I think this is more likely to be caused by a belief in technology rather than a belief in the gullibility of their fellow human beings.

Probably they could be helped by being shown or told by actual writers what such a site needs, a weakness of developers is always to think they know best. Feedback is good.

The simple fact is that editors and agents have enough slush already -- they don't need to go cruising the internet for yet more slush.

I don't think these guys are scammers -- just that they've reinvented a square wheel.

It seems a little worse than that, actually. In order to monitor the critiques of your piece, you need to submit five critiques yourself. That gives people an incentive to churn out those critiques as quickly as possible, ideally without even reading the pieces in the first place. "Loved it! 5 stars!" "Too long, didn't read."

That is, unless they have some sort of mechanism for critiquing the critiquing...

The Friday Project may be completely on the up and up. But they're not doing themselves any favors by co-opting the language of the likes of PublishAmerica.

Of course, nothing in the slushpile is ever considered seriously.

Pfui.

Maybe the author was a COBOL programmer, Evan.

PublishAmerica (a vanity-press/scam)
Whitmore (Dorrance's answer to PublishAmerica)
Vantage, Tate, and iUniverse (all pay-to-play vanity presses)

There is a way to block Google Ads by URL, that the site's owner can deploy.

Steven Brust writes: "I especially liked, '...to ensure that good quality work bypasses the slushpile to be considered seriously...' Of course, nothing in the slushpile is ever considered seriously. Pfui."

Of course, I could just be demonstrating my stupidity again, but it seems to me that the only way to "bypass the slushpile" is to be someone who has already earned a reputation. It's sorta the defining feature of slush: it comes from— oh hell, let's be charitable for once (it's the holiday season)— people who have yet to earn a reputation for selling well.

Never mind, as Mr. Brust implies, the problem that bypassing the slushpile isn't necessarily a good thing for an aspiring writer.

The problem here is that even the people who aren't particularly interested in scamming aspiring writers, just for using them to sell advertisements, are totally clueless about what a community site can and can't do, even a well-moderated one. They just aren't designed to buff reputations sufficiently to get writers out of the slushpile. It's like trying to launch a rocket to the moon fueled with Mentos and Diet Coke. Good luck achieving escape velocity with that rig, Buckaroo.

You think you're offended? Not only are they bad at reinventing publishing, they're worse at inventing new web applications. What are these people doing with my Internet, dammit?

You've been watching MythBusters, eh, j h?

UK literary agent, UK small publisher... and actually UK publishing probably does need *something* to make it even vaguely approachable. AMHeath is one of the (few) UK literary agents I've run across with anything like the kind of web presence the majority of US agents have. Of course, they don't take SF.

And yes, one can believe that good fiction will get published... but that doesn't mean all the good fiction in any given slushpile gets published. I can certainly sympathise with any writer who wants a way to win their book more than a cursory glance. Even if I'm fairly sure they're doomed to failure.

Maybe the author was a COBOL programmer, Evan.

I was thinking more along the lines of "off their meds." But you know, we could both be right.

Egads! Some madman has reversed the e.e cummings dna and posted their formula straight upon the internet!

everyone always cuts me right out of the equation with their fancy technical metrics like 'readability', well I got something that none of your readable peoples have, I got haart.

I really wouldn't expect publishers/publishing house editors to be interested in trawling display sites -- they already have a system which brings post-slushed books to their attention. At least that's what I understood agents were for, and its agent slushpiles I was thinking about.

But I've made the terrible mistake of reading agent blogs :) 'Cursory glance' was a kind of balance between 'rejected unread because I'm five hundred queries behind and there are five MS's for clients I need to read and comment on within the week' and 'I hate anything with an amulet'.

I think it's reasonable to infer it anyway. As you just mentioned on your own blog recently, there is a lot of material that arrives in the slush that simply doesn't get read. A cursory glance of the first few paragraphs (sometimes even just sentences) is all that's frequently required for any sane reader to set aside the rest of the manuscript.

