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01 May 2001
Secret Agent Man

This is an abridgement of a much-longer essay to be published elsewhere. Even so, it will extend over several days.

The publishing industry, with its shortsighted "agented submissions only" policies, is actively inviting fraud against prospective writers. I can't change the policies.¹ I can hope to educate authors to avoid many frauds directed at them, or more properly their wallets.

Fraud directed at writers is a big business. It's terribly difficult to quantify, as most victims never discover, let alone complain about, that they've been taken. That's how fraud works: by lying, implicitly or explicitly, about the "need" for the victim to take part in the scheme. There are so many myths floating around about the publishing world that new writers are prime victims. Based on documentation I've seen, the various publishing industry frauds are in the low eight figures in annual income.

Go ahead. Read that again.

Here's how I reached that figure:

It's only an estimate, based on documentation and some inferences from the documentation, behavior, and public data. But a nice round number of US$19 million is not chicken feed.² Vulture feed seems more likely.

There is one mantra that, if you follow it, will screen out the majority of frauds directed at writers:

Money Flows Toward the Author.

Follow that rule and you'll avoid the vast majority of the scams.

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1. It's not because there aren't enough (low-paid) editors available to read the slush pile—if, and this is the problem, editors are allowed to be editors. Instead, much of their time (usually over 30%, and more for more-senior editors) is spent on marketing: fixing screwups by the marketing department, which takes longer than it would for the editors to do it right themselves the first time; attending marketing meetings at which the editors seldom get to say anything positive, and will in any event be largely ignored; attempting to influence the cover so that it doesn't misrepresent the book, with varying degrees of success. Apply even half that time to a slush pile and it would empty rather quickly, as most book manuscripts—fiction or nonfiction, even specialty nonfiction—can be rejected on the basis of the cover letter, synopsis, and a few pages of the text.

2. The opportunity cost—the loss of income that could have been gained from competent representation, self-publishing, or author-directed submission—is incalculable, but certainly nonzero. That said:

• The documentation I have examined for over 40 "agent" schemes indicates a median first-year charge of approximately $840 when all costs are figured in, ranging from $95 to well over $2,500. (Median subsequent-year charge is much harder to quantify, but is nonzero.) Based on advertising volume and loose lips, somewhere over 3,000 new authors are suckered into these schemes every year. Thus, the direct cost is over US$2.5 million.
  
• The documentation I have examined for over 25 "editor" schemes indicates a median charge of approximately $950 (range $75–$3,100) for fiction and $1,300 (range $125–$5,700) for nonfiction book-length manuscripts. Approximately 1,000 fiction manuscripts and approximately 800 nonfiction manuscripts—many authors getting taken for more than one manuscript—go through this mill every year, for a direct cost of approximately US$2 million.
  
• The documentation I have examined for over 50 "publishing" schemes indicates a median charge of approximately $4,000 (range $1,800–$10,400) for the clearly fraudulent variations on these schemes. Approximately 2,000 books go through this mill every year—again, often more than one from a given author—for a direct cost of approximately US$8 million.
  
• Combination schemes—"one-stop theft," so to speak—are virtually impossible to quantify, as they are both more expensive and easier to hide. Again, considering only clearly fraudulent combinations, this exceeds $US6.5 million.

03 May 2001
Lighthouse

So, then: What are the warning signs? How do you know whom to avoid?

This is precisely the problem. A novice author is the target because he or she doesn't have adequate information to protect him or herself from the predators.^† Unfortunately, as there is no regulation or qualification required to call oneself an agent, there is no accreditation, no training, no enforceable standards. Thus, any set of guidelines will find some exceptions.

