Oh, hey! It's yet another shady-looking vanity publisher who wants to charge you to publish your book and then not do very much with it! Which is probably for the best, as their grammar is not very good!

Oh, hey, they also threaten to sue if Absolute Write won't remove the "defaming" thread! 

And then, ParaDon goes straight for the nuclear option:

if that's the case then you can expect our cyber attack within the next few days if the feed is not deleted.

( Read more... )

Query Shark is a blog where aspiring writers can send their query letters to be looked over by professional agent Janet Reid, and then promptly chewed up, spit out, and glared at it by an angry lamniformes*. Oh, and there's something about insightful critique or some nonsense about helping authors or something silly like that. Anyway...

Query 189 (scroll down for the original version) is a Gilligan's Island/Hawaii 5-0 crossover fanfic in which the Gilligan's Island cast is all suspected of murder and also there is something about magical bat guano and I don't know what this guy was smoking, but I want some. Cue about...ohh, 60 comments of "well, it's an okay idea, I guess, but you should really just post it on FF.Net". A few enterprising web sleuths dig up the author's website, but don't post it for the sake of anonymity.

Cut to a few days later. The comment count has gone up to 73, and the author submits his revised query (which you already noticed in my above link). Now...well, let's let the author explain it, shall we?

"IF NOT FOR THE COURAGE adheres strictly to the legal definition of parody, and thus uses derivative characters under the fair use doctrine. Nevertheless, parodying our beloved seven stranded castaways might very possibly cause a stir. Are you afraid of a bit of controversy? If not, then read on…"

Apparently, a handful of people telling you that you can't publish fanfic and you fail at parody is "controversy" now.

"But where is the wank?" you ask. "This is just a dogpile on a clueless author. It's not like he came back to argue!"

Meet Jason Bloomberg. Jason has C/P'ed selected lines from all his detractors and turned them into praise for his fanfic. It's okay because he admits that they've been edited at the top of his sidebar. Also, bad press is still good press, I know what I'm talking about because I didn't just read Wikipedia, no one has ever written a fanfic where none of the characters were unrecognizable, this book isn't for fans of the show except when it is, and it's an irrefutable parody because Gilligan is gay.

Back at the query, everyone just boggles at the author's giant balls, but it seems to be winding down. I don't expect any future revisions to get much attention, so let me conclude with this delightful quote:

"But questions still remain: will agents and/or publishers steer clear? Would the copyright owner still sue? Will this book create a stir because it uses characters without permission?

My response: bring it on."

*probably used this incorrectly, but thinks it made the sentence sound nice anyway
**It occurs to me in retrospect that this could totally have gone in FW. Somehow, my brain just saw "Query Shark wank!" and ignored the whole "fanfic about Gilligan's Island" part.

Previously, on OTF_wank...

Dear Author posts about Red Rose publishing, reproducing a report from Kat Holmes, a former RRP author, and the ridiculous response of the head of the publishing house. Wank ensues in the comments. In fact, more wank than was even included in the original post!

( Add one batshit teal deer and mix well )

Some additional background on RRP also emerged from the comments of the earlier report. It seems, in restrospect, that there were some warning signs about RRP. That absolute write thread has a lot of opinions one way or the other, but bottom line there were some flags up about RRP for a while, including one notable one from Piers Anthony (search for "Red Rose" on the page).

All well and good, but you didn't come here for a history lesson. No, this is for the new, juicy developments. How juicy? Empty legal threats juicy! A couple of choice quotes from the Dear Author post, made last Saturday:

On Friday, I received a phone call from a lawyer in Utica, New York who represents Red Rose Publishing. RRP is claiming that I defamed them in this post here wherein I summarized the reported complaints of RRP authors and posted the president and owner’s email regarding her displeasure with RRP authors. The lawyer wanted my address so he could send me some correspondence that “laypeople may call a cease and desist” letter. At the time of the phone call, I don’t believe the lawyer had read the post in question as he kept referring to “blog postings.” I urged him to read the post and explain to me where I had been defamatory. I reminded him that truth is always a defense to defamation.

I relayed to RRP’s attorney that I would not remove the post unless he could convince me I engaged in a legal wrong. As there is nothing defamatory in the post, I refused to take it down, gave my address, and told him I would await his correspondence.