The point of not trying to bypass the slushpile is that every aspiring no-name literary giant has to start there— or, at least, ought to have. Using some trick for bypassing the slushpile, e.g. giving an assistant the blowjob of her lifetime, etc., only deprives you of the [negligible, but non-zero] points for having your manuscript/query lifted out of the slush solely on the merits of its naked black and white. It doesn't buy much, because your work still has to run the rest of the editorial gantlet, where it's more likely to get bounced out on its metaphorical ass if it's crap.

I think there are things that a lot of players in the publishing industry do that discourages good aspiring writers and rewards mediocrity and crap. (Purposefully publishing crap, because it sells better than good writing, is one of those things.) There are probably ways publishers could use the worldwide web to develop new talent more effectively, but I'm damned if I know that they are.

I know one thing, though: a scarcity of advertising vehicles is not a problem that anyone needs to be solving.

Maybe our Ingenious Hosts can even throw in a line or two, that's not human-readable, as spider-bait.

But, the way they work, pushing up their advertising bill just means they'll charge their victims more.

Anyway, They were going on about how they're recruited the most powerful man in British publishing, and I thought, "Yeah, right...".

There's this guy, head book buyer for Waterstones, and his decisions can make or break a book. OK, so far. But if he changes his job, stops buying books abd starts trying to sell them, how much of his power is left to him?

Maybe he has some idea of what will sell, but was that what made him special, or was it the desk he sat at?

It's puffery.

On the non-fiction side, also at Crooked Timber, there's the marketing approach taken by Simon & Schuster versus the non-marketing approach taken by Oxford University Press.

But then they'd have come in contact with the Broken Publishing Model Cooties, and everybody knows you can only fix a system if you're an uncontaminated outsider to that system. They must maintain their purity.

Which is why dinosaurs and sodomy come as surprises to them, each and every time. You could almost feel sorry for them, except not really.

Standard scammer tactic: follow my system, pay me money, and you'll bypass the Evil Gatekeepers that prevent you from getting what is your due. Other examples: unemployment "networking" and "career counseling"; college admissions "counseling".

Kat, I guess I won't be sending my manuscript of Amulet of the Deathworm's God to that agent.

(I was just about to try hunting it up.)

True. You commonly get scammers clustering around inobvious processes. As Jim pointed out some long while back, you don't see scammers offering to sell you the secrets of how to become a Machinist's Mate in the Navy.

Dinosaurs being therapsids, and birds being descended from them more or less directly, we may assume that dinosaur sex was similar to avian sex. This implies that dinosaurs used a cloaca, a common opening for defecation and reproduction (more stuff here). Bird sex is, by direct interpretation of the commonest definition -- anal sex -- sodomy; and so was dinosaur sex. No sodomy? No baby dinosaurs!

QED. It's no wonder the Anally-Obsessive Jolly Jesus People don't want to believe in them.

(Now, what was the question, again ...?)

You know, Charlie, it occurs to me that this subject never came up in those old Ray Harryhausen movies.

Go to www.google.com

Click "Advertising programs," then "Google AdSense."

Sign in with your username/password.

Then click "AdSense Setup." Under that, click "Competitive Ad Filter."

There, you can fill in any urls or IP addresses you want it to block.

-------------

At the very least, the URLs for the agents on Writer Beware's Twenty Worst list ought to be blocked from every writing-related site.

I also think there are agents and houses who specialize in polishing turds for mass market consumption (and let us all praise Jeebus for them, too, because they serve an important function in the risk management operations of large publishers who also publish the higher quality work that many of us here like to buy).

I'm getting away from my main point here: these people aren't just screwing up by trying to reinvent publishing without knowing anything about it; they're also screwing up the Internet by littering the landscape of options for community interaction with ever towering heights of useless crap advertising.

I'll be very glad when the current cadre of capitalists all grow old and die, leaving their operations to a generation that might be better at not making huge bonfires of investment capital on the Internet.

The most unforgivable sin in writing is to hold your readers in contempt.

Hear, hear! Loud applause and roar of trumpets.

First: same reason some people refuse to vote for anyone who is "a politician."

Second: because of one of the most peculiar things about people: their tendency to assume that if they know nothing about a topic, it must be simple.

Third: because normal people have an inflated view of their own abilities in general (depressives are more realistic). They think they're good, therefore any system where they don't do well must be unfair. Then along come the predators, selling exactly that concept.

