October 4, 2010

Interrogating the text from the sock-puppet perspective

Attention, authors of the world! It is bad enough to argue with people who post reviews of your books on Amazon telling them they’re not reading it right. (cf Anne Rice, 2004)

But it is so much worse to do so under a sock-puppet alias which you otherwise use to post glowing reviews of your own books. (cf Christopher Pike, 2010) Also, if someone calls you on the fact you got the capital of Turkey wrong then it might be wiser to apologise than continue to berate them. Oh and perhaps do some research as to where Turkey is (i.e. not in Palestine), the ethnic background of the population (i.e. not Arabs) and the state religion (i.e. none; Turkey is a secular state.) PS: Sikhs are not Arabs, not everyone who wears a turban can be conveniently lumped into your concept of the Other.

This kind of behaviour is not cool and it makes authors look stupid. Got something wrong? – apologise and fix it. Someone doesn’t like your book? – that’s their prerogative. If you really must post a rebuttal then things to avoid include: mansplaining (Pike), racism (Elizabeth Bear), aggression and unpleasantness (R Malone). None of these things will encourage people to read your books.

Since I’m beginning to get gigs speaking to writers about how to market themselves on the inter I’ll recap that as a handy little list. Although I hope no one I speak to would even consider most of these!

  1. Don’t attempt a rebuttal of reviews of your work – you either look desperate or crazy or both
  2. If you really really really want to write a rebuttal, don’t use a sock-puppet. People will find out and then you will look desperate, crazy AND creepy
  3. Also don’t use sock-puppets to write about how great you are. (Another author was doing this last week but I don’t have a link because I read about it in Private Eye.)
  4. If you got something really obvious wrong, apologise. People are more likely to forgive you if you say sorry.
  5. If you’ve apologised, don’t un-apologise later. No one will ever believe your apologies again if you retract them.
  6. Enlisting your fans to attack strangers on the internet is rabble-rousing. Don’t do it.
  7. Assuming you know more about someone else’s culture than they do is racist and cultural imperialism. Don’t do that either.

And finally, don’t assume your sock-puppetry and silliness will go unnoticed on the vast reaches of the internet. The internet is big but information moves very quickly across it. And if fandomwank don’t find you, stupidfreedrama will. And if you annoy the internet enough 4chan will come for you and you don’t want that.

March 2, 2010

Things I read on the internet

The Guardian asked writers for their ten rules for writing (part one and part two available here). I like lots of bit and pieces of advice and might take one rule from each author. But overall I liked this advice the best:

Ian Rankin

1 Read lots.
2 Write lots.
3 Learn to be self-critical.
4 Learn what criticism to accept.
5 Be persistent.
6 Have a story worth telling.
7 Don’t give up.
8 Know the market.
9 Get lucky.
10 Stay lucky.

Other things I read on the internet suggest a couple of addendums:

Additional rule a) If a reviewer critiques your book don’t take it personally. Especially don’t declare internet war on the reviewer, abuse them by email and in comments to forums and create sock puppets to praise your book and star rate it. That makes you look crazy – and desperate.

Additional rule b) Even if your dad is a rock star that doesn’t mean you can trace the art from other people’s manga and publish it under your own name without the entire fannish interwebs calling you out on it. And then CNN will notice. That makes you look stupid – and a plagiarist.

January 19, 2010

2010: welcome to the future

Snow in my garden

Snow in my garden

Happy new year to everyone! This post is 19 days late because I began the new year with a stinking cold and I didn’t even go out and play in the snow which has been 8 inches deep or more across Oxford. Here’s a view of my garden from my window. I only went out to put out the compost: those are the tracks you can see on the right.

Since then I’ve been trying to get caught up with work. I am having cover discussions for Ghost of a Chance with OUP and also working on the revisions. Ghost of a Chance will be out in 2011.

I’ve also been working on a redesign of my website. For the first time I’m outsourcing the majority of the work – although I have briefed the designer about the layout I want and collated much of the code. The design will be based on a template created by Matthew James Taylor whose css layouts are well-worth checking out. The site is being constructed by Mo Holkar of Freeform Games in his alter-ego as web designer. It’s a real relief to be able to pass on some of the work of putting the site together to a friend I trust. Mo also runs the sites I designed for Celia Rees and Frances Hardinge so he’s familiar with the way I create sites and write html and css.

