Sandra’s Miscellany

Please allow me to indulge in a little

I ranted a few weeks ago about RWA and exclusivity. Today I want to talk about where some of the fear of exclusivity seems to be coming from. (If you don’t know or care about RWA, come back tomorrow. I’ll post something else then.)

As I understand it, back when dirt was young, RWA decided to vet publishing houses in order to protect its members. An “RWA-recognized” publishing house meant that it paid you (not the other way around), had a decent print run, sold a decent number of books, and generally didn’t screw the author over.

That’s one side of the equation.

The other side is that RWA also decided at some point to create the Published Authors Network. The requirement for membership in the network was that one sell a book to an RWA-recognized publishing house. Obviously, if one is going to have a published authors network, one needs to be consistent and have the qualifying houses be those formally recognized by the organization.

Fair enough.

These days, RWA members are balking right and left at these definitions. Members get annoyed when RWA doesn’t recognize their small press publisher. Other members feel left out when their e-Book sale doesn’t qualify them for PAN membership. When the members who sell to small presses and e-Publishers are formally recognized by their local writing chapters, the PAN members get annoyed.

I’m convinced there’s no way to resolve the hurt feelings and pride of any of these folks. Because, believe it or not (and most people won’t), the issue isn’t about either of the usual suspects: quality or privilege. The real issue is process.

There seem to be two consistent choices a local chapter can make:

• Recognize PANs as the only “published authors” at the local level, in alignment with National’s position.
• Recognize all writers who publish anywhere as “published authors” at the local level.

When chapters decide to buck the RWA National guidelines (which they can do because chapters are not regulated by the national organization), they join the grassroots efforts to encourage and reward the efforts of folks writing for small presses and e-Publishers.

That may seem extremely forward-thinking, but it does two things:

• It undermines the attempts of the national organization to protect its members.
• It creates an environment in which some members, no matter who they publish with, feel neglected or devalued.

The second item goes into effect because RWA, when it recognizes a publishing house, creates an expectation — and it should — that the house has met a minimum of requirements to be considered solvent, honorable, and fair. Unfortunately, a side effect of that is that the house is also considered to be generating material that a large group of readers feels is worth reading. (See? Perceived quality is raising its ugly head again. Let’s not let that happen because it’s not the issue here.)

Me? I don’t care if someone who puts out a short story in a small press anthology signs books next to me at a book signing. I don’t care if RWA changes its requirements for being recognized and opens its arms to every house that puts out fifteen copies of a book in a year.

But I do think that, from a business perspective, it’s a bad idea for a chapter to be an offshoot of a national organization that has certain standards of publisher recognition, and then extend authors of all the other non-recognized publishers the same perks and rights as PANs. It’s not just a matter of confusing the heck out of new members and aspiring authors. It’s a matter of trumping the business practices of the national organization because we want to be inclusive.

It’s another one of those instances where being women does us an ill turn. We want everyone to be successful and prosper and be appreciated, never noticing how we can’t quite climb the business mountain because we’re too busy shooting ourselves in the foot.

If RWA wants to be anything like an author advocate, it needs to stand its ground where publisher recognition is concerned. If the members don’t like it, they can redouble their efforts to market themselves and their books so that their publishing houses are able to qualify for recognition. Or they can get on committees and make change happen at the national level, so that the requirements for small press houses and e-Publishers make sense for those publishing venues.

But it seems counterproductive to confuse the recognition issue by trying to make it about quality, prestige, privilege, or any other distraction. It’s about business and the protection of the writers. Nothing more.