Xandra Gregory

I’ve blogged before about Harlequin’s decision to include a vanity arm in order to monetize the slush pile.  Suffice it to say that any situation where you pay for the privilege of only getting half the money from the sale of something you’ve created and paid all the money to create is only even remotely good in Bizarro World, and even then, they’d smack you upside the head for being stupid.  I am also a member of Romance Writers of America, an organization ten thousand strong (we are Legion), an organization whose purpose is to “advance the professional interests of career-focused romance writers through networking and advocacy.”

During my time in RWA (I joined in 1996), the organization has consistently advocated for, and educated thousands of aspiring authors on, the traditional means of achieving publication within the romance novel publishing industry.  Which is, to sum up, a fairly straightforward process when viewed from the outside.  It goes something like this: 1.)write a great book with a love story and a happy ending, 2.)send that manuscript to agents and editors of houses who publish romance novels, 3.)sign a contract for an advance and eventually collect royalties after your book has come out for sale in bookstores, and 4.)PROFIT!!!! (Yes, that last is an internet meme joke, and by rights, number 3 should be “???” but if I have to explain, it’s probably not as funny as I think it is, but this is my blog and this is how I ramble roll).  This process was a consistently-modeled (if not easily replicated) process, and could be counted on to be not only the current best practice within the industry, but really, the only practice in the industry that would achieve the results of number 4.  But as the past few years have shown, the only constant is change.

With emergent technologies, the prevalence of digitalization, and the opening up of internet access to more people within more social classes as well as physical locations, great change has come to commerce, and publishing is included in that change (big fat duh, I know, but bear with me).  Within the romance publishing industry, challenges mounted to the current best practice, and those challengers have proven viable.  RWA has remained consistent in championing the industry’s current best practice, and I understand why, even if I don’t agree with it.    But at some point, the scales tip, and what was once a conservative approach eventually turns to resistance to change out of habit.

When that happens, and after the resultant time period required to steer a ship of the White Star Line the size of the RWA, the organization’s policy must necessitate a shift from pure advocacy to advocacy with equal parts emphasis on education.  The tl;dr of this is that RWA must now step up to take a more proactive stance to educate its members on the different processes by which they can derive a respectable income from their writing.

When the brouhaha first started, I was honestly surprised at how many fellow chapter members showed little understanding of why vanity press is the oldest scam in the publishing book.  I realized that because of RWA’s strict focus on the one-way current best practice, understanding of other routes of publishing (both good and bad) not only suffered, but fell off the radar altogether.  RWA has well-insulated its members from shady business practices, but it has done so at the cost of members even being aware of those practices.  We’ve lost some of that “caveat scriptor,” and it’s to our detriment.

Epublishing is finally firmly entrenched in the public awareness.  It’s approaching–if it hasn’t already approached–the tipping point of saturation.  And there’s a business model for writers in there that’s been proven via persistence.  But there’s still a lot of room for abuse, and the RWA has a unique opportunity here to step up via education of its members to prevent that.  Taking a proactive stance offers RWA the opportunity it’s never had before–to help craft a new best practice model that benefits its authors, with profitability and career advancement for all.

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This entry was posted by Xandra on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 8:06 am and is filed under An Author's Life, Publishing, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.