I’m also a judge for the 2009 Clarke award so I’m reading my way through the submission list. (I’ve been looking for a link to this but I think it’s not online yet.) I’ll check with the committee to find out where and when the full longlist can be seen.

Shadow

Shadow gazing up at me

I’ve various other projects on the go which I’ll write about in separate entries. The current great joy of my life is that my little black cat, Shadow, has been driven by the cold to sit on my lap. This is something she has rarely deigned to do in the past so I feel very honoured. Here’s a picture of her eyes beaming up at me.

So here I am in 2010! It’s the future: 2010 is a really science-fiction sounding year. I hope it’s been good to everyone so far and here’s wishing you all the best for the year ahead.

August 7, 2009

Colouring over the whitewash

Filed under: covers,publishing news — Tags: , , — Rhiannon Lassiter @ 9:22 am
Liar

Liar

So, who’s been following the recent debacle about a Bloomsbury book with the cover image of a white girl to illustrate the story of a black girl? Liar by Justine Larbalestier was due to hit shelves in November with the cover image of a white teenage girl (left). One problem: the protagonist is black.

The news appeared in July on industry blog Editorial Anonymous where commenters were outraged by the decision. One commenter pointed out that this sort of whitewash is nothing new: “Reminds me of the old-school sci-fi covers I’ve seen. On Octavia Butler’s (whose protagonist’s are always black women) book ‘Dawn’, the original cover was a pale woman with long, blond hair. They corrected it in the next edition (or printing), but still. Completely incongruous with the actual story.”

Larbalestier made a post on her blog and told her readers the sad truth already known to those of us in the trade: “Authors do not get final say on covers. Often they get no say at all.”

Publishers Weekly picked up the story on the same day (Justine Larbalestier’s Cover Girl) where Melanie Cecka, publishing director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books USA and Walker Books for Young Readers did not cover herself in glory with the following comment: “The entire premise of this book is about a compulsive liar. Of all the things you’re going to choose to believe of her, you’re going to choose to believe she was telling the truth about race?” The suggestion that this decision was made deliberately is even more alarming than the idea it was unintentional.

Boing Boing also posted an article about the story. Cory Doctorow wrote Race and book covers: why is there a white girl on the cover of this book about a black girl? pointing out that this cover choice was not made in isolation and that all over the publishing industry authors are protesting against the same thing happening to their own books. White children are mainstream. Black children are urban fiction.

There’s supposedly a happy ending to this modern fairytale. Bloomsbury have decided to postpone publication until October and create a new cover. (Reported in Publishers Weekly: A New Look for ‘Liar’.) But the statement the company has issued is not exactly an apology:
“We regret that our original creative direction for Liar—which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator’s complex psychological makeup—has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character’s ethnicity. In response to this concern, and in support of the author’s vision for the novel, Bloomsbury has decided to re-jacket the hardcover edition with a new look in time for its publication in October. It is our hope that the important discussions about race and its representation in teen literature continue…”

Does anyone believe the part about the whitewash being a symbolic reflection of the character’s psychology? Well done to whatever marketing bod thought that up but it sounds profoundly unlikely doesn’t it? Can you envisage a cover meeting where someone said: “You know, I think it would be a really good idea to show this child as white even though she’s black, that would really convey the psychological aspect of her being a liar.” Surely any modern children’s publishing person would respond with cries of “dear lord no!” or at the very least “that could be problematic”.

So while there is cause for celebration in this cover change, those who should be celebrated are the internet bloggers (amateur and professional) who didn’t allow this story to go away, who demanded a response from the publishing company and who stated publicly that this is not okay. I’d like to be able to praise Bloomsbury too but I don’t think you get cookies for backing off from a racist act, not unless you issue a full and heartfelt apology and a promise to do better.

And we can do better. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to a vision of the future in which white people are not the default, the mainstream and the uncontested image of everyman. We can ‘be the change’. The only thing stopping us is not seeing it as important.

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