An author seeking an agent should be able to answer the following questions:

• Does the agent have a track record of placing manuscripts with commercial publishers? If not, the risk of ending up with a bad agent is simply too high. There are a few agents who are appropriate who do not yet have a track record reported at AgentResearch.com. A very few, mostly agents who have recently left other reputable agencies.
• Does the agent list sales to noncommercial publishers as "recent sales"? An agent who can help a new author get a commercial sale will not do so. Conversely, an author doesn't need an agent to place a manuscript with a noncommercial publisher.
• Does the agent charge any fee that is payable before a sale? If so, run away. Once the agent has your money, he or she has no economic incentive to push anything not clearly a bestseller from an established author. As Ann Crispin and Victoria Strauss noted in their article in the April issue of Writer's Digest, commercial publishers often know who the bad agents are, and ignore their submissions. I do not find it coincidental that all of the bad agents named to Ann and Victoria were fee-chargers. The name applied to the fee doesn't matter; only its timing.
• Does the agent guarantee a sale? Not an infallible indication, but guarantees in "soft" industries that depend upon human judgment tend to point toward what can at best be called "puffery" and should probably be called something much worse.
• Does the agency refuse to name its clients and sales? Only in exceptional circumstances will there be a legitimate nondisclosure agreement that truly creates a need for confidentiality—and certainly not as to all clients and sales.
• Does the agency claim to specialize in "new writers"? Many agents are open to new writers, but I know of no successful agents that really do "specialize" in new writers.
• Does the agent have a common business interest with any "publisher" or "editorial service"? The classic example here is the Deering Agency's affiliation with Sovereign Publishers and Appaloosa Press. I can say this because the Deerings are in jail at this writing for fraud arising from their "agency". This is an impossible conflict of interest. There are at least two established agencies in New York that have "electronic publishing" arms. That doesn't make those two agencies inherently fraudulent; it makes them inappropriate for inexperienced writers.

Keep in mind that no screening system is perfect. In my judgment, due to the damage that can be caused by a bad agent, a new writer should err on the side of a "false positive" for inappropriate conduct. Next time: Do you really need an agent?

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^†  I have or have had access to documentation on over 200 such agents. And these are just the ones who have come to my attention.

09 May 2001
Ice and Eskimos

An agent can make getting published easier. A good agent, that is. And "easier" does not mean "certain." Conversely, a bad agent can make getting published impossible, at least with the particular property being shopped around.

First off, nobody needs an agent for materials that will end up in a compilation. Stories, articles, editorials, features, interviews, and so on must be peddled by the author. Even if it was economically viable for an agent to help place these materials in today's publishing environment—it's not—with very few exceptions, there are either so many potential markets that the author probably knows them better than any agent, or there are so few potential markets that the editors would rather deal directly with the authors anyway.

Many kinds of book-length projects can be placed without an agent, too. The key is to know how to approach the editor(s), do the homework in advance so that you know which editors to approach in the first place… and to write a damned good book in the first place. Even publishers that claim "no unagented submissions" are merely using codewords. All commercial publishers will review unagented queries. The odds may not be very good, but in this publishing environment any agent out of the top five or so in a given commercial category has trouble placing everything in his or her portfolio, even from established authors.

Thus, there's one more step to take: Create the best possible query package. I can't teach you to do that here; instead, look at Don Maass's excellent The Career Novelist (and, no doubt, Writing the Breakout Novel, to be published this summer), or any of several other books. The only real difference between fiction and nonfiction query packages is the question of qualifications. For fiction and quite a bit of nonfiction, it doesn't matter whether the author is a PhD in literature or a convicted child molester with a seventh-grade education; what matters is what's on paper. For much, and perhaps most, nonfiction, however, author credibility does matter. But that's just the addition of some discussion to the cover letter, and perhaps a short resumé or c.v.; it's not a fundamental change in the query package.

Some research performed relatively recently^† indicates that some of the older styles for the synopsis, which is part of any good query package, are losing favor in the fiction world (about ten years behind the nonfiction world). The rule of thumb appears to be simple: If it's structured like something you might have done as part of a high school book report, it's no longer the best choice.

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^†   See, e.g., Katharine Eliska Kimbriel, "Storming the Synopsis," SFWA Bulletin (Winter 1997): 9, 11.

12 May 2001
Living in the Past

There is a vast distinction between inappropriate actions in the past and appropriate responses in the present. Well, duuuuuuh! Unfortunately, some otherwise very bright people frequently fail to make this distinction. More properly, they fail to understand that undoubted discrimination and ill-will toward their ancestors does not justify (to use the strongest possible example) making the former masters into slaves and the former slaves into the masters.^†

Just a few tedious examples:

•  I'm a Caucasian-Semitic-American. Well, no. I'm not a label, dammit. It's one thing to object to a purely pejorative label, such as "Shylock." It's quite another to turn all of the garbage collectors into urban sanitation engineers. Sometimes the terminology change is quite necessary in the face of truly horrific prior conduct, but that's much rarer than I think most exponents of victimhood would like to admit. And sometimes that pejorative terminology is most apt—should we start referring to con artists as "differently ethiced"?

