In mid-2016, I wrote about YA publisher Month9 Books' abrupt decision to scale back its list, reverting rights to as many as 50 authors across all its imprints. Explaining the culling, Month9 founder and CEO Georgia McBride cited her own health problems, along with staffing issues and the company's "substantial growing pains" over the past six to nine months.

McBride's announcement triggered a surge of complaints from Month9 authors, who described a host of serious problems at the company, including late or missing payments (for staff as well as authors), problems with royalty accounting, delayed pub dates, broken marketing promises, overcrowded publication schedules, communications breakdowns, and harsh treatment and bullying by McBride.

According to authors and staff, these problems were not new or even recent, but had been ongoing for a long time. Why had authors kept silent? Almost every writer who contacted me mentioned their fear of retaliation--along with the draconian NDA included in Month9's contracts. I've rarely encountered a situation where authors seemed so fearful of their publisher.

Things quieted down after the initial flood of revelations, as they often do. Month9 survived and kept on publishing, though its list continued to shrink: between a high point in 2016 and now, the number of titles appears to have fallen about 50%. Apart from a handful of additional complaints in late 2016 and early 2017 (similar to this one), I didn't hear much about Month9 in the years following.

Until now. Over the past few weeks, I've been contacted by multiple writers who say they are still suffering from the same problems that surfaced in 2016: primarily, late (sometimes very late) royalty and subrights advance payments and statements (in many cases received only after persistent prodding by authors and their agents), and allegations of irregularities in royalty reporting.

The intimidation level, too, seems not to have changed. Most of the authors told me that they feared reprisal for coming forward, and asked me specifically not to mention their names or book titles. (Writer Beware never reveals names or other unique identifying information, unless we receive specific permission from the individual. That disclaimer is included on our website and in our correspondence.)

If you've been following the recent ChiZine scandal, you may be feeling some deja vu--notably, in the alleged existence of a toxic culture within the publisher that makes authors fearful and and helps to keep them silent. It's disappointing to learn that even if the issues that thrust Month9 into the spotlight three years ago have gone quiet, they don't seem to have eased. Writers be warned.


I wrote about Black Rose Writing in 2009, in connection with its requirement that authors buy their own books. Writers who submitted were asked how many of their own books they planned to buy; their response was then written into their contracts. (Book purchase requirements are back-end vanity publishing: even if writers aren't being asked to pay for production and distribution, they still must hand over money in order to see their work in print.)

Black Rose got rid of the book purchase requirement a few years later, and claimed to be a completely fee-free publisher. I had my suspicions that money might still somehow be involved, though...and as it turns out, I wasn't wrong.

I've recently learned that new Black Rose authors receive a Cooperative Marketing Catalog that sells a range of pay-to-play marketing and promotional services, with costs ranging from a few hundred dollars to four figures. For instance:


It's true that purchase is optional (though I would guess that authors are heavily solicited to buy). But reputable publishers don't sell marketing services to their authors--and in any case, much of what's on offer are things that other publishers, even very small ones, do for their authors free of charge, as part of the publication process.

That's not the only way in which Black Rose authors are encouraged to pay their publisher. Owner Reagan Rothe is a self-described "financial partner" in two additional businesses: the Maxy Awards, a high entry fee book competition that donates "a large part of every entry" to a charity (how large? No idea; that information is not provided); and Sublime Book Review, a paid review service.

Though Mr. Rothe's financial interest in these businesses is not disclosed on the business's websites, both businesses are clearly energetically promoted to Black Rose authors. On Sublime's website, nineteen of the first 20 book reviews are for Black Rose books. There's also this, from the marketing catalog (note the lack of disclaimer):


As for the Maxys, thirteen of the 17 winners and runners-up for 2019 are Black Rose books.

