I believe this issue goes far beyond Corrain. The Propagandist Publishing Industry's absolute loathing of Ungovernable Readers is manifest doubly in their hatred of Ungovernable Indie Authors. How many new and rising Authors in the Indie Sphere have been targeted by Agents of the Industry? How many have had their careers ruined by coordinated harrassment campaigns by the same? Whether in-house or outsourced, Bots or Organic, we see waves of these poorly-written reviews, accusations of -isms, or vicious harassment each mirroring each other, scattered across the social media of Indie Authors at crucial junctures in their careers. Many quit, others are cancelled, some simply disappear, censored out of existence...
it is more than a campaign; Propagandist Publishers are waging war against Indie Authors. They hate our Freedom to write as we dare to write, to publish what they would silence, and they will do what it takes to stop us -
the first step towards protecting Freedom is to recognise those who would take it away.
This is my first time hearing of this. There are plenty of soy brigades by triggered NPCs, sometimes from particular author cliques. I've never heard of publishers themselves doing it, but I can definitely believe it.
My hope is a few writers trying to find an agent or publisher will look at this and decide to go indie instead. Even somebody who fits Kier's wish list is probably better off finding a niche in indie (or better yet Royal Road, etc.) than trying to go through the trad pub meatgrinder.
You're not going to get an audience publishing woke garbage indie. You won't get one going trad either, but at least you can say you're a "published author".
I'm on the inside, and based authors consist of me, a few others, and some Russians. Pretty sure none are on RR, nor could they be - it'd get censored near instantly. There is nothing like comicsgate for LitRPG, even though the western side is even more soy based than comics. Even really milquetoast stuff like "I wanna raise my family in peace" gets soy brigaded and libeled hard, because having literal vampires drinking blood is some sort of far right conspiracy theory. Yes, the NPCs actually said this.
Of course they are. Not only are they terminally insecure, self loathing, and neurotic, but they get triggered and seethe endlessly when they encounter someone who isn't. NPCs cannot comprehend humanity, and they cannot withstand it either. Even if it's something entirely normal and tame, like being assertive but not aggressive when confronting an innkeeper who scams you. Not letting randoms steal thousands of fiat dollars worth of gold is toxic by NPC soy morality lol.
It is very difficult to have sympathy for this author. She would piss on all our graves should anything bad happen to us. A deeply disturbed individual, but that’s why she deserves some sympathy and prayer. What society had done to young people like her will be accounted for someday.
It really is staggering how common things like this have become. I know the word "fragility" gets thrown around a lot these days, but this isn't even being functional.
The sad fact is that mental illness frames cultural cachet. What do you think impressionable kids are going to do? What do you think you are going to see more of?
Annoyingly enough, it’s not even new. Back in 2008 or so, there was a massive blowup (for the time) about a female POC who was sock puppeting nasty reviews and LiveJournal comments on other (usually female) authors blog posts. I can’t remember the details, as I didn’t care then and I don’t really care now.
You have a couple of things going on here. Firstly, most capital-A "Art" comes from the madness place inside most Artists. They're already cray-cray to begin with, just like a lot of people inside academia. Try taking your petty staff lounge BS out to a construction site and a construction crew, and you're going to either wind up with your ass kicked or unemployed. Do it hard enough, and someone will be placing concrete over your impromptu grave...
The other thing is that we're witnessing the death of an industry that dates back to Gutenberg. They really don't know how to adapt to modern tech, and they also don't recognize that they've been essentially replaced. The vast infrastructure that used to be required to get a book published, all the gatekeepers? That's dead and gone; all that's left is whatever is coming next, and I wouldn't even dare predict we'll still be reading novels as we know them in a decade or two.
So... Couple "Nutty Artist" with "Clueless Obsolete Industry", and here you go. Expect even more weirdness to follow...
The publishing industry as it stands now is a "dead man walking", soon to go the way of buggy-whip manufacturers. You can see the outlines with Amazon and "on-demand printing". The question is, how long will they maintain the fiction?
