[hildea]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Gatekeeping is a publisher's job, not a RWA problem.

You did notice that it was the publisher who involved the RWA, right? Nobody complained to RWA about these potentially gatekeeping editors. Some authors complained in public to the publishing house about them employing potentially racist gatekeeping editors. Then the publishing house lodged a formal complaint to RWA because someone was saying mean things about them on Twitter. And then the president-elect of RWA, Damon Suede, did some acrobatics with the rules for handling such complaints, and tried to boot Milan out of RWA.

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

The main reason for republishing old books is for them to be available as an ebook to preserve them from going out of print ever again. It is not a lazy way of an author to rake money in again without doing any of the real work of writing.

In this case, I'm pretty sure Davis did re-release her book to earn money. Not sure about "raking in", most authors don't earn a lot of money, and I don't begrudge them extra income from new releases of older books.

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

This -- making future works better -- is the only reasonable fix when a novelist confronts a negative review he or she feels has great merit.
...
But if Davis did write a book that was unfair to the Chinese, and regrets it, we wouldn't yet know she hadn't done "the decent thing" because of the time required to write and publish better books.

With ebooks it's much cheaper to issue a new edition, so I expect we'll se more of re-releases with small edits. If there's something in a book that may hurt its sales, and isn't too hard to fix, it makes sense for the author to change it. Davis certainly seems to think so:

Originally Posted by Davis in "White romance novelist in racism row says she was used"

Meanwhile, Davis said she had decided to make some changes to the novel Milan had criticized, Somewhere Lies the Moon, and that she has republished edited ebook versions.“Some people have contacted me and have told me calmly what it was that offended them, and it was very few things, and I have corrected those things,” she said.