Links to my books are at the bottom of this post.
I want to correct a minor mistake in my post about The Based Book Sale. I misidentified the three persons who were sued by Dawn Frederick for defamation as former employees: Beth Phelan, Isabel Sterling, and Kelly Van Sant. Only Van Sant was. The other two were an agent and an author, respectively.
In discovering this, I learned about their backgrounds and I thought it would be helpful to take a look at all three.
Beth Phelan is an agent “based out of Boston, MA.” She has her own website, which doesn’t name the agency she works for: Gallt & Zacker. She’s still listed as an agent on their website. Maybe she’s left them and they haven’t updated their site—I don’t know. I do think it’s strange she doesn’t mention the association. In any case, on her “Submissions page” Ms. Phelan lays out the parameters of her aesthetic and her “taste” — it’s tedious, but do read carefully:
Please note that I am only actively seeking to consider projects of MG and YA [emphasis added] fiction (and/or just the right nonfiction project for those age categories) at this time. … I’m interested in contemporary, fantasy, magical realism, speculative, romance, light horror, and thriller/mystery. I am particularly looking to work with authors from marginalized communities (BIPOC, queer/trans/enby, religious minorities, disabled folks including neurodivergent, etc); please refer to the WNDB definition of “diversity” for more info here.
I am not a good fit for books about school shootings, self harm, disordered eating, animal cruelty, or anything promoting copaganda…
I am not interested in any material generated by AI, nor do I care to work with any authors who still support/enjoy JK Rowling or don’t see the issue with book bans or the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli state…
Her “Taste”:
I’m looking to be swept away by new worlds, dynamic characters, compelling relationships, and absorbing settings. Books that feel super specific with a ripped-from-the-headlines, high-concept kind of vibe. I feel deeply, and I want books that meet me there. I’m in particular interested in championing intersectional, marginalized voices, pushing boundaries, and seeing if we can shake things up a bit! These are some overarching themes/ideas I would be interested in seeing:
Stories where the protagonist builds their own community/family.
Books that will radicalize teens/kids—stories that pull no punches when criticizing oppressive systems of power.
Truly escapist fantasy with a world I become absolutely obsessed with!
Experimental (but not tooooo gimmicky) storytelling that just works!
Anything that tackles capitalism in an unexpected way.
Unique, random, niche subculture stories… Hobbies, events, traditions, games that you never could have guessed existed.
Fun voicey fantasy NOT about the world ending!
Fat BIPOC!
Trans femme voices!
And so on.
Moving onto Isabel Sterling, she (I think that’s the right pronoun, interestingly she doesn’t specify1) is an “author and coach.”
I help authors create confident, sustainable writing careers.
You deserve a life coach who understands the nuances of the publishing industry.
Here’s the blurb for one of her books, This Coven Won’t Break:
Hannah Walsh just wants to finish high school. It's her senior year, so she should be focusing on classes, hanging out with her best friend, and flirting with her new girlfriend, Morgan. But it turns out surviving a murderous Witch Hunter doesn't exactly qualify as a summer vacation, and now the rest of the Hunters seem more intent on destroying her magic than ever.
This trash is published by Razorbill, an imprint2 of Penguin, one of the “Big Five” publishing houses. Any writer would give his or her eyeteeth to get a contract from a Big Five. Founded in London in 1935, Penguin’s history is renowned, having published such writers as Iris Murdoch, Saul Bellow, and J.M. Coetzee.
Its success showed that large audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British popular culture significantly through its books concerning politics, the arts, and science.
Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, a conglomerate formed in 2013 by its merger with American publisher Random House, a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Rounding out the trio is Kelly Van Sant, who was an employee of Red Sofa. She is agenting somewhere else now. Her page at Manuscript Wish List understandably omits mention of her stint at Red Sofa—you don’t usually call attention to the fact that your former employer tried to sue you for defamation.
