This TikTok from Victoria Schwab is fucking hilarious. She got agented and a book contract while still in college, got published by Disney, got dropped, was immediately picked up by Tor and has known nothing but success since. To watch this thing you'd think she was eating uncooked ramen while living in a shed next to an interstate, persevering for her big break.
Weird because she could legitimately point to her work ethic, stuff like that.
Late and Gay, and probably re-hashing what
@Three Gorillion Dollars and
@Boston Brand have said but the "struggling writer" persona is the only one that doesn't attract a zerg-rush of envy and knee-chopping from an audience just waiting for the slightest chance to bring a successful author down.
Like the shitty Lightlark writer who had already been published twice for MG little more than a year earlier, making TikToks about how she never could believe any publisher would want little ol' her and her little ol' YA manuscript. Getting interviewed on TV about her wonderful luck at going viral on TikTok (leaving out the bit that her millionare family run a viral TikTok marketing business) really put a big crack in the whole edifice. I actually think this is some attempt at damage control on behalf of other YA authors in the same boat.
It's basically marketing. I know a writer who makes a lot of money from their books but always presents themselves as a starving artist who fawns over any attention and implores people to support them so they don't go hungry. It's rather disgusting.
Uh, pure sociopathy by that point.
Don't buy that act from Victoria Schwab for a minute. There's a reason you're seeing her everywhere now: After a year of Tor offering every lady with a bad die job and a liberal arts degree a book deal, she's the first to actually sell enough books to justify the advance.
Granted, she's white, so Tor won't buy her a Hugo, but after a decade of losing money in the diversity push, she's the first one to actually become an earner for the company.
I have a writer-friend who is not white but is fairly new to the scene and is yet to start submitting their books to publishers. I've been warning them about over-reliance on using identity as a tactical entry man-ram through the publishing gate. Yes, being (Mon Calamari) when there's not a lot of Mon Cala authors out there might get you a foot in the door with these publishers, but if there's no fucking substance to your story, the novelty wears off really quick. To put it simply: It's A Trap!
That's funny, I just read "The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue" by her, I didn't know anything about her or her other books before that, I just randomly picked it up because it sounded interesting. And then I saw the most insane top review on Goodreads.
(snip) I cannot imagine that anyone would say anything similar to a non-white author.
VS's had a few issues of critics coming for her, but she's untouchable now, as she's ascended out of YA Genre and into Literary Bookclub.
I'm pretty antisocial and misogynistic at the best of times, but when all I see are women and trannies in writing groups, leading cons and in positions of power, it just makes the revulsion I feel even worse. Even the men in the industry bitch like women and trannies. You've got to be a bit fucked in the head to be creative, but jesus can we have decent role models that aren't retarded on twitter or mormon?
What I'd really like to do is create an all male group that's curated for not being a tranny or dickhead, like a men's shed for creative writing.
I know a few guys do this, they keep it fairly quiet though. I gotta say that when it comes to organising big public-facing social things like conventions the unsexy admin side has pretty much always been women's work. (Star Trek is the big example of media conventions, I think prior to that, the Hugos and others existed more on a club level) Men
tend to enjoy smaller, more curatorial events (this is probably all a huge generalisation but I have noticed how hard the female members of writing and fandom lean into "getting everyone together.")
So genuine question to the people in the industry like
@Boston Brand, what are the publishers' stance on AI and what is their current plan about it for now and in the future?
Well AFAIK Amazon has cut book uploads to three a day because of it. We have yet to have an AI work that has gone under the radar to a proper publisher though, it's so obvious if something has been AI generated. You see it in AI written articles where the AI has to recursively reference the "prompt" every once in a while and keeps repeating the same phrase.
