Quote:
Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
Correctly, the complaint of the Publisher to the RWA about the person criticising them (who was criticised for having racist employees) should have been ignored. Even if the criticism was unjustified. It's not part of the RWA reason for existing to police writers on behalf of a publisher. So the RWA has showed themselves to be incompetent.
The Publisher was idiotic in their approach to the criticism.
Even assuming the actions or attitudes of the two employees of the Publisher are/were racist as the original author (it was an author?) claimed, that person approached it wrong.
So everyone looks bad, ESPECIALLY the RWA, and it seems they shouldn't even have been involved according to their rules.
Maybe the best thing is for Romance Writers in America to found a new organisation with an unrelated name.
Would anyone even have heard of the stupid publisher without this row? I mean today there is Harlequin/Mills&Boon (who probably rarely take new writers, as is the case with big 5 and popular genres) and then Self Publishing.
No-one can give "diversity ratings" or approve Publishers either as many outside the big 5 are very niche markets, so may not seem diverse. Like someone that only publishes LGBTQI, or Hindi, or Moslem, or Celtic & Norse fantasy, or books only in Scots Gaelic, or Swahili.
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If we use AStrangerHere's thought argument, about widgets, we have to ask ourselves a fairly simple question:
If Milan had ranted about Davis
simply being a crappy writer--would
ANY of this have happened? AStrangerHere's thought experiment says that Person C says that the widgets suck--but, that's not exactly what happened.
If the complaint had been that Davis' work was simply awful, would RWA have become involved at all? Would anyone have paid
any attention?
You can't extract the racism angle, the PC angle, from what's happened. You simply can't, because who thinks that any of this would have occurred without it? Just saying that someone has lousy books wouldn't have triggered all of this, so I don't see how they are extricable, not in any good-faith way to get to the heart of it. There wasn't some firestorm about crappy writing and nobody here can say with a straight face that there would have been. I mean, we ARE talking RWA and I'll bet that at least every author there, as in any writers' organization, has at least one sh***y book to their name.
Hitch