I think this is what could be called in technical terms an "ice burn." A (former) RRP author makes an interesting comment on that entry about her Red Rose works suddenly vanishing from Amazon. Another, anonymous Red Rose author states that provides some info on the RRP NDA: The RRP NDA say that authors may not discuss RRP in a negative way on blogs, forums etc. It is pretty broad.

Yesterday, shit gets real, as Dear Author recieves an official-looking letter ...with no actual legal content to speak of.

( Text of the letter, and DA's succinct response )

The rest of the post is a point-by-point summary of exactly what was asserted in the DA post, and evidence supporting each statement. I won't bother copypasting the whole thing here, but it's worth reading if you like smart bloggers smacking down legal scare tactics.

Of course, a smackdown post is best accompanied by wanky comments, and we have a few wanky comments. Most of them are just written versions of the MJ popcorn GIF, but then we get this one comment by "Interested in Maintaining standards".

There’s something shifty here that no one seems to be catching. I find it hard to take any information seriously when writers or bloggers refuse to stand behind their real names. In journalism school a reporter’s name is his or her badge of honor.

Just saying…

Followed by at least a dozen smackdown comments. My favorite of the bunch is, quite simply: So what's your name?

So that's where things stand now. I'll be keeping an eye on DA and various other blogs to see where it goes from here (after Yom Kippur of course, l'shanah tovah to you all), but yeah, this could just be the beginning.

It's all the fault of literary agents, who are single-handedly destroying literature everywhere!

Excerpt:

The substantial and nearly unassailable wall that separates you from us has been under construction for decades. You can find the names of its architects and gatekeepers on your telephone-callers list, and in your email in-box. They are the literary agents—that league of intellectual-property purveyors who bring you every new manuscript you ever see, those men and women who are so anxious to gain access to the caverns of treasure they believe you sit upon like some great golden goose that they would likely hack one another’s heads off were they not united by one self-serving mission: to ensure that quality fiction never hits your desk.

Just a tiny bit of entitlement, elitism, and self-delusion.

And some responses...

Over on Dear Author, Jane posts about an author overreacting to bad Amazon.com reviews

The author's fans are quick to point out that Jane is just jealous, a meanie, has no life, etc. And the author herself responds. The comments have been deleted, but breecita saved them

( Pro making ass of herself under the cut )

Whiny pros! Whinier fans! Passive-aggressive smilies!

All we need is a flounce, a sobbing vow to Never Write Again, and/or a pseudocide.

ETA: Thanks to carlanime, a prequel of sorts.

ETA2: Crap, wrong link, wrong potential post. If anyone wants to write up about possibly fraudelent conniving, lying, soul-bonding-is-my-religion! roommates from hell, drop a line.

One of those things where it's really just one person (er, possibly two?) being wanky, but if you love a good plagiarism scandal as much as I do -- most particularly when the accused follows the script so familiar from fandom to the letter -- it's pretty entertaining.

So, Slate writer Jody Rosen is made aware that one of his articles has been plagiarized in a small Texas weekly called the Montgomery County Bulletin, under the byline of one "Mark Williams." Further digging (detailed in that link) turns up many, many Bulletin articles plagiarized from sources ranging from USA Today and The Guardian to (*snerk*) customer reviews on Amazon.

After this draws some attention from Gawker and the Houston Press, plus some sniffing the air catching the scent of a story by NPR and the New York Observer, Bulletin publisher Mike Ladyman is shutting down the paper, taking his toys and going home! That meanie Rosen "truly acts like the rock-and-roll or the music critic" and is guilty of "an attack, an attention-grabbing hatchet job." Even though Ladyman doesn't really deny the plagiarism. It was just inadvertent. Mark Williams meant to be copying press releases, or something.

He does, however, deny the Houston Press's insinuations of sockpuppetry shenanigans. Ladyman insists that Williams is a real person.

Indeed, Williams is real enough to have his feelings hurt, and this is where the plagiarist's script so familiar from fandom gets whipped out:

( Some highlights )

So, this Jody Rosen -- a mean girl (despite being male) in the world of journalism, Y/Y?

(But it can't make him use the shift key consistently.)

