aurorawatcherak "I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical."
As a libertarian who believes in free-market principles, I categorically support the right of a publisher to engage in whatever business practices they think will make a profit.
Now, turn that around. I also categorically support the right of the authors who deal with that publisher to engage in critical thinking and to reject business practices they think might harm them.
Members of the publishing industry—authors, publishers, peer reviewers—should be held accountable for maintaining ethical practices. We’re not talking laws here, but voluntary exchange between parties. Yes, it’s not always easy keeping others on the straight and narrow. Whether in search of financial or personal gain, some bad eggs do exist within the industry, attempting to bait-and-switch unsuspecting authors.
Stop being unsuspecting. Educate yourself so you are not taken advantage of. That is wholly within your control, though I readily admit it’s not a fun process.
How do I know this? Well, I encountered some of those bad eggs in my journey to self-publication as a novelist.
Predatory publishers, publications, and conferences proliferated in the past decade amid the increase of self-publishing (sometimes called open-access publishing). These predators offer various “pay-to-play” models with benefits that you can’t possibly refuse – and a lot of authors fall prey to these con artists.
Predatory Publishers
So, let’s say an author stumbles upon this brand-new, full-service Open Access publisher. It looks stellar – cheap and convenient. Nice. But, hold on. How do you know it’s not trustworthy – otherwise known as predatory?
Predatory publishers don’t care about quality. They care about netting a quick profit through various charges or a one-size-fits-all fee that equals your mortgage for a year. These publishers may even willingly take unpolished work, especially if they offer in-house peer review and/or copy editing services. Be cautious of publishers guaranteeing acceptance after paying a fee. Be double-cautious if the publishers lacks review transparency and/or offers a short turnaround for publication. Although this all sounds wonderful, it is not sound publishing practice. If they’re promising your novel will be published for a low-low fee of thousands of dollars and they have the juice to make it a best-seller, hit pause and think.
Too good to be true = con artist.
In the end, after about my third query with one of these wolves, I decided to self-publish. I wanted to maintain control of my product, to assure its quality and to own my publication rights. I had a bit of an advantage because I had worked in an adjacent field of publishing, so I already knew such practices existed — there have always been predatory vanity presses out there. But, man, it’s scary out here in the cold and dark by myself.
Learn to Trust Someone
I eventually started a discussion with an author friend who is part of the author cooperative Breakwater Harbor Books which is my publisher of record. We each still own our books and we each still have to find editors, cover creators, format-services and marketing firms to help us where we need it, but we also can help each other from time to time and if a reader cares about whether a book has a “publisher” they will see a dozen other authors published under this boutique publisher.
Which, by the way, is the only advantage of most self-publishing companies. You give them your money, they take control of your book, they may screw it up or improve it, they may stick a great cover on it or a bad one, they may market it or they may expect you to do all of it (and that’s usually the case), and you will get five percent of the royalties rather than 70 percent … after you pay them thousands of dollars.
I held onto my rights and the quality of my work. What did I give up to join the cooperative?
Some trust. Because we use each other as beta readers, we have to trust that our fellow stable members are not going to steal each other’s copyrighted manuscripts. My ISBNs are listed in my own name, so BHB can’t claim to own them, but I have to trust that Scott and Cara and the other authors are not going to take me to court to claim they own my published books. Although we have verbal agreements to that effect, we didn’t involve lawyers and frankly, we didn’t need to.
Ethics absolutely matter
Far more important than the law, ethics (or morality) are the foundation under-girding society. The law can be absolutely on the side of the predatory publisher who has taken your money, somehow relieved you of the rights to your book, and is now letting it languish in their basement. Ethics, however, are on your side, so it’s best to avoid those unethical publishers and be brave – step out on your own and make your own choices, accept your own risks, and leave the con artists standing there with their hats in their hands.
I grew up against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, but it really didn’t affect me. My parents knew racial discrimination, but thanks to the choices they made, I grew up in a post-racial community.
