Jackie Barbosa

Okay, you tired of the RWA brouhaha? Me, too. Definitely time to give some other folks what-for!

I didn’t have a topic for today, however, until I heard that South Carolina Governor John Sanford, after being “missing” for several days, then reportedly hiking in the Appalachian Mountains, and then reportedly hiking in Argentina, admitted he’s been having an affair with an Argentinian woman for the last year. This, of course, comes on the heels of the admission of “family-values-lovin’” Republican Senator John Ensign’s affair. The list of other straying politicians is, of course, legion, and includes plenty of Democrats as well as Republicans.

Okay, so, here’s the thing. It’s not really that I care that much whether a politician is getting a little on the side. I mean, from a practical point of view, I don’t see that a politician’s marital fidelity has much bearing his effectiveness as a legislator/executive. It might make him (or her) a total jerk and a lying asshole, but it doesn’t make the person incapable of doing his job.

That said, I do care when the politician in question espouses holier-than-thou positions about morality and values, and then goes out and violates them withough, apparently, the slightest attack of conscience. That’s what’s always gotten to me with the various Republican bigwigs who’ve been caught in extramarital shenanigans; they want the rest of us to live up to standards they themselves cannot adhere to.

Even worse than the politicians, though, are the wives who stand beside them while they confess their sins and apologize to all they’ve “let down” with their behavior. (Actually, I think the only thing they’re sorry for is that they’ve been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.) I threw up a little in my mouth watching Eliot Spitzer’s long-suffering wife make sympathetic eyes at him during the news conference when he announced his resignation, and I couldn’t even bring myself to read the reports after John and Elizabeth Edwards were on Oprah.

So, I’m laying it on the line for the ladies. If your husband cheats on you and you stick with him, that’s your decision. But do NOT expect my sympathy for how you’ve been wronged. Because honestly, if you don’t pitch his sorry ass to the curb, as far as I’m concerned, you either don’t think you’ve been wronged or you don’t care that much. You’ve basically given him tacit approval to do it again…and again…and again. And chances are pretty good, he will.

Yeah, I’m talking to you, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And yanno, staying with the rat bastard was probably in your best interests. It’s just that I think you cared a lot more about becoming President than you did about where he puts his junk, so please don’t pretend otherwise.

Just sayin…WTF?

And I’m out!

P.S. I still love Bill Clinton. I know it is wrong, but…I can’t stop. Probably some sort of disease…

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Today, I just heard that Twitter appears to be imposing per hour Tweet limits of 50 per hour per account, even though the API limit is 100 per hour. (If you have less than 100 followers, I gather you are classified as a “small” account and only get 20 per hour.) If you exceed your 50 or 20 per hour limit, you get placed in the equivalent of TwitterLimbo, unable to send through any new Tweets for at least two hours.

WTF?

Okay, I get that there are a fair number of Twitter spammers out there (although I’ve been blessed to encounter relatively few true spam messages through Twitter). I also know that Twitter gets overloaded from time to time and goes down because too many people are sending too many messages all at once. So I understand, in principle, the TwitterGods desire to prevent such problems by tamping down on the number of Tweets that come through on an hourly basis.

The problem is that such limitations, while they may reduce annoyances and downtime, fail to recognize Twitter for what it is–or at least, what it has become. I’m not sure the creators of Twitter fully appreciated what they were creating when they invented it. If you read their introduction to Twitter on the login page, it says:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Oh Twitter, how little thou know thyself!

Those who don’t Twitter or who only use the function sporadically might be forgiven for believing this, and I know for a fact that my husband doesn’t “get” Twitter because he doesn’t understand how much more it is. And I have to admit, I resisted joining for months because I couldn’t figure out why it would be better than chatting with my buds in Yahoo IM.

Honestly, it didn’t take me more than a week to understand. Twitter’s power is in the end user’s ability to follow and interact with a network of people who share common interests in something very close to real time (especially if you use an API like TweetDeck which updates the feed automatically). True, you’re limited to 140 characters, but it’s amazing how complex a conversation you can carry on with a dozen or more people at once despite having to keep your statements brief and pithy. I’ve learned so much from my Twitter network in the month or so since I’ve joined, and have (I like to think) made many new friendships as well as strengthened existing ones.

So, given that I think the entire purpose of Twitter is to let people talk to each other and create new social networks by doing so, it’s obvious why I think limiting how much people can talk is counter to the very soul of what makes Twitter so much fun and so successful.

But it gets worse. Because I think that one of the reasons the TwitterGods are clamping down and creating limits is because Twitter is getting too big for its own infrastructure. And one of the reasons it’s getting too big is that there is so much media “buzz” around Twitter. I keep hearing in the news about Twitter. About how all companies will eventually “have to” join Twitter to market their products and respond to negative marketing news that comes through the Twitterverse (#amazonfail, anyone)? In the past two weeks, I can think of dozens of references to Twitter and its “power” as a corporate tool (including at least one report in which someone said GM should Twitter to help it recover from bankruptcy).

Okay, media, guess what? I don’t follow companies on Twitter. I don’t want to follow companies. I follow people. And if corporate marketing becomes the primary focus of Twitter, I’m out.

