[Prestidigitweeze]

Speaking of people who aren't authors primarily, here's a bit of info on the man behind your blog:

Passive Guy is an attorney, entrepreneur, former tech executive and writer. Prior to reopening his law practice, PG's business involved high-stakes intellectual property litigation. He started The Passive Voice as an anonymous blog so his snarky remarks would not show up when opposing counsel performed a Google search.

As you can see, he's not an established writer. He's a lawyer with a professional agenda and a career background in intellectual property. His perspective might be interesting, but he's probably less of an "actual author" in your sense than the self-professed academics who started AA. The most popular part of his blog (by his estimation) has to do with contracts and self-publishing, which contains the sort of advice that a self-publishing writer without an agent might Google -- esp. someone without a great deal of experience.

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Oh, if anybody cares what actual authors think, here's what the bystanders say:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/05/20...ance/#comments

So by your estimation, Lethem and Doctorow are academics and not "actual authors," but all of the self-publishing and friend-of-publishing writers in that blog queue fit the description? The magazine I co-edit has published actual professors with more solid histories of conventional publishing and sales than the lot in that queue. And in terms of the writers we publish most of the time, they're in the minority. We publish far more non-academics than the reverse.

Samuel Delany is an academic, BTW. After winning every SF award that can be won, and after writing Dhalgren, a book that sold a million copies, he's spent the greater part of his middle and old age teaching in universities while continuing to write and publish. Before you buy into false dichotomies between academics and real-world writers, consider that. Our magazine has published him, but so has Harper-Collins.

You'd be on firmer ground if you were balancing the professional career of T.J. Stiles (the author who wrote the AG response quoted in the blog) against that of various writers associated with the Authors Alliance. Even so, do you really consider Stiles to be more of an "actual author" than Jonathan Lethem?

Also consider that anti-intellectual arguments with a pseudo-anti-elitist slant can be applied equally to the myriad of university-educated programmers on Mobile Read -- esp. if they've ever worked for a university themselves. Just because someone reads genre novels doesn't make their background any less suspect in the world of the accusing anti-academic.

Of course the Author's Guild doesn't like the Authors Alliance. You're looking at a war between copyright hoarders and publishing-house-hording skeptics, and the side you choose (if any) should be informed by more than the invective of one organization against another -- against a second organization that the first considers to be both a competitor and antithetical to its aims. That AG chooses to characterize AA as "an astroturf organization . . . not organized by authors, nor is it governed by them" is not surprising, nor is the anti-liberal epithet "Berkeley academics" a shock.

AG might make any number of valid arguments against AA, but those charges are clearly false. AA is not an "astroturf organization" that hides its true membership or significance. Here is what it has said publicly:

The Authors Alliance seeks to find a new balance that gives voice to authors who prioritize public access to their work. Founded by four members of the Berkeley faculty, we are an independent nonprofit organization launching this May. Our mission is to further the public interest in supporting authors who create in order to be read, seen and heard.

If their work were so terrifyingly antipodal to the aims of "real authors," then why does the publishing history of its advisory board dwarf that of the small-press-founding self-publishers in Passive Guy's queue of hyperbolic responses?

Tech Dirt's take on AA is far less reactionary, as is coverage by Publisher's Weekly.

The problem with certain academic presses is that they're defined by nepotism -- the academic careerist's fast track -- which means that the books they choose to promote in their roster tend to benefit people on or close to their boards, some of whom are professors who assign their own books to their own classes. I've heard stories of national media being interested in a book and contacting the academic publisher for information -- only to be either (1) redirected to those authors whom the publishers wish to promote or (2) discouraged from covering a book that the parent university deems too controversial.

That AA should be interested in breaking out of that sort of closed circuit suggests a specific agenda to me -- one that has been voiced by writers I know who have grown frustrated with academic presses. We have not seen (yet) that AA wishes to challenge every publishing relationship.