How often has this happened to you? You’re reading a thoughtful blog post or comment from a Men’s Rights Activist and you find yourself thinking:
“Gosh! This post or comment on how women are a bunch of malevolent parasites/men are the real slaves if you think about it/women were never oppressed because they could just get maids to clean the house is so witty and wise. I only wish it were 50 times longer, and that I had to pay money to read it!”
Well, I’ve got good news for you: Now you can!
A Voice for Men, having already given the voiceless male gender a way to express itself online, has now launched A Publishing House for Men to give them a way to express themselves in book form!
Well, e-book form.
A Voice for Men’s new publishing house has just published its first book – well, e-book — a slim volume of thoughts on Men Going Their Own Way, written by Peter Wright of Gynocentrism.com with help from AVFM’s Paul Elam, using some material already published online!
Well, technically speaking, this is a relaunch. AVFM Press originally launched last October with the publication of this same book. But Elam decided to call a do-over. No, really.
On October 25th, you see, a bulletin on AVFM proclaimed that AVFM Press was publishing Go Your Own Way: Understanding MGTOW — an e-book it predicted would be but “the first of what will surely become a lengthy series of ebooks (and some hardcovers as well). … let’s get AVFM Press on the map as the iconic source for true red pill appetites.” (A source for appetites? I thought the source for appetites was an empty stomach?)
One day later, Elam announced that he was recalling the e-book.
What I have discovered … is that there were several procedural, legal, and formatting errors that should have been addressed before launching the book.
I made a whole bushel of lemons, folks, and the fault for that lies squarely on me.
But I do make some pretty good lemonade, which I am in the midst of doing as we speak.
I have pulled the book from Amazon Kindle for the time being, and I am removing purchase links from every place they now exist.
After the deficiencies with the product have been corrected, it will be re-launched at a level of quality that AVFM readers deserve, which is the very best possible. All the other issues will be corrected as well.
Please accept my apologies for the mistakes. This whole process of publishing is quite complicated, actually.
It is, Paul, it is.
Happily, Elam announced, the eager customers who’d hurried to buy a copy of the defective book on its first day of publication would be given a copy of the corrected book when it came out. All twelve of them.
That last bit isn’t a joke; according to Elam himself, there were literally twelve of them – less than half the number of those on AVFM’s masthead.
Elam also decided to call a do-over on AVFM Press itself – or at least its name — declaring that
AVFM Press is actually a working title for our publishing arm and will likely change very soon.
But now all the details have been sorted out, right? Well, mostly.
Yesterday’s big announcement on the launch – the real launch, this time – of AVFM’s new publishing house did not actually provide a name for the venture. At least not one that I could find. On Amazon, the publisher of the revised edition of Go Your Own Way is still listed as AVFM Press.
But never mind, because the book is getting rave reviews on Amazon!
For example, a woman named Suzy McCarley declares that the book “was worth the wait!”
Ok, so McCarley is an AVFM staffer who’s given 5-star reviews to everything she’s reviewed — from self–published books by manosphere blogger Aaron Clarey to Avalon Extra Moisturizing Fragrance Free Conditioner. But not all of the rave reviews are written by AVFM staffers under their own names. For example, a fellow calling himself xtime Past gushes:
There is great content for Men and Women of all ages. Most of red pill are apprehensive in reading this book since Paul Elam is a part of the MHRA arm of the manosphere. The read is great for MGTOW to better understand going their own way.
So I would like to congratulate AVFM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good for getting off to such a strong start, at least if you ignore that first start that didn’t go so well.
During AVFM’s last donation drive, Elam declared that:
This year will see AVFM go into commercial ventures that will fund even more activism. I cannot go into any details at this point, but rest assured it is coming, and as with most everything else we have set out to do, we are going to pull it off. This track will ease the pressure on some of our larger donors who have always seen us through donation drives.
AVFM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good is the first of these new money-making ventures. Because as everyone knows, a vanity publishing house that so seriously fucks up its first e-book launch that it has to do it over again two months later is pretty much guaranteed to be a massive cash-generating machine.
It kind of needs to be, as AVFM’s last donation drive (which just ended) didn’t do quite as well as Elam had hoped, at least according to this little thermometer graphic posted on AVFM.
I can only assume that authors will be rushing to sign up with AVFM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good, so that AVFM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good can put its name (which may be changed) on their ebooks – and take a share of the profits, if any, hopefully without introducing too many formatting errors in the process.
No, I can’t see how this could possibly go wrong.
Kudos, Paul!
