A funny thing happens when you start talking about ethical behaviour in one setting or another: suddenly everybody was there first.
I don’t think this is specific to the authorial community or the wider publishing community: I think we’d find that in almost any industry, a move toward guidelines for ethical business conduct would find itself surrounded by a small flotilla of “us, too!” and “already did it!” and “everybody knows that!”
The best reason for this, of course, is that it’s widely understood that ethical ways of working are the right ways of working.
Treating customers and colleagues as you’d like to be treated, yourself, makes so much good sense that arguing against it is not far from coming out in favour of war, famine and pestilence.
Still, what seems to remain open to discussion when the saints come marching in seems to fall into two major categories, at least as indicated by our #FutureChat on the new Ethical Author Code being facilitated by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and announced by the organisation’s founder, Orna Ross, at the FutureBook Conference earlier this month.
- First: there are issues that tend to fall into the category of, “How do you make anybody do anything differently?”
- Second: there are issues that might be callsed, “We’ve been doing this for ages, where have you been?”
An example of the second seemed to arise after our #FutureChat, proper, had finished. The Michigan-based self-publishing author and frequent chat participant Camille LaGuire had an exchange with Ross about it.
By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson
The FutureBook: #FutureChat recap: Can #EthicalAuthor break through the scepticism?
Read the full post at: TheBookseller.com/futurebook