•  Continuing with the theme of language for a moment, I'd like to point something out for some of the ignoramuses who espouse so-called "gender-neutral English" without any real knowledge of where their alternatives are coming from. There are a number of varieties of this movement; some are reasonable, such as those that insist that not all third-person pronouns should be male. "He or she"/"Him or her"/"His or hers" works well in general language, and "one"/"one"/"one's" is just fine too (contrary to the mistaken teachings of yet more ignoramuses, this is not some overformality—it is merely Queen's English). Even "their" used as a singular is probably ok; it's somewhat ironic that those who rail against the overformality of "one" rail equally against the "imprecision" of "their." "Sie"/"sie"/"hir", however, is right out. These are words drawn from other languages into English—and they bring their own gender baggage with them. German seems to provide "sie," which is either the hyperformal Sie (indeterminate gender third-person), and is thus inconsistent with the objections to "one," or the colloquial sie, which is the feminine nominative and objective third-person pronoun in a language with stronger gender than perhaps any other of European basis. "Hir" has a similar derivation. So I guess instead of all being men, we all get to be women.

•  Skipping beyond language to economics, there's a growing controversy over "reparations" for descendants of slaves. I'm not defending slavery at all, mind you, or the continuing misdistribution of wealth that it has caused. However, any reparations have to come from somewhere. Unless the reparations programs are going to find all the descendants of the slave-owners and make them the sole source of funds for reparations—which would violate the Constitutional prohibition against bills of attainder—there are going to be some awfully strange results. None of my ancestors arrived in the New World until after World War I. Are my taxes to be increased, then, not for the general welfare (which is hard enough to swallow, given the amount of corporate welfare and subsidy for harmful agriculturals in the budget), but for the benefit of a select few individuals wholly unrelated to anything my ancestors did? We'll leave aside the fact that much, if not most, of the true poverty in this country is on the shoulders of persons who are not descendants of slaves: Hispanics, Native Americans, Appalachians, post-slavery immigrants, and so on.

It's one thing to point out that something is wrong, discriminatory, evil, or whatever other label happens to conveniently describe it. It's quite another to engage in discrimination as some form of compensation. One does not create harmony by substituting yin-dominance for yang-dominance. Yin and yang must balance themselves. I'm not saying that it's easy; I'm saying that it's the only acceptable alternative. The cure for discrimination is clearly not the reactionary more discrimination. I actually believe Dr. King's suggestion that we should be judged not by the color of our skins—or the presence of Y chromosomes, or the names of the buildings in which we worship, or our choices of sexual partners—but by the content of our characters. Perhaps that makes me a minority these days; that doesn't bother me much, except that I believe it should be the overwhelming majority position.

We're not living in the 19th century, folks. So don't treat me as if I am, and must pay for the "crimes" of my ancestors—particularly given the selectivity of the "crimes." Remember, most (or at least a significant proportion of) slaves were sold into slavery in Africa by other Africans.

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^†   By ancestry, I belong to an identifiable minority that has been more mistreated than most, and quite possibly any other, at least in the Western world. At various times, I've been referred to as "kike," "Jewboy," "Christ-killer," "baby-killer," and a number of other epithets I won't repeat here. I've been excluded from an official function being held at a country club due to my ancestry. I've had stones thrown at my window due to my nationality. And that's before the so-called "behavioral choice classes" (unfortunately, that really is one of the terms that has been used in governmental human relations programs), such as "geek," "nerd," "four-eyes" (and, as I wear bifocals, the more-accurate "six-eyes"), and so on. Some people don't think that's authentic enough to allow me to discuss discrimination at all. They can eat my shorts—after I've worn them for a few days.

15 May 2001
Inducing Disbelief

Once in a while—oh, if it were only that infrequent—someone in publishing manages to seriously undermine his or her credibility by overgeneralizing. (For the meticulous, this is indeed the inductive fallacy.) This time, it was an editor complaining about another publication. The complaint itself has some validity; some of the conclusions and premises, however, do not.

