One more Ron post
After being banned from the "Midnighter" bboard, Ronnie went on talking to himself about how bad an wrong the rate increase was, despite the fact that he apparently changed his position. The rate increase doesn't necessarily hurt those poor poor writers who are too concerned about "craft" to sell their stories to those awful pro-paying publishers, but instead it hurts...publishers! And he put words in my mouth, now that I had been safely banned.

So I registered again and wrote a response. Which he deleted, because he found it insulting. Though apparently deciding that my surname was "Mammy" and making a racial slur about it, or calling me a pathetic simp, was not insulting. Then he banned me again. He's also cranked up the bannage so that anyone coming from my IP address cannot even read the forum. So, unfortunately I can't provide the exact URL for the post I wrote this deleted response to. I'm sure you get the gist though:



Mornin' Ronnie baby, it's me again. Couldn't help but notice that you're still building strawmen arguments and demonstrating your ignorance...that is, when you're not outright lying.

At any rate, I always marvel when I see one of Life's Little Losers sidle up to what he thinks Power is, even while striking a rebel pose. So the problem isn't elitism amongst the members after all -- gee, my arguments weren't so pathetic, were they -- but the state of the publishers! Oh no, not the poor poor publishers, the very same publishers you were gnashing your teeth over last week!

Tell us again how concerned you are about craft and writing when your message to writers is "Take what you're given, sit down, shut up! How can the publishers keep up their profits if you demand two extra pennies???" Are you sure "Ron" isn't just a typo for "Tom"? Uncle, that is.

Now I realize that your one experience as publisher, with your little non-Stoker nominated anthology (sorry Ms. Piggy, the prelim ballot does not a Stoker nominee make, feel free to waddle over to your bio page and remove that LIE right now) was an utter failure, so you probably don't even understand that you don't understand the basics of publishing, but the fact is that you're about as good an economist as you are a writer.

In other words, don't go quitting that sweet gig blowing tourists for nickels down at the bus station just yet.

The high comedy of insisting that a professional WRITERS organization act in the best interest of the PUBLISHERS rather than their own members aside -- and what's next, will you complain that HWA goes after publishers with shitty contracts too, because publishers like Monica O'Rourke need to keep the money they owe writers to keep their own lights on -- you're simply wrong.

"Gee, what would the publishers have us do? Let's ask them!" says HWA.

"Well," says the publisher, looking around his dumpy house, "you should all come over and paint my house for free! Then I can put out five issues of SPICY GHOST STORIES this year -- that means four more of you lucky bastards get your name in print and a crisp new $10 bill! All you need to do is perform $200 worth of labor each."

Luckily for the publishers, Ace Craftsman Ron Horsley will be there bright and early Saturday morning, brush in hand. The smart writer will be sleeping in though, or perhaps even writing.

You seem to think that any intervention in the market will necessarily lead to negative effects for the marketplace as a whole. To which we can only say "I hope your wife doesn't let you handle the money she collects in her g-string, or you'll soon be homeless."

The proof is, shockingly enough, the plurality of markets that offer 3 cents a word. Why DO these venues offer 3 cents a word, Ron? Is it the unseen hand of the market? No. How do I know? Easy: all other inputs and outputs differ widely.

In a market where informal non-profit quarterly websites, quarterly websites with a corporate sponser, POD anthologies, bimonthly print mags with substantia (albeit internal)l advertising, weekly email newsletters, print quarterlies with almost no advertising, and offset printed anthologies with industry-standard trade discounts, all pay 3 cents a word, that 3 cents is NOT based on internal calculations but on an exogeneous pressure.

Namely, the existence of the pro rate as set by professional organizations like HWA and SFWA. If the market was operating entirely freely, magazines with widely different costs of production, audiences, and business models would necessarily develop pay rates more likely to be different than similar. Three cents became common because writers held out for three cents.

Don't log back on and write twenty paragraphs telling me that I'm wrong, because I'm not. These are facts. Shove your hands into your pants and read. Listen. Don't just wait to talk like that loudmouth at the kegger; you know, the underemployed schlub with the big dreams and that aura of rancid bacon fat that warps the air around him? Don't be like you is what I'm saying. Pretend you're someone who gives a damn about the facts rather than just the glorious sound of his own sausage fingers on the keyboard for a change.

Horror magazines, even the big markets like Weird Tales and Cemetery Dance, do not operate as you think they do. Those magazines are essentially catalogs-with-content for their publisher parents. They're extended ads/samples/marketing hooks for Wildside Press and Cemetery Dance Books respectively. Think the Loompanics Catalog (another paying market), but less entertaining. Loss leaders. Ditto SciFiction.

Horror and SF is a marketplace dominated by loss leaders and magazines that are pro only to the extent that they pay their writers, even as they generate no income with which to pay "employees." If Darrell Schweitzer had to live off his Weird Tales checks, he'd be joining you on his knees by the gloryhole in the Greyhound Station men's room. The zero-sum game you posit between labor and management (or vendors and clients, really) does not exist in this maket because most magazines are based on extramaket decisions in the first place. Capital doesn't flow toward SF and horror mag startups; editors and publishers of good will and people who wish to make a name for themselves in the field do. Nearly every market, even those that pay 10 cents a word, are "4theLuv" markets.