Alaska outlawed racial discrimination in 1945. Yes, that’s 20 years before the rest of the country got on board with the idea. Why? Well, because in 1945, the population of the Territory of Alaska was pretty much evenly split between Alaska Native and non-Native and the Natives were getting restless. As part of the first generation of well-educated Native folks, the leaders of the Native rights movement here didn’t wave signs and shout, they didn’t march in the streets, they didn’t threaten their neighbors with physical harm. They simply went to the territorial legislature and talked and convinced the all-white board to outlaw racial discrimination in the whole of the territory. I can’t help but think that a large part of the reason for this was that these were their neighbors that they saw every day on the street and it’s hard to look your neighbor in the eye when you know their lives aren’t what they could be because of an arbitrary law designed to protect bigots.
Two years later, my mother and her first husband moved to Ketchikan, Alaska. A stateside Indian who wasn’t raised on a reservation, Mom quickly noticed that nobody was giving them a hard time about renting a house. Yes, her husband was a white man, but in Seattle, where she’d lived before, they had struggled to find housing. Not much had changed when they moved back south in the 1950s, so in 1956, they moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, and stayed.
Meanwhile, my father and his first wife experienced the same difficulty. Dad, a red-headed second-generation Swede from the Pacific Northwest, married a Creole woman when the Merchant Marine took him to New Orleans. They weren’t out of place in NOLA’s Creole community where interracial marriage wasn’t unusual, so it never occurred to them things would be different if they moved elsewhere. They returned to the Tacoma region because that was his home base and quickly discovered housing and jobs for June were hard to come by. Dad had fallen in love with Alaska when he’d passed along the coast in World War II, and so they moved to Anchorage and experienced a similar lack of racial segregation there. June became a successful business owner and when she retired in the 1990s, the news article relating her half-decade in business mentioned her triracial status without making a big deal out of it. It was her reason for moving to Alaska, not the definition of her life.
Growing Up Nonracial
I grew up in Fairbanks, where about a third of the population was Native. Because my father was white and my mother was stateside Indian, Natives considered me “white”. What did that mean? Not much. I played with a whole range of brownish kids. Because my eyes are blue, I kept people guessing. I comfortably wear a kuspuk (Eskimo summer parka) and eat muktuk (avoid the seal oil and it tastes like really salty bacon) and aqutiq (Eskimo “ice cream” and, it’s better if you don’t want to know what’s in it). We all went to school in the same buildings and we played in each other’s houses. Our parents drank together, played cards together and rooted for the Alaska Gold Panners or Nanooks basketball. My mom, who weighed about 92-pounds, was popular for blanket tosses. Since the whole team was judged by how high they could toss the person on what amounts to a portable trampoline, her lightweight and athletic grace meant she was invited to participate even though she wasn’t “Native”.
The Civil Rights Movement perplexed me because everybody here was “just people.” My mother’s first husband worked for a local car dealership and his boss was a black man. “Great mechanic,” he’d say. “Good supervisor.” And when someone would mention he was black and didn’t that bother him, Roy would shrug and say “Not sure what the color of his skin has to do with how good he is with cars.” I just couldn’t understand why police would go after people of any skin color with water cannons because they were walking down a street. When I heard about lunch counters closed to black people, I happened to be sitting in a cafe where my mom worked and I looked right and left and saw all shades of brownish people. I just didn’t get it. What was the big deal? My mom put her darker arm against my lighter arm and said, “Some people think that matters.” So perplexing! Later I would hear from folks who’d grown up in “the Lower 48” and I met my father’s ex-wife and she told me about the South. I believed that racial discrimination was real, but I still didn’t understand why it existed.
A Brief Interlude
Then the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline started and a whole new type of person came to Alaska. A lot of Texans and Oklahomans, some Louisianans — folks from the Gulf Coast. And for a while, there was turmoil. The federal Civil Rights laws were less than a decade old and some folks from the South still hadn’t let go of their privilege. But in Alaska, you quickly find out that you don’t care what color the man is who is pushing your car out of a ditch at 30 below zero. You’re just glad he stopped to help you. And if you’re a teenager and you make a racist remark in the cafeteria, the dark-haired girl with the blue eyes might speak up for her Native friend and tell you to shut your mouth. So might the red-headed Swedish guy on the construction job. Or the green-eyed brownish woman in the cafe. Racism just didn’t fly here and our new “Alaskans” adapted or they found themselves shut out. You wouldn’t get invited to the card game at someone’s house and your new “white” friend might turn away from you to talk to their Native friend because they considered you rude. Yes, there were racists among us — maybe as they had always been — but they weren’t tolerated, so they kept it to themselves. Maybe they chose not to frequent the cafe where Mom worked because she was Indian or the beauty shop where Ruby worked because she was black, but I think most people quickly learned that it didn’t make any difference and they stopped trying to force the issue.
