Annie Bellet Criticizes 20Booksto50K Slate and Members of the Group Respond

Annie Bellet says she was livid when she read about “The Nebulas & 20booksto50, not-a-nudge-nudge-slate” on Camestros Felapton.

She’s brought to bear on this 2019 Nebulas slate her experience with the Sad/Rabid Puppies Hugo slates of 2015, when she took her Hugo-nominated story out of contention (see “Two Hugo Nominees Withdraw Their Stories” from April 2015). Twitter thread starts here.

She also showed the characteristics that distinguished this slate from a mere recommendation list.

Marko Kloos was the other 2015 Hugo nominee named in the story linked above, and he added his support today:

Marshall Ryan Maresca commented on the differences between authors asking for consideration and a slate.

People involved with 20Booksto50K, the creator of the slate, and the author of one of the listed works, have also weighed in.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, co-author with R.R. Virdi of “Messenger,” a work on the list that is now a Nebula finalist, had this to say:

The disproportionate influence of a slate may also be due to the small numbers of nominations needed to make the Nebula ballot, according to this exchange:

Whether something is a recommendation list or a slate is a question:

Bellet said this about recognizing the difference between slates and recommendations:

Incidentally, there is support for Wijeratne’s nominated story.

Michael Cooper responded on Facebook by essentially arguing no one can show anybody was influenced by the list:

Recently the Nebula Award finalists were announced, and there’s been some flak because of the number of independent authors on the ballot.

Honestly, so far as I’m concerned, I don’t think there are enough.

I think that the ratio of indies to trad pubs on the ballot is backwards from what it should be. Why do I think this? Well…sales. Indies sell more books than traditionally published authors by a wide margin. Granted, this is as a whole and there are individual trad pub authors who do very well, but if you look at the top SF authors on Amazon, the list is dominated by indies.

…If you’re a SF reader, then you probably know this statement: Correlation does not equal causation. Just because a list of books to vote for was posted in the 20Books FB group, does not meant that that list got the indies who are on the ballot up there. It’s not a smoking gun.

To say that the indie authors in SWFA (the organization that produces the Nebula awards) voted as a bloc because of that list is to call into question the character of all those people and to say that they did not evaluate the books they voted for.

That sort of statement is: irrational, a baseless accusation, and irresponsible. Now, I know that a lot of people didn’t come out and *say* that members of the 20books FB group voted as a bloc, but they implied it. For the sake of intellectual honesty, they should make it clear that they did not imply such a thing, and that to the best of their knowledge, every SFWA member that nominated a book or story, did so after careful consideration and review.

Because they have no evidence to the contrary (that they’ve presented, at least).

Lastly, to say that because a person is a member of an FB group means that they adhere to all the core tenets of that group is frankly stupid and lazy thinking. To then denigrate them because you don’t like an aspect of a group in which they are members is the sort of thinking that belies a lack of clear logic and reasoning.

Craig Martelle, who runs the 20Booksto50K Facebook group, added a comment on Cooper’s post:

It’s hard not take negative comments about 20Booksto50k® personally since I run that group, but taking a step back, we did nothing untoward. Indies read indies. We support each other by reading and buying each other’s stuff, often promoting it as well with our own hard-acquired email lists. The ignorance is appalling about what we do. I think ethically making money isn’t dirty and that’s part of the allusions. People contact me if they find a typo in one of my books – I fix them and reupload. The books with the most typos are my trad pub books. Trad does not necessarily equal higher quality. I think my latest books are as high in the quality department as any trad book out there. But I digress – this isn’t about me. It’s about a system that promotes ebooks that cost more than a hardback. It’s about the old guard who are slowly changing yet having a hard time giving ground. It’s about the industry of middle men who stand to lose their jobs from the indie revolution. Of course they don’t want to change. I can’t begrudge them a long career that ends on a whimper. But adapt and overcome. That’s what has made indies a force to be reckoned with. I demonstrate that with The Expanding Universe anthologies, now a two-time Nebula finalist publication. I support indies taking charge of their own careers through 20Books. I support all authors taking responsibility for their career decisions. I don’t support those who need to denigrate others. It won’t make them feel better and it definitely won’t stop the indie train. That baby is already well down the tracks and picking up speed.

Martelle also waved the threat of a SLAPP suit against offenders:

We simply asked people to read our stuff with their limited time because full-time indie authors are busy as hell. I’m watching the blogs and stuff. If anyone crosses the line into libel, I’ll drop a C&D on them and then follow with a lawsuit. As they say, put your money where your mouth is. I’m willing to because I know for a fact that we didn’t do a slate. Let’s see how the keyboard warriors respond to real world consequences.

