Harlequin founds vanity imprint; Internet asplodes!

[annathepiper]

Now I know several of you likely to be reading this are writers, either already published or aspiring to get that way. Among you, I know that several are specifically involved with the romance genre or the urban fantasy/paranormal romance genre. So you’re probably already aware of the huge debacle that’s exploded across the publishing blogs the last couple of days about Harlequin opening up a shiny new vanity publishing imprint.

I posted earlier this week about another new Harlequin venture, Carina Press. Which I thought was pretty awesome. Harlequin’s new vanity imprint? Not so much.

Here are a whole bunch of links expounding on the brouhaha:

• Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware (which you should be reading if you’re not already) gives an overview of the situation and why it’s of deep concern
• Pub Rants, the blog of agent Kristin Nelson, brings the news of the Romance Writers of America issuing a very strong statement against this, and what they’re going to do about it
• Making Light chimes in with news of the RWA statement and much discussion in the comments
• Smart Bitches Trashy Books addresses the issue, and a whole heckuva lot of heat about self-publishing vs. vanity publishing can be found in the comments
• Author Jackie Kessler does a breakdown of the concept of Harlequin Horizons and explains exactly why the various stunts they’re trying to pull are bad
• Writer Beware posts a statement in from the Mystery Writers of America, also strongly against this development
• Kristin Nelson breaks the news that Harlequin is now backpedaling on the “Harlequin Horizons” brand name on the imprint but no word yet about whether further retractions will occur
• Most relevant to my interests as an SF/F author, SFWA weighs in with a very, very strong statement of their own
• Inevitably, Fandom Wank has put up a post since there’s some sideshow wankery involved, featuring a flamewar in the abovementioned SB thread, and a very snarky article from the New Yorker

My take on the matter? Well, initially I was going to say that I didn’t really have a horse in this race, since I’m an SF/F author, not a romance author–but solarbird pointed out and quite correctly that actually, any writer of fiction has a horse in this race. The reason for this is that if Harlequin actually pulls off doing this imprint of theirs, it’s highly likely that other big NY-based publishers will follow suit. As Writer Beware calls out, a couple already have, although they’ve apparently taken pains to be less obvious about it in their branding.

And, the big sticking point for me is that according to the spin that was going around the Smart Bitches thread from a Harlequin rep, they will be including in standard rejection letters an upsell to the vanity imprint. Which essentially means that an author who comes to Harlequin via traditional publishing routes and who gets rejected would be getting told “we don’t think your book is good enough to be a Real Book, but if you pay us enough money, we’ll humor you and print it anyway!”

This goes against the unshakeable law of writing: money flows to the author. Always.

So yeah, this is huge and the furor is still ongoing. I’ll be very, very interested to see what Harlequin does now that they have not one, not two, but three professional writers’ organizations angry with them.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Comments

[maellenkleth]

Thank you for this useful summary, Anna. Have been wrapped-up in non-fiction writing lately and have therefore not been keeping an ear to the situation with vanity publishing. "Oh, Harlequin, how low hast thou sunken?"

[redcolumbine.livejournal.com]

This is an outsider's viewpoint - I'm not a writer, but this is my one experience with a vanity press.

I bought the books of a writer I met at a convention, because he was a really nice guy and nobody else was buying them, just because I had the money and I wanted the pleasure of asking him to sign them. Standard fannish behavior, really.

But then I read them.

It was painful. Not only could he not devise a believable character or make a plot make sense, let alone more complex issues of pacing or sequence - but his English was a disaster. He couldn't even construct a sentence.

It's bad enough that bogus "poetry contests" pull these stunts. But writing a novel takes a huge chunk of a person's time, and the willingness to then throw it down an unedited hole to fester among stuff like that - and pay for the privilege - is an illness that should be contained, not spread like swine flu.

[annathepiper]

Thanks for chiming in with this!

The question was raised in the Smart Bitches thread that why would a vanity-pubbed book be so bad if several books that actually get published are drek? The answer to this was in short that at least with the way Harlequin's trying to do it, these books would be the ones they've already rejected out of their slush pile. Which would make the worst of the ones that they actually do publish look like shiny, shiny gold.

[hyperbard.livejournal.com]

I personally have no issue with "vanity presses", but I think there should be a clear distinction between what is and what is not being paid for, so that authors don't get screwed in the process. The way that this press seems to be going about it is not right to me; it blurs that line, and that's something I don't like.

What you really get

[(Anonymous)]

Author Solutions published 13,000 titles last year. Titles that vary in content and quality. Titles that perhaps didn’t quite fit a publisher’s existing lines. Those books already exist, but are the readers buying them?

And if not, why? (IMHO they aren’t. 2,500,000 copies were sold of 13,000 titles. That first number sounds impressive, right? But divide that down to the average number of copies sold per title = 192. Depressing.)

Those books I spoke of are no different than the products readers will receive through Harlequin Horizons. Because these are Author Solutions products, not Harlequin products. Products designed to lure in writers, not readers. (13,000 packages sold to writers at a BASE price of $599 multiplies out to $7,887,000. Cha-ching )

Re: What you really get

[annathepiper]

Hi, commenter who also dropped this comment over on angelakorrati.com. :)

Unscreening the comment here for the benefit of folks who follow me on LJ instead of on the Wordpress blog.