Reader Entitlement Syndrome: Stacey Jay and the Windmill Full of Corpses
I would like to begin this post with a disclaimer: what will follow is unlikely to be pleasant; it will be filled with profanity and angry ranting. If that’s not your thing, then you can find a happy home next door where ponies dance in the moonlight and authors get shit all over for no good fucking reason and just have to smile and take it because they’re the modern equivalent of the court jester now. Yeah. So, if you didn’t know that a thing happened over the last few days, then you should probably read this less angry post on Chuck Wendig’s blog. In short, due to poor sales, an author named Stacey Jay (author of Princess of Thorns) was let go by her publisher, Delacorte Press, and decided to start a Kickstarter for the sequel to her novel. Among the things she included in her target goal were funds for living expenses ($7,000, to be exact). Apparently, some people really didn’t like that, and even less so the idea that Jay might not release the novel if she couldn’t reach her goal. And so they threw a fit about it. Jay eventually took down the Kickstarter and threw in the towel, saying she’d continue writing under other pen names. And still more people threw a fit. That’s where I come in. The moment I saw the post on Wendig’s blog, the rage monster rose up. I was so pissed off. I thought: Holy fucking hell; the people throwing fits are entitled pieces of shit. What the fuck is this garbage? And so I decided to hold off on the Twitter rant that I wanted to write at that moment so I could rant like a madman here. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this mentality of “what readers want is more important than the needs of the writer” became so embedded into the writing landscape. Regardless, it’s a mentality that needs to fucking die, not only because it’s toxic, but also because it derives from a series of totally bullshit premises about how writers earn their keep and what we as consumers should be asked to provide. There are few other classes of workers in this country that people would actually point to and say “you get paid when I damn well tell you” than writers. Even fucking employees at fucking McDonald’s are treated with more respect than writers, and they’re probably some of the most unloved workers in the whole of the Western world other than IRS agents (who everyone hates, but everyone still thinks should be paid more money than the guy who could be putting his boogers in their food). I’m not saying that McDonald’s workers deserve to be treated like shit. I’m just saying that we treat that guy a lot better than we do writers. Well, unless they’re writers we love and they make a shit ton of money and never have to ask for anything because publishers will toss $500K at them or their books sell so fucking much that it’s never an issue. Oh, wait. No. If a writer who sells a ton of books ever says “gosh, being a writer is tough,” someone will step up on the balcony over their heads and take a steaming shit all over them. Because NYT Best Selling Authors are as rich as Bill fucking Gates (lies). Writers are one of the few classes of worker to whom you can say “you write that thing and then I’ll pay you to live later” and almost nobody bats an eye. Now, it turns out that the mechanics of publishing demand this to a degree. After all, how the hell is a publisher supposed to know which book to publish if the damned thing hasn’t been written yet? But we’re not talking about a new writer. We’re talking about an established one, to a certain degree. And even so, that’s why good publishers pay this little thing called an advance. As you probably know, that’s the sad chunk of cash a publisher gives an author when they decide to publish a work, as if to say (not really), “Well, you did all that friggin work, so now we’ll give you something so you don’t have to starve anymore.” And some authors get paid those things even if the book isn’t fucking done, because they’ve built a relationship with their agent or publisher or whatever through writing other shit — as I’m sure Stacey Jay has. So the idea that Stacey Jay would say, “hey, you all liked my books, but the publisher wanted to sell 4,000,000 copies, and I’m never going to do that, so I thought, since a bunch of you liked the darn thing, maybe we could do this whole bit where you help me live for a few months so I can write the book without interruption, and then you’ll have it and we’ll all be happy” is really not that out there. Presumably, her publisher would have paid her that money anyway. The entitlement of those who think this is absurd is no more apparent than in the tweets from shitheads who seem to think writers are some kind of new class of serf. Take this shit, for example: @_KatKennedy if it were just the editor and the cover, i’d be like, yeah that makes sense but asking us to pay your bills is ridiculous — Nova Lee Zaiden (@NovaBlogder) January 5, 2015 @_KatKennedy EXACTLY. Threatening to stop writing if fans don’t pay her enough money to write full time? Hard pass. — Angie (@disquietus) January 5, 2015 @_KatKennedy i saw it and like, since when does buying groceries and gas count specifically for the project? — Nova Lee Zaiden (@NovaBlogder) January 4, 2015 @booknerdcanada Yeah…which is just a whole world of no. — Molli Moran (@MissMolliWrites) January 5, 2015 Again, the question: since when does buying groceries and gas count specifically for the project? SINCE FUCKING EVER. Why, yes. It is