@sunnysombrera:
You say it like the book hasn’t been written already.
Didn’t we already have Baen on its worse days for this?
Arctic Ape.: Hah, I remember that. 🙂 If the Scopes trial was high drama, Dover was slapstick farce.
Kirby: good point. I kind of wish the series had never been written, because all the proto-rapists and misogynists are using its success to say that women love being raped/abused.
I think the MGTOW will only GTOW when we show that we actually are upset that they are GTOW. I mean, how can you spite someone who doesn’t really give a shit?
On that note, let me be the first:
Oh, please don’t go your own way. Come back, please. I will miss you and your alpha-maleness.
/Now will they GTOW?
I also self-publish on Amazon Kindle, and the first time one of mine came out it was full of errors, too. Unless you use an intermediary tool such as Calibre, it’s difficult to see how the books will look, plus I’m just one man reading and re-reading and hoping he’ll catch all the mistakes. Nor do most people have the luxury of an editor. You can join a novel workshop, as did I, but to read out an entire novel (~100,000 words) at one of those could take five years.
Then again Elam does have a large number of staff. Couldn’t some of them have proof-read it for him? As for the legal errors, I reckon M the Social Justice Ranger is right about him using/stealing parts of other people’s work. Maybe not advocating paedophilia and rape, though. A book can get away with pretty much anything, as Rex Feral’s ‘Hit Man; A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors’ proved.
sunnysombrera
“Kirby: good point. I kind of wish the series had never been written, because all the proto-rapists and misogynists are using its success to say that women love being raped/abused.”
That makes no sense so I guess men and boys have a fantasy of being killed because of call of duty? And do I have a fantasy of being eaten by dinosaurs because of Jurassic park?
Fruitloopsie: I know. That said they don’t have the best track record for discerning fantasy from reality.
Rapists and rape culture peddlars have tried to invent loopholes and excuses for years though. They even twisted the No means No campaign to tell themselves that anything that’s not a firm “No” is consent. Even if she’s blackout drunk.
Are you sure this isn’t just a case of Men Writing Their Own Way?
Well, there’s the possibility that they are relying on DRM for certain copyright protections. It turns out that breaking encryption is illegal in the US (unless, say, you are the US). But exactly what constitutes breaking encryption is a particular legal question. So using one publishing tool protects you, using another doesn’t.
Of course, you still have the copyright itself, but that allows fair use. If you don’t want anyone to be able to exercise fair use (say, to fisk it, or just laugh at it) you publish it in a format where copying and pasting requires a decryption process. Then, if anyone quotes you, you claim that as proof that they decrypted it (b/c they probably did – who would type all that shit out by hand? – but of course they may also have printed a screen shot and scanned it with OCR…though depending on the legal definition even that my count as “decrypting” if it is considered “bypassing encryption”).
Since all the big tech companies have reason to want limits on other people decrypting things (since they’ve spent loads in development of all kinds of apps/databases/content and want to be able to charge you for it rather than have you figure out how it works and then just make something similar without paying…or just outright stealing their shit and stripping out any code that limits your use, if you’re entirely unethical), they’ll respect a notice that demands takedown of content that was produced via violation of that law.
I’m not sure how that work in the US, I study law in Canada, but I’m sure that there’s a process for preventing/stopping the publication of something decrypted (or acquired by bypassing encryption) since there was that big kerfuffle over DeCSS.
This is just one example of how clicking a box on publishing software to use/not use a given tool results in long-term consequences for your legal rights and your practical ability to fuck with others using the law.
I don’t know what they fucked up, but there are so many options, it’s not at all surprising that a fuck up happened.
“AFVM’s Possibly Still Unnamed Publishing House for Men Who Don’t Write Good”
I think that should be the name, actually. Reminds me of that facepalm worthy time when some MRAs claimed that they didn’t send Anita Sarkeesian the death threat that caused her to cancel her speaking appearance… because “they don’t write like that, the feminists did it for attention!”.
Or… “don’t write good”, actually. Yeah. They don’t write good.
@sunnysombrera:
Unfortunately, that pretty much IS the name of that crummy series. Oh, and count me in as another person who wished that that series never existed for the same reasons that you mentioned.
I’m actually hoping that the movie bombs next month, but that’s unfortunately unlikely. *sigh*
Aw, now I wanna watch Zoolander. There’s definitely a low-budget movie or a TV show in the manosphere/alt-right somewhere… at Cinzia’s blog they got to casting it as a soap opera and I laughed so hard I laughed til I cried a little.
