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Dear Author: Jane Litte Reveals She's NA Author Jen Frederick

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Dear Author • Jane Litte • Jen Frederick
Yesterday, Jane Litte revealed on Dear Author that she was New Adult romance author Jen Frederick. The reaction has not been universal love, however.
The post comes on the heels of being deposed in the Ellora’s Cave lawsuit, with the implication that she’s letting the word out because it came up in the deposition, and controlling how the word gets out. (I have no problem with controlling how the word gets out.)
There was some backlash, perhaps best stated in this post (and its comments) on The Passive Voice:

Now that I know better, I make sure that, if I vent at all about anything industry or book related, I vent to trusted friends and colleagues and in loops with other authors. In those private loops (and yes, I’m aware nothing online is ever truly private) likeminded authors speak more freely. Because you have to understand, we don’t have an after work softball team, or a water cooler, or a birthday cake for Sally on Tuesday where we get to bitch about old Mr. Jennings and how he’s really busting our hump at work that day.
We just have each other and those loops. Most of us never see another author face to face more than once or twice in a given year, if that.
In those loops, we talk industry and strategy and marketing and pricing and trends and hard sales numbers. We talk about the writing process and how hard it can be sometimes, and acknowledge that the muse doesn’t necessarily pepper our dreams with glittery ideas for bestsellers and that it’s a freaking GRIND sometimes, or how we just HATE our current manuscript and are terrified our readers will hate it too, and what a struggle it’s been, and yes, some authors talk reviews. It’s the place that we get to speak freely and treat our business like exactly that. A for profit business. A place where we don’t have to wear our public hat that, by necessity, requires us to stifle ourselves to some degree or risk ostracizing our readership. A place where we take our bra off and stretch for a minute with other braless writer-types. Not that I’m pretending to be someone else on open social media, but there are definitely things I say to authors in “private” that would pull back the curtain, so to speak, in a way that would make me uncomfortable in public, not unlike a school teacher talking politics on Facebook or something.
Imagine my surprise, then, to realize that Jane is on more than one of these loops with me as Jen Frederick. I find myself…not okay with that.

As an author who’s been on some of those “among author” conversations, and as an author who’s also had a different role (convention runner) in the greater fandom, here’s what concerns me:
How much of what was posted on The Curious Case post was told in Jane Litte’s hearing vs. Jen Frederick’s?
As an author talking privately to other authors, I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories, like the agent who spikes a book, the solicited manuscript that winds up sitting in the editorial office for years, the (now former) editor dissing an author behind his back.
As a convention runner, I hear different things, like who has a restraining order against whom, who will (or will not) speak with whom, and who will or will not get in an elevator with whom (for real).
Running this series of posts about the EC v. DA lawsuit, I’ve heard enough privately that I believe that Jane Litte’s claims in her Curious post were substantially true.
But…now that I know the two people are the same, I have to admit that a lot of what I read on the Curious Case post sounds like the kind of thing authors would say privately to other authors.
Not that this makes the underlying claims seem less legitimate; quite the contrary. But I wonder how much of the information was intended to be public, and how much of it was things the authors would rather not have to back up in public in the resulting court case.

Does this Change How I Feel About the Dear Author Case?

In short, no. The case always seemed like it was intended to bully those who spoke out—whether intentionally or not—and I’m just as opposed to that as I always have been.
Also, I’ve been around the lawsuit-watching rodeo myself, and I’m aware that generally neither party looks very good when all is said and done. I had no expectations this case would be different.
One commenter on the TPV post said she’d have felt differently about donating to the legal defense fund if she’d known Jane had a book deal and a movie deal pending. I can speak to this as someone who’s had a movie deal before (that didn’t turn into an actual movie):

  1. Jane did say she had twenty grand to contribute to her defense. That’s possibly where it came from.
  2. The movie deal in question was probably an option, which pay very little money until the movie is actually ready to produce. Far less than twenty grand. I wouldn’t be shocked if we’re talking on the order of $1,000-5,000.
  3. Book deals aren’t a bunch of money all at once, particularly not for a relatively new author like Jen Frederick, even with a better-known co-author.

I think the free speech issues are larger than how I feel about Jane Litte/Jen Frederick. Or Ellora’s Cave, for that matter.

On the Other Hand

Because Jane Litte has recommended some NA books I’ve loved (e.g., Sarina Bowen’s [popup_product]The Year We Fell Down[/popup_product]), I figured I’d probably like her books. So I picked up the first one (which is free, btw), and I’ll read it when I get around to that part of my TBR pile. However, I’ll not link to it here.