Encounters with Racism
So, I really didn’t experience racism growing up. Or did I?
I would occasionally visit relatives on my tribal reservation in Oklahoma. Post-Wounded Knee, I heard plenty of people say really mean and mostly untrue things about my father’s people. And they thought I didn’t know what word they used to describe me meant, but I wasn’t uncomfortable with being a “breed” — as indeed most Wyandots technically are. By the way, most American Indians I’ve met outside of Alaska really don’t like black people more than they really don’t like white people.
In high school, I was in a store with a decidedly Alaska Native friend and the black shop owner said she needed to leave, but I could stay. We left and I never went back (cheapest ice in town during the fishing season and I wouldn’t let my husband buy there until after the owner died 30 years after that incident).
As a school paper reporter in high school, I went to the office to cover the story of a school-yard fight and the head of the local NAACP was there shrieking about how this was a racial altercation. I knew the kids involved and it was a fight over a girl. Yes, one of the boys was black and he might have been objecting that his sister was dating a white boy, but it wasn’t a white-on-black attack as the strident community organizer insisted. It was actually the other way around, although both boys said really awful things about the other’s race as they were being pulled apart.
In college, I took a trip through the Southwest US with some friends. We hiked and attended an evangelical college gathering in New Mexico. Outside of the Navaho Nation reservation, a white shopowner kept popping up and asking me if I needed anything. The shop was awash in the afternoon sun so I kept my sunglasses on (hiding my blue eyes). I had a deep-brown tan and my curly dark hair was in a braid. I was also wearing turquoise earrings. I thought she was rude and I chose not to buy anything, but when I got out to the van with my friends, one of the girls asked me how I put up with “that racist nonsense.” I’m sure I looked very intelligent with my mouth hanging open because I’d forgotten I’m Indian because in Alaska it never mattered. My friend was from Washington State where apparently it mattered. She admitted that she’d never thought of me as anything but human until she tried to figure out why the shopkeeper was bugging me, and whoops, maybe it’s because she’s Indian.
We tested the theory on the way back a week later— no sunglasses or turquoise earrings and my hair loose and, by gum, my friend was right. Totally different experience wrought by blue eyes and unruly hair. I still didn’t buy anything because I don’t reward racists — but there were some nice earrings there I would have loved to have bought (more on that in a minute).
In recent years, my husband and I were stopped on the Cherokee Nation reservation for no discernible reason and I watched the Indian cop treat my husband pretty shabbily. When I pulled out my tribal card as identification, suddenly, the encounter became “friendly”. What changed? You can guess, I think!
Racism is a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. It’s a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles. It’s a political or social system founded on racial prejudice or discrimination.
Racism is real and no skin color is exempt from its coercive effects. Are there white racists in America? Yes. Are there black racists in America? Yes. Are there Indian racists in America? Yes. Name a race and you’ll find members of that race who discriminate against or actively hate members of another race just because they judge those people by the color of their skin. Are any of them justified in their racism? NO!
Content of your character, not the color of your skin
If you’re looking for a racist behind every bush, racists will be dancing in front of the bushes with flaming torches to attract attention. If you think the broad scope of Americans are not racists, you’ll run across an occasional person who is rude and you’ll think they’re having a bad day.
I’d rather have the second experience. Some of this might come from my Alaska childhood in a mostly post-racial community. Some of it might come from 12 Step work. There are things I can change. There are things I can’t change. I have developed a modicum of wisdom to know I can’t change other people, I can only change myself. I choose not to go through life pissed off because I’m part of some intersectional group that’s been given societal permission to be pissed off. That just seems like such an artificial way to live my life.