One of the really big "tells" is how they keep giving these massive multi-million dollar advances to their favored ones. Like the politicians whose books don't actually sell; what you're seeing is money-laundering on a biblical scale, along with bribery. Question is, how long is it sustainable?
I think there's an equation to be built describing the situation, factoring in "corruption" "length of time in existence" and "relevance". The traditional industry is losing its relevance; what comes next? No damn idea, but 300.00 specialist trade books in any field are simply not sustainable. Not when I can download a pirate .pdf instead. 19.99 Kindle books? Don't make me laugh; I'd just about guarantee you that a.) the actual author of those books only sees pennies or, at best, dimes of that, and that b.) they'd sell a hell of a lot more copies of that book at 3.99. Probably more than enough to make up for the difference in price; there are damn few authors today I'd willingly pay full-freight on. There are some, but... Not the majority of the formulaic and eminently forgettable trash that infests even the indie press.
Yeah, I'll never understand why anyone would overprice a digital product like that. It's not like there are production costs that go into each copy. It's gonna be a crazy decade ahead, that's for sure.
What I can't quite wrap my head around is how the hell they can maintain the illusions they do. I mean... Just... Wow.
There's "Willing suspension of disbelief", and then there is this, which I'd term more "Willful denial of reality". Whatever it is, it's pathologic and so deeply embedded as to be akin to the stereotypical false identity disorder that was so popular a trope not that long ago: "I'm Napoleon!!! I'm Caesar Augustus!!! Bow before me! I'm Abraham Lincoln". The only real difference is that these people think they still matter, while they set about rearranging the deck chairs on their little Titanic as it heads down for impact on the ocean floor...
Frankly, I think they've got maybe a generation or two before the ship's hulk impacts the bottom; just long enough to let the die-off of the Boomers and others who're still emotionally invested in traditional publishing. Once that hits? Yikes.
Part of the "tell" for the whole thing is how the only people that think this stuff still matters are the "cat lady" types currently infesting the publishing houses. They've captured the heights, only to find that the fortifications have been abandoned, and that having that fortress is meaningless. It's a very similar thing to what's going on in academia; they've captured the institution, but in so doing, they've rendered it irrelevant and trivialized the whole thing with silly little identity politics games. So, anyone rational? Routes around them, and they still haven't figured out that they're a joke. The really precious thing is, they still think they matter. Same as with the whole Sad Puppies/Hugo Awards fiasco.
It's really kinda nuts, TBH. But, given that most of these people are basically the sort of dysfunctional human being that belongs under care somewhere with thickly padded walls, well... Here we are.
What's been going on the science fiction/fantasy genre is a microcosm of what's been going on in publishing in general; same silly shiite has been going on over in the romance novel sector. As well as everywhere else... And, sadly, publishing is also a microcosm of everything going on everywhere else in society: The essential crisis of competence as we discover that the anointed <i>soi-disant</i> elites really ain't all that elite, and that the supposed meritocracy they all belong to suffers from one fatal flaw: It ain't demonstrating a hell of a lot of merit at the moment, and is on a steady course to actually being a kakistocracy in name and fact.
My cut-off date is partway through the Interdependency series but I get your point. I chalk up the decreased quality of output to three factors. Firstly, the Tor book contract (X books over Y years for Z dollars) resulted in his submitting suboptimal quality. His characters have become flat and he wraps up loose strands in obvious ways. Secondly, he has been captured by his twitter audience; this audience encourages his latent mean streak which leaks into his writing. The traitors in Ghost Brigades have nuance, those in the Expanding Universe are cartoon villains. Thirdly, I think he feels vulnerable as a white male writer—with vocally left-leaning fans—and that has cramped his creativity.
Also, note how I refrain from typing the author’s name? A couple of years ago, during the height of twitter pile ons, this author saw, or was sent, my *untagged* comment to a tweet. (The tweet was about JK Rowling and her upset former fans. I had written in my comment that I was disappointed <author> thought transwomen were women but it was ok bc his work had gotten sloppy.) Well, that asshole tweeted a screenshot of my comment to his zillion followers. Small mercies: it was a screenshot not a retweet, he covered up my twitter handle, and I saw it soon enough to delete my comment and go private before anyone could keyword search the text to identify my twitter handle. But what kind of insecure person searches for his name on twitter and blasts out a defensive response to his followers? And his work had gotten sloppy.