Mr. Rothe does admit his relationship with the businesses in this recent email to Black Rose authors--though only to afford them yet another opportunity to give him money:

Walking down the hallway at school, an administrator stopped me in my tracks. I felt her eyes glare from the top of my head, past my torso and down my legs. She told me that my shorts were too short and that she didn’t want to see me wearing them ever again. I felt embarrassed […]

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#311 — May 8, 2020 Unsubscribe  :  Read on the Web Golang Weekly Caddy 2: The Go-Powered Web Server with Automatic TLS — After over a year of redesign, Caddy 2 has a new architecture to v1. If you want a new HTTPS server that ‘just works’, Caddy is well worth a look IMO. Its lead creator, Matt Holt, answered lots of questions on this Hacker News thread about the release. Caddy Web Server Rek: An Easy HTTP Client for Go — The inspiration here is from Python’s very well known and highly esteemed Requests library.. so the Pythonistas among you might like this! Luc Perkins Modern Redis Features with RedisGreen — Online upgrades to the latest Redis 6.0 features, memory mapping, key size tracking, and more. RedisGreen sponsor Life Without Line Numbers — There’s a lot of buzz around reducing the size of Go binaries (1.15 does so by ~6%) and here’s another tactic: reduce the precision of the position information. The gain is 2-6%, depending on how far you take it. Josh Bleecher Snyder ▶  Discussing Black Hat Go — “Are you excited to learn about hacking and that?” Got an hour? Roberto Clapis, a security engineer at Google, and Tom Steele, a co-author of Black Hat Go, join the Go Time team to discuss security, penetration testing, and more. Go Time Podcast ???? Jobs Enjoy Building Scalable Infrastructure in Go? Stream Is Hiring — Like coding in Go? We do too. Stream is hiring in Amsterdam. Apply now. Stream Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started. Vettery ???? Articles & Tutorials Mid-Stack Inlining in Go — Inlining a function can lead to serious performance gains, so why not do it for everything? Well, there are always trade-offs. Dave Cheney Asynchronous Preemption in Go 1.14 — How the new preemption implementation works, including the use of a lesser-known signal (SIGURG). Vincent Blanchon Why Are My Go Executable Files Larger Than My Source Code? — We built a data visualization tool to find out. Here’s how we built it, and what we learned. Cockroach Labs sponsor Accelerating Aggregate MD5 Hashing Up to 800% with AVX512 — The culmination of this work is md5-simd, a Go library that performs such rapid MD5 hashing (when running concurrently). The use cases here are quite restricted but you may appreciate seeing how such things are implemented for any high end SIMD wrangling you need to do one day. MinIO Blog ▶  A Beginner's Guide to gRPC in Go — There’s a written version of the tutorial if you dislike videos. TutorialEdge Four Steps to Daemonize Your Go Programs — Daemons are programs that run as non-interactive background processes (e.g. background job processors, Web servers, database systems). Ilija Eftimov Go as a Scripting Language? — There’s plenty of folks that use Go as a scripting language, but there are challenges around REPLs and shebang support. Some of these challenges are being addressed today. Segio De Simone ???? Code & Tools UUID 3.3: A Pure Go Implementation of UUIDs — A pure Go implementation of Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) as defined in RFC-4122 covering versions 1 through 5. The Go Commune Reed-Solomon: A Reed-Solomon Erasure Coding Library — A Go port of a Java library built by Backblaze that does Reed Solomon erasure coding (a way to send or store data in a larger form that’s resilient to data loss). Boasts operation of over 1GB/sec per core. Klaus Post ko 0.5: Build and Deploy Go Apps on Kubernetes — ko’s objective is to “to make containers invisible infrastructure.” It’s been rapidly maturing in the past few months too. Google Monitor the Health and Performance of Your Golang Apps with Datadog APM. Free Trial Datadog APM sponsor Tengo 2.2: A Fast Embeddable Script Language for Go — Quite a mature project now and worth a look if you need to add some dynamic scripting to your code. Daniel Kang UniPDF 3.7: A Library for Creating and Processing PDF Files — Pure Go, which is neat, but note it’s dual licensed: AGPL for open source, commercial for closed source projects. UniDoc Mockery: A Mock Code Generator for Go Interfaces Vektra Dynamo: An Expressive DynamoDB Library Greg Greg ???? Two Fun Side Projects gasm: An Experimental WASM Virtual Machine for Gophers — “I did this just for fun and for learning WASM specification.” Nonetheless, it works with basic examples. Takeshi Yoneda thdwb: A Homebrew Web Browser and Rendering Engine — Another experimental, fun learning project. You won’t be using it for your day to day browsing any time soon but projects like this keep the imagination fueled up. Danilo Fragoso It'd be quite cool to link to more fun Go experiments and side projects actually, so let us know if you work on any. Bonus points for games, musical, or Web experiences ????