Here’s what she’s looking for. Bolding is in the original:
In the Children’s space I am seeking Middle Grade, Young Adult across all genres, including fantasy, science fiction, adventure, historical, and contemporary. For Adult I’m seeking romance (contemporary), and SFF. I am also aggressively acquiring Nonfiction on occult topics such as magick, witchcraft, tarot and other esoteric topics and modalities. I love character-driven stories with intricate plots, and am always drawn to explorations of friendship and found family. I am especially interested in #ownvoices and inclusive narratives and working with creators who are from traditionally marginalized communities, including but not limited to Indigenous, Black, POC, LGBTQIA+ folx and any and all intersections thereof. I’ve expanded on my interests within each category below.
These people run the show. The show that controls the imaginative world of children and young adults.
They’re hardly unrepresentative.
The publishing industry is controlled by deranged, defective people.
Of the three, Beth Phelan strikes me as the truly malevolent one. Singling out J.K. Rowling, Palestinian genocide and “copaganda” are screaming red flags. But as a writer, the slur on Rowling hurts the most personally.3
And “copaganda”?
In a horrifying coincidence, I learned this stupid word (from her website) the day Jonathan Diller got blown away by a criminal with twenty-one arrests. I thought of sending her a query based on the story…. but why waste the time?
What else can be published other than Z-grade tripe by this crew of delinquent children? They’re weak. They’ve never struggled. All their lives they’ve been catered to by an army of enablers. And now they run the show.
A based book sale is good, but it’s not enough.
We need visionary publishers to turn things around. The problem is that the demographic that would produce these publishers doesn’t think literature is important. They’re probably into video games and other, more advanced forms of entertainment.
I do not deny the importance of video games, but I think that literature is the most important, primary, source of ideas that a society produces.
Think of J.K. Rowling herself. Think of the influence that Harry Potter had on two generations of kids.
Do you remember when Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was posthumously published? How all those people who named their kids “Atticus” were outraged that the real Atticus Finch was far more ambivalent about civil rights than the idealized Atticus in "To Kill A Mockingbird”?
Read about the effect that Gone With The Wind had on Civil War memory. Whatever your opinions, it was massive. I’m referring to the book, not the movie4. There are over a million reviews of the book on Goodreads. I expect many of them are bad, but you can’t ignore it.
I’m sure you can supply many other examples. I remember watching one of those British TV shows on PBS some years ago. One of the characters was an aging upper-class British public school survivor who bounced around various diplomatic posts. He traveled everywhere with a copy of a Jane Austen novel.
As I said in the introduction to the first volume of my books, American literature turned me into an American, not a New Yorker, an American.
As much as anything in my direct experience, my father’s memories and my mother’s books made me who I am.
Through books I was able to travel to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, in the 1920s. The Nebraska plains. Irish Chicago of the early 1900s. Black Chicago during the Great Migration. The Dust Bowl. Alaska. The South during slavery. Immigrant slums of the Lower East Side. I traveled to other countries too, but they never made as much of an impression on me as American literature did. Big exception: Alice in Wonderland, which I read every day from the ages of eight to ten.
Kafka said that a book should be an “axe to break the frozen sea inside of us.” So many times as a kid I’d reach a place in a book and I’d have to put it down. I didn’t know what hit me. It was the truth.
Then I’d pick up the book and resume, a little stronger, older, and wiser.
Literature is the soul of a people, not video games.
Our soul is being polluted by the gatekeepers.
Links to Volumes I and II of Technium:
Interestingly because I thought that was a requirement in her crowd.
An imprint is a subsidiary of a large publishing house. Being published by a boutique imprint makes it look as if you’re edgy and independent. In fact Sterling is published by Bertelsmann, one of the largest communications conglomerates on Earth.
I simply cannot, and never will be able to comprehend how anyone, especially a woman, can hate Rowling for standing up for another woman’s sex-based rights. Does she not have eyes in her head to see the direct physical damage done to women by men who invade women’s spaces?
And the movie is the biggest box office hit of all time adjusted for inflation, bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Titanic.