A Requires Hate Update

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delphinium-700
I posted something in November in haste, and I regret breaking one of my own rules in doing so.
That rule is: rely on your own research when calling people out.
Another thing I’ve become aware of since the Marion Zimmer Bradley story: I actually have a significant platform and need to be careful how I wield it.
Further, we were on sippy cup internet that week (like GPRS every once in a while) and, by the time we got back to normal internet, much of the context was already lost. So it wasn’t that easy to go back and see what happened.
Then a writer of color linked to a piece on the subject that made me think I’d been backing the wrong horse. But it needed research and I was sick, so I put it off. Sadly, that piece has since disappeared, as has another piece it pointed to.
I then added an update to this original post, but didn’t amplify it further, because I wasn’t sure what to say.
So I’m left with a gnarly mess where most of what I really need in order to get the big picture—is incomplete and temporally inconvenient.

Then I Got Called Out on Twitter

First, let me say this: it’s always appropriate to call me out. I’m pointed and direct, so that can be intimidating, but I will always respect it.
So:

  1. I should not have jumped to conclusions based on a single source.

  2. It’s one thing posting things one’s unfamiliar with if they happen to be objective fact, but quite another when it’s not.

  3. I should know better after STGRB in particular that sometimes groups have ironic names.

  4. In general, I try to stay out of drawing conclusions based on what people are have alleged to have done, and instead try to focus on what happened. I didn’t do that, either.

I’m left with the distinctly discomfiting feeling that I should know more about what happened than I do.
I apologize to all I’ve hurt in this, directly and indirectly.

Update: Some Points of Clarification

  1. I didn’t mean to imply that Laura Mixon relied solely on one source. I meant that I had.

  2. This is not a recanting of my prior post. This is an, “I feel an obligation to look into this further because I posted about it in haste and therefore have a duty to the subject matter. And people.” Please don’t assume I’m taking a particular side. I’m simply going to do what I should have done before posting: look and listen.

  3. My usual way of working when there are disparate stories is to start from the position that all people are telling the truth as they know it, and that disparities of information are a part of almost all conflict.

  4. This is big and gnarly and I have a chronic spoon shortage. I may be at this for quite some time, and I’m not starting on it for two weeks.

  5. I believe that pseudonymous and anonymous speech are important, but I believe they can (and should) have limits, too. (Here are some recent US court rulings on anonymous speech.)

  6. I don’t know that I can be impartial (ever, not just in this situation), but I always try to be fair.

  7. To the extent possible, I’ll rely on first-hand information.

(There’s more I wanted to say, but I’m just amazingly tired and in pain, and I need sleep too badly.)
If you wish to comment anonymously here, others have used an email address of anon@anon.com. It’s always moderated, and moderation may take a day or two over the next couple of weeks. Obviously, I get your IP address, but I have no intention of using it.

H. M. Ward Asks Fans How They Want New Book Notifications

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H. M. Ward Asks Fans How They Want New Book Notifications pie chart
There’s no doubt that H. M. Ward is an indie writer sensation. She’s sold six million books over the last three years. I previously blogged about H. M. Ward and some other favorite new adult romance books if you’re interested.
One of the first things I noticed about her books was her offer in the front matter: text a number to get new book release notifications. I’ve never seen anyone else do that. (Note: sending a text to that number gets a return text asking for an email address, so she’s not delivering book release notifications by text. Not yet, anyway.)
And I thought it was strange. Seriously? A text message?
But…many of us aren’t phone people. And some people are mostly phone people.
I should have realized something.

H. M. Ward Knows How to Reach Her Fans

Her model is unusual. While traditional publishing often has longer lead times, Holly’s lead time is super short. She finishes the book, it goes through editing, typically the cover has long been designed, and then it goes to beta readers. There are usually only a handful of days between the beta reader call and final release.
Because of that, the traditional pre-order model doesn’t work for her.
Amazon’s terms, for example:

Your final version must be uploaded at least 10 days before the release date you set, with the last day for upload starting at midnight, U.S. Eastern time. For example, if you were releasing a book on September 20, you would need to upload it before midnight Eastern time on September 9.

Recognizing that readers don’t want to wait ten days just so they can pre-order a book, Holly does live launches.
Her books are often uploaded at odd hours, and then take some hours to churn through the review systems at Amazon, iBooks, et al.
And her fans, myself included, we’re rabid when it comes to wanting that next book at the first possible second.

