Craigslist Irony

The irony isn’t lost on me. We put up a craigslist ad asking for people to submit their own ‘Memoir of Meanness’ to our blog, and what did we get? One very mean (and angry) person who wanted to tell us we were awful.

Not for publishing a book about being mean. (I can see how someone might take that as a bad thing.) Not because they didn’t like the blog or the stories or the grammar. We were awful because we had asked for submissions, but hadn’t offered to pay for them.

This is a touchy subject with writers everywhere, and, being a writer, I more than understand. It is frustrating to work hard and not get paid, and I myself have been hired for certain writing jobs in the past, only to find that a paycheck never materializes… but there are a few things I have to point out about today’s situation.

His initial email talked about how we should pay, and then said this is America, after all. Ok, yes, it is. And America’s in a bad recession. Typically, the arts suffer when we’re in hard financial times. It’s rough, but true. Meanwhile, we are trying to build something positive – a new venue for new writers to be heard. I know people (myself included) who have been asked by top publishers (think Random House, Harper Collins, McGraw Hill, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Scholastic) to submit essays for inclusion in books for free, and these are publishing houses with the funds and the means to profit greatly from the writing (much more so than Pergola can at this point.)

In these tough economic times, when big publishers are less and less likely to look at emerging writers (they need to keep their numbers up, and let’s be honest, to do that, they need to stick with celebrity authors and other ‘established’ writers), the independent publishing house is a new writer’s best friend. Oftentimes, while they are completely ignored by a big publisher, new writers will be discovered by an indie press that will also help nourish their careers in the early stages. While we couldn’t pay our contributing writers (we wish we could!), we did give them free books, helped them to arrange publicity events when they were interested, and, in instances when they took the initiative to arrange and host their own publicity events in their areas, let them pocket the profit from the books they sold.

There’s one final thing I want to mention, which is perhaps at the core of not just this incident, but the book Memoirs of Meanness itself: there’s no reason to send negativity out into the world when no one is bothering you (especially a world that’s in as much transition as publishing). If you see a call for submissions but don’t like the terms, don’t submit – it’s just that simple. Why does it warrant a negative message? (P.S.: About 90% of writing gigs posted on craigslist are unpaid. Does the Writing Avenger message every one of them?)

Long story short, we sent him back a polite message detailing the above points, and, in response, he wrote back to say that we weren’t Random House and that he’d review our site and, if he approved of us, we could sign a letter of agreement on his fee. A few moments later, another email – saying he’ll speak with us again when we are ready to discuss his terms. What? Terms? Fees? For what? Friend – you haven’t written anything yet besides rude emails.

At any rate, I’d love to hear other takes on this. Who’s in the wrong here? Are we the jerks, for not paying for the stories that we would like to include on our blog? Or is it this guy, taking it upon himself to judge us?

You decide!