I think the northern Trail of Tears was a shitty way to treat my ancestors, but I’m not angry at white people who live now, generations later. THEY didn’t do it. And it wasn’t done to ME. And am I expected to be angry with portions of my own DNA? I’m white AND Native American. How schizophrenic would it be for my Indian DNA to hate my white DNA? Why can’t I just love myself and other people without consulting my tan lines?
I don’t want to try and read the minds of everyone I encounter. I have friends who are white, Indian, Alaska Native, black, Asian, Hispanic and Pacific Islander. I see them in shades of brown. Their skin tone is a handy means of identification, like eye or hair color, or height or weight. I don’t think it has anything to do with who they are as people, although sometimes the different cultures associated with those “races” lead to some interesting conversations. I hope they think of me as Lela, a nice human being who is interested in their culture, and not the intersectional groups I belong to. I prefer to think the shopowner is just annoying, not that she’s worried I’m off the reservation. I would buy the earrings today because I like the earrings and if I suspected the shop owner was a racist, I’d take off my sunglasses and enjoy her floundering in the folly of her bigotry (though that hasn’t actually worked in about 20 years — which should tell us something). I feel more human exercising pride for all my DNA. My white father’s Swedish culture is as precious to me as my grandmother’s Wyandot culture or my grandfather’s Irish culture. I’m a blended Alaskan and I’m comfortable with that.
And, you’d be surprised how much less stressful life is if you don’t see yourself as a member of an aggrieved group so you’re not angry at people you don’t even know for something they don’t even know they’re thinking or doing.
People are just people and we’re all some shade of brown. I almost never encounter racists because I’m not looking for them, so 99% of my encounters with people are civil.
Lela Markham is an Alaska-based novelist and blogger who is interested in a wide range of topics, often from a libertarian perspective. You can reach her at lelamarkham@gmail.com.
So, I wrote this great article on this topic and accidentally swapped it for last week’s blog hop article. Have I mentioned I suck at math? Yeah, I do. And calendars, apparently.
Here’s a link to the original article, and I’m starting this one with the same intro. It was a great article in which I explore novels written by Artificial Intelligence. Yes, that’s really a thing, though neither a good one nor a real threat to legitimate novelists, in my opinion. It’s probably before its time, just like my article was. Great ideas are always jumping the gun.
Do I believe a writer can be a good writer if they don’t feel strong emotions?
Absolutely!
Let’s define our terms first. A writer is someone who writes. An author is someone whose writing is published. A novelist is someone who writes fiction.
Do we assume the author who wrote Essentials of Modern Refrigeration (a book on my husband’s shelf in the family library) had strong emotions about refrigeration? How about the Chilton’s Manual on Ford Taurus 1995-2010?
Yes, writers produced those books and I’m thinking neither of them wept over any chapter of them, although I can assure you my husband has shed a few tears over that stupid California car in our driveway. Essentials of Modern Refrigeration didn’t even put me to sleep (I am my husband’s study partner, so I am obligated to read his technical manuals before he has to take licensing tests, so he can use me as his pre-tester). So, yes, a writer can write without feeling any emotion whatsoever about a topic that really doesn’t stir a lot of emotions. Trust me, absolutely nobody is passionate about how to change an oil filter on a 2005 Taurus.
I think the question we’re really asking is “Can someone be a novelist if they don’t feel emotion strongly?”
In my other article, I focused on the writer’s job to draw out the emotions of the reader regardless if we feel the emotion. Yeah, I’m not writing the same article, so go read it if you didn’t already.
I don’t think you need to have experienced the exact same emotion your character experiences in order to illicit an emotional response from your readers.
Writing about a hot mess doesn’t mean you have to be a hot mess yourself. I work a responsible job and have managed to stay married to the same man for more than 30 years. I raised two reasonably well-adjusted children (okay, one of them is a gypsy musician, but she’s a functional gypsy musician. I did MY job and she’s feeding herself, though the roof-over-her-head thing is still debatable). I would not define myself as a hot mess.
On the other hand, I’ve lived a life. I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it. I’ve been scared. I’ve faced loss. I’ve been angry. I’ve been lonely.