The Results I found Interesting

I would never have guessed that so many of H. M. Ward’s fans would have preferred to be notified by text message. In quite a few cases, fans said they would love to get a text message, but they can’t because they’re outside the United States. (I counted these under email, however.)
As writers (and, really, anyone in marketing), we’re often told that “the money is in the list,” meaning: the e-mail list.
No one ever seems to talk about a text message list.
Yet, clearly, Holly’s strategy shows that maybe we’ve been missing something all along.

Laura J. Mixon on Requires Hate

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For those who don’t know, Requires Hate was a book reviewer—of sorts. And so much more. Laura J. Mixon analyzes.
In many other situations book reviewers are simply and only book reviewers, e.g., this review and set of progress comments from Blythe that led to Kathleen Hale’s self-admitted stalking, leading to the #HaleNo backlash.
Here’s RHB’s MO:

Using one of her pseudonyms, RHB begins chatter about a writer or a social-justice topic on her blog, a forum such as LiveJournal, or on Twitter. She uses increasingly obscene and insulting language against her target(s). This is done to goad the target (or their supporters, or a particular community) into responding sharply. In their responses RHB finds words or phrases she can re-cast as misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or colonialist (sometimes they actually are those things, but for her purposes it doesn’t matter).
For instance, rachelmanija, a commenter on the Livejournal community 50 Books POC, told Requires Hate (as Winterfox) that it was inappropriate to call Chinese-American author Cindy Pon a “stupid fuck.” Rachelmanija added that the standards at 50 Books POC were different from those of 4chan (a community where anything goes). In response, Requires Hate accused rachelmanija of being racist and implying that Winterfox was a Nazi, because 4chan was a cesspit of Nazis and white supremacists.
Often RHB will then begin to pursue the person she has decided to target, issuing multiple vituperative posts or death threats on blogs they frequent, and/or on Twitter, and/or in the online forum where she first targeted them. She then erases—at the very least—the most violent and abusive comments and posts, leaving the target reeling but with no visible proof that the threat occurred. Often, she deletes everything. Therefore not many screencaps of her worst abuses exist.
However, I received numerous screencaps that had been recovered by her targets or witnesses, and I was also able to obtain copies of a portion of RHB’s now-deleted content via The Wayback Machine. In addition, I received independent emails from both targets and witnesses confirming the substance of the death, rape, maiming, and dismemberment threats RHB has been accused of.

I believe reviews are sacrosanct. However, I believe stalking and threats are not.
Much like Kathleen Hale, Requires Hate is a case where she was doing the stalking, then ironically accusing the other party of doing so.
As Mixon documents, her targets have been largely of color and women, two groups that are already under-represented.
Therefore, as far as award consideration goes, Benjanun Sriduangkaew unfortunately goes in the Sin Bin along with a handful of others. I won’t nominate for awards, and the Sin Binners will be the last I read for award consideration (and not just in that category; on the entire ballot). I still believe the work stands alone, so if I genuinely think it ranks first, that’s where I’ll vote it. That’s never happened so far, though.

Our genre has always had a soft spot for sharp-tongued souls. The person who speaks embarrassing truths has an honored—if discomfiting—place at the dinner table, in our SFF Island of Misfit Toys.

I honor such people (and in fact am one of them)—but only up to a point.

Update

At one point, I read a post about the Requires Hate controversy from the perspective of a writer or reader of color, and it was interesting, and, after reading it, I felt guilty linking to the above without also amplifying a voice of color’s perspective on it. I was traveling at the time, and I appear not to have saved the link. (I remember it being tweeted by Naamen Tilahun, but attempts to look at his Twitter stream don’t go back far enough.)
However, I found this thoughtful post from K. Tempest Bradford, so I’m linking to that, as it brings up one of the points I’d been feeling guilty about with respect to this specific controversy.
In general, I have not been receipt gathering. I value the people who do that work, it’s just not something I think to do. But I shouldn’t have piled on without digging deeper, either. I try to do my own research, and when I can’t, I try to limit my commentary to the part of a controversy I actually understand. This is a case where I exceeded that. I think it’s valuable for me to preserve what I originally wrote, but also valuable for me to fess up.

Eugie Foster, RIP

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It was just under a year ago that Eugie Foster broke open a dam with her plea for people to buy her work, but not the Norilana editions. She was fighting cancer, an aggressive form.
Unfortunately, the treatments she’s gotten, including radiation, several courses of chemo, and stem cell therapy, weren’t enough to save her life.
Sadly, she died today.
If you don’t know Eugie’s work, she was an amazing writer with a Nebula award and a hundred-ish publishing credits to her name. Link below.
Her last published story is, “When it Ends, He Catches Her,” published in Daily Science Fiction.