Giles Coren would like you to know that "a" is very srs bsn:

3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing. I have been away, you've been subbing joe and hugo and maybe they just file and fuck off and think "hey ho, it's tomorrow's fish and chips" - well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. weird, maybe. but that's how it is.

It's just his letter, but oh, it's so tasty and I love "academic" wank on a Sunday, don't you?

It's already on clairvoyantwank, but with 1000+ BoingBoing comments and half the blogosphere a-titter, this wank has matured.

San Francisco sex blogger Violet Blue used to be chummy with the folks at Boing Boing, and naturally, they linked her a lot. However, she recently discovered that they "unpublished" all posts that mentioned her, effectively excising her from the internet's most popular purveyor of wonderful things. Last week, VB wondered what happened (and note that all links to her blog are NSFW). Valleywag, "Silicon Valley's tech gossip rag" (must be thrilling) picked up the story, and promptly started sensationalizing the shit out of it: Did the Internet's free speech guardian try to hush up a girl-on-girl love affair?, they wondered, and speculated on How [Boing Boing editor] Xeni and Violet's Boing Boing affair went sour." It gets Dugg, of course, and pretty soon we're hearing about censorship, Trotsky and "strangely unethical" goings on. Violet posts a tiny-violin follow-up and people start pestering the Boing Boing editors in comments to unrelated posts.

So finally, Boing Boing responds. They say they did the "unpublishing" a year ago. They say they notified Blue. And then, in (*checks bottom of page*) 1100 comments and counting, the shit hits the fan. People accuse Boing Boing of hypocrisy, 1984 allusions fly all over the place, and the Boing Boing comment moderater completely fails to hold the moral high ground as she dances around explaining what Blue did that was so "evil." It's a huge game of they-said, she-said at this point, and figuring out what the hell is going on is frankly less interesting than tracking the endless comparisons to Stalinism. Nothing is like the gulags, people. Nothing.

Now with highlights!

Metafilter commenter sends BB a note from Winston Smith
Scalzi gets his teal deer on, defending Cory Doctorow from the mean metafilterians
Boing Boing's haters are worse than Donald Rumsfeld!
Whether it is redaction, bowdlerization, expurgation, or censorship I see no place for it here."
Boing Boing hates your freedom, just like the Republicans. :(
The OED doesn't deserve this kind of abuse.
BB Moderator Teresa COULD say something mean about that evil, lying attention-whore ... but she won't.

Taken from a mousie on wank_report, with some editing by me:

In August, Teresa & Patrick Nielsen Hayden's blog Making Light featured a story about an Australian book retailer whose management (one Charlie Rimmer -- insert Red Dwarf joke here) sent a ridiculously rude and potentially extortionate letter to a small Aussie publisher.

The small Aussie publisher responded with a whup-ass response and displayed both docs in a public forum. As the Nielsen Haydens are editors and a lot of their blog participants are writers, this created a lot of good and informative discussion about the book trade in general and the Rimmer's asshattery.

More than a month later, a "Chris Oliver" shows up in the comments to tl;dr defend and justify Rimmer's Ghengis Khan-style correspondence and management methods. When "Chris Oliver" is called on various asshatteries (sneering at the NH's "double-barrelled" name, for example) as well as his insistence that books are really no different than canned vegetables, he flounces and spawns sockpuppet #1. S1 doesn't fare well either, flounces, and sockpuppet #2 is spawned. By the end of the thread, "Chris Oliver" and sockpuppets are presumed to be Rimmer himself or someone very close to him. (And if he isn't, "Chris Oliver" is a prime example of making a side look more stupid than it did before.)

When Teresa posts an update here, "Chris Oliver" returns for a last pot-shot/flounce. Says Chris: "My cadding days with you are over but I shall possibly keep looking for chinks in some other mean-spirited site and post as TN-H to my heart's content." Oooh, he's going to pretend to be Teresa too! We'll have to keep our eyes open for that.

(I vaguely remember seeing something on the publishing extortion story somewhere on JF, but can't find it in the wank comms or in the lounges. Anyone know where it might be? ETA: found it, sort of. )


ETA: And speaking of Making Light, they've got a new story on a self-publishing plagiarist... only it seems like it's not the author's fault, but that of her scamming agent/ghost writer. More discussion in random_lounge...

ETA2: Good god, the mice on w_r are ridiculously bitchy.