IWSG - August 2025

 It's the first Wednesday of the month, so it's time for the Insecure writers Support Group.

The awesome co-hosts for the August 6 posting of the IWSG are Ronel Janse van Vuuren, Natalie Aguirre, Sarah - The Faux Fountain Pen, and Olga Godim.

This month's question is intriguing:

What is the most unethical practice in the publishing industry?

This question had me really scratching my head.  There are any number of things I feel are not right or unethical about the way the publishing industry works, but which one do I think is the MOST unethical?

I mean, there are whole swathes of so-called publishers out there who charge exorbitant fees for things self-publishers can do themselves far more easily and cheaply, and often with better results.  I'd consider that unethical.

There are also a lot of scammers out there, impersonating agents and publishers and film executives to prey on authors.  It's hard enough being an author and dealing with endless rejections and the crises of self confidence that come with them, without adding in impersonators out to grab cash for junk services.  Not to mention the false hope they give authors who might, even for a fleeting second, believe that someone is finally, actually taking notice of their work.

Then there's traditional publishing contracts that pay the author on the net profit for their books, not the gross profit.  This means all costs are taken out of the royalties before anything gets paid to the author.  And the author rarely, if ever, gets a breakdown of what those costs are, so they may receive nothing if the publisher decides to assign monetary value to things like social media posts as marketing expenses.

A new one is the use of AI in publishing.  I think it's unethical for anyone to use AI and then claim the work as their own.  It's not.  The words the AI spits back at you are not yours; they're other people's words that have been tossed around and regurgitated in a different order.  And if you use AI generated art in your cover design, you're taking legitimate work away from real artists in favour of a machine mashing together the work of multiple artists to create something that's likely not even half as good as something a human can do. 

In a way, AI use is actually plagiarism.  And that's definitely up there in the top five unethical publishing practices.  Stealing someone else's work and passing it off as your own, is not, in any way, okay.

I also feel like asking anyone to work without getting paid for it is unethical.  It's one of those things that happens all the time in all arts careers.  You get asked to do your creative work for "the experience" or to get your foot in the door.  I feel like that's unethical.  It also devalues the work and work in the the arts is already valued far too little.  For something that can give joy, explain complex ideas and issues in ways that can make them more easily understood, something that can bring people together and create community, the arts are not given enough credit.

Time to jump down off my soapbox... I get quite passionate about this, as you can probably tell.

What do you consider to be the most unethical publishing practices?

Weekly Goals 4-8-25

 I didn't get any writing done over the weekend, at least, not on my book.  I had too many other things I had to do - mainly gym stuff.  So this week, I need to get some writing done.  I'm pretty close to finishing the first draft of this book.  And it's only been a few months too.  Not bad for a not-NaNo draft.

Standing too Close is out at the end of the week, so I need to keep the publicity going.  I have a blog tour booked and the last time I did a tour with this company (for My Murder Year) I got a lot of reviews through it too, so fingers crossed it's the same this time.  I've also started following a content calendar for August so I have something to post every day, even if it isn't necessarily about Standing too Close.  Finding things to talk about every day on social media is always tough for me.

I'm going to be super busy at work for the next couple of weeks because I have a lot to finish for them before I leave.  And with only having a couple of days between the two, I'm not going to get the break I would have liked to have had.  

Plus, the Film Festival starts next week and I have films booked every night for 10 days and I'm doing an extra shift at the gym for two months while one of the other instructors is away.  Ack!

What are your goals for this week?

Celebrate the Small Things 1-8-25

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things.

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

I got another lovely early review for Standing Too Close.  Maybe I was being too doom and gloom about this one - I was certain the reviews would be...controversial.

And in other exciting news, I have a new job.  On 25 August I will be starting a new role with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (and no, I won't be playing an instrument).  I'm sad to be leaving my current job because I really like the culture and the people there, but this is a more senior role and has a more senior salary to go with it.  Plus, I'll get to do some traveling.