But I’ve never killed anyone in a drunk driving accident and I’m writing a character who has. How can I write that character if I’ve never felt that emotion? Well, maybe I can’t. We’ll see how the readers like it when it’s finally published.
I’ve never shot anyone in a war either and I don’t suffer post-traumatic stress disorder from an experience I’ve never had. Yet readers seem to think I do a believable job of portraying Shane because they read all the published books in the series and enough people have read the most recent book in Transformation Project that I’m guessing they were waiting for it to come out. Do you think they read the whole series (to this point) because I did a bad job of conveying emotions I’ve never experienced?
Probably not.
Though I’ve never actually experienced those emotions, I know people who have and I can sense by what they say and, more importantly, what they don’t or can’t say what some of their emotions are about those past events. My job as a writer is to give expression to the groanings of a soul that has no words for what has wounded it. And, yes, of course, I feel empathy for their emotional turmoil, but frankly, if my response was to weep, I’d not be able to interview them dispassionately and that would, I believe, harm my purpose. If you’re feeling too deeply, it’s hard to put the words on the paper. It’s hard to even understand the other person’s emotions. As an author, I need some distance from the character to write their pain effectively.
My job as a writer is to give expression to the groanings of a soul that has no words for what wounded it.
When I experience the emotion is when I read the manuscript as if I were a reader. And, if I get that tingling sensation in my soft pallet and my eyes start to gloss up, then I know I’ve done my job, because if it makes me cry, it’s going to illicit a strong response from the readers who encounter it for the first time.
I trained and worked as a journalist where you typically have less than 350 words to convey something to a reader – the horror of the car accident, the fear of the burning building, the passion of the City Councilman. In my day, journalists were supposed to report the news, not insinuate their opinion or feelings into the news, but certainly good reporters understand word choice and how to tug on a reader’s emotions without saying “Hey, cry about this.” My News Writing professor used to say “Be dispassionate to bring out the passion.”
I don’t have to feel the emotion strongly to write strong prose, but absolutely, I have to understand what elicits emotions in others in order to draw an emotional response from them. But there comes a place and time where writers must not manipulate the readers into feeling passionate about the character’s experience. Instead, we need to set up a scene where the reader follows the character through an emotional roller coaster and then provide an opportunity for the character to reflect on that now-past shattering event. While the character is unpacking their own response, the reader may process theirs as well, if they choose, and if I’ve done my job as a novelist correctly.
I read an article recently in which the writer asserted we could have “free” stuff because a country of 340 million people can afford it. She further asserted that it was ridiculous and self-serving to think otherwise.
Courtesy of Washington State Highway Patrol
Sigh! This shows a profound lack of economic understanding.
In the physical world, there will always be scarcity. Capitalism has done a really good job of reducing scarcity around the world because it innovates more efficient use of resources and devises new ways to distribute it, as well as offering wanted items at lower prices through economies of scale, but it continues to struggle against the headwind of centralized government planning that insists that a board of bureaucrats can eliminate the resource scarcity simply by declaring it “free”.
Human wants are limitless. Resources are scarce.
Yes, we could have “free” almost everything. Except “free” doesn’t exist. There’s a cost to everything. If you don’t realize that, you haven’t thought seriously about the world around you. Look about and ask yourself “What is the cost of that?” Sunshine? To have sunshine requires blue skies which isn’t really available in countries like China. Sunshine, therefore, is not free because, among other things, air scrubbers on factory smokestacks cost money. Water isn’t free because it must be pumped to your location and filtered to remove contaminants. My daughter once informed me that the aurora borealis is free and I agree with her. I tried that same experiment with my son and he pointed out that the solar storms that cause the aurora borealis fry electronics that aren’t properly shielded, therefore there is a cost to the aurora borealis. Literally, just look around and consider what something costs.
College could be “free” if only the professors and staff were willing to work without pay, but then it wouldn’t be “free” because they’d be bearing the costs that the students rightfully should pay. Professors and staff are performing a service and ought to be paid by those who value that service.
