RWA – Romance Writers of America – has officially taken the stance to no longer recognize Harlequin as a publisher eligible to receive conference resources.
Holy crap, I must admit I never thought it would happen. Why? Because the RWA has been less than kind to the smaller presses by exhibiting a bit of ’snooty-ism’ toward small press authors while brown nosing the big New York houses, such as Harlequin. It’s the main reason I happily let my RWA membership expire. My thought was, “Well, hell, if I’m not good enough to be recognized as a true pubbed author in your eyes, then why should I keep sending you my money?” Yes, I am a real author with real contracts and real royalties coming in. I’ve never paid anyone to publish a book, but have gone through the submission process just like the New Yorker’s. Yet being part of RWA was like trying to please the ever disapproving parent that was never going to recognize that you’d ‘made it’.
So why the fallout with Harlequin? Due to the powerhouse publisher’s launch of their self-publishing entity, Harlequin Horizons, a vanity press. Vanity presses require authors to pay to be published rather than the age-old (and wonderfully lovely model) of paying the author for their work via royalties and/or advances. And vanity presses are not recognized by the RWA.
Piggybacking on Ann Aguirre’s thorough post on the topic, here’s the skinny–>
TJ