One of the things that has seen much debate in the last few days is a handful of sentences on the (now renamed) Harlequin Horizons website, which stated that editors would be watching products from the Harlequin Horizons line, with an eye towards inclusion in the “traditional” Harlequin imprints for manuscripts that enjoyed particular success. I can’t find that line on the new website of DellArte press, and much ink has been spilled (or rather, many pixels have been arranged?) into attacking that particular line, both as a positive (if it’s true, why not disclose it?) and as a negative (holding out hopes and dreams that are unlikely to be fulfilled).

I don’t want to talk about the pros and cons or whether it’s misleading or what have you. My reaction was slightly different, and it went like this: I was a little taken aback by the implication that someone would be doing you a favor for publishing you once you’d proven yourself a commercial success. Commercial publishing, like just about every other for-profit business, doesn’t generally make its money off of doing people favors.

New writers, I think, train themselves to think about publication as a gift from the gods, and so a statement along the lines of “if you prove your commercial success, we will include it in our traditional publishing program”–to a new writer, this signals the heavens opening up and glory shining down upon you. Someone might think that this is akin to a lowly worm being crowned.

But if you have a proven commercial success, no matter who you published it with, you are not in the position of beggar at the publishing industry’s table any longer. Whether you published originally with DellArte or Westbow Press; whether you release it for Kindle, or do it yourself entirely with Lightning Source, whether it is produced by Dorchester or Harlequin or Pocket–it really doesn’t matter. No traditional publisher is going to walk away from a commercially viable project that they believe will make money just because you self-published first with Lightning Source instead of LuLu. They care about the success, not the source.

(They may walk away from the project because no editor wants to champion it; or because it’s too similar to something else they have in the works; or because they don’t have the expertise to market that kind of work. But those are separate questions.)

And so my beef with that line is that it encourages people to continue to think of themselves as beggars after they’ve proven themselves to be businesspeople. Have you made a success of yourself with self-publishing? Have a little more chutzpah. You deserve it.

If you’ve proven your ability to be a commercial success, especially through the vagaries of self-publishing, you opened up the heavens, you found the glory, and yes, someone will want to publish you. Not as a gift or as a reward, and certainly not because the publishing industry likes wasting its crowns on worms, but for one reason only: they believe they can make a profit off of you. And you should not respond to positive overtures as if those offering them are strange and distant aliens come to uplift you to success; you should treat them as business partners, and you should choose to work with someone who you think will do the most to help expand your commercial success.

If you’re a commercial success, you’re not a beggar. You’re not a worm. You’re not beholden to anyone for their transcendent grace. (Neither are you a god descending from on high to grace them with your magnificent presence either; don’t get carried away.) Remember that it’s a symbiotic relationship, and if you’re a proven commercial success, you have as much to offer the publishing industry as it has to offer you.

Act like an equal, because you are one.

So, for those of you who haven’t heard the news: Harlequin opened a self (vanity) publishing arm. In response, RWA knocked them out as an eligible publisher. This has all kinds of implications for me, as an author who writes for a Harlequin imprint, and for other authors, and for RWA, and for romance publishing, and so forth.

How do I feel about this?

I feel like my best friend just kicked my dog.

When I lived in the South many, many years ago, I had a long discussion about race with an elderly southern gentleman, who happened to teach mathematics at a community college.  He was not, he insisted, a racist–no, he had supported the civil rights movement in the 1960s. But, he added, he could unequivocally state what he believed was a politically incorrect, but true, statement: Black people, he told me, were just dumber than white people. His proof of that was that in 30 years of teaching, he had never, ever had a black person get an A in his class.

Now, I hope you are as dumbfounded and horrified as I am by that revelation. I really do believe this person honestly believed he wasn’t a racist. But I’m also positive that his belief that black people were less intelligent had a huge impact on his grading and treatment of black people. I suspect he gave black people less credit on exams for identical performance, because he was convinced they just didn’t get it, no matter what their paper showed; I’m sure he gave them less time and attention in and out of class.

And I’m damned sure, that he shortchanged 30 years of black students by his attitude. It’s just simply not possible that not one black student ever deserved an A in his class.  And instead of asking himself, “What am I doing to cause this unconscionable disparity?” he looked at an entire population and found them wanting.

A similar phenomenon was observed in orchestra hiring. The conventional wisdom was that women had smaller technique, and less artistic ability than men. It had nothing to do with sexism, the conductors who did the hiring insisted; women just weren’t as good as men, and they were selecting for quality. Political correctness was pointless. Then someone decided to implement a drastic technique–initial auditions were conducted behind a screen, so the conductor couldn’t see who was playing as he judged the merits of the performance. Needless to say, female participation in orchestras increased rapidly.

So when Publisher’s Weekly defends their all-male top 10 list by explaining that they chose what they believed to be the best stand-out books out there, but that they chose without regard to “political correctness,” you’ll have to excuse my bored sigh. Been there. Done that. Got the irrelevant T-Shirt.

I understand the argument about quality, and I don’t want Publisher’s Weekly (or anyone else) to bless any book with an imprimatur that is undeserved simply in the name of political correctness or inclusiveness or diversity. But their conclusion that including women on the list would simply be a matter of “political correctness” suggests to me that they’re asking themselves the wrong question. It looks like they’re asking themselves, “Why should we bend our standards to include women?” when they should be asking themselves, “Do our standards exclude women, and if so, are they good standards, and if not, how can we fix them?”