Rita rabble rousing

I vote with my wallet with RWA. They make ePub author's 2nd class citizens and it is an outdated, silly idea that only 'twu(true)' authors are print/Big 6 authors. RWA needs an overhaul but I don't see it happening in the next few years.

Either way that sucks ass and you totally got hosed over.-hugs-

I'm with Ann - I don't support RWA b/c they don't support me.

So for an outsider - what's "GH"?

And more generally - this is reminding me of a recent kerfuffle in m/m land about registering for a conference. I can see how the organizers in both cases need to put SOME sort of limit on things to prevent complete sprawling, but it seems pretty hard to do it without being unfair to some people they really should be trying to protect.

GH is the Golden Heart contest, it's for manuscripts from unpubbed authors.

I'm sorry to hear this Hildegarde. I don't follow the politics of RWA anymore, but it sounds fishy to me.

I never joined RWA because I didn't like their policies on digital and M/M, even though I love my local chapter. National seemed filled with too many destructive cliques. If the RWA wants to remain relevant, they really need to avoid tempests like this.

Filigree said:

I never joined RWA because I didn't like their policies on digital and M/M, even though I love my local chapter. National seemed filled with too many destructive cliques. If the RWA wants to remain relevant, they really need to avoid tempests like this.

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I hear this over and over. Lots of people have problems with the organization, but love their local chapters. I went to two meetings of my local chapter about two years ago now, and it seemed quite positive to epubs and m/m.

You'd think they could figure this out...

I'm not sure what happened this year as far as PAN vs. PRO. I know in past years, I was able to enter Rita as a PRO and get my books in. (Although I have to wonder at what the longtime PAN members think when they receive a small pub book... Not sayin' they judge it lower. Just sayin' there's a definite division between the old guard PAN authors and the newbies--be them PRO or newly PAN.)

My first conference was almost my last because I felt so much like an outsider. I went to a second, vowing not to go again because I STRONGLY felt that division and it was damned uncomfortable. Took a year off, then was asked to go with a friend. I decided if I was going, I was getting involved. Pitched a workshop, had it accepted, and felt more like a part of the conference.

I LOVE and need my local chapter, so I'll always be in RWA so long as the chapter exists.

shameless said:

I LOVE and need my local chapter, so I'll always be in RWA so long as the chapter exists.

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This is the only reason I keep up my RWA membership. It galls me to give my hard earned dollars to them, but I adore my local chapter.

There are many who will insist otherwise, but I'm in agreement that RWA treats epubbed authors like second class citizens. Not pubbed for Rita awards, but published as far as the GHs go? Stupid.

The RWA has always been ridiculously slow on integrating new/current publishing trends into their requirements. This is one of the many reasons that I have never joined. It's shitty that they don't recognize electronic authors who have worked just as hard as the traditional authors.

This crevasse between GH eligible and Rita eligible has existed for years. In '02 when my first small press (print and e-) was published, I naively thought I could enter it. No. If it was e-pubbed first it fit neither contest, and of course so it went with all my subsequent books.

E-pubbed authors have been second class that far back, at least. I don't know about earlier because I was in RWA only from 2001-2007 or so.

If they wanted to do something equitable, they might entertain the idea of a lottery system for Rita entry, taking any book published that year that would qualify its author for PRO status. With advances going the way of the dodo, I don't like the earnings qualifications either. Just my opinion, but I don't see it as even-handed to the membership.

The earnings thing bothers me because it seemed to be put in place with the exact reason of giving them a reason to exclude epubbed authors. They never cared about it prior to 2007 (I think. It was around the same time as the Triskelion implosion and within days of my signing my first Samhain contract. Had I signed it a month earlier, I'd have qualified for PAN right out of the gate instead of having to wait until I reached their required amount.)

Before that, if the publisher was on the RWA approved list, an author under contract with that publisher qualified for PAN status, IIRC. If I'd signed my first Samhain contract a month earlier, I'd have qualified right then and there. People will argue the opposite, but I swear they did it because it gave them a legitimate excuse to keep the "riffraff" in its place.