One of the hazards of being a writer—nay, one of the continuing rites of passage—is the dreaded rejection. If all writers had a professionally thick skin, they would shrug off even the nastiest, vilest rejections. If all editors (and first readers) acted professionally, only the very rare, and objectively execremental, story would even get a nasty rejection.

And in that best of all possible worlds, marketing dorks would be in their proper place (Siberia), Hugo and Nebula awards would go only to truly excellent works and publications, and professional politicians would be a distant memory.

The editor of Chiaruscuro received what appears to be an inappropriate and unprofessional rejection from Weird Tales. I know that writers are supposed to praise [insert deity here] every time the rejection slip in today's mail is more detailed than a flat "no." Bullshit. Writers are entitled to be treated as professionals until they demonstrate otherwise by either unprofessional behavior or repeated, flagrant submission of grossly substandard material. But Ms. Macomber went much too far in her denunciation by asserting that the unprofessional conduct of one particular first reader (and yes, I would say that to the face of said first reader, assuming that the facts are as presented) demonstrates conclusively that people who are not experienced editors have no business rejecting stories.

[J]ust because you don't like a person's style doesn't mean the story SUCKS. Or that the writer sucks. And even if they do, you do NOT have a right to say so. Ever. It's destructive and mean. [emphasis added]

And Carol… who are you? If you're a member of HWA, you're not on the list. If you've ever written anything, I can't find it. If you have a degree in editing, that's fine. What you need is bedside manner. And common sense. [ellipses in original]

Bullshit.

Too many of our experienced editors have ossified, and even fossilized. Bringing in first readers to help get the slush actually read is an excellent idea, so long as there are proper controls, such as a blind, multiple-reading process. The concept is not wrong because one such reader was not properly trained or supervised (and, on the basis of a number of complaints, seldom is).

Writers—at least some of them—are qualified to write, and perhaps to judge their own writing. Very few, however, are in any position to judge the objective quality of writing in general. The sheer quantity of crap produced by supposedly professional members of the various "professional" writers' groups is more than adequate demonstration of that! I'm not a member of SFWA, but I daresay I probably know a fair amount about literary quality in general and in speculative fiction. (I'd like to think that I've retained at least some of that academic work.)

Is there an excuse for routine, mean-spirited rejections? No. Is there an excuse for routine commentary on tenuous issues of style by anyone other than the editor Herself? No. Conversely, is there an excuse for asserting that one cannot either edit or judge the value of writing without having done it before? No. I am not certain that is what Ms. Macomber meant. It is, however, what she implied, and is sure as hell the prevailing opinion in the professional writers' organizations.

Two wrongs don't make a right. The rejection was wrong, insofar as it has been presented, in the manner in which it commented on Ms. Macomber's writing. Ms. Macomber, however, was equally wrong in generalizing so broadly. Bluntly, sometimes writers do need to be told that something sucks, in very explicit language. I wish that someone had done so with Sheri Tepper's current novel, The Fresco (almost mediocre).

Ms. Macomber's blanket statement seems much more concerned with the language. At the risk of stating the obvious, can I remind both ends of this miscommunication that there are polite, professional, yet blunt ways to say "this sucks" that are much more adroit than "this sucks"? For example, one could say something like this: "This story would benefit from greater directness in the writing (Strunk & White, II.16, V.4, V.8). The multiple adjectives and adverbs kept me at too great a distance."^† In this day of macros, mail-merges, and boilerplate documents, there is little excuse for not having this kind of phrase readily available for rejections; as this is a particularly common difficulty with contemporary American writing, perhaps even that phrase. <SARCASM>Of course, this requires those who evaluate manuscripts to have some defensible notion of good writing and style in the first place. Given the crap that's out there, that's all too rare.</SARCASM>

Professional communications are the minimum writers (and editors, for that matter) deserve, and absolutely so in writing. If someone wants to bitch to me to my face at WorldCon that this journal sucks, so be it. Be prepared for return fire, though. I do not take prisoners. I do, however, shoot the wounded—and there are some editors at the pro level (under my definition of "pro") whom I would so classify.

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^†   Yes, Virginia, this journal entry is deliberately written to parody some of these style issues. I hope you weren't kept at a distance.

