However one might feel about the Author’s Guild’s performance to date, there is an apparatus of advocacy there, a depth of experience and mechanisms for response. All authors — as The Bookseller’s Philip Jones is saying — deserve to be so seen and so heard.
An author wouldn’t join the Guild to perpetuate its past; that author would join the Guild to influence its future.
And when we hear voices in the author corps rejecting Douglas Preston out-of-hand and throwing back the idea of joining the Guild, it’s not hard to understand why some observers wonder if authors, overall, truly want to find common ground at all.
- When one author with a protest (I’m thinking of Preston here) is all but shouted down because he hasn’t led a public objection to many other issues faced by authors, are we to understand that he doesn’t get to pick his battles as everyone else does?
- And when the quick answer to the Guild’s new exploration of wider membership is “hell, no, we won’t go,” is it not logical to wonder if some authors might not want to maintain the organisation as the evil mansion on the hill. Could the Guild have become convenient as a symbol of what’s not wanted?
- How fond are authors of the moats around their respective fortresses? It can take guts — and real effort — to share responsibility for trying to bring about change. What if it’s more cathartic, entertaining, and blog-building to “fight than switch,” as the old cigarette commercial had it?
The good thing about our community is that TheFutureBook.net is ever-united under one colour: it’s magenta, but it’s consistent.
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By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: #FutureChateau: Do Authors Really Want To Get Along?
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