Plus ca change...

[anghara]

aeriedraconia provides a link to this particular little gem.



If he only wrote about the state of publishing, as and of itself, and had something solid to back it all up - well and good. But the money quote is this one:

I consider myself a fairly good writer. I've had a literary agent and I'm proud (?) to tell you I've been rejected by the largest publishing houses in New York (and smaller ones elsewhere). Plenty of literary agents have requested my work but decided to pass. And I wasn't rejected because of my inability to write well. I have been complimented on my writing skills by editors of very successful, household-name authors and summarily rejected.

Count the snarks and whines. COunt 'em, please. This is a rejected writer, and these are sour grapes, and if you can't blame them on yourself, hey, find someone else to blame it on.

He's right in one way, and that is that a lot of the publishing industry is staffed by women. However, there is no "glass ceiling" - men are perfectly capable of choosing this line of work as a career. And *many do*. A rejection is a rejection, whichever gender it comes from, and a frustration with rejection is what comes across BRUTALLY in that paragraph I quoted, but I think it stings particularly hard that the rejections in question come from WOMEN. I suspect this guy is the kind who swaggers up to women at cocktail parties with a macho drink like a double shot of scotch (no ice)and feeding the "girls" a line like, "So, Honey, what would you like for breakfast?" This is a man's man, ladies, and look what else he says somewhere later on in the article:

Unless a blockbuster author like Stephen Coonts writes a tome for men, less gets written for them. Then, again, Coonts first book was published by the arm of the Defense Department (Naval Institute Press) that published Tom Clancy. His first book was rejected by every other publisher before that. He's a former Navy flyer and a real hero, most men would agree. He made hundreds of takeoffs and landings from aircraft carriers, sometimes in the middle of the night. That takes real courage or, as a man might say, balls! Men like Coonts are good. They're willing to risk themselves to protect the rest of us. I guess women prefer not to read about them. Or am I mistaken and is it the feminization of the book business that prevents everyone from reading about them in greater quantity?

Is it just me or do the two halves of this paragraph have nothing to do with one another? So what if Mr Coonts is "a former Navy flyer and a real hero". Yes, that takes courage, but screw you, sir, women do things that require courage EVERY DAY. If you're going to all macho on me, I'll go all femme on you and basically challenge you to plug yoruself into a machine which simulates the pain of childbirth without an epidural - and then I'll ask you if you wouldn't prefer to go an be a "real hero" any day. But in any event - what the frick does a man's being a pilot (or a woman's having a baby, for that matter) have to do with the quality of their writing and the reasons it was rejected? You sink or swim based on what you show, what you write, what you produce. Your CV and your resume and your life story should not be a ticket to having a book published.

I've been lucky enough to have been surrounded all my life with literate and insightful men. My granfather was a poet who read the classics and wrote sonnets and instilled a firm love of language in me from babyhood. My father surrounded me with books, and encouraged me with my own words every step of the way. My relationships have always been with guys who love to read, and whose homes were stuffed with books; and I married a man who already owned enough books for a small provincial library (you should see what became of our house after *I* moved in...) Is it possible that I am a complete statistical anomaly and that these are the only males who actually read or admitted to reading? I don't think so, which means that despite the blogger's assertions, MEN DO READ. No, really. They do.

They just happen to want to read other things than those that the blogger in question happens to have written, apparently.

Sir, the fact that your work has been rejected means your WORK has been rejected. You haven't been doing the rounds of teh publishing industry asking the agents and editors for a dinner date - and if you come on this strong when you DO ask for dates, speaking for myself, I'd be the first one to tell you to take a hike. You have been presenting not yourself, but YOUR WORK. However much you present yourself as Louis L'Amour and Stephen Coonts (and hey, while we're at it, how about some more names? Clancy, you've mentioned. Grisham? King? Patterson? Frazier? For that matter, james Frey? DO you want me to go on?) the fact remains, you are NOT those writers. You are YOU. It is YOUR work that is being put on display here. And if the professionals have rejected it for publication, might it be down to the quality of the WORK and not to your gender? Or are you seriously telling me you believe that women don't get rejected...? WOuld you like me to send you copies of my rejection letters? Have you ever attended a gathering with other writers - male AND female? Have you ever listened to the stories of these people's lives - male AND female?... Rejection doesn't feel around for cojones before it pronounces its fiat. At least not in THIS industry.