You're dead on. He's definitely slacked off after he scored that big contract, and yes he is completely wrapped up in his twitter feed and espousing his politics to anyone who would listen.
While he was president of SFWA, he was going on and on about the lack of leadership at Penn State during the Sandusky trial at the same time that an actual VERY prominent member of the org was being arrested, tried and convicted of child molestation; somehow he didn't have anything to say about that. Twitter absolutely ruins a certain type of person.
And as for the not feeling safe being a white male author thing? Absolutely, he references it constantly. It's a particularly odious form of self-loathing he's allowed himself to believe.
Exactly! And though I laughed when he snarked about the sad puppies (sic?), now my sympathy is with them. Better old fashioned scifi than a morality tale
Truly effective morality tales are not easily discernible as such...
Scalzi is, in my opinion, one of the worst sorts of hacks when it comes to writing. He is, in short, a whore. You can sense his heart isn't in what he writes, and that he himself doesn't really know what is in his heart in the first damn place. He's a trimmer; he'll go whichever way the wind is blowing. If you don't like his beliefs this week, wait around: He has others that will be on display shortly, once he's done the math on who will pay him off, monetarily and with the sort of false adulation he adores from his sycophants.
With Scalzi, you can tell there's really no "there" there, at all: That's why he's so super-sensitive to criticism and contradiction. If he weren't a hack of limited talent, he wouldn't care what others say, but he's deeply immersed in a fully justified "imposture syndrome" mindset, and cannot tolerate anyone questioning how or where he's gotten to in the industry. If he were all that he's made out to be, both in reputation and within his own mind, he'd respond differently to people questioning him or his works. He isn't all that he thinks he is, he knows that subconsciously, and because of that...? You get the Scalzi we see on display. How well have any of his books really sold, and what would he be absent Tor fluffing him and his numbers? He sold out for a mess of pottage, legacy-wise, and it will eventually catch up with him.
I've tried reading him a few times, but never got much past the first chapter in everything except "Old Man's War", which I mostly finished out of curiosity just to see how he'd butcher what was obviously a total rip-off of "Starship Troopers". Wasn't surprised by how he did it, TBH... The man can't rise above the source material he stole from. Anywhere. He lacks the real talent to create new things for himself; it's all derivative dreck he's stolen from everywhere, and then filed the serial numbers off of.
It's one thing to write for money and popularity; it's entirely another to prostitute your already very-limited talent entirely in order to satisfy the mob, which is what he did while he was in the SFWA.
Lol. A publisher goon was seething that publishers are mocked. I suggested they should quit being the punchline of jokes if they don't enjoy being laughed at and considered as an anti recommendation.
It went over poorly of course, but many laughs were had.
Well, I went self published from the start because rejecting soyciety is the central premise of the plot.
Thanks, Maya. I appreciate that views can be discussed even if we don't agree on all aspects of an issue. I read your piece and thought it was fascinating, I'm going to share it on X. You raised some great issues about how writers who aren't mentally prepared for the Pecking Order in mainstream publishing, and the more people in our sphere can get that out there to other hopefuls, the better.
Thanks! Deleted previous comment (professional/job reasons), but appreciate your thoughts and feedback so much! Cheers to everyone making it a more friendly and supportive industry.
A well written and insightful piece, thank you for sharing it!
I believe this issue goes far beyond Corrain. The Propagandist Publishing Industry's absolute loathing of Ungovernable Readers is manifest doubly in their hatred of Ungovernable Indie Authors. How many new and rising Authors in the Indie Sphere have been targeted by Agents of the Industry? How many have had their careers ruined by coordinated harrassment campaigns by the same? Whether in-house or outsourced, Bots or Organic, we see waves of these poorly-written reviews, accusations of -isms, or vicious harassment each mirroring each other, scattered across the social media of Indie Authors at crucial junctures in their careers. Many quit, others are cancelled, some simply disappear, censored out of existence...
it is more than a campaign; Propagandist Publishers are waging war against Indie Authors. They hate our Freedom to write as we dare to write, to publish what they would silence, and they will do what it takes to stop us -
the first step towards protecting Freedom is to recognise those who would take it away.