I have a pretty busy weekend ahead of me.  Lots of gym stuff.  I have to refresh my memory on a new class to teach next week, and we have tuition on Sunday for the new release that goes into rotation in a couple of weeks.  Hoping to claw some writing time out too, but that might be a little hard.  Maybe some reading instead.

And that's about it for this week.

There's still time to sign up to be part of  the blog tour for Standing Too Close!  If you'd like to take part, you can join here.

What are you celebrating this week?

Books I've read: Perfect Little World

 

I've read a few of Kevin Wilson's books and have always found them to be both hilarious and slightly odd.  So when I found this one in a second-hand bookstore, I bought it right away.

And while I did enjoy it to a point, it certainly doesn't have the same weirdness or sense of humor that so captivated me in his later books.

It's about an experiment in family, where a professor brings together ten sets of parents with babies born around the same time to bring their families up as a collective.  The main character is a young woman called Izzy, the only single parent in the group.  Funded by an unusually hands-off billionaire, the project has all the resource it needs, a beautiful campus on which the families live and enough money to pay research assistants and servants.

Initially planned to run for ten years, the families move into their "perfect little world" and surrender their children to a nursery where they are kept.  Called the Infinite Family Project,each parent plays a role in every child's life, but the children don't really have any idea which set of parents is their own.  They are collectively loved and collectively cared for.

And at first, the perfect little world is exactly what is sets out to be.  But as time goes on, personalities, ideologies and feelings clash, making things within the Infinite Family Project more challenging.  And for Izzy, the only member of the family without a partner, things grow more complicated when she realizes she has feelings for Dr. Preston Grind, the man whose idea the compound was.  How can she continue to take part in his experiments when she's aching to take him into her bed?

The ideas behind the experiment were intriguing and I was interested to see how they played out.  The communal living and communal caring brought to mind a feral hippy commune, but without the drugs and free love.  I thought it might turn into some kind of cult, but Dr. Grind was never that kind of leader.  And the children were always so well cared for, had such structure to their lives, there was no risk of them turning feral.

In fact, far more than the children, it was the adults who turned dangerous, unable to maintain the kind of rigor expected of them by the Doctor.  Which is, I suspect, the problem with experiments of this type. You may be able to control a lot, but people are unpredictable, and being placed into an environment like this may not be the right choice for everyone.  Or, anyone.

So, while I'm not raving to the rafters about this one, I did enjoy reading it.  And if you're someone who's interested in social experiments, you might be too.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

When Isabelle Poole meets Dr. Preston Grind, she’s fresh out of high school, pregnant with her art teacher's baby, and totally on her own. Izzy knows she can be a good mother but without any money or relatives to help, she’s left searching.Dr. Grind, an awkwardly charming child psychologist, has spent his life studying family, even after tragedy struck his own. Now, with the help of an eccentric billionaire, he has the chance to create a “perfect little world”—to study what would happen when ten children are raised collectively, without knowing who their biological parents are. He calls it The Infinite Family Project and he wants Izzy and her son to join.

This attempt at a utopian ideal starts off promising, but soon the gentle equilibrium among the families unspoken resentments between the couples begin to fester; the project's funding becomes tenuous; and Izzy’s growing feelings for Dr. Grind make her question her participation in this strange experiment in the first place.Written with the same compassion and charm that won over legions of readers with The Family Fang, Kevin Wilson shows us with grace and humor that the best families are the ones we make for ourselves.

Weekly Goals 28-7-25

 I got some writing done yesterday, which was good.  I'm at that annoying point in the book where there are a whole bunch of different directions I could go in, and I'm not entirely sure which one I should take.  I know where I want to end up, but there are a few different ways I could get there.  So, I'm trying one, and we'll see where we get to.  

I may end up having to go back and re-write, but I'll need to do that anyway for some other parts.

Tried out a new version of my query and got the fastest rejection ever - less than eight hours.  Not sure if that's the query or just the agent having something very specific she's looking for, which isn't A Stranger to Kindness.

So this week, my goal is to keep writing and see where it takes me.  Arlo's been pretty good at guiding me this far, so I'll trust him.  It's Devon who took me the places that made things tricky.

