Thud: Saturnalia

July 24, 2008 Progress Notes:

Saturnalia

Words today: 250.
Words total: 1250.
Reason for stopping: Past bedtime already.
Munchies: Caramel cream rooibos with a bit of milk in.

Darling du Jour: "Oh no you don't," Zacharias Lane said when Gregory brought in the girl.
It was raining, rain due to round and turn to dirty snow inside a stone cold minute. A shit night for anything, and a shittier night for music; the strings moving sluggish and prickly even after an hour under his hands, and the humidity liable to bloat the joins. Anyone with a gram of sense would have the instruments away tonight, wrapped up in felt or wool to keep the bad air off.
Zeke Lane, though, was playing. Because it was the end of the world, and he wasn’t worth shit for anything else.


Mean Things: End of the woooorld! Not!Meth addiction!
Research Roundup: Etymology of Zachariah; and Gregory, for that matter; guitar case materials; meth mouth. And let me warn you, do not google that last one with the image search on if you want to keep your lunch where you put it. Ugh.
Books in progress: M.T. Anderson, Feed.
The glamour: Today was sort of the day where nothing was going right, but only until about 3pm. At which point I got myself a sandwich and some gazpacho, had a backrub, and brought home an African violet and some ivy. After that, it was the day I spent in my garden setting up a new bed of carrots. Which was vastly preferable.

---

I opened up Above to take a look tonight, and my eyes blurred when I tried to read the first page. Apparently, that means Not Yet.

Luckily, one of our name holdouts from Saturnalia deigned to give it up, and like a stray cat, I lured him closer and closer until the cat carrier could descend from above. He is now Mister Zacharias (or maybe Zachariah) Lane, a fitting name for a meth-addicted fortysomething blues guitarist who isn't ever going to be famous for real. As my characters all know full well the binding power of names, this means he is now mine. Heh heh heh.

I'm about one name short, still, but I figure she'll wonder where all the other cats disappeared to any day now.

And further to yesterday, a discussion of business.

Having slept on this, I have decided that exhorting people to talk about business for the team and praising those who do makes me a special kind of douchebag if I sit in my bunker and don't. I, as always, have no desire to be a feminine hygiene product. So today you will be treated to:

The Saga of Why Leah Doesn't Deal With Prime/Wildside Publications

With help from the copious records she keeps

Back in October 2006, when Clarkesworld was a fairly new market paying ten cents a word, I figured I'd give them a try with a story. I waited a little, and then instead of hearing from Nick, got an IM from Sean Wallace (my IM is fairly findable if you look) saying that Nick had passed the story on to him for Fantasy Magazine (which was then a print publication paying 2-5 cents a word. This, I will note, is highly irregular. The ettiquette for passing someone's story to another editor seems to be, well, don't. Recommend the author submit to that editor instead. Or if you do, you ask the author for permission first.

So I was a bit steamed, but Fantasy wanted the story, and I recall having a half-agonized conversation in a coffeeshop before a Waking City event as to whether I should turn down the chance to crack a new market because of my irritation over that ettiquette breach.

Ultimately I decided to take the sale, and woe unto me that I did, because that was the beginning of the Saga.

Skip forward a few months; "Furnace Room Lullaby" is being included in the fifth issue of the magazine, which is coming out pretty quickly, in December 2006. I'm asked for bio and photo information three times (it's lost twice) before I get any sense that it's done. Between these things falls the World Fantasy Convention, at which Sean solicits a novel from me. As I'm working with these guys partially on a "what harm short stories" basis -- knowing personally someone who got screwed hard by Prime on her two collections -- I put him off. Let's see how the short story goes, says me. Throughout this drama, Sean is chasing me for book proposals and IMing me to solicit gossip, occasionally about my personal life.

This makes me uncomfortable, but it is not business and sometimes people are odd in this business. I limit my IM availability to him and mostly shrug it off. A second story is bought by Fantasy, "A Month of Sundays", and one placed with the Japanese Dreams anthology, accepted in a land speed record time that makes me sure to this day it wasn't read the whole way through.