We could have “free” medical care if only doctors, nurses, etc. didn’t expect to be paid. They do actually need to be paid because, like the professors, they need to eat and have roofs over their heads. We could argue whether doctors and nurses should get paid so much for the valuable service they provide, but rather than you and I arguing, why don’t we get the government and the government-created insurance companies out of the way so the patient and the medical providers can negotiate face to face? It would solve a whole host of problems that “free” created in the first place. Patients would come to realize that the true cost of their medical care is at least 80% higher than they currently pay and medical providers would learn that their patients can’t afford them. If they want to keep a roof over their heads, they might need to lower their rates once there’s no insurance industry to play “Hide the Facts” on their behalf. And patients, freed from $1000 a month premiums would go to their providers and say “I can afford this much, but not this much — let’s make a deal.” The quality of medical care would not be reduced and might even improve because providers would not want to lose patients to someone who is doing it better for the same or lower price. Yes, competition improves quality and lowers price in any market where the government isn’t intervening, even the medical profession.
No amount of wishing will make that truck safe.
There is no such thing as a free lunch (or dinner or breakfast) and when offering all this “free” stuff, the propagandists neglect to admit that it means you’re going to have to live on a whole lot less of your income. Yeah, yeah, yeah — we’ll mine the rich — until they move to a country that doesn’t while they can still afford to do it. Don’t believe that? Look at the outmigration rate from Massachusetts (which requires universal insurance coverage) to states that don’t require that (like Texas). If “free” is so great, why are people opting to live where “free” isn’t available?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll run deficits because “deficits don’t matter” … until the economy collapses under the weight of them and we’re all living in a Greater Depression. That’s a pretty high cost and if you study classical economics you learn such collapses often come from deficit spending.
Yeah, yeah, yeah — we’ll make the middle class pay their “fair share” and — on and on and on until there’s nothing left of what was until the 1970s the most vibrant nation in the world. You see, we’ve been collectivizing for about 100 years — it really picked up speed with the New Deal and the Great Society. And with every new buy of “nice things,” we’ve seen our economy shed vitality. By the 1970s, the economy started sending signals that “free” (government-provided) is hurting us. Some of us noticed it and argued for a return to what made our economy vital in the first place — the relatively free market of the 19th century when the US government wasn’t large enough to interfere. While some of our politicians pay lip-service to that, they continue to grow government and its cost and now we have an election that has been all about the “free” stuff.
The economy is running out of steam and it’s not going to get better until we get a load of bricks off its drive train. Not even “free” jobs will take care of that because there is a cost of offering people jobs and the government has to take that from us — you and me, the taxpayers. It’s never enough because the government strips the vitality out of the economic activity and teaches us that we shouldn’t strive to make a better widget. We should instead strive to make a government auditor happy by making the same widget we made last year.
The last thing we need is more “free stuff”. In fact, what we really need is a major purge of all propagandist nonsense. No country in the world can afford “free” because free doesn’t exist. Yes, we should take care of those who legitimately cannot take care of themselves, but when 50% of the adult working population is on some form of “free” (government benefits) and the other 50% are paying the bill for what isn’t “free” something is wrong and it’s time to dump the apple cart, toss out what hasn’t worked and return to what did. History can teach us a lot if we’ll only study it.
Lela Markham is an Alaska-based novelist and blogger interested in a wide variety of subjects, often from a libertarian perspective.
Welcome to this week’s Open Book Blog Hop. The topic today is:
‘Would you like to be a bestseller or have a smaller, more manageable following?’
I already have a (very) small following which is totally manageable! I’ve quickly decided I’d love to become a bestseller and to be able to earn my living as an author instead of writing as a hobby and working as a medical secretary. However, there is one small stumbling block that all Indie authors have found…
Needing to find a literary agent who loves our work and who is able to send our books to one of the big 5 publishers.
There have been two ‘maybes’ over the past 7 years, but the road to becoming a bestseller is paved with rejection letters. I have enough of them to paper my two lavatories at home, and in fact rarely send any of my writing…
February 10, 2020 Would you like to be a bestseller or have a smaller, more manageable following? Truth? I want to write a bestseller. Sure, the money wouldn’t hurt, but the virtual pat on th…
February 10, 2020 Would you like to be a bestseller or have a smaller, more manageable following? Truth? I want to write a bestseller. Sure, the money wouldn’t hurt, but the virtual pat on th…
aurorawatcherak 