Make that “I laughed til I cried a little.” Gosh, maybe I can be an extra… a semiliterate housewife with a series of increasingly incoherent picket signs standing in the background, or something.
@Leftwingfox: Rifts is the best RPG nobody plays. Seriously, there are some great ideas there. Problem is the mechanics, and how if you don’t have weapons capable of penetrating tank armor you’re screwed. That find-and replace story is awesome and embarrassing at the same time.
And, @Arctic Ape, I remember Dover and the cdesign proponentsists!
Boy these people are really a piece of work!
But none of this is an excuse to not meet the minimum standards of the industry. A reader has a right to expect a book to be properly formatted and free of errors. Either you can go through an editor or you can do it yourself, but it has to get done or else you don’t have a publishable book.
It ruins self-pub for everyone when people throw up error-riddled junk on the logic that self-pubbers can’t be held to the same standards as traditionally published books.
@ David Futrelle
Do you think the failure to raise the target amount for the fundraiser is significant? Is this the first time? Why do you think it’s happened?
[blockquote/]But none of this is an excuse to not meet the minimum standards of the industry. A reader has a right to expect a book to be properly formatted and free of errors. Either you can go through an editor or you can do it yourself, but it has to get done or else you don’t have a publishable book.
It ruins self-pub for everyone when people throw up error-riddled junk on the logic that self-pubbers can’t be held to the same standards as traditionally published books.[blockquote]
Well, fortunately I did quickly realise this and issued a free update to all… sorry, both the people who’d bought the book at that point. And the mistakes hardly made the thing unreadable. They were things like a lack of notches in the progress bar along the bottom for the chapters, actually a fairly common mistake even among professional publishers. Or use-of-words things that only the book’s author would notice. As for Elam’s work, like any other commenter I’m only guessing at what was wrong with it and if he had to withdraw it entirely that implies it was rather more serious.
“But how can you miss them if they don’t keep reminding you they aren’t there?” – bwahaha kirbywarp!
And 50 shades! Oh my God! I’m reading the recaps on das-sporking and the obvious, repeated wrongness of that relationship dynamic makes me that mix of furious and beyond sorrowful that there should probably be a name for. As there should be a word for the mix of horror, pity, fear and instant defensive hilarity I get when I read of Pauly or jb’s latest.
PS. Some film protests are being discussed over on @50shadesabuse – I’ve seen Berlin and London mentioned, if anyone hates them as much i do.
@pallygirl
Oh snap, you beat me to it! I was going to suggest he start the “Paul Elam Center For Misogynists Who Can’t Write Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too.”
Ooh, maybe they were waiting for that sculpture of Pauly and woody spraying each other with gasoline to be erected?
@Miss Andry, yes it’s not just the writing that they’re bad at. Lifting them up to mediocrity levels of competence would be an achievement.
LOL!
@sunnysombrera
It’s odd that no one ever concludes that all the femdom porn on the internet and pro dominatrices in all major cities means all men secretly want to be controlled by women.
De-lurking for the first time because…*snerk*
Another self-pubber here. This really, REALLY is the bare minimum, errors and all. Given the mistakes I’ve noted (the double-cover at the start being the big one) I can probably find the tutorial AVFM used to set up the .html file for conversion.
However, you have to feel some kind of sympathy for them. Most of the decent freelance editors, typesetters and so forth are women. If they put forth the effort needed to make a good product they might have to *gasp!* PAY WOMEN to make things look good.
In all seriousness, though…this is like Published Author: The Role Playing Game. Self-pub is fun, and good if you have the contacts and time to make your stuff be successful. But it takes a lot of research and an awful, awful lot of work to manage more than the bare minimum, and that, in turn, usually requires you to park your ego and preconceptions long enough to ask for help.
I do not see these fine gentlemen doing that. Ever.
@HRF
I’ve also heard a lot of people are planning to boycott the movie as well. As soon as a group I frequent another forum (Fittingly, it’s a Twilight forum) with heard, they were all talking about boycotting it.
I could write a thesis on why 50Shades is terrible and why it should be loathed by now. I mean, the author’s actions alone are enough.
She called Mara Wilson (the lovely woman who played Matilda in the movie when she was a small, lovely child) a “sad fuck”, and then blocked her on twitter because Mara said that her books were terrible and full of abuse, and was offering up good substitutes.
In fact, she was blocking anyone who dared to make such a statement about her precious series, except some don’t get a reply.
So nice to see she picked up some pointers from Stephanie Meyer on how to handle being a “big time writer”.