Jersey Chick said:

Before that, if the publisher was on the RWA approved list, an author under contract with that publisher qualified for PAN status, IIRC. If I'd signed my first Samhain contract a month earlier, I'd have qualified right then and there. People will argue the opposite, but I swear they did it because it gave them a legitimate excuse to keep the "riffraff" in its place.

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Nah, they did it because they're too lazy to actually examine publishers and give solid advice to their paying members, in general.

I mean, in this instance I actually appreciate that the RWA was/is kind of between a rock and a hard place, and did the best they could: they had paying members who were furious that their publishers (and so their sales/they themselves) didn't qualify for recognition, and who thus felt treated like they were/are second-class. So they did away with the idea that a publisher must be of a particular size/have a particular sales record/whatever to qualify (and Triskelion didn't help that with the fudging of sales numbers or whatever other chicanery they pulled in order to get RWA recognition; I don't recall the details) and decided to make it individual-author-earning-based.

But again, the problem is that they have so many unpublished paying members, and they need that money, so are unwilling to actually take a stand. The result is an organization that purports to be for and about professional writers but is actually just an expensive social club/critique group whose membership is overwhelmingly unpublished, and that offers its membership nothing that other pro writers' organizations offer their members (insurance plans, legal defense funds, contract critique services, general legal services, etc. etc.).

If they had any guts and were actually worth anything they would start offering more than monthly social group meetings and an admittedly good convention, and actually draw a line about what makes a publisher worthwhile and stop admitting anybody who can write a check. They'd also pull their collective nose out of Harlequin's behind and learn about/deal with the industry and genre as it is today; heck, they still whine about those awful unladylike writers who put that dirty sex stuff in their books, and attempt to define whether or not it's romance to have two men falling in love, and attempt to control what their members are allowed to say about an organization they pay to have a say in and about (hence their refusal to allow Dear Author's Jane become a member because she was meeeean about some books on Twitter; yes, they have a right to decide who can and cannot be a member, but their excluding her from membership is them basically saying if you don't toe the party line with pom-pons in hand you can't play in their pool, which is not what a professional organization should be saying. Imagine the AMA refusing to allow an MD membership because he criticized the work of another surgeon, or the American Bar refusing to allow an attorney membership because they said online that Lawyer X's defense strategy was shameful).

I appreciate the moments when the RWA actually has stood up and said or done something, like their response to the HQN Horizons thing, but for the most part, they're too busy making their members feel good about themselves and discounting the realities of publishing to be anything more than a club for ladies who like to exclude others. This is the sort of situation that needs real professional boundaries and guidelines, and they need to step up to the plate and quit trying to be all things to all people and succeeding in being nothing to no one but a select few.


(ETA: That's not to say you're wrong, Jersey Chick, just offering anther viewpoint.)

Actually, I agree with most of your post. It just seemed like the timing worked out to where a lot of epublishers were making that approved list and RWA had to find some way of keeping any more from being able to - and I'll admit, I'm cynical. PAN status doesn't matter to me, but it did bug me at the time because that status meant a lot more to me than it does now. Now I realize it means very little outside RWA, but when I got that first offer from Samhain, I was all "WOO! I'm part of the club!"

And then I wasn't.

Now, I only keep up my membership because of my local chapter. I don't even know if the RWA mag is worth the price of admission any longer.

I'm another person who's hanging in there for the local chapter.

I've been keeping an ear to the ground, Irene, and I still haven't heard a peep from a single PRO or general member who got accepted into the RITA preliminaries. Maybe there are a few and they're afraid to pipe up. Maybe one will stumble in and tell us anonymously.

I agree with a lot that Stacia said. I argued, all along, for RWA to maintain a tougher stand in terms of publisher recognition, all the way back to when they allowed Kensington's Precious Gems authors to be PAN members. (It was a TINY flat fee, rather than advance/royalties.) And then the small epublishers came along (some of which were and are excellent), and the authors started arguing "but digital publishers are SPECIAL, and that's why they don't pay an advance, so you should recognize them when they prove that their authors still end up with a living wage," when they should have been arguing "but PIONEER [or "small pioneer" or "experimental"] publishers are special, and that's why they don't pay an advance, etc." Because now we have everyone, from Carina to Random House using the authors' words against them: "digital publishers are special, so we don't need to pay advances."

