Dear Tor,
I am an evil unicorn, not a bot. Love and kisses! G.K. Masterson
I mean, I am an INTJ which, I’ve been told, means I have a sometimes robotic personality but I promise you, I’m a real person.
My mother swears I was actually born in the usual way and not hatched, dropped off by wandering aliens, beamed down as part of a reconnaissance mission, or delivered by a very confused parcel servicebeing operating out of the Corona Borealis supercluster who just took a wrong turn at the Sloan Great Wall. And, given that my niece looks exactly like me, I’m inclined to believe that my mother is telling the truth so I’m definitely human.
I know, I’m a bit disappointed, too, Tor, but we have to deal with reality as it is, not as we which it could be.
Now, I’ve been a pretty avid reader since I was about two and a half years old. And, I’m definitely a geek as these photos will attest.
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As you can see, I have quite a few Tor books in my library. Over the years, I’ve massed a sizable collection of Tor books that is worth around about $3000. On average, I purchased about $50 worth of Tor books a month on my Kindle. So, while I’m not going to put much of a dent in Tor’s bottom line by myself, I’ll bet the authors whose books I bought will feel it and they might decide to move to a publisher who doesn’t call their customers neonazis and bots. And, ultimately, if Tor doesn’t have books to publish, they have a problem, don’t they?
— G.K.
Sorry, authors are NOT the customers of a publisher. The book buyers are the customers, and the customers of the author as well. I suspect there are plenty of wanna-be writers in the world such that publishers will never have a problem finding stuff to publish.
True, but finding authors of the caliber of Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Orson Scott Card, and Terry Goodkind is quite difficult. Not to mention that not many authors have that kind of stamina with a single series — especially one where they’ve done the world building all on their own (I’m thinking of Jordan and Goodkind specifically here). You could find a lot of mediocre authors who aren’t going to sell well and an Imperial Metric Fuckton of authors who can throw words on a page but the big guys? The guys who are going to sell a million copies in the first week — if not the first night? Those aren’t so easy to find. Trust me — I’ve done Acquisitions and I’ve crawled through the lairs of sites like AO3, WattPad, and Fiction Press.
Also, without the authors, Tor has no product to sell. If enough of their top-selling (and thus, top revenue generating) authors tell them that they’re losing customers because of public statements and the sentiments of Tor’s senior management and that those top authors (who also have the discretionary income to hire lawyers to get them out of their publishing contracts) are leaving to publish with Del Ray or Baen or someone else, I’ll bet that a real apology will be issued. One that isn’t an “I’m sorry that you got upset” but an “I’m sorry; I was wrong.”
— G.K.
As we are now calling for Irene Gallo’s resignation after her public apology; I call on Castalia House to lead the way in this genre. I’m publicly calling for Castalia House to apologize for the libelous comments made by their Lead Editor, Vox Day, against African Americans.
He stated, “She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too. The laws are not there to let whites ” just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.”
Calling “people like her” i.e. African Americans, “half-savages” is insulting and racist. Since Vox Day is attempting to hold Tor to a higher code of civilized conduct, I call on Castalia House to hold their publishing company to the same high standards and force an apology from Vox as well as obtain his resignation. I do not believe that any publishing house where the Lead Editor engages in such obviously racist and inflammatory conduct could truly state that they are open to submissions from any prospective writers.
I’ll be honest — I really don’t know anything about Vox Day other than what I’ve heard second- and third-hand and so you could be as full of crap as you claim he is for all I know. I’m approving your comment because I’m going to nail you down on something. If Vox is an ass, then he’s an ass. But he’s obviously not an ass who’s in senior management of one of the top and most prestigious names in the sci-fi and fantasy publishing world. He’s like a minor league player whereas Tor is more like the Yankees, capice? He can’t black-list people (or sorry, is “black-list” offensive and do I need to call it a #000000-list instead?) from the industry and he’s not been using his influence to shut people out of publishing based on their real or perceived ideologies and philosophies.
But all of that is beside the fact here. The fact is that Tor started this particular round. It was the Neilsen-Haydens who started screaming over the Hugo nominees days before they were announced to the rest of us. It was Moshe Feder who’s been saying that all of us who think that WorldCon should try to grow and embrace new members and audiences are terrible people. And then it was Irene Gallo who called us neo-nazis and said that some of Tor’s own authors were “bad-to-reprehensible” simply because of who had nominated them — not because of the works themselves. They go first. They all apologize first and it has to be an apology with absolutely no equivocations. They start publishing and embracing authors of all socioeconomic and political philosophies and backgrounds and promote them and their works equally. They start to embrace true diversity instead of this offensive tokenism they have which makes it clear that the only reason Irene Gallo has her current position is because of the cells on her chest, not the cells in her brain. They live up to their standards first and then I’ll be happy to call Vox Day an ass.
Oh wait. I just did. Guess it’s all on you guys now. Let’s see how it goes, eh?
— G.K.
I have to say, seeing that INTJ Meme in your post made me smile. (nuance). I didn’t think they had gotten too far outside of Google+ when I made them up. I’m actually glad you found use for one of them to better illustrate your point, and I’m flattered 🙂
Great blog, by the way. It was an excellent read.
Best wishes going forward,
Will
Oh, cool! You made the INTJ nuance image? I’ve been trying to find the person who originally made it (I found it on Pinterest) so I could give them credit. It’s one of my favorite INTJ meme images. 🙂
Thanks!
— G.K.