People buy lottery tickets, too. Mystifies me.

People demonstrably do win the lottery--I've seen them on the news, and likely so have you. What the lottery wants to keep quiet is what the odds are--that is, significantly worse than something like The DaVinci Code becoming a huge hit. :)

Because they think crap is easier to write, I'll bet. Easier to write=more gets written=more profit for the writer.

And a very few books (I think there may be as many as three in the history of publishing) start out self-published and then get picked up. Likely an even smaller percentage of self-published books than the winners are of lottery tickets bought, though.

There are a myriad of reasons for poor writing; holding your readers in contempt is but one of them.

Xopher: If you live in the United States, you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the lottery.

You're more likely to be struck by lighting than to make a living as a writer, too. (But if you make a deliberate habit of climbing tall places in thunderstorms, flying kites with conductive wires, etcetera ...)

And a very few books (I think there may be as many as three in the history of publishing) start out self-published and then get picked up.

Cough, Scalzi, "Old Man's War", cough, edited by Patrick, cough, Paolini, "Eragon", cough ...

But it's not enough to publish yourself if you want to go that route: you've also got to be good, and to have a clue about how the real publishing business works, and that's just for starters. You've got to do all the work that a real publishing company would do for you, and write the bloody thing besides.

Lord Dunsany started that way. But you're not him.

Time to get away from the computer.

Incidentally, here's what Dale Brown himself says you need to get published:

You have to assume some basic responsibilities to play this game. You have to be willing to study your craft: learn about writing, structure, grammar, character, plot, story, pace, and all the ingredients that go into a good novel or script. But more importantly, you must write. Nothing happens until your idea, imagination, art, and perspective is put down on paper and placed into the hands of someone willing to evaluate it and make a decision on its future.

from Dale Brown's website

Honest.

--Mary Aileen

Enter the whoremongers, stage right: people who are very skilled at producing, identifying and polishing the rare turd in the sewer that has the requisite piquancy to part the lowest common denominator from its hard-earned cash. These people seem to have the most opaque process in the industry, from a writer's point of view.

If you know you're not the next $AWARD_WINNING_AUTHOR, but you might be the next $BESTSELLING HACK, how do you craft your story for optimal craptacularity? Strangely, it's not as simple as, "Step 1: Collect best practices for writing stories; Step 2: Pick one at random, and violate as many of the rest as possible; Step 3: Profit!"

I'm just a skosh uncomfortable with the quoted passage. Because if you were to make a list of books that are turds in the sewer, produced by whoremongers, that the lowest common denominator likes, you're likely to hit on more than a few that are, or have been, enjoyed by my wife.

And you better not be calling my wife "lowest common denominator," there, bub.

I've enjoyed reading Star Trek novelizations and Piers Anthony, and I'm certainly not LCD.

Agreed, but there are exceptions. Alistair MacLean fell off horribly at the end of his career; the last four or five Dick Francis books weren't nearly as good as the first thirty, and even Elizabeth Peters' last Amelia Peabody book made me think she was dead tired of the series and wanted to tie up loose ends and go home.

John D. MacDonald, on the other hand, never lost a step.

> The most unforgivable sin in writing is to hold your readers in contempt.

An old fave from Dorothy Parker:
"If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you."

Perhaps you noticed I conveniently spaced-out and forgot to provide any examples. Oops. My apologies. (Oh, you wanted examples of genre fiction? I think I hear my mother calling me...)

I'm unlikely to be worried much about what your wife is reading, since I have an ever-expanding personal library full of crap in my own basement that my family [including me] has been collecting over the years. Fortunately, as I've grown older, the vectors by which crap writing gets inserted into my library have changed. Now, it's more likely to arrive because some family member has pressed into my hands the latest literary equivalent of a marian apparition manifesting on a stack of buttermilk pancakes.

I have been known to buy media tie-in novels from time to time. Some of my favorite lower-tier writers have gone on to great success writing tie-ins.

