Go get them! By the time I become a real author, I do not want selling my copyright to be part of the standard contract.
As to why ML has wso many comments and yet the comments are mostly worth reading, I can only offer my own experience here as an explanation. The posts and the comments here are often so literate, complex and well-thought-out that I've felt a bit shamed to put my two cents down, unless I felt that I really had something unique to add the the discussion.
On other blogs, I feel less self-conscious about plopping down a mindless "Me too!" type of comment. But, here, I feel like I'm dragging down the discourse unless I've got something important to add. And I feel like there must be many lurkers who feel the same way, perhaps even to the extent of not posting at all.
To Simon at #139:
Try not to feel too bad about being scammed by a vanity publisher. A lot of people get scammed like that. You were actually smarter than me, because I paid money up front to my vanity publisher, but your vanity publisher is the type where its business model is set up to make money off the authors after publication. Those are much harder to spot.
I can think of another reason: fake threats. The more inane things you can keep people worried about, the less attention they can spend noticing real problems. Divert attention, and give the conspiracy mills so much random, weird grist that they can't even come up with plausible theories for it all. Then you discredit the conspiracy people, along with diverting attention.
This is really fascinating stuff, and has inspired me throw away some misconceptions I had about agents, which should (hopefully) help me to find one more efficiently.
Although I sympathize with those who have to reject as part of their jobs, and do it politely, but then still get anger in return, I couldn't help noticing a few really questionable rejections among the vast majority of ordinary rejections. For example, freelance writer from Kansas, which sounds like it was either written by someone totally clueless about publishing, or it is an attempt to butter up an author for a vanity press sale or some other scam. This phrase immediately popped out at me as sounding ridiculous:
"Selling a project to a paying publisher is now more impossible than ever"
Since when do publishers refer to themselves as paying publishers? It implies that vanity presses are real publishers too. Also, since when do real publishers try to convince authors that submission is an impossible game?
As someone who got taken in by a vanity publisher, the whole tone of the rejection letter really reminded me of the hype that vanity publishers are always repeating.
I also have sympathy for the recipient of got the wrong letter. I actually had a similar experience, but with a happy mix-up. I received both a rejection letter and a request for my full manuscript from the same publisher, within about a week of each other. I happily ignored the rejection letter, send off my manuscript, and got a very nice rejection letter some time later saying that they liked the manuscript very much.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 1 |
| 2007 | 3 |
| 2006 | 2 |
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