So, yeah, I do think RWA has been too soft on taking a stance, because too many members were crying that a tougher stance would keep them from recognition until the digital publishing world established itself. It always seemed to me that if they TRULY believed in the digital publishing world, then they wouldn't be so eager to set the financial bar lower for it, and they were actually hurting themselves in the long run.

To head off claims that I'm biased against small epublishers, I was published (under another name) by a small but reputable epublisher. It always bugs me that RWA, or at least its ruling board, is constantly accused of being anti-epublishing. When the whole epublishing world first started to gain traction, the president was an author who was among the very first to epublish, in addition to her trade contracts, back when it meant readers were buying disks to read on their computer, rather than downloading to an e-reader.

I still admire a lot that RWA does, and I love the people I've met through the group. I'm no longer a member, but only because I'm not really writing romance any longer.

Jersey Chick said:

Actually, I agree with most of your post. It just seemed like the timing worked out to where a lot of epublishers were making that approved list and RWA had to find some way of keeping any more from being able to - and I'll admit, I'm cynical. PAN status doesn't matter to me, but it did bug me at the time because that status meant a lot more to me than it does now. Now I realize it means very little outside RWA, but when I got that first offer from Samhain, I was all "WOO! I'm part of the club!"

And then I wasn't.

Now, I only keep up my membership because of my local chapter. I don't even know if the RWA mag is worth the price of admission any longer.

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And that's true, yeah. In my memory the "Screw it, we'll just do away with approved publishers" thing was in large part a response to the failure of Triskelion. (In fairness [again], they had disinvited Trisk from their convention in response to author complaints, and in fairness [again] I really do think they were trying to find a middle ground between member expectations and industry realities. I'm certainly no fan of RWA but they were trying. The problem is that their solution really wasn't a solution.)

But I'd forgotten the uproar over so many epublishers suddenly qualifying for Approved status and the definite sense that Something Must Be Done About Those Dirty Upstarts, since the whole erotic romance thing was still such a divisive issue (and may still be).

I still think that unless and until they're willing to really change things they're essentially useless as a professional organization, and it makes me quite angry that romance--the writers of whom are mostly female, certainly far more so than other genres--seems to be the only genre which lacks a real solid professional organization willing to provide something real for its members. I believe if they did, views on romance and its writers might change at least somewhat, but the public image of the RWA is still ladies having tea and gossiping about other ladies and how to keep them in their places.

htrent said:

I'm another person who's hanging in there for the local chapter.

I've been keeping an ear to the ground, Irene, and I still haven't heard a peep from a single PRO or general member who got accepted into the RITA preliminaries. Maybe there are a few and they're afraid to pipe up. Maybe one will stumble in and tell us anonymously.

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If any members would like their experience posted but don't want it done under their names, feel free to PM me or email me offsite. I'll post it.

I will say that I judged this year and there was not a small press book in my batch (and there normally is). FWIW.

Irysangel said:

I will say that I judged this year and there was not a small press book in my batch (and there normally is). FWIW.

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I judged as well. ALL were traditional paperbacks through large publishers.

Deb Kinnard said:

This crevasse between GH eligible and Rita eligible has existed for years. In '02 when my first small press (print and e-) was published, I naively thought I could enter it. No. If it was e-pubbed first it fit neither contest, and of course so it went with all my subsequent books.

E-pubbed authors have been second class that far back, at least. I don't know about earlier because I was in RWA only from 2001-2007 or so.

If they wanted to do something equitable, they might entertain the idea of a lottery system for Rita entry, taking any book published that year that would qualify its author for PRO status. With advances going the way of the dodo, I don't like the earnings qualifications either. Just my opinion, but I don't see it as even-handed to the membership.

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What Deb said.

Hildegarde said:

It is the UNFAIRNESS of it.

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Welcome to the RWA.

Why it no longer registers on my radar, even though I like my local group. If I left the Republican Party because I could no longer excuse its platforms, I sure can't accept what the RWA has been doing.

As I've said before, if I didn't need the support of my local group, I'd leave RWA in a heartbeat.