More more more!

NOTE: The SFWA's 20 Worst Agents List is now ~2 on a Google srarch for Barbara Bauer! YES!!


So in addition to following the Barbara Bauer scandal with a fascination almost scary, I've been working pretty hard.
Really, though, it's the Barbara Bauer thing that's held most of my attention. I'm so proud of the writing community for standing up. I'm so pleased to be a part of it.

As I put in my last post, the plot has indeed thickened. The woman who ran AW's web hosting, Stephanie Cordray created a post about her decision to reopen her own message board for writers. Apparently because the boards that were out there lacked information. (insert eye roll here.)

Check out the comment threads on that post. They're pretty vicious.

It's not a good idea to make writers mad. We spend so much time in our own heads anyway, that when something like this happens all we do is sit and stew. And oh yeah, write.

I've got another thought going through my head, too. With apologies to the person who started it, it's been implied elsewhere that it is A)Somehow unethical to start a website to help people and at the same time ecourage them to buy your book on how to be helped; B) Somehow unethical to buy the books of your friends and/or fellow writers just to support them.

That's the first time I've ever heard of buying a friend's work to help them described as "unethical". Frankly, I didn't know there was a more ethical and kind thing to do. Don't you want to do everything you can to help your friends succeed? Since when is doing something completely legal to acheive that a bad or wrong thing to do?

I just find it frustrating. I buy my friends' books. Even if I wouldn;t ordinarily have bought them, I buy them. Because it's a nice thing to do, a good thing to do. Most of my writing buddies are just starting out, like me. We buy each other's books. We help promote each others books. If someone who read my book sees my plug for one of the other Indulge Authors' books, and decides to buy it, have I done something unethical in recommending it?

We're all in this together, folks. I'm a writer, you're a writer (wouldn't you like to be a writer too?). We don't generally work with each other, we work alone. We don't generally have marketing blitzes at our disposal. What sells us is word of mouth, through both the readers and our fellow writers. How this is any more or less ethical than, say, going to A Sporting Goods rather and B Sporting Goods because you know the guy who owns A Sporting Goods is beyond me. How it's unethical to buy a book you might not read is unethical totally confuses me, as I have several books upstairs written by complete strangers that I haven't gotten around to reading. It's bad enough they're up there unread without me now feeling I have somehow committed a disgraceful act by not reading them.

In happier news:
2 projects going. One that I'm doing with a buddy is at like 15k already and we've been working for a week. The other is at 8 and I've been doing it for 2 days. I'm on fire, baby!
Getting mad must be good for me. :-)


absolute write

barbarabauer