So I thought I’d post Madris DePasteur’s latest rambling post. Apparently she sent this to all the authors again.

“There are a lot of reasons we’ve abandoned the critiquing phase of editing and now generally accept books `as is’. Foremost among these reasons is a lack of cooperation from the authors whose books we’ve tried to improve who appear to have far more confidence in the pointers they get from friends and family members than people experienced in the business.

Since this actually is a matter of opinion, expert or not, and the authors seem determined to live with their decision, we let them. The only exception to this is when an author has a habit that is so distracting and/or annoying that we feel that it will be impossible for the reader to get any enjoyment out of the book.”

She can’t help herself can she? Although, admittedly, I had to read that paragraph about three times before I finally understood what she was saying.

“We consider if bad policy for any of our authors to annoy our distributor, who is not only very prompt and reliable in paying, but who also sells a high volume of books. If our distributor reports to us that one of our authors has been annoying them we will pull that author’s books from the list to ensure that our authors do not annoy our distributor, and that includes all of the online booksellers who get the books from the distributor, who report to the distributor, who reports to us.

Do not NAG the distributor or booksellers unless you’d just rather not have your work widely available, in which case, you should just tell us not to list your book with the distributor and STILL leave the distributor alone.

Professional to the end isn’t she? *g*

Thanks to you know who for the e-mail.