Diary of a Mad Editor

Conservative blogger and author of the book 7 Myths of Working Mothers, Susan Venker, has written a follow-up post to her previous entry on liberal media biased in publishing. In this entry, she whines about how mainstream publishers don’t want to publish books by conservatives. To prove her thesis, she cites Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter’s early years of rejection and her own struggle to get her book published.

Well, all writers get rejected. If there’s a writer out there who’s never been rejected, I don’t know of one. Second, I don’t recall anywhere in the Constitution an amendment stating that writers have a right to be published — only that they have the right to say and write what they want to write. And, while that little annecdote about the unnamed literary agent, refusing to represent "conservatives" may be true for all I know, one agent out of thousands doesn’t exactly make your case that there’s a vast left-wing conspiracy to keep conservative writers from getting their idiot message out there.

Now, I didn’t read your book, Ms. Venker, so I can’t really critique it, but I sincerely doubt that mainstream publishers rejected it because of your politics. They probably just thought it wouldn’t sell very well. Sure, Laura Ingraham and Michelle Malkin are both published by Regnery Publishing, which is a conservative press, but what about Coulter, Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, etc.? Beck and Limbaugh are both published by imprints of Simon and Shuster. O’Reilly and Coulter are both published by imprints of Random House. What about Michael Savage? He’s had books published by conservative and mainstream publishers. The idea that there’s a liberal media bias in book publishing is a myth concocted by right-wing crybabies to explain why most intelligent people think they are idiots. What if I said that conservative publishers were prejudiced against progressive writers? After all, I’ve pointed to examples of conservative writers published by mainstream publishers, but can you name a single progressive writer published by a conservative publisher? Obviously, there’s a biased there, but who fucking cares, Ms. Venker? Anyone can start a publishing company and publish whatever they want. I could decide to only publish books about peanut butter. Does that mean I don’t like jelly? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it just means that I like peanut butter a whole lot better. So get over it.

^* This post is sponsored by http://www.blackheadremoval.org

some douchebag muscle-bound meathead gets up in your face and ruins your workout at the gym? That’s what’s been happening to me lately. There’s this guy I see at the gym who bugs the shit out of me. I’m not by nature the most sociable person anyway. In my private life, I’m kind of shy and am not crazy about meeting new people. Add to that the fact that I don’t go to the gym to talk to people or hit on women or flex my muscles. I’m there for my health. To lose weight. Period. End of story. In addition to trying to figure out a healthier diet for myself and my continuing search for the best weight loss supplement ever and taking my daily thyroid pill, I spend between 1-2 hours at the gym nearly every day. Lately there’s been this guy kind of stalking me around the gym. Up until today, he just sort of gawked at me as I worked out, making me uncomfortable. Today, while I was lifting weights, he approached me.

I had just finished a set on the military press and was sipping from my water bottle when he says, "Watcha tryin’ ta do?" I’m like, "Huh? Trying? What?"

Instead of allowing me to do another set, he "demonstrated" what in his mind is the proper way to do the exercise. Now, I’ve been lifting weights off and on since I was about 13 or 14. I don’t think I need a wannabe fake-ass body builder who, as far as I can tell, only seems to work his upper body and does no lower body or aerobic exercises at all ( and doesn’t breathe properly either, which is probably why he gets so winded lifting weights)telling me how to workout. So I just nodded my head, skipped my second set and moved on to another machine in the hopes of escaping this guy. Eventually, my exercise routine took me to the next room and Hercules moved on to another area as well. After I finished lifting weights, I did my time on the treadmill. Hercules was looking for me. I could see him on the main floor from the upper deck. Most of the people I see in my gym are either anorexic young women working hard to keep their flat asses flat and steroid freaks like Hercules. The difference is, the other steroid freaks politely ignore me and allow me to ignore them. Hercules, however, wasn’t done with me. As I weighed myself a half hour later, I noticed him standing behind me breathing heavily.

"You done?" he asked.

