When they came for me...

[erastes]

Because I'm not of the mind to Calm Down ("The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing") I'm still keeping an eye on the RT debacle.

Ms Stacy has been in correspondence with Dear Author and I quote her response from this page.  The hypocrisy still astounds me. She states, quite unashamedly that they don't review m/m even thought they take the money for ads and don't review - although these policies don't apply to "mainstream publishers"

This disgusts me, to be frank. I would imagine that the reasons behind this are commercial, and that's understandable - Ms Stacy would no doubt explain this away by saying that the "mainstream" publishers are more likely to spend money on advertising - but doesn't that fly in the face of what she says about groups of authors advertising?  And it certainly does negate her stance on m/m - for if - for example Ms Waters were to produce a m/m novel it would then be reviewed.

It's just our little books that aren't worthy of notice then. 

Off for my lovely lunch in the slashy pub now.

Comments

[irreparable.livejournal.com]

....Jesus.

I have no other words after reading all of that.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I know. There are no words. I really didn't expect the RL writing world to be wankier than Potter but yay! it is!

*headdesk*

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Of course it is! There's $$$ at stake. And at the top of the food chain, it's a lot of $$$. (Sorry, no pounds-sterling sign..)

[erastes.livejournal.com]

That's always annoyed me. We have dollar signs, its very RUDE of the US not to have £'s on their keyboards

[julesjones]

I had to buy a new keyboard last year, and although I *adore* the new one for its wonderful ergonomicness, being geographically challenged at present I had to buy a US layout. And it's got no pound sign! Is annoying.

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

££££££££

Hahaaaaa! The cut & paste pirate strikes again!

[logophilos.livejournal.com]

Always amusing to watch bigots tie themselves in knots trying to prove they're not bigots. Frankly, after 'some of my best friends are gay' from her, she's going to have to do better than this.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I can only hope her gay friends dump her. Mine certainly would if I said anything so vile in a public forum.

The entire staff need to go on a public relations course.

[semioticwarrior.livejournal.com]

Good grief. I hadn't even heard of RT before this, nor had I been a big romance reader. In fact, Standish was one of the handful of romances I've ever read--and it was the one that made me begin to rethink my position on the genre. If there were more romance novels that grabbed the heart while satisfying the mind, I'd be a bigger fan.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm a bored revolutionary. I hadn't heard of them either until I started hanging around writers group etc

I'm very thrilled to hear that Standish made you think about the genre. I'm (and a few of my compatriots) of the opinion that we are rather sick of a few women in America being able to pigeon hole an entire genre the way they do. And to say "this isn't romance, and this is"

All it seems to do is to encourage people to churn out "more of the same" in my opinion. I know that I'm in a tiny minority of people who think like this, but I'd rather be in it than not.

However, this is the infancy of m/m romance novels, I firmly believe that this time the bandwagon will take off, in print - it's already well established in ebooks - so I can only hope that eventually they will cave in. However, I wonder NOW if it's more of a case that they don't want to cave in because it will make them look stupid rather than for any business decision, which rather makes them look stupid already.

*G*

[erastes.livejournal.com]

hahahaha!

that's "born"

although bored is so much more realistic.

[galadhir.livejournal.com]

I'm new to this whole scene, having only just discovered Lee Rowan's Ransom and gone 'wow, fantastic!' I found you through her LJ. So basically I have a newby's complete ignorance of the subject, but even a complete noob can see that RT's 'we'll review small press books which advertise with us as long as they're not m/m' is just staggeringly indefensible.

Huh, and here I was expecting less wank from professionals than from LJ, not more. Shows what I know!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Isn't Lee Great? I'm most happy you came to me via her! Ransom was the first m/m historical I read and I was so impressed with it. Winds of Change is even better.

And yes, it's indefensible. Completely. And the more they do it, the worse they look.

[galadhir.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! Ransom was quite a revelation to me - to know that there were people out there actually writing and selling slash. Fabulous! And now that I've read a few m/m ebooks I appreciate her from the other side too - by which I mean that I appreciate the good strong story and plot; the build up and the dramatic tension, and of course the setting :) I'm something of an 18th Century/Navy fangirl myself.

