Talk About Your Toxic Work Environments

Back when I was first writing for publication, Jim Macdonald and I wrote a number of YA novels, mostly for book packagers (that was one of the entry points back then, before packagers turned into high-profile wheeler-dealers and were instead mostly borderline sleazy providers of work-for-hire content to publishers who were too dainty to make such deals themselves.)  Some of the stuff we did I’m still quite proud of; and all of it was the best we could provide given the sometimes-weird constraints we had to work under.

But my golly, I’m glad I’m not working in that end of the business right now.  We’ve come to a place where a pre-publication social-media campaign can — shall we say, bully? yes, we shall — bully an up-and-coming author into withdrawing her own book before it can be published.  And that sort of thing can happen more than once.

Whatever happened to publishing the book and letting actual readers decide for themselves whether it’s a Bad Thing or not?

(Right.  I forgot.  This is YA literature, and therefore falls under the purview of all those good-intentioned people who want to Protect Impressionable Young Minds.  Thank God for all the impressionable young minds who are already way ahead of them in finding the stuff that young minds actually want to read.)