I’m a member of the Horror Writers Association. I don’t get much out of my membership, particularly since I pretty much quit going to the message board. Why? Because of the elitist attitude of many members. No. Scratch that. Of a few members with big egos and a need to dump on people.
The HWA recently changed its policies to reflect a more rigid definition of professional pay. That’s fine. But certain members of the organization feel compelled to ridicule people who choose to publish in venues that don’t meet the HWA’s standards of a pro market. Because of the vicious attacks — which I think show a much greater lack of professionalism than that displayed by members giving stories to royalty-only anthologies — I’ve been staying away from the HWA. Instead, I’ve been spending most of my message board time at Shocklines.
But every once in a while the HWA shit spills over to there, too. This is really funny because Matt, the owner of Shocklines, left HWA in good part because of the in-fighting about professional standards and the attitudes of the attack squad. But, because he’s a decent, fair-minded guy, Matt’ll let people bicker on his board when they should take it back to HWA.
Such was the case today. A certain publisher who espouses HWA standards — but who doesn’t live up to them, according to some of his own authors — was needling a poster for promoting Cyber-Pulp’s Halloween 3.0 anthology. The HWA loudmouths have mostly moved on from constantly attacking Publish America to making Cyber-Pulp the devil publisher. So, this poster, Freezenerve, runs another message board, but cross posts to Shocklines. Freezenerve runs a forum of book discussions and will post a message at Shocklines inviting people to come to his board, Wicked Carnival, to rate and discuss certain titles. In his post he puts the book cover and a link. Been doing it for a while with a variety of books from different publishers and nobody’s criticized him for it.
Today I go to Shocklines and find this other publisher asking why that post inviting discussion of Cyber-Pulp’s anthology is relevant. So far he hasn’t replied to tell his real meaning, but based on past posts and his needling in this thread it’s obvious this publisher is wanting to kickstart the demonization of Cyber-Pulp again. CP’s anthos are royalty-only, meaning the authors only get paid when and if the book makes money. Most royalty-only anthos don’t make much, if any, money for the authors. Ideally, this isn’t the best way to reach pro status, but despite what HWA’s attack squad says, it is the way most new authors start out and move up.
Anyway, it just gripes the hell out of me that the attack squad, most of whom live on the East Coast (and no, I won’t give them the publicity of naming them here), constantly go after these publishers and the authors who find an outlet through them. They don’t like? So what. It doesn’t hurt them if Joe Blow gives away a story. And if the anthologies are as bad as they say, it won’t hurt their book sales because nobody will want the antho. Get over it.
I just want to scream at those people to shut the hell up. But, I choose to continue to abide by the advice given to me by a pro who left HWA. I just keep my own mouth shut and my fingers still because of the lurkers on those boards, some of whom are editors who actually do pay their authors but who remember the names of people involved in the unprofessional fighting. Well, except for here. I’ll say what I want here.
This isn’t even what I wanted to write about today. Maybe I’ll get to that later. It’s just a work rant.
Steven E. Wedel 
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