I start getting concerned when reviews of the story, in that issue of the magazine, hit two major review outlets. And I still don't have a contract. I get on the horn, and Sean is sending out contracts and payments; the issue is already out. I make my discomfort with the publishing without a contract known, even though the discomfort is now outright anger. Sean is very sad that he has screwed up, but does not in future take steps to correct this.

I get the contract the first week of February (the magazine came out end of December/beginning of January).

It's a really, really bad contract.

The rights in the contract do not match the rights advertised at that time on Fantasy Magazine's public guidelines. That approaches fraud. They want all rights, all languages, for two cents a word. There is no reversion date. There is no statement of legal jurisdiction, which is a standard feature of any contract anywhere. For those not familiar with short fiction contracts, this is highly nonstandard and borders on abusive. I get on the horn to Sean (this will happen a lot). He says it's all Betancourt's fault and enacts IM spy drama so Betancourt won't see him typing. I drop the f-word (fraud).

I revise the contract to standard specs, and send it back.

Time passes. And passes. Seven weeks, in fact.

And I'm e-mailing and IMing, and I'm bugging, and I can't seem to get a copy of the countersigned contracts back to make this an actual official legal agreement. Sean, who was more than happy to talk to me before to the point of calling me "dear", which is really professionally inappropriate considering we are not friends, is now avoiding me.

I am now very upset, and very afraid that given all the fast ones they've tried to pull above, and given all the horror stories I heard from authors I know, like, and respect when I "came out" as someone who was having contract and payment trouble with Prime/Wildside, that I'm never going to get those countersigned documents and they're gonna pull a fast one regarding rights somewhere quiet, where I can't see it or do anything about it until too late.

So I pull the other two stories and get on the horn to Griefcom.

---

Griefcom are fast-moving and lovely people. My countersigned contracts are wrenched out of the publisher's hands. I am assured that things are going to get dealt with by several people at Prime/Wildside in the wake of my pulling the stories and telling people at that company (other ones) why. Many promises are made.

I, however, have had enough, and do not go back.

At my last intelligence, which is a few months back, that contract was still being used. Fantasy Magazine's submission guidelines still advertise a purchase of First North American Serial Rights, despite that being impossible as they are now a web publication. The near-fraudulent issue of claiming one rights buy and substituting another in contract has not been addressed, and it has been over a year and a half since this all went down.

Sean still occasionally IMs me until I block him, shortly after the contracts are back in my hand.

That was my experience with Prime Books/Wildside Press publications.

I still have a reprint pending there, in Best New Fantasy 2, but that anthology has been delayed for a year and a half as well, and I expect it will never see print. Sean guaranteed me and one other contributor this past weekend that it was going to proofs this summer. We will see.

---

In sum: I don't know if the Prime/Wildside business model runs on, to be perfectly blunt, malice or incompetence. But as concerns my personal business, I don't care anymore. This was beyond the pale of what I've ever seen in a short fiction market, and it is not in my business plan to touch hot stoves twice.

Your take-home lessons:

1) This only got as far as it did because I did stupid things. I cannot emphasize this enough. My gut was giving me warnings about this person's attempt to assume friendship, to get in my personal space in order to get things from me, about the delays and avoidance and sketchy practices that could have been just a one-time oopsie, and I disregarded them. Never do that. Listen to your belly. It knows about publishing.

2) Do not conduct business in IM. Take any business conducted in IM to e-mail, which has a timestamped and traceable record.

3) And for that matter, keep all your business correspondence. You may need to make a case to Griefcom one day.


I no longer deal with any Prime/Wildside publication, have turned down their solicitation of a novel, and do not advise those who solicit my opinion to touch this publisher with a ten-foot pole.

As always, my experience is mine, and your business is yours, and I am not telling you what to do. But I hope this is a useful datapoint for those of you considering doing business with this publisher, or any publisher. Tell your children not to do what I have done. You'll save yourself a lot of grief, and you don't really want to be in the exclusive club of people, who as Cisco put it, got Primed.