There I was this morning, with ten paragraphs of what I hoped would be an insightful, well-documented, though controversial blog post about ‘(X) affiliation being used as an excuse for predatory/bad practices and substandard work in genre publishing’.
It would have been about one facet of certain substandard small presses, vanity publishers, predatory and/or incompetent ‘literary agents’, and self-published authors. I only started researching it because of synchronicity. Over the past few months, I’ve been seeing this issue crop up multiple times in the publishing forums and posts of Writer Beware, AbsoluteWrite, Preditors & Editors, and other private sites. I had well-documented good examples (of business people being responsible and effective at their work) and bad examples (of people using certain affinities as an excuse for shoddy work – or worse, for openly unethical goals.) I had compelling evidence of how the offenders use similar tactics to other kinds of affinity fraudsters who tend to prey on the same client base.
By the eleventh paragraph, I quietly trashed the post. It’s gone. I’m not going to write about it in detail now, and probably not ever. I recognize that any good I might do in posting will be drowned out by outrage coming from several directions.
After all, I’d seen the same reactions on some of the aforementioned sites, whenever another poster commented even obliquely on the underlying issue:
How dare I write about this thing, since I am not part of the target client group?
How dare I criticize the target client group for being misinformed about how publishing really works?
How dare I write any criticism at all of this nasty side to what are notable and worthwhile advances in publishing? Don’t I know that my negation hurts the whole field’s forward momentum? Don’t I know that my contrary voice amounts to the same thing as the most heinous abuses of the past?
How dare I name names of the aforementioned bad examples and their companies? After all, they claim they are merely providing a service to an under-served market.
So once again, I’m invoking Filigree’s Rule and stepping aside. Because the route for all those under-served writers reaching fame and fortune in genre fiction is not through predatory publishers and agents (or uninformed self-publishing). It’s through research, training, diligence, brilliant writing, a bit of luck, and enough learned common sense to know a scam when it’s first presented.
The future great genre authors will surface whether I write my post or not; they’ll change the publishing world on their own, as previous authors already have begun to do. The authors who probably would not succeed in commercial or self-publishing, anyway, will stall out among their predators – whether I write my post or not.
That ‘(X) affiliation’ could be any one of half-a-dozen identifiers, each with the same approximate backlash, does not escape my sense of irony.