(Edited for sp.)
This is my first time hearing of this. There are plenty of soy brigades by triggered NPCs, sometimes from particular author cliques. I've never heard of publishers themselves doing it, but I can definitely believe it.
My hope is a few writers trying to find an agent or publisher will look at this and decide to go indie instead. Even somebody who fits Kier's wish list is probably better off finding a niche in indie (or better yet Royal Road, etc.) than trying to go through the trad pub meatgrinder.
I decided to go indie for a few reasons.
1) I found out it takes a minimum of two years to publish. I'm doing one a year easily.
2) I was writing novels that I wanted to read
3) Two successful 'trad' sci-fi novels I enjoyed of the last ten years in my genre started out as indie.
You're not going to get an audience publishing woke garbage indie. You won't get one going trad either, but at least you can say you're a "published author".
Oh, there's niches for everything. There's fanfic writers being supported by Patreon.
I doubt it on Royal Road, knowing that you'd need to appeal to the Litrpg/Western Web Novel crowd.
Definitely, they are turbo soy. This entire genre is fucked by the west lol.
Eh, there are a couple of good authors in the genre (Not sure if they're on Royal Road), some of whom are /ourguys.
I'm on the inside, and based authors consist of me, a few others, and some Russians. Pretty sure none are on RR, nor could they be - it'd get censored near instantly. There is nothing like comicsgate for LitRPG, even though the western side is even more soy based than comics. Even really milquetoast stuff like "I wanna raise my family in peace" gets soy brigaded and libeled hard, because having literal vampires drinking blood is some sort of far right conspiracy theory. Yes, the NPCs actually said this.
Got a link to your books?
Sounds like the NPCs are insecure.
Of course they are. Not only are they terminally insecure, self loathing, and neurotic, but they get triggered and seethe endlessly when they encounter someone who isn't. NPCs cannot comprehend humanity, and they cannot withstand it either. Even if it's something entirely normal and tame, like being assertive but not aggressive when confronting an innkeeper who scams you. Not letting randoms steal thousands of fiat dollars worth of gold is toxic by NPC soy morality lol.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08ZLSTXFM
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09M8M59GH
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CVN212WZ
RR has the same ruleset. It's slightly less obvious, but if you make anything that isn't your standard soyboy you will get brigaded hard lol.
It is very difficult to have sympathy for this author. She would piss on all our graves should anything bad happen to us. A deeply disturbed individual, but that’s why she deserves some sympathy and prayer. What society had done to young people like her will be accounted for someday.
It really is staggering how common things like this have become. I know the word "fragility" gets thrown around a lot these days, but this isn't even being functional.
The sad fact is that mental illness frames cultural cachet. What do you think impressionable kids are going to do? What do you think you are going to see more of?
This culture needs a serious reckoning.
I must give Kier credit. They (because they contain within themselves multitudes) are very clear about what they'll accept.
Which is garbage headed right for remainder tables and eventual pulping.
Annoyingly enough, it’s not even new. Back in 2008 or so, there was a massive blowup (for the time) about a female POC who was sock puppeting nasty reviews and LiveJournal comments on other (usually female) authors blog posts. I can’t remember the details, as I didn’t care then and I don’t really care now.
You have a couple of things going on here. Firstly, most capital-A "Art" comes from the madness place inside most Artists. They're already cray-cray to begin with, just like a lot of people inside academia. Try taking your petty staff lounge BS out to a construction site and a construction crew, and you're going to either wind up with your ass kicked or unemployed. Do it hard enough, and someone will be placing concrete over your impromptu grave...
The other thing is that we're witnessing the death of an industry that dates back to Gutenberg. They really don't know how to adapt to modern tech, and they also don't recognize that they've been essentially replaced. The vast infrastructure that used to be required to get a book published, all the gatekeepers? That's dead and gone; all that's left is whatever is coming next, and I wouldn't even dare predict we'll still be reading novels as we know them in a decade or two.
