Of Grief and Griefcom: Part 2

To briefly recap Part 1:  late last year I sold a story, A Shadow Play, to a magazine called Transfusion, owned by an outfit named Bleeding Heart Publications.  A number of months  passed, in which I asked for the money I was owed for it quite a number of times and was met with a variety of excuses and unfulfilled promises, until, six months after I should have been paid, I explained that if the amount wasn't in my account by the end of that week then I'd pass the matter to the SFWA's Griefcom team.  The money didn't arrive.  I got in touch with Griefcom.

Now, in retrospect I'm not sure what I was expecting ... possibly ninja lawyers to dive through the windows in a shower of glass and contract clauses.  What I hadn't mentally taken into account and in retrospect seems obvious is that Griefcom is a service provided by busy people with many other important things that they could be doing, who are giving up their time in order to help their fellow writers be treated less crappily.  Thus things got off to a slowish start, and it was a little while before I got a response to my request.  Then my designated liaison, Eric, asked for full details of what had been said so far and of my contract with Bleeding Heart, so that it was a while longer yet before we got to the point of his actually get in touch with BH's director and co-founder Gordon Ross.

More time passed.  Eric got in touch to tell me he'd finally heard from Gordon, who'd said that he couldn't discuss the situation with Eric unless he was sure Eric was properly authorized by me to do so.  This seemed like obvious prevarication, since I'd told Gordon in my last e-mail that someone from Griefcom would be in touch and then, hey presto!, someone from Griefcom had been in touch.  But Eric took it in his stride, drafting a simple form e-mail I could send to say that, yes, I did indeed authorize him to act on my behalf.

A couple of more weeks more went by and Eric got in touch once more, to say that Gordon was willing to settle up the monies owed via wire transfer, and could I discuss this with my bank?  Having only heard of wire transfers from nineteen-forties movies, I was dubious, and sure enough the guy in Santander - obscure, regional banking chain that it is! - had never heard of such a thing.  But he guessed it might be what was now an International Money Transfer, and those I knew how to do.  I sent Eric all the relevant details and doubtfully crossed my fingers.

We were at the end of June by now.  A week later Eric told me that Gordon had promised payment for that week.  A week later and no payment had arrived - and a week after that, nothing still.  Eric queried once more and told me that Gordon had told him I'd been "inadvertently left off" their payment run.  I couple of days later Gordon claimed that the money would be in my account on that Tuesday.  It wasn't.  But when I mentioned this to Eric the next day, he told me Gordon had also been in touch, to say that his bank wasn't accepting my Sort Code.  Eric confirmed that the details were correct - and later that day, just under nine months and more e-mails and Facebook messages than I care to count after my story was published, my money arrived.

I never did get my contributor copy, though.

Now it's entirely possible that Bleeding Heart had always intended to pay me.  It's possible that, at worst, settling their debt to me was just low on their list of priorities and they kept getting distracted by shiny things and loud noises.  It's entirely conceivable that there were valid reasons why they couldn't pay via Paypal, as just about every other publisher in the world does, and conceivable too that they had reasons for not explaining those reasons to me, or ever giving the slightest explanation of why they hadn't paid.  All of those things are possible, if unlikely in aggregate.  But here's the thing: I don't care.  Not the slightest bit do I care.  And there's no reason at all that I should care.  Because my relationship with them was as a craftsman selling a product, and the terms of our business arrangement were clearly agreed in the contract we both signed, and that, in the end, has to be where the buck stops with these things.

Which isn't to suggest that as a writer you should be needlessly a jerk about this stuff.  Publishers are people and sometimes people have problems, and sometimes those problems are of cash-flow nature, and not everyone is one hundred percent organised all the time, and if you're selling your work then sometimes difficulties or delays will inevitably arise.  If people play straight with you then a degree of tolerance is clearly a good thing, and much more likely to produce results than wading in with threats and shouty rage.

Then there are the times when people jerk you around for no clear reason, ignore your e-mails,  mislead and obfuscate and keep it up for month upon month, with no clear end in sight ... and on those rare occasions, a service like Griefcom can be an absolute goddamned blessing.  I'm glad they were there to fight my corner, and even more glad that they did such an effective job of it.  And I really, really hope I never need to call on them again.

Of Grief and Griefcom: Part 1

I said a while back that part of my plan for this year was to start fighting my corner a little harder and to be more proactive in the face of injustice.  But ever since I began writing for money there was one fight I had no desire to fight, that I dreaded ever becoming an issue, and that was trying to get payment out of a publisher who wasn't inclined to pay.

It's not a situation you want to find yourself in, not in any line of work, and perhaps it's that little bit worse when it comes to the publishing industry, where remuneration often seems to be viewed as more a perk than a contractual right.  I think on the whole that I've been fortunate, in that I went for seven years without ever having a publisher downright refuse or otherwise seriously neglect to cough up monies owed.  (The one time it did happen it was for a measly ten dollars and I just didn't have the heart to kick up a fuss over the price of a (London) pint.)  But luck only lasts so long, and I knew it was a problem that was bound to come up sooner or later.

Which it finally did when I sold my story A Shadow Play to - at that time - new outfit Bleeding Heart Publications' literary magazine Transfusion.  It's always a risk selling to untried markets, especially when they're as cagey about what they pay as this lot were.  But they were enthusiastic about the story, it meant getting a piece that I liked a lot out into the world, and it turned out that the money was good: $100 for just over 800 words.  They promised payment within a month of publication and were quick to get a contract over, which looked entirely kosher.

