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How to kill a writing career
Jan. 17th, 2009 07:00 pmThere are Bad Publishers out there who will try to scare inexperienced authors into putting up with abuse by threatening them with being put on the industry blacklist. As lots of more experienced authors will point out, there is no such blacklist. If your writing's good enough to be interesting to one publisher, it's good enough to be interesting to another, because there really aren't many niches that are small enough that there's just one publisher and its tentacles.
So yes, blacklists are mostly not an issue. Mostly. Because there is one way to get on a blacklist. That way is to behave so appallingly badly in public that every editor in your genre decides independently that they do not want to have anything to do with you ever again, in case *they* have to deal with the crazy. Editors do not like having to deal with the crazy. They can always find another author who doesn't do what Kevin W. Reardon aka Cole Adams appears to have done, which is to suggest to an editor suffering from depression that he should commit suicide, and follow that up with a death threat. All because said editor had a one line unfavourable comment about Reardon's short story in a post commenting about stories he was considering for a reprint anthology.
It's possible that the guy's being framed by someone else posting under his name, but the timeline suggests it's real. [*] More details at http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1249222.html
ETA: Poppy Z Brite has a particularly lucid summary of what happened:
http://docbrite.livejournal.com/656896.html
[*The editor in question confirms in a comment at my post on EREC that there's solid evidence it's really Reardon: "Please note that I asked the publisher of the anthology to speak to the author. He did so and received word back, confirming this was not a case of 'sock-puppetry.'" ]
So yes, blacklists are mostly not an issue. Mostly. Because there is one way to get on a blacklist. That way is to behave so appallingly badly in public that every editor in your genre decides independently that they do not want to have anything to do with you ever again, in case *they* have to deal with the crazy. Editors do not like having to deal with the crazy. They can always find another author who doesn't do what Kevin W. Reardon aka Cole Adams appears to have done, which is to suggest to an editor suffering from depression that he should commit suicide, and follow that up with a death threat. All because said editor had a one line unfavourable comment about Reardon's short story in a post commenting about stories he was considering for a reprint anthology.
ETA: Poppy Z Brite has a particularly lucid summary of what happened:
http://docbrite.livejournal.com/656896.html
[*The editor in question confirms in a comment at my post on EREC that there's solid evidence it's really Reardon: "Please note that I asked the publisher of the anthology to speak to the author. He did so and received word back, confirming this was not a case of 'sock-puppetry.'" ]