So... Couple "Nutty Artist" with "Clueless Obsolete Industry", and here you go. Expect even more weirdness to follow...
The publishing industry as it stands now is a "dead man walking", soon to go the way of buggy-whip manufacturers. You can see the outlines with Amazon and "on-demand printing". The question is, how long will they maintain the fiction?
One of the really big "tells" is how they keep giving these massive multi-million dollar advances to their favored ones. Like the politicians whose books don't actually sell; what you're seeing is money-laundering on a biblical scale, along with bribery. Question is, how long is it sustainable?
I think there's an equation to be built describing the situation, factoring in "corruption" "length of time in existence" and "relevance". The traditional industry is losing its relevance; what comes next? No damn idea, but 300.00 specialist trade books in any field are simply not sustainable. Not when I can download a pirate .pdf instead. 19.99 Kindle books? Don't make me laugh; I'd just about guarantee you that a.) the actual author of those books only sees pennies or, at best, dimes of that, and that b.) they'd sell a hell of a lot more copies of that book at 3.99. Probably more than enough to make up for the difference in price; there are damn few authors today I'd willingly pay full-freight on. There are some, but... Not the majority of the formulaic and eminently forgettable trash that infests even the indie press.
Yeah, I'll never understand why anyone would overprice a digital product like that. It's not like there are production costs that go into each copy. It's gonna be a crazy decade ahead, that's for sure.
What I can't quite wrap my head around is how the hell they can maintain the illusions they do. I mean... Just... Wow.
There's "Willing suspension of disbelief", and then there is this, which I'd term more "Willful denial of reality". Whatever it is, it's pathologic and so deeply embedded as to be akin to the stereotypical false identity disorder that was so popular a trope not that long ago: "I'm Napoleon!!! I'm Caesar Augustus!!! Bow before me! I'm Abraham Lincoln". The only real difference is that these people think they still matter, while they set about rearranging the deck chairs on their little Titanic as it heads down for impact on the ocean floor...
Frankly, I think they've got maybe a generation or two before the ship's hulk impacts the bottom; just long enough to let the die-off of the Boomers and others who're still emotionally invested in traditional publishing. Once that hits? Yikes.
Part of the "tell" for the whole thing is how the only people that think this stuff still matters are the "cat lady" types currently infesting the publishing houses. They've captured the heights, only to find that the fortifications have been abandoned, and that having that fortress is meaningless. It's a very similar thing to what's going on in academia; they've captured the institution, but in so doing, they've rendered it irrelevant and trivialized the whole thing with silly little identity politics games. So, anyone rational? Routes around them, and they still haven't figured out that they're a joke. The really precious thing is, they still think they matter. Same as with the whole Sad Puppies/Hugo Awards fiasco.
It's really kinda nuts, TBH. But, given that most of these people are basically the sort of dysfunctional human being that belongs under care somewhere with thickly padded walls, well... Here we are.
What's been going on the science fiction/fantasy genre is a microcosm of what's been going on in publishing in general; same silly shiite has been going on over in the romance novel sector. As well as everywhere else... And, sadly, publishing is also a microcosm of everything going on everywhere else in society: The essential crisis of competence as we discover that the anointed <i>soi-disant</i> elites really ain't all that elite, and that the supposed meritocracy they all belong to suffers from one fatal flaw: It ain't demonstrating a hell of a lot of merit at the moment, and is on a steady course to actually being a kakistocracy in name and fact.
I liked the cover of Starter Villain. The book itself? Meh. Old Man’a War it’s not
It seems "Old Man's War it's not" can describe just about all of his work after Old Man's War.
My cut-off date is partway through the Interdependency series but I get your point. I chalk up the decreased quality of output to three factors. Firstly, the Tor book contract (X books over Y years for Z dollars) resulted in his submitting suboptimal quality. His characters have become flat and he wraps up loose strands in obvious ways. Secondly, he has been captured by his twitter audience; this audience encourages his latent mean streak which leaks into his writing. The traitors in Ghost Brigades have nuance, those in the Expanding Universe are cartoon villains. Thirdly, I think he feels vulnerable as a white male writer—with vocally left-leaning fans—and that has cramped his creativity.
