Board Thread:Inclusion debates/@comment-1506468-20190827123101/@comment-28349479-20190828150616

Now for the specific allegations against Arcbeatle Press and small publishers in general ...

Amorkuz wrote: And according to T:NOT, "The administration of the wiki reserves the right to remove fan fiction or art — even from your user page — at any time, for any reason." I do not know any examples on this wiki of stories by a company formed to publish works of its owner. Neither do I! And that includes the stories we’re discussing. For instance, by my count, only two of the nine stories in the 10,000 Dawns Christmas 2018 series were written by Wylder; based on some cursory googling, Arcbeatle has also published (among many other things) a new printing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a book by Star Wars comics writer Nathan P. Butler. Just the number of writers in this 10,000 Dawns anthology alone should belie the claim that Wylder made or uses Arcbeatle Press solely to publish his own writings.

(Also, isn’t the point of that quote from T:NOT specifically that you shouldn’t use your user page to post fanfiction? I.e., that this wiki shouldn’t be used as an alternate to FFN or AO3? I don’t think anyone’s doing that in this discussion, lol.)

Amorkuz wrote: James Wylder claims that if he prints such a pdf, staples it nicely and sends it by mail or sells it to you at a convention, then it is a publication. And somewhere around March 2020, he promises, he will finally produce a real book with these 3 stories (judging by his previous books, printed via something like CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, i.e., Amazon self-publishing services) In one breath, you have condemned a publisher as amateurish both for (A) printing its own books and (B) paying a printer to print its books. Which seem like the only two options, actually. What exactly is the problem here?

The printing and distribution methods of several small publishers recognized by this wiki — Mad Norwegian, Telos, Random Static, Candy Jar, just to name a few — could similarly be described in reductive terms that make it seem like they’re worthlessly amateur. They often hire independent third-party printers to make the books, then they either use their houses as an informal warehouse before shipping them to the customer, or they cut out the middle-man and have the printer send it straight to you. That’s just how small publishers work. Where, I might ask, does the cutoff need to be in the supply chain for a publisher to be “real” in your eyes?

... I might ask that, if our wiki based its criteria for validity on the “officialness” of the publisher. But we don’t. We have T:VS instead, and nowhere on that page are ebooks or self-publishing even mentioned. Which specific of the four little rules do you think these stories violate?

Amorkuz wrote: This last step of persuading somebody else to publish your story is a crucial safeguard against a free-for-all and cannot be dropped. If that’s where we draw the line, we must immediately remove all stories written by Stuart Douglas for Obverse; by AndyFA for Candy Jar (under any pseudonym); by Iain McLaughlin at Thebes; by David J. Howe at Telos; by Alan Stevens at Magic Bullet; by Gary Russell at Big Finish before 2006 and by Nicholas Briggs since then; the list goes on and on.

It’s true that not every small publisher grows up into Virgin Books or Big Finish, but I don’t think we should wait until that point before we can discuss their officially released, comercially-licensed, DWU-set stories on this wiki.

Cheers.