A Note from Her Husband

Matthew M. Foster said:

Eugie Foster, author, editor, wife, died on September 27th of respiratory failure at Emory University in Atlanta.
In her forty-two years, Eugie lived three lifetimes. She won the Nebula award, the highest award for science fiction literature, and had over one hundred of her stories published. She was an editor for the Georgia General Assembly. She was the director of the Daily Dragon at Dragon Con, and was a regular speaker at genre conventions. She was a model, dancer, and psychologist. She also made my life worth living.
Memorial service will be announced soon.
We do not need flowers. In lieu of flowers, please buy her books and read them. Buy them for others to read until everyone on the planet knows how amazing she was.

You can find her fiction linked here on her website.

Some Tweets from Others


May she never be forgotten.

Robert Heinlein on the Breendoggle

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From William H. Patterson’s book Robert A. Heinlein, Vol 2: In Dialogue with His Century Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better, p. 263.
At just that moment, in fact, science-fiction fandom was tearing itself apart over the preemptive cancellation of the membership of a suspected pedophile by PacifiCon, the most recent world science-fiction convention, in September 1964. This conflict might have passed the Heinleins by, except that the suspected pedophile was the husband of one of Heinlein’s more intimate correspondents, Marion Zimmer Bradley. Heinlein never commented on the “Breen Boondoggle” publicly, but to Bradley Heinlein wrote:

The fan nuisance we were subjected to was nothing like as nasty as the horrible things that were done to you two but it was bad enough that we could get nothing else done during the weeks it went on and utterly spoiled what should have been a pleasant, happy winter. But it resulted in a decision which has made our life much pleasanter already and which I expect to have increasingly good effects throughout all the years ahead. We have cut off all contact with organized fandom….I regret that we will miss meeting some worthwhile people in the future as a result of this decision. But the percentage of poisonous jerks in the ranks of fans makes the price too high; we’ll find our friends elsewhere.

Fortunately, not all their fan contacts were so unpleasant.
(end excerpt)
You know, I’ve never been a Heinlein fan either, but this takes my non-fandom to new depths. Guess they never cared how pleasant the winter of the kids would be. Patterson’s a piece of work, too.
For context, Mark D. Eddy adds:

For context, though, Heinlein had already had a series of negative experiences with fans and conventions (including a fan who was harassing friends and family to try to write an unauthorized biography for a publisher Heinlein wouldn’t write for), and was already distancing himself from the “poisonous jerks” — so all he apparently knew about the situation was filtered through MZB, who was hardly an uninterested party.

Which is a fair point. While it’s always good to get as much of both sides of the story as possible, there’s a real human failing believing the predator’s side of the story. (See also: STK’s comment on the deirdre.net version of this entry.)
Hat tip: RPG.net commenter The Scribbler.
Note: I’m also tagging all of the posts with the breendoggle tag to make it easier to find in the future.
Also: When asked, Can this be true? The MZB click thrus are upsetting., Deborah J. Ross, author of many books set in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover universe, replied, Only half the story is being told. Please be careful about believing sensationalist rumors online.
Note: I’ve edited out a couple of paragraphs from the original post as Deborah has apologized for her ill-considered tweet.
In light of that apology, I’ve deleted my unnecessarily harsh snark but am leaving the context above intact.

Jackie Barbosa's Son

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Most of you reading this will have no idea who Jackie Barbosa is. Nor who her son is.
Jackie’s a romance writer. Last week, her teenage son was driving to school and struck by an oncoming car. Dear Author mention is here, including link to a fundraiser.
I don’t know Jackie, but I do know what it’s like to have a husband suddenly die, and it really and truly sucks.
So, what I’m asking: here’s her booklist. If any of those are your cuppa, consider reading a sample and see if it’s something you want to buy and read the rest of. If you know other people who might like her work, consider telling them about her stuff.
She has a blog about publishing matters (she is a hybrid author, meaning both published traditionally and self-published). You might wish to read that. Like, for example, this post about metadata ownership concerns in publishing contracts. So, even if you don’t care about the romance genre, if you write, there may be something of interest to you in there. Maybe even if you don’t write.
From my own experience and that of others I’ve known in grief support groups since my first husband’s death, it’s going to take 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 years to be fully productive again. I don’t know how many of you read the linked Esquire article in my recent MH 370 blog post, but part of what was disturbing about it for me was how the article really communicated how differently people grieve and how that can drive a wedge between family members when someone dies. And in the case of that article, between parents who’d lost a child.
I wish her (and her family) the best.
Update: Kensington has put one of her books on sale until 4/1. Link has details.