(This is an old post that I accidentally made a draft when I was editing it. Sorry if it shows up in your RSS feed again! The comments are amusing, though. It should also be noted that the book discussed below was eventually released as a proper publication.)
You’d think it would be incredibly hard to do, but J. K. Rowling has once again pissed me off by doing something that no respectable writer would do in her position. You can find the story here.
The short version is that Rowling is going to publish seven copies of a new book called The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Yes, only seven. We’ll get back to that in a minute. Six copies are going to her friends and family, and the last copy is going to be put up for auction for charity–the bid starts at
$62,000. Okay, now the only good side to this is that she’s raising money for kids. Here is my problem.
You are the richest damn person in England and practically the richest woman in the whole freaking world. So, instead of saying “thank you fans for making me filthy stinking rich” you’re going to take a nice dump right in the face of everyone that supported you by not making this book accessible to everyone. Gee, thanks Rowling. I appreciate it. I mean, goodness, I spend over $200 of my hard earned money buying your books, reading them, and then spending another $300 going to the movies and buying them on DVD. But, your reward to me as your fan is to slap me in the face and make what could be a very interesting reading experience impossible.
Now hold on before you think I’m a horrible grumpy man ignoring that she’s donating to charity. Take this into account. What if Rowling had simply gone to her publisher, who presumably wouldn’t think twice about this, and said “I’d like to publish this book from the HP series, but I don’t want any royalties. All royalties should go to such-and-such charity”? Think about that. The publisher gets its profit and that little charity gets millions of dollars to help kids in Europe. The seventh HP book sold millions of copies. We can assume that a couple million would be sold of this other book. If 1$ from every purchase goes to unfortunate kids, that’s easily a million dollars, if not more. If she donated her advance too, which would probably be considerable anyway, just imagine? So not only is she spitting in the face of her fans, she’s also spitting in the face of all those unfortunate kids in Europe by telling them “well, I don’t care enough about you to actually do something that could bring you considerable money”.
So, Rowling has spit in the face of gay people, spit in the face of fans (twice), and now spit in the face of unfortunate European children. Congrats Rowling, you earn the Worst Person of the Month Award. Keep it up and you might get Worst Person of the Year.