Me, but not literally.

This was in August and September of last year, and it didn't take long for things to start going suspiciously wrong.  The issue with A Shadow Play in came out in October, I think, and when December came around and I hadn't been paid or received my contributor copy, or even been told that the issue was out, I sent a polite e-mail with a simple form invoice attached.  (Invoicing was something I'd already decided I'd do when payment was late, to try and subtly enforce the point that this was both my profession and my livelihood.)

When two weeks passed and I'd had no response I resent the invoice.  This time I got an undeliverable receipt back - and the alarm bells that had until then been ringing softly began to clang.  Had Bleeding Heart vanished and not felt the need to settle their debts?  There was nothing useful on their website, but when I checked their Facebook page they were still posting, which gave me the idea of sending them a note via Facebook.  This time I did get an answer, explaining that my "honorarium" would be paid when my contributor copy was shipped "at the beginning of the year." 

A rather vague term that, so I waited until early February before I checked again.  This time I was told that my issue and payment had been mailed.  Curious as to how my payment had been mailed (US cheques being both difficult and expensive to cash in the UK) I suggested Paypal as a possible alternative, and was told that payment was via a money order and that Bleeding Heart weren't able to pay by PayPal.  By this point those alarm bells were positively clattering, and I wasn't surprised when neither payment nor issue arrived.  I gave it another month-and-a-bit and then wrote again, once more via Facebook since that seemed to be the only thing that worked, explaining that nothing had turned up and asking if I might be paid by some other means, like PayPal as I'd suggested.  Within a week I'd had an apology and assurance that another contributor copy and payment by some other means would be arranged.

Two weeks later and I hadn't heard anything.  I queried again and got no reply.  By this point it was abundantly clear that I was dealing with people who, at best, did not consider honouring their contractual agreements to pay writers to be a high priority.  So I gave it one more week and then sent the following, both via Facebook and to every e-mail I could find online for Bleeding Heart or had had any communication from:  

"I'm writing to you once again to ask that you pay me the $100 you owe for the use of my story "A Shadow Play" in Transfusion issue #2.

I was promised payment with 30 days of the issue going to print; that makes it now five months overdue. This will be the sixth time I've had to query, and it's both frustrating and embarrassing to have to keep asking you for this money.

My PayPal account is under [PayPal account details redacted!].  Please can you transfer my payment by the end of this week. If I haven't received it by then I will be passing the matter to the SFWA's legal team* for investigation."

This time I got a response: a same-day response in fact, and from someone I hadn't dealt with previously, an individual named Gordon Ross whom the Bleeding Heart website listed as both director and co-founder.  Gordon's somewhat terse reply said, "Apologies for the delay, we will get it sorted in the week or 2."

I wrote back saying that, as per my e-mail, a week or two would be too late, and got a faintly apologetic reply suggesting that "threatening legal action ... will not speed up the process."  I explained that I wasn't threatening legal action and what exactly the SFWA's Griefcom service was, and suggested that Bleeding Heart had already had ample time to settle the debt, and in fact could have done it in the time it had taken for us to have that particular conversation.  I didn't get a reply.  So five days later, as the night that I'd given as a deadline drew to a close with no payment and no convincing sign of impending payment, I sent Gordon one more e-mail, explaining that I'd be referring the issue to Griefcom as I'd said I would.  Which was exactly what I did the next morning.

Next: More Grief!  Griefcom!  Explosions!**

* Not a particularly accurate representation of Griefcom as it turned out, and I should probably have done my research first, but it does sound impressive.

** Explosions may be of a metaphorical nature, or else an outright fib.

Selling Outside my Comfort Zone

What are we supposed to call non-genre fiction these days?  I refuse to go with 'literary', because that implies that books like 1984 and The Man in the High Castle aren't literary, and that's plain stupid.  Ditto for mainstream; would anyone seriously claim that Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones aren't mainstream?  So what does that leave?  I can't think of anything better, so let's just stay where we started and go with non-genre, even though it's barely less rubbish.

So, I mostly write genre fiction, obviously, but every so often I write non-genre fiction, and I don't know exactly why any of that is.  Partly personal preference, of course, partly because I know certain markets a lot better than others, and partly playing to where I've always figured my strengths lie, and ... wait, no, that was my supposed to be my point.  Maybe I should be writing more non-genre fiction, because I actually seem to do quite well with it.

First there was Strive to be Happy in Flash Fiction Online, one of my first pro sales, my first award nomination, and possibly the most well received thing I've written.  Then, a long time later, FFO also took my slightly autobiographical extended-metaphor-with-swans (how does that not make you want to read it?) For Life.  And now I've sold my third stab at non-genre fiction to new publisher Bleeding Heart, for their magazine Transfusion, for the highest rate I've ever earned from a short story, cent per word.

This one's particularly amazing because I was convinced that this little slice of lives, titled A Shadow Play, was going to be a tough sell.  I've been talking about it being non-genre, but it is sort of fantastical: two life stories, one real and one imagined - though perhaps it's not quite that simple - told in a little over 800 words.  It's kind of abstract, downbeat, weird and overambitious and not much like anything else I've done.  All of which, of course, are reasons I'm proud of it, but it's a foolish writer who expects editors to share their predilections!

Fortunately in this instance Bleeding Heart did, and not only that but they work fast: A Shadow Play is due out in the second issue of Transfusion next month.