Steve 211 said:
The Book Club is a quality outfit, and so I'm hoping they're unaware of PA's reputation and aren't sinking their own by pushing the fact that their members have been published.
The Book Club,
WD, and F+W Publications know perfectly well what they're doing. They just don't care about preventing anything less than outright and obvious fraud, and even then it's questionable whether they'll do anything. Keep in mind that the advertisers essentially pay for the magazine: The ad revenue alone covers all of the magazine's sunk cost (or, at least, does under the GAAP), meaning that every copy sold is profit.
Of course, one must remember that the
WD empire is built upon four precepts:
- Anybody can be a published author if he/she works hard enough; talent, education, intelligence, ethics, etc. are all relatively irrelevant.
- Everyone who wants to be a published author not only can be one, but deserves to be one—that is, there is an entitlement.
- The less we emphasize the hard work involved in being a successful author, the greater our audience will be. (This is a corollary of the "entitlement" noted in the previous point.)
- Our audience is going to turn over by better than 90% in 24 months, so we can facelifted versions of the same tired material, relying on the same tired mythology, every couple of years and almost nobody will notice.
That's not to say that's the attitude of everybody there, or of all of the authors; it's the corporate culture. Consider, for example, the changes in labels in the classified ads in the back of the magazine. All of those ads for fee-charging agents (it isn't illegal or unethical
per se, but then neither is putting a grossly inflated price on a used car of dubious repair history) used to be under "agents;" they're still there, but spread across several more-innocuous-sounding categories. The labels, though, don't change the substance; they don't somehow change M___ Su___ into an agent who can actually get
any writer's manuscript placed at
any commercial publisher, let alone on favorable terms or with any degree of reliability.
In short, the
WD approach—and I'm picking on
WD just because they were the subject of the quoted message; most of their "compatriots" in the writer-advice business are no better, and some are far worse—doesn't work because it doesn't empower a writer to say no. It implores the writer to follow the dream, even when the dream bears little relationship to reality. That is the classic environment for fraud. Perhaps it's better to compare
WD et al. to enablers (in the dependency-treatment sense) than anything else: They're not doing something inherently wrong, but it is not in the best interest of their "friends" with dependency problems.