Jonathan Brazee continues to claim SFWA itself okayed the list:

I didn’t respond to any of the blogs or Reddit, but just as an aside, the indie FB list was cleared with the SFWA staff before it was ever posted.

I have asked Brazee for the name of the person he spoke to. Who knows what really happened anyway? If somebody asked me “How about if I put up a reading list” I wouldn’t think anything of it, unless I knew that person was the representative of a large group, and was going to preface his list with an encouragement for the group to nominate those works for the Nebula Award.

J A Sutherland has added perspective in this Twitter thread:

96 thoughts on “Annie Bellet Criticizes 20Booksto50K Slate and Members of the Group Respond

  1. Psst, you misspelled Camestros.

    And good for Annie Bellet, Marko Kloos and J.A. Sutherland to calling out 20Booksto50K.

  2. Grits teeth.

    “Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana

    The Puppy thing worked because not very many of Worldcon members bother to nominate, so a small number of nominators working as a group could easily get works onto the final ballot. I assume the membership of SFWA is even smaller than Worldcon, and so the Nebula is potentially more susceptible to slate tactics than the Hugo?

    It did occur to me during the Puppy slate years to wonder if other genre non-juried awards were similarly susceptible to slate tactics. At the time I thought that the Nebula was susceptible but discounted it ever happening because of the nature of its membership. I mean, what sort of professional would do such a thing?

  3. I just want to give Annie and Marko all the hugs. 2015 was crap, especially for them. They did come out of it with my respect, though. For what that’s worth.

    Slating is bad. It was bad then and it’s bad now.

  4. Argh.

    Yudhanjaya Wijeratne might well be the best writer the world has produced. However, **IF** he deliberately joined in on slate tactics (and neither being on the slate nor even defending it actually prove that, though the latter certainly suggests it), on “You nom me and I’ll nom you” backscratching rather than “hey, read my work, I think it’s good and so does Mary Anne Mohanraj*” then the merit of the work IS IRRELEVANT TO WHETHER HE GOT ON THE LIST. Using slate tactics actually undermines the merit argument, because he didn’t trust merit. And not trusting trad pub to pay adequate attention to indies might indeed be a genuine issue (one Annie Bellet would agree is one) but slate tactics to force things onto the list regardless of merit are not, in fact, the way to fight back against that.

    And accusing Annie Bellet of complaining about it because it’s “not one of her friends” seems a lot like a pot trying to call out a kettle.

    * and this latter has some influence with my decision to read a book.

  5. I think many of the indie writers see no issue with this because they are so focused on the business aspect of publishing and promoting their books. It’s all over the indie publishing blogs and publications and how-to guide–produce, produce, produce and market, market, market.

    And with many of the authors, and certainly many of the people creating how-tos for aspiring authors, there is a real sense that any angle you can find that boosts your sales and reputation is fair and worth doing.

    So there are people who figure out how to game Amazon with fake reviews, boosted page views, and little gimcracks like putting the table of contents at the end of the book so it somehow registers as a different page total for Kindle Unlimited purposes. Tinkering with categories to list your book in so that you find some hyperfocused microcategory that you can rank in and then promote your book as an “Amazon bestseller”…

    The way this group views the Nebulas seems very similar — there doesn’t seem to be any understanding of what the Nebula award actually is meant to represent, it’s just that it’s a great marketing angle that the trad publishers are selfishly hogging all the access to, and just like tinkering with Amazon, finding the angle that gets you that boost is just how the game is played. The focus on numbers of votes, and the group of authors all teaming up to help each other (this is also common in the Amazon indie publishing world, with things like doing the 99 cent 10-book bundles with multiple authors, or logrolling reviews and in-book promotions for each other) makes me think they see it as one more lever to pull in the crowded/rough-and-tumble world of self-publishing.

  6. I’m agreeing with Annie: it doesn’t matter how loudly you say it’s not a slate, if it looks like a slate and acts like a slate – and we went through this with the Hugos in 2016 and 2017, IIRC, with people saying “this list isn’t a slate” while they implied really strongly that we should nominate books from that list.

  7. @Lenora Rose: Yes, that author’s tone toward Annie Bellet (and the obvious ignorance of or disregard for what she went through with the Hugos a few years back) made me bristle.

    If this does turn into a whole Puppies like thing, complete with all the acting out and namecalling by the slate-ers and slate-ees, I’m gonna be adding more authors to my dead-to-me/will-never-buy-no-matter-what-I-don’t-care-if-they-get-a-Pulitzer-or-a-Nobel list.