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It's going to take a while before we can swallow the fact that Irrfan Khan is no more with us. He fought till his last breath and refused to give up. To be able to smile and spread happiness despite your own struggles is the very notion of any artist in the world, and Khan was one such gem that will always continue to shine.

He was admitted to the Kokilaben hospital last night due to colon infection and passed away today morning. Nearly all the Bollywood celebrities paid homage to the actor on their social media accounts by sharing messages and pictures. Shah Rukh Khan called him his friend, inspiration, and the greatest actor of their times.

However, Deepika Padukone, who shared screen space with him in Shoojit Sircar's Piku, shared a black picture that reflected the void that his unfortunate demise has left in Bollywood. She also shared a broken heart in the form of her caption.

Have a look right here:

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

💔 #irrfankhan

A post shared by Deepika Padukone (@deepikapadukone) onApr 29, 2020 at 3:51am PDT

Irrfan Khan and Deepika Padukone were supposed to collaborate once again for a film that was to be directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, but due to the actor's illness, it was pushed indefinitely. May Irrfan's soul Rest In Peace!

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Welcome aboard! But before you read this one, let us be clear that the next few paragraphs are filled with nothing but spoilers. If you are nerd enough to gorge on all the sci-fiction shows the web throws at you, you've landed on the perfect page. Amazon Prime Video released a good sci-fi show, that has a hint of comedy and a dash of romance and drama, on May 1, 2020, and we couldn't help but binge on this one.

Black Mirror, the popular Netflix show, which gave us some good dark and gritty content to watch out for, has kind of an uncanny resemblance to this show. How, you ask? An episode on Black Mirror showed an alternate world where people who die can move to a place named San Junipero, and live an afterlife on their own terms. Watching Upload, you'll surely be reminded of that episode.

Here we have four reasons that make Upload a good watch:

A futuristic approach

As the lockdown extends, and so does our watch-list (of course, it is a never-ending one), we have got you the scoop on one more show, and this time, it is a futuristic approach towards the afterlife of a human. In the new show Upload, our loved ones or us, 'upload' our memories and special moments on a database, which will help you to experience everything, just like a living person. Even the seven sins of a human -  pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth, have been shown by the great brains who work on the artificial intelligence of this 'afterlife heaven'.

A life, after life

Okay, so the essence of this entire show lies in the afterlife of people who have decided to 'upload' themselves, and live a kingsize life in a virtual world. This manmade heaven is no less than a fairyland, where everything is just happy and the way we want it. But, the only glitch in this virtual world is the bugs and the viruses. Just like our real-world has problems, the digital world created beyond the horizon by some great nerdy minds have to face multiple technical difficulties.

Watch the trailer of Upload here:

A gamer's show

The show Upload starts with a brat Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell), who is deeply in love with his girlfriend Ingrid (Allegra Edwards). The duo sees their future together, but Nathan's death faults Ingrid's plan. To keep him forever, she uploads his memory and avatar in an afterlife - Horizen - and what comes next is AI personified! Video game lovers will connect with this show for real. The only difference is one doesn't have to sit with a joystick to select the next move.

A reimagined heaven

Upload shares a materialistic world which many people mistake for life and realise it once everything is gone for real. Nathan experiences the same thing when he meets his angel, Nora (Andy Allo), given by Horizen, to guide him. She not only becomes his 'guiding angel' but also helps him solve the mystery behind his sudden death caused due to a technical glitch in his auto-driven car. What comes next is kind of predictable.

The entire struggle to maintain a lifestyle in the afterlife will make you cringe about the world's perception of leading a good life, and also an afterlife. This show will actually make you think about what went wrong with these people.

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