When I was ten, I loved horses. My parents, who were well-off and indulgent, drove me nearly an hour away every Saturday for riding lessons. All the other students in my riding class were locals. Most of them were also stable hands at the riding school - they were paid to work there. One day my riding teacher had a great idea. He asked my parents whether, during the school holidays, they would like to leave me there for the day, as often as they liked, and I would do the same work the other stable hands did, and go on trail rides with them and socialise with them, and my parents would pay him forty dollars per day for this. They would be paying
him for me to be a stable hand.
My parents thought this would be fun for me. I had a bad feeling about it, but I tried it for one day anyway, and found that it was even more awkward than I imagined - all the other kids knew that my parents were paying for me to do what they were getting paid to do. I was a poser. It was humiliating. I learned an important lesson then about paying someone to confer on you a status that you have to earn.
I think about that when I read Jim Macdonald's basic law of writing:
money flows toward the writer. If you are paying someone else to make you a Real Published Author, then, axiomatically, you are not a real published author. You are being scammed, or you're scamming yourself, or you're paying someone else to enable you to role-play being a published author. This also applies if you're not paying them money, but you don't get paid and don't get a contributor's copy and you're expected to do all the promotion for your book and maybe buy a stack of them yourself to sell to all your friends and relations. Those are all signs that you are not the product, you are the market. They published you not because they could sell your work, but because they knew
you would buy it.
In the Undead Press debacle (
the basic details are here, trigger warning for comparing things other than rape to rape) both author and publisher were role-playing Publishing Industry. And I think both of them believed it was the real thing.
In the case of the first author who sounded the alarm, Mandy de Geit, her ignorance only hurt her. She didn't do due diligence researching her market (if she had googled him, she would have run away from Anthony Giangregorio very fast) and she let him have her story for nothing, not even a contributor's copy, because she was so excited to be a Real Published Author, but that's her business. She wasn't hurting anyone else.
Anthony Giangregorio's ignorance is not just his business. He's been doing this for years, and I think he is actually deluded enough to believe that he is a Real Live Publisher who has the power to get authors blacklisted by the industry if they talk about him disrespectfully in public, and who has the legal right to make substantive alterations to their stories in the name of 'editing', although he doesn't even know the proper function of an apostrophe. He formed his three successive 'small presses' to publish his own writing, because he himself couldn't get published conventionally. What he is not doing is running a real business. He told someone at a con that it was beneath his dignity to set a price point of $2.99 for an ebook, and that it was an insult to his hard work and that of the authors (those authors he's not paying) not to charge $9.99. He said he'd rather sell 12 ebooks at $9.99 than 50 at $2.99. In other words, this business owner would rather make $120 than $150, because setting lower prices is insulting. That, to me, is the clearest sign of all that he is just playing publisher.
To make it clear: I do not have a problem with hobby writing, with fanfic, with staying an amateur writer all your life, with operating a press as a hobby, any of that. I have a mild problem with paying money to shore up your delusion that your fantasy is real, and I have a REAL FUCKING HUGE problem with nonconsensually recruiting other people into your fantasy.
Links:
Absolute Write's watchdog thread on Anthony GiangregorioAlyn Day's experience with Anthony GiangregorioTim Lieder's encounters with Anthony Giangregorio (the one with the price points)
James Roy Daley's take (includes Giangregorio's reaction to Mandy de Geit's post)
Kristina R Mosley dodged a bullet (It sounds like he was trying to neg her.)
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vassilissa
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