Now we're encouraging writers to hold out for five cents. And already we're seeing magazines adjust.

But but but...profits! Losses! Passing on the costs! See, this where your idiocy really shines.

Newsflash: most magazines, even "pro" magazines, don't have employees. They do not depend on advertising (this is easy to check: if fewer than 40% of pages are taken up with outside ads, the mag isn't using an ad-driven model) to stay afloat. Most magazines in the genre are quasi-non profits run for a wide variety of reasons.

Why did you publish your anthology? Was it to sell 40000 units to the trade with a returns rate of 30% at $6.99, and thus see a profit of $15,000 in six months? No? Then your economic calculations are not the same as the calculations of, say, the first entry in the Darkside series of anthologies.

But you paid the same 3cent rate, didn't you?

Hmmm. Why was that?

You wanted to be a pro market. And you were.

But now at 5 cents what will people do? You alluded to it yourself: They lose the status of professional publication solely because the HWA ratified doing so and got the SFWA and others to follow suit.

Actually, SFWA has more stringent requirement for pro mags than HWA (a SFWA pro mag has minimum circulation and frequency requirements to meet) but yes, you've got it right. If a magazine wants to be pro, they gotta pay 5 cents. They don't want to be pro? Cool, no problem. Semi-pro magazines like Space & Time and Talebones have been doing fine for a long time, and they get stories from SFWA and HWA Actives for every issue.

But if they want to be pro, they have to pay.

Are magazines going to collapse now? Well, magazines always collapse. Even with decent start-up capital, magazines are an incredibly risky proposition. The vast majority of horror mags have nothing other than sweat equity and the ease of desktop or web publishing going for them. This is one reason why, incidentally, it is a bad business decision to give a story away to a royalty-only anthology or a free market. By the time a story runs through all the pro mags and the prestigious semi-pros, there will likely be new magazines emerging and looking for material. The only constant in the SF/horror mag field is churn.

I mean, really, when is The Midnighters Club II: Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid coming out? Never, right? And yet, plenty of anthologies and other markets have rushed to fill the teensy hole left in the market.

Economies are ecologies. When markets fall new ones arise. The new ones arising now had already been orienting toward 5+ cent payouts. Part of why, as I mentioned, HWA increased its pro rate was in recognition of the already existing tendency to pay 5 cents a word. Let's face it: if a loser like you can afford to pay 3c a word, someone who actually wears an ironed shirt occasionally can likely afford 5c or more. And it's happening. You should be happy; something good is actually happening for writers.

But you're not happy. You overdeveloped ego will not let you be happy, not so long as it is someone other than you making those 5 cent sales. So you cast about for an enemy! First, HWA is raising barriers against those "craft"-oriented writers. When that doesn't fly, you weep crocodile tears for those poor poor publishers who are all going to have to live in barrels, or even worse, OHIO, now that they have to pay a few hundred bucks more a year for stories if they want to keep their pro status.

As far as the freebie markets, I'll be blunt. Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em right in the ear. All those so-called publishers and editors who "love the genre" and want to "help new writers" are morons at best and lying cretins at worst. They love the genre so much that they value the stories of the writers they publish at exactly zero. Meanwhile, all those people they don't love, like the local printer or Lightning Source or Lulu.com, or their webhosting service and server space...those folks get paid!

And exposure? When was the last time you saw a Cyber-Pulp anthology in a bookstore? Just this side of never. I live within ten miles of three different SF/F/H specialty stores (Borderlands, Dark Carnival, and Other Change of Hobbit) and even THEY don't carry Cyber-Pulp titles. Only one of them had a copy of Vivisections, the antho containing your last opus, Ron.

The same financial decisions that make it "impossible" for freebie markets to pay their writers also make it impossible for those markets to connect with an audience of any size. You may as well wheatpaste your manuscript over your "workspace" in the bus depot men's room if you really want exposure. More people will read it that way.

So what do you, in your bilious manboobery, end up defending, Ron? The people who, whether they mean to or not, take advantage of your egomania and ignorance to elevate themselves. They get to saunter around thinking that they're real-life publishers for a while, and when the bill comes due, they collapse and you look the fool.

And who do you attack? People who believe that the labor of writing deserves compensation, and make no mistake, both writers and publishers who pay believe this. When Omni folded, Ellen Datlow started Event Horizon and continued to pay top top rates. She easily could have gotten similar work for only 3 cents a word, but she new that writers deserve real money, so she made a go of it. If SciFiction told her tomorrow that she could keep her job and paycheck, but that from now on that job was to get original writing for free from her friends, she'd quit.

Btw, she was also for the 5c rate increase.

That's the sort of professional you attack in your little shit fits, Ron, and you decide to defend someone who publishes your story and makes you BUY a copy of the book in which your story appears.

You are what they call a "mark." A sucker. If you had any cash, you'd probably have bought some phone sex operator a car by now...





Thanks to johnaburks for snagging the post before Ron deleted it.