18 May 2001
I Told You So!

Those of you who have been following this journal for a few months may recall a "publishing" contract I analyzed late last year. The cat's out of the bag now: this was from our good friends at Time-Warner, for their new iPublish program.

Warner has cleaned up the contract a little. A very little. Enough to avoid prosecution, anyway (and no, I'm not entirely joking). But not enough to satisfy me. Or the Authors' Guild, as noted at CNet News and Wired. As other commentators have noted, Time-Warner's outraged response never actually attempts to refute anything in the Authors' Guild's objections. Time-Warner's spokesperson either was completely ignorant of publishing law and practices, which is entirely possible, or lies better than most.

Oh. I forgot to mention something. It's sort of like the classic graphic of fish eating fish:

 
For our purposes, though, it looks like this:

Remember that AOL bought Time-Warner not too long ago. <SARCASM>No doubt AOL truly has authors' interests as its main priority.</SARCASM>

20 May 2001
Random Excursions (Version 3.11)

A few lawyers manage to avoid insanity in the midst of discovery battles. I can't avoid insanity on even my best days. Thus, the following random snippets are about the most coherent that I can get.

•  An item in the May 2001 Scientific American explains, although perhaps not intentionally, just how Ronald Reagan managed to get away with his disjunctures from reality, and perhaps how the current administration intends to do so. Discussing a recent pseudoscientific criticism of a relatively rigorous work of cultural anthropology in "The Erotic-Fierce People," Michael Shermer notes that

To be sure, Tierney is a good storyteller, but this is what makes his attack on science so invidious. Because humans are storytelling animals, we are more readily convinced by dramatic anecdotes than by dry data.

Trees cause pollution.

•  Life of Brian isn't just about first-century religion. It's about twenty-first-century politics. Come to think of it, I'm not sure there's a difference. Yes, we are all individuals!

•  Once in a while, I'd like to see some of the ignoramuses who put themselves forward as "new media" gurus get slowly boiled in their excessive egos. Hmm. Perhaps I should arrange for that myself. I have just the object lesson(s) in mind. [insert maniacal laughter here] Watch the reviews.

26 May 2001
I'll Never Be Greedy Again!

Yesterday morning, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit heard oral argument in Atlanta on the The Wind Done Gone matter. A District Court had preliminarily enjoined (prohibited) publication of the book because it is allegedly an infringement upon the copyrights of the estate of Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind). Houghton Mifflin, the prospective publisher of TWDG, appealed.

The honorable Court did the right, and highly unusual, thing. Normally, an appellate case is not resolved for some time after the oral argument, ranging from a few days to over a year. On Friday, however, the Eleventh Circuit ruled from the bench—scathingly—and overturned the injunction moments after the oral argument had been completed. The Court held that this preliminary injunction was an "unwarranted prior restraint on First Amendment rights," and promised to issue a written explanation shortly.

Why is this the right result? Mostly for procedural reasons—those little tricks that lawyers play to change the way that arguments turn out. Assuming arguendo that TWDG does infringe Mitchell's GWTW's copyright, a preliminary injunction is clearly unjustified as a matter of law, for a very simple reason: There is an adequate remedy at law following publication. Under the Copyright Act, the Mitchell estate would later be able to confiscate all unsold copies and all revenues earned from the book. Unlike Richard Nixon's memoirs, this is a work of fiction, and thus the argument that the harm is irreparable is quite a bit weaker. There is a strong thread in First Amendment law that discourages prior restraints on publication; upholding the preliminary injunction would seem to run afoul of the Pentagon Papers doctrine.

But we don't even know if one can assume that TWDG is infringing! Nobody has seen the book; certainly virtually nobody qualified to judge whether it is infringing. And, even if it is infringing, Houghton-Mifflin and the author may have a valid parody defense to the infringement under the reasoning Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (the Two Live Crew parody of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman"). All of this weighs even further against a preliminary injunction.

Frankly, there are few so-called "classics" of American literature that are more overblown, more deserving, and more fruitful for parody than GWTW. Whether TWDG qualifies as such is something I cannot judge, because I haven't had the opportunity to read it. It seems to me that this is precisely what the Mitchell estate is most afraid of: not the inspiration of another work by GWTW, but ridicule. Scarlett is naked, and doesn't make a particularly attractive nude.

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