how to win friends and influence people

[julesjones]

Those of you who are into both slash and het in your pro romance might like to know that there is a publisher that saw nothing untoward about sending out a contest call that included the following paragraph:

"Entries that include m/m, f/f, bondage, rape, or bestiality will not be considered and will be returned to the author. All genres of romance will be accepted." (Emphasis theirs.)

Now, I don't have a problem with publishers not wanting to handle m/m and f/f romance. But there are ways of saying they don't want it that don't involve equating it with rape and bestiality, and don't involve denying that it can be romance. I'm not too impressed with the equating all bondage with rape, either. It didn't really help that their promo company accidentally posted this ad to homopromo, which as you can probably tell from the name is a discussion group for m/m and f/f romance. But I'd have been pretty unimpressed by this ad even if I'd seen it first on one of the m/f romance discussion groups. I may write mainly m/m, but my reading ranges somewhat further. I won't be buying my m/f from Whispers at scarletpublishing.com/whispers

(You'll probably see more of this around the original slash writers' LJs today, because there was an apology on homopromo this morning that basically insisted that not only was there no intent to offend, the ad wasn't offensive anyway.)

ETA: Someone's confirmed that both the original ad and the mea culpa from the promo company were cross-posted to a bunch of glbt book groups. The mea culpa includes this line

"This contest promo was not meant to be posted at this
site. This is a wonderful group filled with great writers and I would
never purposly send out anything that upset anyone. "

Oh yes, I believe that it wasn't meant to be posted at the carefully unspecified "this site". However, for some reason I'm not *quite* convinced by the sincerity of the belief that it's a wonderful group filled with great writers.

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Cheeky buggers! Stupid buggers too, if they couldn't figure from the name what that community was. Still, I'm glad to know I needn't bother with their books....

[julesjones]

What happens is that there are these promo companies that for a fee will handle all the hard work of sending out ads to the many and various romance mailing lists. Since it's a low pay thing, they just cross-post it to a whole bunch of lists without necessarily reading any of the day to day conversation on those lists. In theory they make sure they don't send material where it's not wanted, but in practice some of them are a bit hasty in pressing the send button before trimming the To line.

There was much mea culpa this morning about posting it to homopromo (it was off-topic in a big way, and would have been unwanted even if it had been a *polite* "no m/m"), and I'm sure it was just carelessness on "To:" trimming, because that promo company has previously sent ads for m/f books to the list even though they are explicitly unwanted. The promo person is obviously scared that they're going to get the sack for sending this one to a group that would take offence, but really, the offence is in the wording and it would have been offensive wherever it was posted.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

... there was an apology on homopromo this morning that basically insisted that not only was there no intent to offend, the ad wasn't offensive anyway.

This is obviously some strange new meaning of the word "apology" of which I was not previously aware.

[julesjones]

I think that there was a certain amount of panic this morning when someone realised what had happened and how pissed off people were, and thus some over-insistence on the fact that no offence was intended.

I doubt any offence *was* intended. It's just that someone's Freudian slip is showing...

[horace-hamster.livejournal.com]

If they are proclaiming that gay romance and lesbian romance do not fall under "all genres of romance" then they damned well are being offensive.

[julesjones]

This has been pointed out to them, in a number of venues they managed to offend.

I gather from the followup reply I got to my private email to them that I was correct in my speculation in the thread on erastes' LJ -- they had edited down the guidelines on the website to save space, and it simply hadn't occurred to anyone that the end result said something bloody offensive to both gay and straight fans of gay romance.

Posting it to the glbt book discussion groups was unlikely to be anything but an honest mistake, but that's an issue in its own right because even though the majority of the members read m/f as well, we don't want to be spammed *there* with ads for m/f, and there'd been an extended discussion of that very issue a week or two earlier. I think they initially assumed that's what the uproar was about. They have been disabused of this notion.