I'm moving house in a couple of weeks, which is highly frustrating, as it means that if I order Standish now, it won't get to my house until it's no longer the right house. (I'm in the UK so stuff from the USA can take nearly a month to get here.) But I've heard such great things about it that I'm all agog to read it. I don't care what RT might think, I reckon m/m fiction is here to stay and that's a wonderful thing :)

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

I'm blushing, you peeps. Galadhir, if you mean ordering Winds will cause a shipping problem, contact me off-list (lee.rowan@yahoo.com). I should have copies by May 23 (knock wood) and can mail one to you Global Priority, which usually takes about 5 days to reach the UK--definitely within a week, so you'd have it by 5/30. Would that help?

[galadhir.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for the offer, Lee! My problem is just that I don't know where I'll be living at around the end of May - whether it will be my current house, or the new one. I think that the best thing will be to wait until I've got a moving date, and then order them both to be delivered to the new address. It's very frustrating, but it would be worse for them to end up in the wrong house, waiting for the new owners to get round to posting them on :)

Thanks again, though! The offer is very appreciated :)

[liebesdammerung.livejournal.com]

Sweet mother of Jefferson Davis! I am quite astounded at the behavior of these people. *shakes head in disbelief*

They ought to be ashamed of themselves for being more wanky than Suethors.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

If they were just, you know, ordinary bods with no agenda, I'd be rolling my eyes at the Diva behavoiur but that would be their affair if they wanted to behave so badly, but they are such a high profile organisation, - words fail.

I hope their sales drop, I truly do.

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Given that there seems to be more fishy business afoot, with one of the self-styled Grande Dames of Romance buying into a successful e-book publishing firm (this is showing up on dearauthor dot com) it's really becoming a tailbiter, because the epub in question does a lot of m/m. Quite a soap opera.

[julesjones]

I'm fascinated by the whole "m/m authors know that they won't get reviews like everyone else, so they have only themselves to blame if they give us money."

No, they don't. Because RT still doesn't have the balls to actually come out and say on the advertising page "fag hags not welcome". They only way you'll know is if you've heard it on the network from other authors, and not everyone's plugged into that network. And the only reason the network knows is because Laura Baumbach forced them to admit that they had no intention of reviewing m/m even when authors had paid for an ad in the expectation of getting a review.

The stuff about telling authors is rubbish. If you only hear about it when you submit the ad, that's too late. You've already spent money on having the ad designed, and if you're part of a mixed group, you're then faced with the choice of pulling out and letting down the het and menage authors, or paying for the ad and not getting all of the service you were paying for.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I guess that they are leary of putting it into words in case they open themselves up to lawsuits.

However, what I don't get is why people aren't suing them - perhaps the contract doesn't now say you get reviewed?

If I 1. had any money at all and 2. not known for yelling about this and 3. In America - I'd place and ad and then sue their arses off.

[julesjones]

Don't know what the contract says, but the website no longer explicitly offers a review in exchange for buying an ad. It does suggest that one may have opportunity to write editorial material, but it's not guaranteed, and there is weasel wording about having the right to vet submitted material (both ads and editorial, by my interpretation) for unsuitable content. Of course, they don't give any examples of what they might consider unsuitable content...

I strongly suspect that the reason Laura Baumbach was so clearly targeted out of all the m/m authors at the con is that she dragged the anti-m/m policy into the open and forced them to admit that they were taking money for ads when they had no intention of providing the review in return.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I have no doubt of it, there was other m/m stuff around in the promo room, I understand.

I know that the contract USED to say exactly that, that they'd be guaranteed a review, because one of the blokes who posted on that poll had a major beef about their reneging on him. But I bet they've changed it.

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

My own editors at Linden Bay didn't know about RT's queer-ban policy until after Laura kicked up such a fuss. I'd bought a share in an ad for $100 because they told me in good faith that new writers from small presses pretty well had to buy ads to get their books reviewed. I wasted the $ and a lot of printing (it was only an e-book at that point) only to learn it was all a waste.

I wish everybody who is on the side of m/m reviews would hold off on advertising for a couple of months and let RT feel the consequences.

In the long run, though--Affaire de Coeur is strongly egalatarian. RT is coming across as a bunch of hypocritical little church-ladies who refuse to admit a mistake, change their minds, or admit that their way is not the only way. (We have a lot of that going on in the US, don't we...?)

The global theme right now seems to be change or die. Fossil fuel or fossil fools... anyone who doesn't adapt is going to find the world changing around them. "My name is Ozymandias..."

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Sorry you got ripped off. That sucks.

I wish people would boycott too, I really do.