  8. [groan]
    It’s like a morality play about the first rule of holes. I didn’t think the 20booksto50k not-a-slate was a big deal or on the scale of the puppies etc but… I’m not a SWFA member and it’s fair enough for other SWFA members to be unhappy with 20booksto50k. The prickly response from various 20/50 nominees is such a bad look.

  9. MaryAnneMohanraj: As a long-time pro, a SFWA member, the founder of Strange Horizons, and a fan of Yudhanjaya’s work, I think this Nebula nom is well-deserved.

    I notice that she hasn’t said “This particular story is award-worthy”. This sounds a great deal to me like the Puppies’ arguments that certain authors “should get Hugo nominations because they’ve done good work” and just… no. If you can’t say that this particular work is Nebula-worthy, then don’t try to argue that the author should be nominated for a body of work.

    There’s an old saying, “Be careful what you wish for… because you may actually get it.” They wanted people to read their work. A whole lot of people are going to be reading these works that have been gamed onto the ballot, and I think that these authors are not going to be happy with the results of that sort of scrutiny on their not-ready-for-prime-time stories.

    I’ve read the story in question (“Messenger” by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne and R.R. Virdi), and it’s so mediocre that it’s painful to see it on the Nebula ballot.

    The 20BooksTo50K authors all talk as if access to Nebula Awards nominations is something which they deserve, rather than about how their works are exemplars of good writing. It’s pretty obvious why that is.

    And that laughable lawsuit threat from Michael Cooper? Wow, it’s really starting to sound just like the bad old Puppy days.

    cmm, I’ve already got these people on my “Do Not Read, Ever” list now. 😐

  10. Jonathan Brazee continues to claim SFWA itself okayed the list

    Let me guess, this was like when BT asked Juliette Wade if it was okay if he put her story on his “list of recommendations”.

    He no doubt misrepresented what he was doing to whichever poor person in SFWA he asked. And the opinion of one person in SFWA is not “approval from SFWA as an organization”.

  11. I already had a great deal of respect for Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos due to the way they behaved with such integrity during the Puppy slating. This just makes me respect them more, and I am so sorry that they are having to deal with all the pain that this has dredged back up for them.

  12. JJ on February 26, 2019 at 2:56 pm said:

    I already had a great deal of respect for Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos due to the way they behaved with such integrity during the Puppy slating. This just makes me respect them more, and I am so sorry that they are having to deal with all the pain that this has dredged back up for them.

    Seconded.

  13. I suppose my question is… well, I have several, but a fairly crucial one is what proportion of this “recommendations list” consists of works by authors not in the group? I know independent authors have a tough row to hoe… but if this is another one like the Puppies’ “works by underappreciated conservative authors who just happen to be us and our mates, honest guv”…. well, it’d be doing a disservice to the awards, to the readers, and to independent authors who aren’t in the group. Not a good thing, in my opinion.

    I don’t have a say in the Nebulas, obviously – but I will be voting in the Hugos, and if anything turns up on that ballot that doesn’t look like it got on by legitimate means… I will scrutinize it very carefully, and I still have Noah Ward’s number in my Rolodex if I need it.

  14. Shorn of an explosion of profanity, I find that the only thing I have left to say is kudos to Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos for taking a public stand on an issue that must have dredged up some very painful memories.

    That, and there are a couple more names that have moved onto my “Will never buy” list.

  15. DuBoff has now deleted her series of Tweets defending herself and boasting about her Booklife review.

  16. @JJ

    And that laughable lawsuit threat from Michael Cooper? Wow, it’s really starting to sound just like the bad old Puppy days.

    That was Craig Martelle, who defacto runs the 20Booksto50K group, not Michael Cooper a.k.a. M.D. Cooper.

    Anyway, I’d been wondering why my by now a few days old Nebula post suddenly got an influx of hits from Facebook. But now I know why. It’s becaue Amy DuBoff was nice enough to link to my post in the comments on Michael Cooper’s post.

    What gets me most is that those folks claim that those who reported about and/or criticised the 20Booksto 50K Nebula not-a-slate somehow hate indie authors or are jealous of their success. Because that’s bloody ridiculous and they’d know it, if they’d even spent one minute looking up the people they’re attacking.

    Annie Bellet is an indie author and a very successful one, too. Marko Kloos started out as an indie, before he was picked up by 47North. J.A. Sutherland is an indie author. I am an indie author and have been promoting indie books for years. Cam is an indie author or rather Timothy is.

    This is not about indie versus traditional and never was. It’s about slate tactics and why they’re never a good idea.

