Friday, April 25, 2008

David and Goliath

It would appear that my blog posts about RT have angered a particular publisher. Hmm, imagine that - I've annoyed someone. It never fails that people get so upset when you tell the truth.

It would seem they are questioning my motives for making negative statements about the behavior of the male models they sponsored at the recent RT conference. In a memo to their staff, they mentioned my association with another epublisher - hinting that I had some dark ulterior motive to lodging a complaint.

What I find amusing about that is I never tried to hide anything. I attended RT in 2007 and handed out business cards to all and sundry. A great many of their authors knew who I was so I have to ask myself, why would they bring this up now? To try and make my 'motivation' seem more sinister than it is? Talk about grasping at straws...

Convoluted? Yes. Logical? No.

See, the bad blood between said publisher and I came to light in 2005 - long before the other epublisher even existed. That was the first year I made a complaint about the behavior of their models. So why did I make the original complaint?

The authors received an email from TPTB that outlined our expected behavior in public. Yes, we were given guidelines on how to act and to dress while representing the company at a conference. Now the models - they obviously received a different code of conduct as they were offending people by making dick jokes and talking about how many times they were going to get laid at the conference.

And this was only at lunch.

Why should the authors be held to a different set of standards than the ahem...models? If anything they are far more public than the authors so where were their standards of behavior? They didn't have any. Now I hear they have some sort of standards now but I saw little evidence of that in Pittsburgh.

Hence the reason for my first complaint and for any model complaints after that - it has to do with professionalism or lack thereof. Why do the authors receive recommendations for how we should appear while the models drag their knuckles on the floor? Does that smack of sexism to you?

I guess their way of slapping my hand is to remove me from some of the yahoogroups they use for communication. I have to ask myself, they have a few other authors who work for competing houses - were they removed as well?

Somehow I doubt it. I guess I'm just lucky.

3 comments:

azteclady said...

Quick question from someone who is extremely confuzzled by all these shenanigans:

The authors, who are basically subcontractors to the publisher, were given behaviour guidelines and a dress code, because the publisher considered them its public face during a conference--even if said authors may have been published or submitting to other companies, and are not actual employees--while the cover models whose only business at the conference was to represent the company, were free to behave as the would?


WTHell?

J.C. Wilder said...

Azteclady - we were given clothing and behavior guidelines for conferences. I was told later that it was directed at one specific author but I have to wonder about that.

As for the cover models, they may have been given guidelines but they certainly weren't held to them. My original complaints because in 2005 and if you read other blogs, you will see similiar comments from quite a few people.

azteclady said...

What I'm truly sorry about is that you are given such a hard time over this--and yes, I've seen more than three different blogs where some of these antics were highlighted.

At least two were much harsher than anything I've read from you so far.