Former bookseller here who dealt with many local authors for both events and consignment. Do not start with "local author" because 90% of "local authors" are the worst kind of kook.

"I have a memoir out from The Ohio State University Press" is a much stronger opener.

https://twitter.com/GraceLP/status/1810014279531458590

"Local authors" are often religious kooks, self-published authors with no idea how books should be discounted, with covers made by some relative who has never seen a book before, with trim sizes and prices dictated by holy angels instead of the marketplace etc etc.

I see there's a new round of "Don't call a boycott to support an organizing campaign if the union doesn't" discourse on Twitter and I guess I'll need to explain again that this is actually wrong.

A boycott may or may not be a good idea. Organizers are NOT always right. Union organizers are not always right because sometimes they are business unionists and are looking to limit rank and file power for various reasons.

Unions have made reactionary demands, issued racist and anti-immigrant slogans, etc. and do NOT always work in member interest.

It's that time again: please note that it is very difficult to donate books to a public library, but simplicity itself to ask a public library to purchase a book. Donated titles are a. 95% from lunatics, The Truth from various Sons and Daughters of God, illiterate ranting, or other bullshit that nobody wants.

Even if you're in the 5%, you're not in the 5%, because you are trying to donate a book!

Hello, new followers! My tragic writer story is that my book THE SECOND SHOOTER faced several shipping delays due to supply chain issues and is thus carried in Barnes & Noble nor Waterstones despite rave reviews in the Times of London and Washington Post.

thetimes.co.uk/article/the-be… Here's the Post review:

washingtonpost.com/books/2022/02/…

It's MFA program acceptance season, so here are a few notes for those who have applied:

1. Unless you're going to a top school that attracts agents to campus, you could have just gotten a library card. 2. Teaching will involve a school one or more levels lower than the reputation of the school from which you graduate. For most MFA programs, this means your local community college is the best bet.

It's hard to locate a list of best-selling literary fiction because bestseller lists are usually dominated by thrillers, but this might be a decent snapshot given the hegemony of PRH. What is literary fiction about? Affairs?

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/best-sel… #1 historical fiction about fringe religious leader, paginated backward for fun.

Everyone hates this answer, but here it is:

Except for important titles, publishers don't engage in particular marketing strategies or activities for specific books. They sell via book-type.

Further, this is a good thing.

https://twitter.com/kl_pearson/status/1443189168138502150

If you like books, you need to get down on your knees right now and thank Lord Jesus for the fact that publishers don't put effort into marketing individual titles, as the end result of that would only be many fewer books.

Things I must explain to workshop students very often:

1. Those song lyrics may be very expensive to reproduce in your story, and ninety percent of readers won't hear the tune in their heads when they read. 2. There is no such thing as a "spoiler" in a workshop setting.

Bad reply guy habits.

1. Replying to a tweet that mentions a famous person to explain why the famous person was bad. 2. Tagging a third party in reply to a question or request in order to volunteer their expertise.

If a writer doesn't start from the perspective of maximizing expressive freedom, they'll almost certainly end up siding with oppression sooner or later.

It doesn't matter what the details of a text are. Expression is a principle, not something decided on a case by case basis. At the risk of getting extremely weird, there's a long prayer, not often chanted, basically designed to get souls of the dead out of the bad experience of Hades.

Florida's barring the teaching of critical race theory in public schools reminds of when I was writing problems for a Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test prep program. I wrote a bunch of reading comp questions for the 3rd grade test and was asked "Where did you go to school?" I said, "Brooklyn, the 70s and 80s."

And my supervisor said, "Ah, that explains it. These questions are too hard for Florida. Think about your first grade class in New York. That's the equivalent of entering fourth grade here in Florida."

Pretty odd to see a lot of people telling a small press publisher about the importance of content warnings when the overwhelming majority of publishing doesn't put content warnings on their books.

And I guarantee that despite concerns about trauma, warnings will harm books. Leaving aside the sheer fact that warnings are a psychotherapeutic tool and copywriters/editors/authors are generally speaking entirely untrained in psychology, such warnings will only become a marketing tool, just as film and music and vide game ratings are.

So a lot of people on Twitter are dumb, I guess, or just quickly got used to thinking they could start their own TV network or newspaper with a click of a button.

The Internet may well be "the new Town Square", but you're not supposed to schedule your political murders in it. Are you planning secret crazy radical things? What do you think old revolutionary leaflets and posters and newspapers were printed on, or with? Poor equipment, amateur-grade stuff, distributed surreptitiously via meetings and mail order (and often censored that way).

One reason it really is difficult for some to wrap their heads around why it's fine that Trump is banned from Twitter is because "a private company can do what it wants" is an unsatisfying answer. And it really is unsatisfying, but it is also not the actual reason why it's fine. The reason why it is fine is basic to cybernetics: the most unstable element of any system has the most influence over the system. Not control necessarily, but influence.

Am I concerned about Twitter banning the President? No, because I've been online since I was 17 years old. Any venue too haphazardly moderated—either too strictly or too loosely—grows unstable and collapses.

So what if Twitter is Too Big. So was MySpace, Livejournal, Usenet... Did Twitter make a mistake? I don't think so. Its primary concern is that its HQ is here in the US and frankly the Reps are more likely to drop the hammer on social media than the Dems, especially if the Reps can ignore election results.

1. There are maybe 3000 people in the English-speaking world for whom this matters, but I will now describe why "selecting the best stories" or "excellence is my only criterion" is a foolish way to edit a short fiction magazine or anthology, whether of originals or reprints. 2. It's foolish, and is foolish even if one is very skeptical of the idea of curating and editing with an eye toward demographic diversity in tables of contents. I'm not skeptical of this at all, btw.

1. All right, here's something to consider in discussions of copyright, piracy, and the like.

Copyright is a site of struggle, and the state, particularly the courts, has an instrumentalist function. 2. There is nothing "natural" about copyright, but clearly some level of copyright is useful for encouraging cultural production. It's actually a fairly low level—people create all sorts of things for personal reasons.

For cultural DISTRIBUTION, though...

I use a website that connects writers—mostly people who wish to self-publish their work, rather than people who aspire to commercial publication—with editors.

I get many requests, then the offer I make is almost inevitably turned down, because my offer is to actually edit. Many of the clients say that their work has already been edited once or even twice, but they want another pair of eyes on the manuscript before they upload it to the Kindle story. They send a small sample of the work. It is invariably—INVARIABLY—garbage.

So what is the difference between literary and genre fiction?

A thread. As both literary fiction and genre fiction are products of mass culture, it makes little sense to describe the categories by examining the attributes of the members of the categories. There are too many and thus too many exceptions.

1. This was on my mind all day—a thread.

ejroller.com/2018/10/25/my-… 2. The essential question is "What advice would you give to working-class/poor young people interested in an arts career?" and basically she doesn't really know what to say about it. There are reasons for this. But I have plenty to say!

1. I am beyond excited to have been invited to a small FB group about radical politics and art—a thread. 2. The specifics of the group do not matter. What I'd like to discuss is what does matter "at the current juncture." AtCJ is a term of art in radical politics.