Question for Canadians - anyone get in to the Writers Union of Canada? I applied and it took them months to reject me because my book was 'not formatted to the same quality as a trad pub' book.
Curious: what formatting did your book have? Vellum? Did you send print copies?
Anyway, this is such humongous BS. They say they want to see "commercial intent" in self-published books, and yet they don't demand anything even slightly similar from trad pubbed books.
And we know that some of these books are published by small presses and sometimes sell as few as 50 copies.
I joked the other day (about an event) that even though self-published books don't count, a book published by the author's beer buddy's "small press" selling 50 copies counts. A woman (representative of an association of publishers) said I offended every single English press in Quebec. I guess I did.
Anyway, tiny presses publishing their beer buddies self absorbed , navel gazing attempts at literary greatness by clueless noobs have the right to exist and the right to be recognized. What sucks is the double standard.
In Quebec, the QWF (provincial federation), simply doesn't consider self-published authors as professional members. Period.
Again, if your book is "published" by your buddy's "small press", selling only 20 copies at the launch party, for friends who won't even read it, then you're accepted. It's such, such, such BS.
And this kind of issue causes people to have a lot of power and no accountability as seen in #Canlitaccountable issues.
I'd like to speak out about it and bring these matters to public attention, but I'm not sure who would listen to it or how to do it. It's a serious matter because "published" writers can get grants, and those small presses get money from the government. Nothing against it. Art needs to be funded, sure.
The issue is how independent writers, who are the hardest working writers, don't have any access to this.