So please, for the love of all that is holy and Twitterific, restore our Tweet limits to their original, glorious 100 per hour and upgrade whatever you need to in the underlying software to make that work. And remember the prime directive–Twitter isn’t about promotion or marketing or sales; it’s about PEOPLE!

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When Amie Stuart suggested WTF Wednesday as a title for a regular feature (I had just invented yesterday’s TV Tuesday), I thought it was a fun idea and figured I’d use the space to discuss weird things that just make you go “WTF?” Then I got the June issue of Romance Writer’s Report (RWR), the monthly magazine published by Romance Writers of America and distributed to its members. And at the very front of this issue, there was another letter from the president, Diane Pershing, that made me (for the umpteenth time) say “WTF?”

Now, for those of you who don’t follow RWA, there is a lot of history here, and for the sake of length, I’m not going to rehash it all. Suffice it to say that RWA has had a rocky relationship with epublishers and epublished authors for quite a long time now, and this latest foray isn’t going to improve things.

To understand the letter, you have to know that RWA made the decision this year not to allow any publisher that doesn’t pay a minimum advance (the threshhold being the $1,000 in advance/royalty required for entry into PAN, the organization’s Published Author Network) to take pitches or deliver session content at the National conference in July. These publishers are still welcome to send people to the conference (i.e., give RWA their money), but they are not permitted to actually disseminate information about what they have to offer in any meaningful or useful way. Ms. Pershing’s letter was an attempt to explain RWA’s rationale for this decision, but far from mending any fences or making a really solid case, she managed instead to push pretty much every one of my buttons on this subject.

The thing is, I think it is safe to say that I do not wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to the merits of epublishing. Just a week or two ago, I posted my article, The Perils–and Pleasures–of Epublishing, and the “perils” portion is probably four or five times longer than the “pleasures.” After that, I hardly think I can be accused of being a blind cheerleader for the epublishing industry.

Notwithstanding, the patronizing tone of Ms. Pershing’s letter irked me from the outset, but my head hit the ceiling and my jaw hit the floor when I got to this passage:

So, back to RWA and its focus on the entire membership. At present, it is to the advantage of the publisher alone to not offer advances or a guaranteed minimum per author. It is not to the advantage of most of its individual members, and it is, most assuredly, not beneficial to the RWA general membership, as a whole…

Now, perhaps I am overinterpreting, but to me, this says that any author who accepts a contract from a publisher that doesn’t pay a minimum advance is doing harm to other members of RWA. It says that because I am willing to publish something without a guaranteed minimum payment, I am making it harder for other authors to get decent payment in the future. And for the record, I think that is bubkiss. As long as I am fully aware of what I’m doing, my decision doesn’t affect anyone except me, and it may be to my advantage as a career-focused writer to do it.

Case in point, obviously, is the first manuscript I ever had published, Carnally Ever After. I’ve already explained in my First Sale column over at Dear Author last week how the sale of that short novella led to my first sale to a royalty-paying New York publisher. Granted, I haven’t earned anywhere near a PAN-eligible advance on that story, but SO WHAT? The story is under 15,000 words; I couldn’t have submitted for PAN membership with it anyway. And while none of the novellas I’ve published since at Cobblestone have earned the PAN-eligible minimum either, put all together, I never expected them to and understood exactly how much I was selling them for (a guarantee of $0 but a likely return of more than if I didn’t publish them at all!) going in. This does not make me a stupid author. And it does not hurt other RWA members.

What does hurt RWA’s members is the persistent Jekyll and Hyde attitude of the organization toward epublishers. If it’s really RWA’s mission to assure that authors get paid what it thinks is a reasonable minimum for every book, then that’s the only model of publishing it should recognize as valid. That means publishers that don’t do so would not only be cut out of formal events at the national conference, but would not be recognized by RWA as “legitimate” in any other way. That means no more First Sale announcements in RWR for authors who’ve sold to a non-advance paying epress, no pink ribbons for those authors at the conference, and no PAN eligibility based on royalties (an author could earn $100k in royalties on a book, but if there was no advance paid, it wouldn’t count).

But what we have right now is a crazy mish-mash of “come here, come here” and “get away, get away” directed toward epublishers and epubbed authors. RWA wants the membership dues of those epubbed authors, make no mistake. It doesn’t want to offend those authors by telling them outright that their publishers are not legitimate. So it wiggles around the issue and ultimately ties itself up in knots trying to defend the indefensible.

Because it is indefensible to say that those who choose to publish without a minimum advance payment are uneducated (which Ms. Pershing’s letter clearly implies) and then not provide a forum in which to provide the education those authors need to make an informed decision. RWA can’t solve the problem of fly-by-night publishers who take advantage of authors by hiding an entire segment of the publishing market from its members. The only way for authors to decide whether it is in the best interest of their careers to publish without an advance is to have a clear-eyed understanding of the business model and what it can and can’t guarantee. Then it’s the author’s decision as to whether that publishing model is best for her book and her career–and she can do that without causing harm to other members.

I could go on and on and on about how, if RWA thinks a guaranteed income sufficient to support a “career” in writing is so important, its current $1k threshhold is laughable, but this is already over 1,000 words and I’ve made my point. Please, have at it in the comments. I’m all ears–er, eyes–to your thoughts on the subject.

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