I didn’t answer him just shrugged and walked into the locker room. At this point, I was half-convinced that there had to be something wrong with him.  He followed close behind me as I made my way to my locker.   He started flexing his muscles and acting like a full-on retard, mugging in front of the mirror.Hercules made some comments about my weight. I wasn’t sure whether he was trying to be friendly, cruel, showing-off or what. But he made me defensive and I started spouting off about my health problems, trying to explain why I am so heavy at the moment (because these steroid freaks act like the non-steroid freaks at the gym don’t belong there). I realized my mistake immediately.  The moment I mentioned that I was a cancer survivor, Hercules started talking about Jesus and asking me whether I went to church and prayed.  My second mistake was that I answered him. So Hercules decided that it was his job to save my soul. He was blocking my exit and wouldn’t let me by. Started preaching to me.  I did not want a violent confrontation with him, but he kept getting in my face talking about why I needed to go to church. Truth be told, I haven’t been in a real fight since high school and I wasn’t convinced I could take the asshole, so I stood there trying to debate him until I could find an opening to escape. After about ten minutes of his rambling discourse about Jesus,  some else entered the locker room, distracting him just long enough that I managed to slip by him. Unfortunately, he followed me to my car, continuing to bait me. “Look, man,” I said, “I’ve gotta go. I’ve got shit to do.”  He tried to get between me and  car, but this timeI nudged him out of the way  and sped out of that parking lot.  I’m going to have to avoid him from now on or else find another place to workout. 

I’ve been saying for years that eBook prices are too high — a position I reiterated during the whole Kindle/Macmillan/iPad debacle.

The position of the publishing industry and the bestselling authors they publish is that the current digital book market devalues their creations and Amazon is the chief baddie in this scenario. Well, black hat or not, Amazon’s $9.99 price tag came from it’s realization that this was the tipping point for most of their customers.

It’s true that you cannot really put a price tag on genuine art. However, when you try to sell your art — whether it be a painting, a song or a book, you have to assign a dollar value to it. Now, you can charge whatever you think it’s worth, but what you think it’s worth isn’t necessarily what people will pay for it. In a recent article in the New York Times, this point was addressed quite well:

When digital editions have cost more, or have been delayed until after the release of hardcover versions, these raucous readers have organized impromptu boycotts and gone to the Web sites of Amazon and Barnes & Noble to leave one-star ratings and negative comments for those books and their authors.

Authors and Publishers cry foul. One author, the second-rate horror writer, Douglas Preston says,“It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.” Well, boo-fucking-hoo to you, Douglas. The real price! What is the real price of an eBook? If you’re talking about it’s inherent artistic value, I’d point out that a novel by Douglas Preston has far less artistic value than say, a novel by Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens. If you are talking about fair market value then I don’t see how you can possibly justify charging more than $10 for a digital copy of a book. Dougie, you do, in fact, come off as a greedy asshole who doesn’t respect his readers.

An executive at Simon & Shuster adds:

“There are people who don’t always understand what goes into an author writing and an editor editing and a publishing house with hundreds of men and women working on these books. If you want something that has no quality to it, fine, but we’re out to bring out things of quality, regardless of what type of book it is.”

Quality? Like Celebrity Pets Tell All? Really? Are you going to tell me that hundreds of men and women worked on that book? Listen. I think most people understand that there are people behind the scenes producing these books. They also understand that those people make a lot more money than most of the people who buy those books. Readers are not just paying for a book — they’re paying for the bestselling author’s kid to go to Harvard and Costa Rica vacation rentals and other shit. That’s a bit of hyperbole on my part, but my point is that when publishers and author’s talk about "real value" they are talking out of their assholes. eBooks have a practical value closer to zero than to any price above $10. And your average book buyer certainly knows this. Jacking-up eBook prices is no way to grow readership or build customer loyalty. Obviously, writers like Douglas Preston are doing well enough that they don’t have to shop at Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, the rest of us do.