Also, note how I refrain from typing the author’s name? A couple of years ago, during the height of twitter pile ons, this author saw, or was sent, my *untagged* comment to a tweet. (The tweet was about JK Rowling and her upset former fans. I had written in my comment that I was disappointed <author> thought transwomen were women but it was ok bc his work had gotten sloppy.) Well, that asshole tweeted a screenshot of my comment to his zillion followers. Small mercies: it was a screenshot not a retweet, he covered up my twitter handle, and I saw it soon enough to delete my comment and go private before anyone could keyword search the text to identify my twitter handle. But what kind of insecure person searches for his name on twitter and blasts out a defensive response to his followers? And his work had gotten sloppy.
You're dead on. He's definitely slacked off after he scored that big contract, and yes he is completely wrapped up in his twitter feed and espousing his politics to anyone who would listen.
While he was president of SFWA, he was going on and on about the lack of leadership at Penn State during the Sandusky trial at the same time that an actual VERY prominent member of the org was being arrested, tried and convicted of child molestation; somehow he didn't have anything to say about that. Twitter absolutely ruins a certain type of person.
And as for the not feeling safe being a white male author thing? Absolutely, he references it constantly. It's a particularly odious form of self-loathing he's allowed himself to believe.
Exactly! And though I laughed when he snarked about the sad puppies (sic?), now my sympathy is with them. Better old fashioned scifi than a morality tale
It would be nice if the morality tale was actually moral.
Truly effective morality tales are not easily discernible as such...
Scalzi is, in my opinion, one of the worst sorts of hacks when it comes to writing. He is, in short, a whore. You can sense his heart isn't in what he writes, and that he himself doesn't really know what is in his heart in the first damn place. He's a trimmer; he'll go whichever way the wind is blowing. If you don't like his beliefs this week, wait around: He has others that will be on display shortly, once he's done the math on who will pay him off, monetarily and with the sort of false adulation he adores from his sycophants.
With Scalzi, you can tell there's really no "there" there, at all: That's why he's so super-sensitive to criticism and contradiction. If he weren't a hack of limited talent, he wouldn't care what others say, but he's deeply immersed in a fully justified "imposture syndrome" mindset, and cannot tolerate anyone questioning how or where he's gotten to in the industry. If he were all that he's made out to be, both in reputation and within his own mind, he'd respond differently to people questioning him or his works. He isn't all that he thinks he is, he knows that subconsciously, and because of that...? You get the Scalzi we see on display. How well have any of his books really sold, and what would he be absent Tor fluffing him and his numbers? He sold out for a mess of pottage, legacy-wise, and it will eventually catch up with him.
I've tried reading him a few times, but never got much past the first chapter in everything except "Old Man's War", which I mostly finished out of curiosity just to see how he'd butcher what was obviously a total rip-off of "Starship Troopers". Wasn't surprised by how he did it, TBH... The man can't rise above the source material he stole from. Anywhere. He lacks the real talent to create new things for himself; it's all derivative dreck he's stolen from everywhere, and then filed the serial numbers off of.
It's one thing to write for money and popularity; it's entirely another to prostitute your already very-limited talent entirely in order to satisfy the mob, which is what he did while he was in the SFWA.
Lol. A publisher goon was seething that publishers are mocked. I suggested they should quit being the punchline of jokes if they don't enjoy being laughed at and considered as an anti recommendation.
It went over poorly of course, but many laughs were had.
Well, I went self published from the start because rejecting soyciety is the central premise of the plot.
Thanks, Maya. I appreciate that views can be discussed even if we don't agree on all aspects of an issue. I read your piece and thought it was fascinating, I'm going to share it on X. You raised some great issues about how writers who aren't mentally prepared for the Pecking Order in mainstream publishing, and the more people in our sphere can get that out there to other hopefuls, the better.
Thanks! Deleted previous comment (professional/job reasons), but appreciate your thoughts and feedback so much! Cheers to everyone making it a more friendly and supportive industry.