sold out of its first printing and is going into its second. There's no understanding some people.

~~

On the blatant plagiarism front, good ol' Lanaia Lee, god-awful poet and slipshod artist of the "WOE IS ME I R VICTM I'LL SUE YOU" type, has finally taken down the excerpt of David Gemmell's Dark Prince that'd she'd been claiming as her own work. In its place, she put . . . a terribly worded (also plagiaristic) reworking of David Gemmell's Dark Prince. One assumes this past week hasn't been a learning experience for her.

Word has it that The Powers That Be from Gemmell's estate have since taken care of things--so though Lee & associated webmasters were refusing to take down the work, saying that she didn't intend to plagiarize so they shouldn't have to remove it, it's finally done.

I wonder if she'll miss the attention.

Jane of Dearauthor.com was solicited by Lanaia Lee, who was all about her self-pubbed "book of her heart"--which just happened to be the late David Gemmell's Dark Prince with some name changes.

Dearauthor.com has since created a nice friendly list of Top 10 Tips for Plagiarists. In the meantime, Lanaia Lee is/isn't claiming the work as her own (with varying degrees of vehemence and grammatical WTFery), though she may/may not have had a ghostwriter who a) "wrote" the section(s) for $400 a month or b) told her how to "write" the sections.

Whatever.

The real rainbow sprinkles on this wank is the author's "agent" (though "selling" books to vanity presses or self-pubbing outfits makes her a scammer, not an agent), who's threatening to use lawsuits and evil Wicca against the people who talk bad about the author. I think. Her post is kinda incoherent. As follows, from the Makinglight report:

My name is Cheryl Pillsbury, published in my own right, I'm also the founder of AG Press which did the work on the book, 'Of Atlantis.' Come to find out from a deep search into this issue, we discovered a former literary agent she worked with on this book gave her advice on how to write the prologue. Come to find out, it is simular to his book. We didn't know this, we don't know him and never did until today. We do apologise for this, we are planning to do a re-write and remedey this issue.

For people who throw stones at glasses houses should be very cautious about speaking before they know the truth. Slander can cause a major lawsuit from the author and the publisher mentioned, because I will make sure they know about this and dear Jane will have nightmares in 10 fold. Yes, I'm Wicca.

I was just informed, the author has already set the motions for the lawsuit, be prepared. You were told by the lawyer not to post anything related to this issue, first amendement does not apply. I have made a copy of this site for proof, see you soon. Have a ducky day.

I'm getting a beer--the wank in Makinglight's comments is already full of glorious mockery.

I've added fairies to the list of things in fantasy-type fiction that I can no longer stomach. When I could spill a coffee in the YA section and easily hit at least eight fairy books (three of which are about how the main female character is a lost fairy princess/needs to become the fairy queen), then I'd think it's pretty safe to say that authors need to get the fuck off that bandwagon.

This makes me sad, because Gregory Maguire wrote a YA tooth fairy story and I'm curious, but am not sure I could bring myself to get through it.

So instead I've picked up Kelley Armstrong's Dime Store Magic. Her characterization doesn't seem to be quite as smooth as in No Humans Involved, but thus far I'm easily able to forgive her for it. Here's to hoping for the best.



Okay. So Borders put out an employee newsletter where they went on about the success of their proprietary publishing venture, then told employees they'd love to publish someone from within the company & to send in a manuscript by January. To the best of my understanding, ( I am not seeing how this is a good idea. )

Writer Beware brought a tale of an author, David Lassman, who changed some names and titles in chapters of Jane Austen's works and submitted them to a handful of different publishers and agents.

The response, as one might expect, was across-the-board rejection.


One might take this as a indication of the awful world of publishing, where publishers and agents can't even recognize t3h awesomeness of classics when it's stuck in front of their faces. Writer Beware calls otherwise: Lassman sent submissions to publishers that don't take unagented submissions (autofail), expressed confusion over which genre the works were (generally autofail), sent the query and chapters to publishers that don't even deal in romantic works (I can hear Miss Snark gnashing her teeth from here), and left the well-known intro from Austen's Pride & Prejudice intact. ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.") Hell, I hate Austen and never managed to get past the first few pages of any her of works, and I would still recognize that line.


BTW: The query letters suck, too. Where's the hook? What the hell happened to their punctuation? Why would I want to read something that sounds no more new and exciting than a bowl of cold oatmeal? More autofail.



Dear Mr. Lassman: Troll harder, or with better direction.