Technothrillers have:

Cool hardware, described in painstaking detail
Cool scenes where the hardware is pushed beyond where it's supposed to go!
Cool scenes where the heroes are pushed etc.
Bad guys who do complex and evil things
Explosions
A plot that drives the heroes forward faster than they can normally cope with (leading to cool scenes where etc.)
Detailed logistics in organising travel and equipment

Technothrillers don't require:

Complex characterisation
Inspired writing
Character-driven plots
Dinosaurs*
Sodomy

This incomplete list shows how you can write technothrillers without being more than competent at writing, if your cool ideas are cool enough and your hardware detailed enough. Dale Brown's faults are the ones which map onto the technothriller blindspots. I'm guessing that other (sub)genres have their own musts and not-neededs (so if Dale Brown wrote a Romance novel...)

* Michael Crichton disagrees with me on this one

Surely, this should be a challenge to "Making Light" posters. Examples, anyone? (Sorry, but it's too early in the a.m. here for me to take a stab myself.)

(NB: those links are SFW, but sub-links from those pages may be NSFW.)

Completely off topic: I've often wondered what would happen if Sherlock Holmes were written by Conan the Barbarian rather than Conan Doyle, but only just now have I realised that Conan the Barbarian could have been written by Sherlock Holmes after he retired, moved to America and changed his name.

The article also includes some interesting thoughts about self-publishing.

(Actually, the romantic sub-plot of "Galaxy Quest" did involve tentacles, but that's the movies for you.)

Milne also wrote at least one mystery (_The Red House_)that the only reason I finished it was that I'd downloaded it from Gutenberg to my Palm to read during waits for physical therapists. I wonder whether it would have worked better if I had read it in dead tree? (Note that I'm still stuck two years later on a download of Stanley Weyman's _A Gentleman of France_; I think I discern a trend.)

If you write it, I'll proof it.

To be fair, I remember once reading a strange short love story between a girl and her cute "tentacle monster boyfriend", complete with going to the mall to buy new clothes with him.

It was in manga form, and I can't remember anything else.

Hentai is just a catch-all term for sexually explicit material. There is a distressing tendency within the genre for the female lead's dialogue to mainly consist of "No, please, I don't want to!", but it isn't always in the context of violent gang-rape; sometimes the objections are merely presented in the aggravating tradition of maidenly modesty without real conviction behind them, surrounded by tender bilateral declarations of love and commitment.

That said, most of the consensual (i.e., non-rape) naughty doujinshi I've seen still retain an element of token protest which cumulatively embitters me.

What was the problem with Milne's mystery, joann? Characters, writing style, plotting? All of the above?

Well, Alexander Wollcott called it "one of the three best mystery stories of all time." Unfortunately for Milne, Raymond Chandler happened to read it and featured it in one of the most famous essays on mystery fiction ever written: The Simple Art of Murder.

Chandler starts off by saying "It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not so easy as it looks." Then, like Twain with Fennimore Cooper, he gets out a baseball bat and beats Milne to death, the major difference being that Twain used humor with his examples of bad writing to do the maximum damage to Cooper, whereas Chandler uses an almost clinical tone in presenting why the plot makes no sense and the writer is totally ignorant of what happens in a murder investigation and probably lacks the intelligence to cross the street by himself. If you haven't read the essay I strongly urge you to do so.

I consider myself urged, Bruce. I am printing the essay as we speak. Speaking of Chandler, If I had to read one single novel of his, which would you recommend? (No, I've never read him, but I enjoy the movie adaptations whenever they show up on TCM, even the weird one with Robert Montgomery that is literally from his point of view.)

has anyone ever described hentai or tentacle porn as "romance"?

Hentai usually implies perverse sexual contact, so it's unlikely to be in the category of romance. (A certain OAV/Manga from the 80's involving a teenage phone-sex worker and a boy that transformed into the contents of an interstellar zoo comes close, but along with the romance there's a tone of Tom Swiftian "if I do this to him, he becomes that" on the part of the phone-sex worker that makes the romantic/happy ending not work too well for me.)

As far as tentacle porn goes, with the exception of one I once saw featuring the relationship between a woman and her giant squid, it usually involves rape, which only spills over into romance in the Rosemary Rogers universe. (Sorry, but my first quarter in college I took a course on the popular novel and we read "Sweet Savage Love," which for me set the gold standard in "I made her do it and now she LOVES it and ME" books.)