    I initially was willing to give 20Booksto50K the benefit of a doubt, because it’s quite possible that they are not familiar with the etiquette surrounding the various SFF awards and what is and isn’t considered acceptable. But this behaviour isn’t a good look for them at all.

  17. Quoth Michael Cooper:
    I think that the ratio of indies to trad pubs on the ballot is backwards from what it should be. Why do I think this? Well…sales. Indies sell more books than traditionally published authors by a wide margin.

    McDonalds sell more meals in a day than Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz and Rene Redzepi and Ferran Adria combined sell in a year. Why don’t they get the Michelin stars and the Beard awards?

    What a maroon.

  18. Bad case of déjà vu, huh. Exceedingly similar justifications to the Puppies. Right down to the expectation that people should ignore that something got slated onto the ballot and just focus on the ~quality~ of the ~work~. As if they didn’t already break that convention by slating in the first place.

    Tch. Shameful behaviour and a distressing lack of professionalism.

  19. Cora Buhlert: I’d been wondering why my by now a few days old Nebula post suddenly got an influx of hits from Facebook. But now I know why. It’s becaue Amy DuBoff was nice enough to link to my post in the comments on Michael Cooper’s post.

    In that same comment, she also says:
    I would encourage everyone to not engage with these individuals. We are professionals and should demonstrate poise.

    So apparently she has now become a “professional” with “poise” after her Tweets and all of her comments at Cam’s blog made her look childish and unprofessional. 🙄

  20. In reading various blogs and posts about this, I see that the “gatekeeping” meme is making a big appearance.
    Lots of “I know writers (unnamed, of course) who have been treated poorly by SFWA”
    And this is being framed as “opposition to indie writers”.
    For a bunch of writers who supposedly out-sell trads, have millions of fans and are the future; they seem to be very insecure.

  21. Harold Osler: And this is being framed as “opposition to indie writers”.

    Because that’s ever so more flattering to them than the truth, which is “opposition to indie writers who are behaving like assholes”.

  22. Wow, if Mohanraj cares about Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, she’ll advise him to stop acting like a condescending dick on Twitter, especially to Annie Bellet.

    “Sorry, Annie. But you’re sounding like a petulant child here. I’m not out to even any scores – Asia is quite large, in case you don’t know. I’m asking why this is unusual, given a clear record of similar recommendations lists on professional writers’ websites.”

  23. Annie Bellet’s most popular work is the Twentysided Sorceress urban fantasy series, though personally I also loved her Pyrrh series of police procedurals in a fantasy setting, which sadly seems to be on hold.

    J.A. Sutherland writes the Alexis Carew series, which is basically Horatio Hornblower crossed with Honor Harrington. It’s enjoyable space opera.

    Marko Kloos writes military SF, though I haven’t read anything by him, so someone else will have to chime in with recommendations.

  24. Thanks! One Bellet (Twenty-sided Sorceress #2) and one Kloos (Terms of Enlistment), both with bargain upgrade to Audible, purchased. A Sutherland selection will wait till I’m awake, and perhaps someone else will weigh in with more info, in the meantime.

  25. The condescension in some of these tweets is simply breathtaking.
    If you’re going to be mansplaining slates to Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos honestly, there’s just nothing I want from you, ever.
    Straight onto the Nope List right there.
    It’s the finest anti-marketing I’ve seen in a long time.

  26. If you’re going to be mansplaining slates to Annie Bellet and Marko Kloos honestly, there’s just nothing I want from you, ever.

    Quoted for truth.

    I get that to the offenders this doesn’t look like a slate. It’s marketing and fairness and supporting one another and…a clear indication that they don’t understand how math works. Simple, easy, uncomplicated math.

    Hundreds of award worthy books, for some value of award worthy, are published every year in the US. Fifty people voting for books based on an asterisked list will generally ensure that at least some of those books will get more votes than 50 books voted for by 50 people who picked based on their own wide reading, because the first 50 have a consensus the second 50 do not.

    So, you end up with a tainted nomination, because there’s no convincing argument that your work is on the list because of merit. It may have merit, but that is not why it’s been nominated. It’s there because of how slate voting works.

  27. “? Well…sales. Indies sell more books than traditionally published authors by a wide margin.”

    That might be true. I do not know. But that is nit very interesting. As all of the books nominated are from the 20BooksTo50K-slate, the real question is if the authors in that group outsell the traditionally published authors. I find that very hard to believe.

    The argument from Michael Cooper is pure bullshit. Sigh. *adds some new names to authors never to buy things from*

  28. I spent the evening reading a bunch of the slated works. Only one really doesn’t belong in that the Richard Fox peace. The others I could see people legitimately wanting to vote for, even if I’m not one of those people. Still slates suck. 2015 was pretty painful, even if it ended up OK for me.

