Last week, we had a lovely mini-controversy over the poorly announced inten­tions of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to launch a work­shop for newer writ­ers run by Gardner Dozois.

The details that we were able to gather were:

• The work­shop will be online.
• The work­shop will be lim­ited at first to around 100 writers.
• Gardner will be able to choose up to 3 sto­ries a year from the work­shop sub­mis­sions to appear in F&SF.

The details that we do not know:

• When will the work­shop launch?
• How much will it cost?
• How much face-time will you get with the work­shop admin with 99 other students?

The issues that  weren’t clear to some:

• Whether or not Gordon would pay for the sto­ries that come from the work­shop like any other story
• Whether the cost of join­ing the work­shop would in fact include the price of the soul of your first-born child?
• Whether this is a vio­la­tion of Yog’s Law, in which money flows from the writer to the pub­lisher? (“money flows to the writer”)

The con­tro­versy to me was exactly the same as Amazon’s screw-up a few weeks back regard­ing the data­base and adult/gay con­tent being removed from list­ings.  It boiled down to this:  poor infor­ma­tion con­trol and release.  It was a PR fubar.

Perhaps I assumed the bes in that work­shop­pers selected for the pub­li­ca­tion would be paid just like any new writer, that Gordon was not plan­ning to sell my unborn chil­dren into slav­ery to the Mi Go  and that Yog’s Law was per­haps sim­ply bent, but not in a way that was unprece­dented.  Ultimately, I shouldn’t have to assume, nor should any­one else.  Once again, the issue is that, in the absence of real infor­ma­tion, the inter­net will invent a con­tro­versy.  WhateverFails are spon­ta­neously gen­er­at­ing every­where on the web because a rumor has got­ten out of hand and real infor­ma­tion has not stepped into to fill the void.

What could F&SF Done Differently?

Gordon and his staff prob­a­bly should have acted quickly to cor­rect any mis­in­for­ma­tion being spread (and to their credit, they did so, but I don’t think they did it com­pre­hen­sively enough).  He should have issued a full press release in the first place, out­lin­ing every detail of the project, from cost, to dura­tion to “here’s the web­sites, go sign up.”  The first any­one should have heard of this project should have been when every detail was sorted out and  ready to go.  If you are vague on any aspect, it just gives peo­ple an oppor­tu­nity to see bog­garts where there prob­a­bly aren’t any.

Information about this seemed to leak via hearsay on one blog, and the con­tro­versy built rapidly in this infovoid.  Damage con­trol would have been to imme­di­ately release all infor­ma­tion.  Unfortunately, I think not every aspect of the project as nailed down, so it seemed that they were rushed to release what they knew so far, which wasn’t and as far as I know, still isn’t every­thing.  I put my name on the list of inter­ested par­ties and I look for­ward to learn­ing more.

In gen­eral, I think F&SF needs to con­trol its online pub­lic rela­tions bet­ter (I imag­ine Gordon might think ‘great, yet another new job I don’t need and didn’t sign up for.’  Sorry, man. ).  The prob­lem is, and jus­ti­fi­ably so, they see relat­ing with the pub­lic online to be an antag­o­nis­tic thing.  n this posts, I am care­ful not to say ‘Gordon should do…” which is way too easy with F&SF.  I’m try­ing to say “the orga­ni­za­tion should do…”  Because I know F&SF has a team of peo­ple, pri­mar­ily dri­ven by Gordon.  Being the only editor-owned mag­a­zine of the Big Three in the field, its easy to place the blame or put a face to any per­ceived prob­lem with the ‘zine.  Gordon, for bet­ter and for worse, is F&SF in the pub­lic eye.  You can’t nec­es­sar­ily do that with the Dell Magazines. Their edi­tors gen­er­ally aren’t mak­ing the busi­ness deci­sions.  So the crit­i­cisms of F&SF often come across as too personal.

That’s unfor­tu­nate.  F&SF is a good mag­a­zine and Gordon is a great edi­tor.  The orga­ni­za­tion needs to reset their inter­ac­tions with the online world entirely, and design­ing a good PR plan would be a nice place to start, in my opin­ion.  I have some ideas of how to go about that which I will go into in more detail at a later date.

What Could We the Public Done Differently?

We should be bet­ter at real­iz­ing when we have par­tial infor­ma­tion and we should be less eager to jump to con­clu­sions based on that par­tial infor­ma­tion.  Perhaps our first instinct should not be to write a blog post or to start a com­ment thread on a forum.  Perhaps, when we have sus­pi­cions or are con­sid­er­ing cast­ing asper­sions, we should con­tact the par­ties involved over email or phone and ask our ques­tions.  If we don’t get sat­is­fy­ing answers, then maybe that is the time to scream from the rooftops.  Also, apply some com­mon sense.  What in Gordon or Gardner’s long career would ever make you think they weren’t going to pay writ­ers?  Yes, it’s impor­tant to make sure you get paid as a writer–but these guys are NOT the enemy. I have dis­agreed with Gordon on mat­ters elec­tronic in the past, but I know that he is a con­sum­mate professional.

This lat­est con­tro­versy is made up of mis­takes on both sides.  The bur­den of pro­vid­ing clear, accu­rate, and com­plete infor­ma­tion rests with the publisher/project run­ners.  The bur­den of the rest of us is to not jump to assump­tions with­out ask­ing ques­tions first when we receive only par­tial information.

Tagged as: editing, My Writing, public relations, workshopping