Sometimes you get odd variations. In the case of a copy of La Blue Girl that the video store mislabeled as being Ranma 1/2 and kindly rented to me so I could show it to my wife to be (hard to give a good impression under those circumstances), various robots had been outfitted with tentacles and, well, let's just say I'm glad that nobody at Marvel saw that episode and thought of Dr. Octopus.

Speaking of Chandler, If I had to read one single novel of his, which would you recommend?

Well, it's been years since I've read any Chandler novels--I tend towards Hammett--but I'd actually start with the short story collection The Simple Art of Murder to find out if you like his stuff. (It also has Pearl are a Nuisance which is so charming and funny a short story that I wish he'd gone ahead with his plan to use the leads in another novel instead of finally rewriting it for Marlowe.) If you choose The Big Sleep you can get some interesting insights into the studio censorship system in the 40's watching the Bogart/Bacall version: an entire subplot involving (as I remember it) a homosexual blackmailer is excised with the exception of a beaded curtain in his house that's supposed to show his sexual makeup. (I had a wonderful course in the English department where we read the novel and then watched the film that was based on the novel several times during the week and covered stuff like this. The Big Sleep, Wuthering Heights, Who Goes There?: it was great, although the screams of "Where's the rest of the book! Where's the kid!" from the class at the end of Wuthering Heights still ring in my ears...

Astroturfed blog comments discussion. Response?

Dinosaurs and sodomy? Check.

Hentai and tentacle porn? Check.

<sotto_voce>My work here is done. My sponsors will be pleased with me ...</sotto_voce>

Thanks for the recommendations, Bruce.

NP. I've got such a bad head cold I've had to stay home from work for two days and haven't been able to sleep much, so about the only thing I'm good for is doing cardboard and string imitations of Mike Ford--glad to have been of service.

Bruce, is that like the cardboard cutouts that infested boosktores when the Lord of the Rings movies were coming out? (Me, I want one of Claudia Black.)

Dinosaurs and sodomy? Check.

Hentai and tentacle porn? Check.

Now if you can get Dinosaurs and tentacle porn you'll have something really new.

Serge:

cardboard and string imitations of Mike Ford

Bruce, is that like the cardboard cutouts that infested boosktores when the Lord of the Rings movies were coming out?

No, it's more like Ace Bluebottle, East Finchley Boy Scout and idiot. Willing to do almost anything for a quarter of dolly mixtures or jelly babies--they're a UK thing.

Tentacle Romance with Lovecraftian undertones:

Sassy single squid Coral Benchley has got a lot on her tentacles. Her career as a freelance writer is finally gaining momentum but her best friend Peter, a gay penguin, thinks she's just hiding her failed lovelife behind clouds of ink. He may be right, but what's a squid to do when she's gone crazy for an Elder God who keeps telling her the stars have to align before they can go on a real date? Find out this spring in F. W. Thurston's Call Me, Cthulhu!

Now I'm scared ...

There was a thread at Absolute Write earlier this week about how that is not in the least bit true, what with the way "forced seduction" stories have made a huge comeback of late. (And yes, I am well aware that my own publisher has contributed to this trend.)

Looks like Bruce D. already took care of the matter in far better fashion than I could have; I seem to have buried the details. What I remember is that it read like bad E. Phillips Oppenheim. Given that I treasure my EPO collection, you may gather I was not amused.

>what with the way "forced seduction"

ponders

ponders

ponders

nope. I'm not going there....

I can understand people being sceptical of The Frontlist, I was when I first heard of it. But to denounce it as a scam without researching further is lazy.

If it were a scam then the owners, who have a strong background in local community sites, would be charging a lot more than they are.

As it stands they have The Friday Project (who I work for) and AM Heath checking submissions on a regular basis. We are both companies who want to give new authors a chance and this is one way of doing so.

My favorite "when I win the lottery" fantasy is opening up a franchise of Calypso Cafe in Houston. Needless to say, I'd hire someone with actual restaurant-running experience to do the work; I'd just be the angel.