Honestly, until the day that people like this stop pointing fingers at the wicked wimmin who are the only reason that they themselves are not the great glowing successes they should obviously have been had it not been for the "power" of the female dragons guarding the gates, there will NEVER be any kind of gender equality. Until the day that a person gets judged purely as a human being, until the day that the smallest success by the woman stops being seen as a threat to the dominance of the man, we remain stuck in the dark ages.

Okay. Rant over. I'll go and get myy coffee now, and perhaps I'll revert to being the quiet gentle timid little girl that I am obviously supposed to be.

And hey, blogger guy? You yourself said that women statistically buy more books. Well, here's another statistic who's just deliberately walked across the aisle in order NOT to purchase yours. I don't need to read anything by someone this patronizing.

Comments

[julesjones]

Hell, I'm epublished, and I'm a damn sight more professional than this person. Of course, I'm epublished with an actual, you know, commercial publisher, and my whining about New York won't take my books tends to involve recognition that if I want to be published by New York I'd better learn to write at something other than novella length.

Nice icon. Very appropriate.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

You could have a totally brans dpanking new gender angle for whining about New York [grin] - "oh look, they won't take me on because I'm a woman writing about men..."

But apropos the "epublished or PODed" comment - I was a witness as recently as yesterday to an encounter I saw from my car - a man knocked on the door of a local business establishment, not QUITE open yet but on the verge of being so and one which I was waiting for, too - and I was too far away to overhear actual conversation but what I saw was this man knocking on the door, the proprietor opening it, the man talking for a few minutes, then proffering some sort of poster-sized piece of paper, the proprietor looked at this, nodded, the two men shook hands, and the visitor left. It being now opening time, I sauntered up to the business in question in time to observe the proprietor fixing the poster he had just been handed into the shop window of his business.

It was an invitation to a reading and booksigning by a "new local author".

The book was prominently displayed as having been published... by PublishAmerica.

I think I must have winced out loud because the proprietor looked puzzled, and then said, "He was just here, he gave me this..."

So I told him why I had winced. He looked a little blank, which is fair enough - never having had literary aspirations of his own he had never tripped over this particular rock (or lifted it to look underneath it, as it were). But the point is - that poor bastard who was doing door-to-door promotion. It DEPENDS on people never having heard of PublishAmerica. And from here on he is branded. He will very quickly learn that if he had hoped to use this publishing credit in order to sell a book to an agent or a reputable publisher, all he has to say is that his last work was published by PublisAmerica and there will be eyes glazing over...

[julesjones]

I feel so sorry for them. It's a dream come true, and they don't see the scam because they don't know how publishing really works. Even if they've heard about "money flows *to* the author", PA has worked out how to use POD to get around that.

And the worst of it is that I'm sure that a few of the people scammed by the stealth vanity presses have books that *are* publishable. Maybe with some heavy revision, yes, but they've gone to a vanity press because they don't know any better, not because they can't write well enough to get the attention of a real publisher.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

They're in the 'will be publishable' rather than the 'are publishable' category, I would think. And that's the most dangerous level to get stuck on - you know your book doesn't stink, so you think it's good enough for publication.

And every time you think you've mastered that level, you read a book that blows you away and makes you realise how high the bar hangs. Eventually, you'll be good enough to climb over the bottom - to _get_ published, but at that point you'll hopefully realise how much seperates you from the best.

I think early publication is the death of many authors; because they think that is _all_ they need to produce. If they keep collecting rejections with something that's fluent and readable, they keep trying to get even better. If they can publish it, they're less likely to stretch.

That's my excuse, and I'm sticking with it - but I really *do* think that the worst that could have happened to me would have been to have my first novel published.

[julesjones]

Yup. The main reason The Trashy Porn Novel That Grew is still waiting to go out again is the usual screaming panic at sending That to Respectable Agents, but there is also the fact that even three years ago I knew that it could do with another revision pass on the first three chapters, but didn't have the distance from the text to do it -- and now I _really_ know just how badly that section needs revising, but haven't had time to do it.

(The problem is essentially that I started off thinking that I was writing a Trashy Porn Novel, and it was only when I was about three or four chapters in that I realised that if had Grown.)