I may have something exciting to share soon, so keep checking in.  And it's less than two weeks until Standing Too Close releases. 

Celebrate the Small Things 25-7-25

It's the end of the week, so it's time to Celebrate the Small Things.

What am I celebrating this week?

It's the weekend!

I haven't got much writing done this week, partly because of time and partly because I've been doing a beta read for another author.  I'm hoping to finish that today so I can use the weekend for my own writing.

Only one rejection for A Stranger to Kindness this week, so that's good.  I hope to get a couple more queries out today too.  I've tweaked it again, so we'll see if that makes a difference.

Got a second very good review for Standing Too Close which makes me happy.  I was seriously expecting some diabolical ones, so that my first two, before the book even launches, are so good, is gratifying.

And that's kind of it for this week.  What are you celebrating this Friday?

Books I've Read: Leave the Girls Behind

 

This was the book my book club picked to read this month, mainly because the public library had multiple copies available via the Libby app.  Perhaps not the best way to choose a book to read; I suspect I'm the only one who finished this one, and I probably wouldn't have if I didn;t commute to work by bus and like having a book to read on my phone.

I'm not a habitual reader of thrillers, but I do like a good one, especially if it has a lot of good twists in it and a character I really want to root for.  This book tried for that, but didn't really succeed.

The main character, Ruth-Ann is clearly damaged from the very first page.  She works in a bar, dropped out of college and is obsessed with true crime.  As we get to know her better, we discover her childhood friend was abducted from a playground and was later found murdered.  So when another child is abducted from the same town - one Ruth-Ann's parents moved away from shortly after the abduction - Ruth-Ann's obsessive curiosity is piqued.

The rest of the book follows Ruth-Ann down the rabbit hole as she chases ghosts from her past while trying to solve the current missing child case.  With the man accused of the original crime long-dead, Ruth-Ann's obsession becomes fixed on finding an accomplice.  She's certain he didn't act alone, and becomes fixed on the idea that it was woman who helped set up the abductions.

Her single-minded pursuit of the truth sends her on a journey around the world and throws her into the orbit of three very different women, one of whom just might hold the key to both today's mystery and the ones that have haunted her since childhood.

Having the MC of this book being so unbalanced is a great idea.  Ruth-Ann sees and speaks to the ghosts of missing girls each night and allows herself to be guided and influenced by their opinions. Her family barely speak to her and the only stable relationships she has are with her uncles, the owner of the bar she works in and her elderly dog.  And all these people treat her like she could break at any minute.  

So, right from the start you begin to guess that Ruth-Ann is maybe not the most reliable character to be guiding us through the story and makes her impulsive decisions feel all the more dangerous and ill-advised.

I didn't hate the book, but it never really engaged me in the way I want a thriller to engage me.  I want to be so invested in the story I can't put the book down.  I put this one down numerous times, only picking it back up because I was on the bus and had nothing else to do.  But bonus points for taking the main character to New Zealand!

So, I don't really recommend this one.  I imagine it might be a good plane read, where you have a long stretch of time to fill and few options for entertainment.  But I certainly found it hard to come back to once I'd put it down.

But don't just listen to me.  Here's the blurb:

The acclaimed author of the “tour de force” (The New York Times Book Review) Before You Knew My Name returns with a fresh suspense novel about a woman haunted by a serial killer and the ghosts he left behind.

Ruth-Ann Baker is a college dropout, a bartender—and an amateur detective who just can’t stay away from true crime. Nineteen years ago, her childhood friend was murdered by suspected serial killer Ethan Oswald. Still tormented by the case, Ruth can’t help but think of the long-dead Oswald when another young girl goes missing from the same town. And when she uncovers startling new evidence that suggests Oswald did not act alone, she is determined to find his deadly partner in crime.

Embarking on a global investigation, Ruth becomes close to three very different women—one of whom might just hold the key to what happened to the missing girl. And her childhood friend, all those years ago.

From an author who “pushes the boundaries of crime fiction in all the right ways” (Alex Finlay, author of The Night Shift), Leave the Girls Behind is another spine-chilling thriller that will linger long after you finish the last page.