RITA and Me, Part 2
As some may remember, I've already posted about judging for this year's RWA RITA contest. It was an interesting experience—some of the books were first rate (I've discovered a couple of authors I really enjoyed whose other books I'm now reading), others were less so. I plan on volunteering again next year.
But one response I got to my judging was a little unexpected. A couple of ebook and erotica writers told me they refused to judge the RITAs, even though they were members in good standing of the RWA Professional Authors Network (which RITA judges must be). Their reason? They felt their work was unfairly excluded from the competition because of its format or its subject matter; therefore, they refused to join in the competition as judges when they couldn't be contestants.
I understand this point of view quite well. Like a lot of other PAN members, I'd like to see RWA accept ebooks as RITA entrants and I also believe RITA badly needs a specific erotica category (since erotica authors shouldn't be forced to compete in categories where they don't fit and since some PAN members object strenuously to reading anything they consider erotic). But although I understand the logic here, I'd also urge these writers to reconsider their position.
For a while, RWA had a kind of "two-tiered" membership, divided between writers who were published by the big New York print houses and writers who were published by small houses that specialized in epubs and POD (print on demand). Not surprisingly perhaps, writers in the first group tended to look down upon writers in the second group. That attitude is changing I think, given the widespread popularity of ebooks and the rise of a new self-publishing industry that even some print authors have embraced. But that way of thinking still occasionally rears its head. I wonder sometimes if RITA entries from small independent presses receive the same attention from judges as those from the big print houses. They should, of course, but I'm not sure it always happens.
Old attitudes die hard. If those of us who publish with smaller houses want to be taken seriously, we need to make our presence known. A judge who publishes with both majors and minors or a judge who publishes with an indie press is much less likely to dismiss a book from a smaller publisher when it shows up in her RITA bundle, even unconsciously.
It only makes sense for writers from all types of publishing formats to take their place in RWA. If changes are ever to be made in the way RITA entries are categorized and distributed, writers from smaller publishers need to make their voices heard. And one way to do that is to stand alongside other PAN members in judging the RITAs.
