When Anti-Bully Bullies Go Mainsteam

I haven’t written anything about the “Stop the Goodreads Bullies” phenomenon, because (1) I haven’t really wanted to give them that extra little bit of exposure, and (2) people like Stacia Kane, Foz Meadows, and John Scalzi have already covered the things that needed to be said about this group specifically, while Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books wrote a fantastic post about the broader reality of public conversations and criticism:

“The conversation and interaction in response to what we consume is essential. It is normal. It is not always positive. It is always valuable.”

I didn’t have much to add to all that, beyond a few tweets.

If you aren’t familiar with this situation, here’s the short version: There’s a cluster of people who are put out by Goodreads users “bullying” authors through negative reviews, so they’ve taken it upon themselves to anonymously (and pseudonymously) harass those users by exposing their personal information. They’re nothing more than a sub-literary version of jumped-up thug wannabes, and even that is giving them more respect than they deserve. They’re the kind of malicious people who claim they’re speaking truth to power, when what they’re really doing is using a thimbleful of power to intimidate people they think don’t even have that much, and convincing themselves they’ve got the moral authority to do so.

They’re a mutual appreciation society of cruel, smug assholes, and I say that as somebody who, nearly half a lifetime ago, was myself capable of being a major asshole on the Internet, until I acquired a proper sense of shame and mortification. I also say it as somebody who’s been in the crosshairs of cruel, smug assholes, and who continues to see good friends in the literary community have to deal with cruel, smug assholes and self-appointed enforcers of what’s wrong and right. But it’s not a pleasant topic, and I didn’t have anything particularly original to add to the conversation, so as I say I’ve held off.

But then the Huffington Post book section decided to give these smug assholes a platform.

I’m not going to link directly to the post; you can find it if you want (and it’s one click away from a link I’m about to give you). Suffice it to say that HuffPo basically gave them an uncritical space in which to make their case for literary vigilantism, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. And when readers began to point out what had happened, HuffPo’s response was to add a note at the beginning: “This is an opinion piece, and does not represent the views of HuffPost Books or its editors.” And to tweet: “We do not endorse the actions or words of people who write blogposts on our site.”

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20 July 2012 | theory |

The Story Behind Penelope Trunk’s Last Book Deal

When I learned about Penelope Trunk’s bitter farewell to traditional publishing, there were several key aspects to her story that contradicted my own experience of the publishing industry, but one element seemed particularly suspect. Here’s how Trunk described her book deal:

“So I sold my book to a mainstream publisher and they sucked. I am going to go into extreme detail about how much they sucked, so I’m not going to tell you the name of the publisher because I got a lot of money from them. I’m just going to tell you that the mainstream publisher is huge, and if you have any respect left for print publishing, you respect this publisher.”

Trunk adds that she sold the book two years ago—and, if you’ll recall, the upshot of her story was that she found the marketing department at this publishing company so incompetent that they essentially cut her loose three months before the scheduled publication date rather than put up with any more of her criticism. Here’s what didn’t make sense to me about that: When you’re 90 days away from publication date, a competent trade publisher will have already been sending out advance reading copies to the media—particularly to monthly magazines with deadlines well in advance of the cover date. And Trunk’s track record as an author of books like Brazen Careerist(well, okay, as the author of Brazen Careerist) would certainly suggest that a smart publisher would be sending her new book out to both monthly and weekly business magazines, and Trunk’s “Internet famous” status would suggest that some of those magazines would be interested in her new book—interested enough that the news that it had been scrapped just months before it was supposed to come out would be, well, newsworthy.

But the first we were hearing of any of this was on Trunk’s blog.

My initial reaction was that it was simply not possible that a book deal for a well-known Internet expert with a major publisher could blow up like this and nobody would say anything about it for nearly two years. (Keep in mind, too, that if Trunk were as good as online promotion as she gives herself credit for being, at T-minus 90 days, she should have been promoting the heck out of an upcoming book whatever her publisher was doing wrong, so we could reasonably have expected attention to have been paid when the publication date came and went without any book showing up.) Coupled with some of the more outrageous details of her characterization of this publisher’s marketing department, it made me—along with more than a few other people—whether there had even been a book deal.

It turns out there was—but perhaps it’s not quite as prestigious as Trunk made it out to be.

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16 July 2012 | theory |