  29. The argument from Michael Cooper is pure bullshit.

    What stands out to me is what isn’t in his argument. He talks about sales of indies, in the abstract, and how he thinks that means that more indies should be nominated.

    But he doesn’t talk about the actual books. Nothing about the quality of the stories.

    Like, if he argued, “A great book like [TITLE] by [AUTHOR] shouldn’t be ignored!”, I would at least believe he was promoting something he thought was a worthy nominee. But it’s not about the work at all, it’s literally just about the concept of indy publishing. And I don’t find that remotely compelling. There are several very good indy-published books, but the mere fact that they’re indy is not what’s interesting about them, and certainly in-and-of-itself doesn’t make them award worthy.

  30. I have vague memories from the early Puppy days that various people said “Oh, yeah, the Nebulas – different nominators, different voters and SO MUCH logrolling”, but I don’t know how to find who said it.

    I may take a look at Making Light’s archive.

  31. And yet another condescending dick tweet from Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, who has “generously” offered to give the trophy back if he wins, as long as a bunch of SFWA members are willing to tell him to his face that his nomination was unfair:

    “So we are asked to abide by the unwritten rules of a community we do not know, with history we are not fully aware or part of. The first step of the process is to understand the viper’s nest we seem to have set foot into and what idols demand placation.”

    He openly admits that he’s not familiar with the SFWA community, but is happy to insult them and still feels entitled to their awards.

    I don’t care how many major publishers put out this guy’s work, I won’t ever be reading it.

  32. Niall McAuley: Jason Sanford on how the “new” Nebula rules reduce logrolling:

    Note that that post is from 2010, before self-published authors were allowed to join SFWA. I suspect that Jason had no idea just how shamelessly mercenary and ethically-bankrupt some of the future self-published members would be.

  33. 20booksto50k members and group admins have multiple times ran afoul of Amazon’s TOS and have had their books removed from sale. Them acting as if this isn’t a slate is ridiculous.

  34. Marketing. Publishing.

    Wasn’t establishing a publishing house, complete with promotions that mentioned “Hugo Nominated” tied in … somehow … to the whole puppy thing?

    (yes, of course it was)

    FYI

  35. I haven’t read everything Yudhanjaya Wijeratne said on Twitter since this controversy arose, but I’m inclined to view his angry comments more charitably than others. He’s not an SFWA member, not involved in 20booksto50K and had nothing to do with the encouragement of slate voting.

    I think it’s a fair point when he said to me in a response, “Quite frankly I’m only discovering this now, so I must remark on the extraordinary hubris of expecting someone from halfway across the world, with no involvement in the US scifi community, to know every granular detail of these byzantine community politics.”

    People should recognize that he’s in the same position Annie Bellet was in back when the Puppies slate controversy exploded. It wasn’t easy for her to be dragged into a fight not of her own making, particularly when it tarnished the enjoyment of being nominated for a prestigious award.

  36. arcade: People should recognize that he’s in the same position Annie Bellet was in…

    Sure. I don’t remember Annie Ballet being a complete and total dick though. Somehow that makes a significant difference in how I view their respective circumstances.

  37. @Harold Osler, re “gatekeeping”: I was particularly struck by a couple of lines from Craig Martelle’s screed:

    It’s about the old guard who are slowly changing yet having a hard time giving ground. It’s about the industry of middle men who stand to lose their jobs from the indie revolution.

    Aside from the Puppyish sound of those lines, I’d respond that my 45 years on congoing has shown me that many of those “gatekeepers” are people I’ve personally heard talking with passion and knowledge about our genre, showing the breadth of their experience, their respect for good writing, and their desire for excellence (even a glint of it that can be nurtured and/or polished) wherever it can be found.

    @Marshal Ryan Maresca: I hadn’t noticed that disjunction (promoting volume rather than quality) specifically. Thanks for pointing it out; ISTM that’s a particularly Puppyish feature of this mess.

    @Niall McAuley: that Locus link is a riot.

  38. I don’t remember Annie Bellet being a complete and total dick though.

    Bellet had to work through a process after she was nominated and it became controversial. She got upset with me on her blog after I made a comment to her in 2015 that’s similar to what she told Wijeratne this year. She told me, “I feel good about my nomination and my story. Everyone else voting can make their own damn decisions.”

    So it was initially difficult for her too, though she may have handled it a little better than he did.

    (Incidentally, I caught hell elsewhere from Puppies and their fans for commenting on her blog to question the slate tactic. They exploited her distress.)

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