Writer's Grove

The Disclaimer

If you’re an aspiring author, perhaps (I hope!) you are already aware that you should never, ever pay an agent or a publisher to be published. The way the business works is, legit publishers pay you; therefore, anyone offering to get you represented, published, or copyrighted “for a small fee” is a Dishonest Hole of an Unsanitary Nature.

Alas! We live in a world full of such Dishonest Holes—people willing to prey on other people’s dreams and laugh about it—or, in one case, get angry about it when they’re called out. Writer Beware and Absolute Write, both excellent resources that I highly recommend, have been targeted by a website called The Write Agenda. (I’m not linking to it because Dishonest Holes deserve no traffic.) Since The Write Agenda is anonymously operated, poorly spelled, and they are attacking/boycotting authors who are legitimately trying to help aspiring writers avoid scam artists, it’s pretty clear that The Write Agenda is a front for those same scam artists. We at The League of Reluctant Adults expressed our outrage that we weren’t boycotted too—because we are all proud to stand beside John Scalzi, Victoria Strauss, Jim Macdonald, et al. in their fight against Anonymous Dishonest Holes. That was on Oct. 7. I pulled out my big guns and called them cockwaffles.

The response of the cockwaffles has been to put me and some other authors on their brand-new “Recommended Authors” list. All of the authors are sci-fi/fantasy, and while I haven’t checked, I’d be willing to bet that all of them either commented on the League post of Oct. 7 or otherwise annoyed the cockwaffles with blog posts of their own. Ha! Aren’t they clever, recommending us instead of boycotting us? Whatever.

Now, part of me wants to respond precisely the way my fellow author Ari Marmell did. But he did it extremely well and I’m not sure I can say it any better. So I will confine myself to saying one obvious thing and one perhaps not-so-obvious thing:

1. Obviously, I do not want to be one of The Write Agenda’s “Recommended Authors,” because I despise everything they stand for.
2. Their use of Amazon sales rankings as if they actually mean anything demonstrates that they a) either don’t know jack about how publishing really works, or b) are assuming you don’t know jack about it, and regardless of which is true, you can’t trust a damned thing they say.