It's a major award.

Just woke up. Status post in a bit. I'm getting the first signs of pushback from organizers of the RAB* Awards. I'm getting the impression that my habit of enthusiastically leaving suggestions on every post I comment on and/or implying the organizers ought to have done a little more organizing has ruffled some feathers. When I offered a correction on the victory post for s00j and voiced my hope that musicians would merit their own category next year, I received a snarky "This is the post for congratulating the winners" response.

You know what? I congratulated the winner on her Facebook. It hadn't occurred to me (nor has it occurred to anyone else since the post went up yesterday afternoon) to congratulate the winner on the post in crowdfunding because... well... it's not like the community's a major internet destination, you know? I'd have no hope nor expectation of a specific person seeing anything that I left as a comment there.

And if they're out to quash anything that's even remotely like cross-talk, no wonder. I mean, I'd noticed that every time somebody voiced an opinion or suggestion on how things were being run, they got a reply telling them there'd be a discussion post after the awards were done for the year... it's only now that it's getting explicit that I'm seeing the implicit "...so keep that talk quiet until then." I'm beginning to wonder if these people have ever seen the internet before.

Well, "meh" to that. They chose to set up their awards in a Livejournal community. Not even as a Livejournal community but as a series of loosely-linked posts in an existing Livejournal community. As I discussed in one of my poss on finding and building your audience, the LJ format sets a tone... if they didn't get a lot of cross-talk on their posts before now, that's just a testament to how few people know or care about these awards.

Yes, I've been snarky about the organization. But when something is so poorly organized that it stands out to me as poorly organized, that's... well, that's some rather poor organization. Yes, I've been flippant about my chances of winning, but seriously, I could run the score up into the thousands if I offered an incentive. Yes, the tag I use for my RAB posts here is kind of denigrating... but it's also kind of amusing, and it reflects my hope for the future.

Here is a fact: winning this award cannot possibly do as much for me as I have done for the award already just by realizing I was nominated. If I kept my mouth shut except to tell people I was nominated, if I hadn't bothered to make the ballot post and copy and paste the relevant sections into the comments of the individual voting posts, if I had done nothing except to say "I'm up for an RAB. Go vote.", I still would have raised its profile by a substantial amount.

And when I say these things? I'm not bragging. I'm lamenting. I want this to be something bigger than me. I want there to be an award for crowdfunding that means something, that isn't just one insular little community's thing.

I think that award will exist sometime in the not-too-distant future, but I'm starting to think it might not be the Rose And Bay Award. I'm not giving up on them... I'll participate in the Officially Sanctioned Comments Go Here post, I'll actively participate in promoting them for the next year, I'll try to raise awareness of them prior to the nominating period so that we can have some more representative ballots next year, but I've got my eyes open now to the possibility that this caterpillar won't ever turn into a butterfly.

In that eventuality?

Well, to quote Gandhi: Be the change you want to see in the world.

---

*Dude still owes me a horcrux.

Wednesday: This feels like Thursday.

News For Today

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later... I set incentives based on what I think is within reach, but in a lot of cases that's just my best guess. I guessed that fifty tweets in 24 hours would be within reach, but it was closer to 25. Now I have a benchmark for next time.

It's probably for the best, as I don't know if I'll be able to get a chapter up today. Seguing directly into Personal Assessment, I didn't sleep well again last night. Because you all made the effort, though, I'll make the effort. I do have a bit of a head start, and maybe I'll feel more awake/alive/human after food, pills, and a bath.

Dreams From Last Night

Indistinct yet troubling.

Random Link

Amanda Hocking is a self-published author who sells 100,000 books a month. Yes. People are doing it. They're getting rich doing it. She has no trad-pub credits to give her the kind of respectability/attention/whatever it supposedly takes to make something like that work. At this point it's pretty obvious she could be trad-pub'd, if she wanted to be... but why would she want to be? What's a publisher going to do for her in exchange for the chunk of her money they would take? According to her blog, she's sold the foreign rights to some of her books herself and has a movie deal.

What's a publisher going to do for her that she hasn't done for herself?

Obviously not everyone who takes her path can succeed on the same level as she has, but that's the way anything goes. I can picture the trad-pub apologists stepping up to say that she's an anomaly, she's an exception, as if their industry isn't built on the hope of being an exception and isn't supported by the efforts of the exception.

The difference is that if you don't go trad pub and you are the rockstar superstar exception, you keep all the money yourself. It doesn't go to subsidize the entire industry and underwrite all the failures. And if you're not the exception... well, you're not a failure that needs to be written off. If you make $500 a year from your book, that's $500 in your pocket and a good start, not a failure.

Andrew Sullivan linked to her with the heading The Death of Book Publishing, a title that reveals his traditional bias: she is publishing books. Even if she sounded the deathknell for traditional publishers, it wouldn't be the end of publishing or the end of books. But I really don't think traditional publishers are going away within the lifetime of anyone living today. They are useful. Having a formalized process--no matter how fucked up it sometimes becomes--for getting something done is useful. But I do think that more and more they're going to be seen as an option, not necessarily the first choice or the last resort of authors who want to be published and read.

And I especially believe they're going to be seen as a less-attractive choice for authors who know they have what it takes and who want to actually see some damn money for their work.

(Yes, I'm a little cranky today.)

Plans For Today

Wake up. Write.

So, apparently...

...if you define womanhood in terms of being a thing that can bleed for a week once a month without dying, you're either a misogynistic jerk or a Dianic Wiccan.

I'm not sure if they've turned an unfunny, sexist joke into theology or turned their theology into an unfunny, sexist joke... either way, you just have to stand up and applaud someone who has the gumption to reclaim misogyny for women.

Okay, I give up.

I'm going to go lie down. This is not the happy-fun-productive insomnia where I stay up for three days and write, write, write. This is the I'm cranky, I'm wobbly, I'm just plain not getting enough sleep to actually accomplish anything insomnia.

This will either end up being a short nap because I'm -still- not sleeping right, in which case I'll be up in a few hours and we'll try this again (I swear, if I were just a little bit less tired I'd be in the perfect mood to write Mackenzie's encounter with Teddi) or I'll have hit the breaking point in my insomnia cycle and I'll just sleep and wake up tomorrow. We'll see what happens.

In the mean time:

Goodnight, Dune.

(Also, the banner at the top of the screen says: "Game on, ElJayers! You can diagnose your friends in Sim Hospital"... my experience is that ElJayers don't actually need an app for that.)