In a former life, I tended bar at a Mexican restaurant. It was a hole-in-the-wall dump of a place, a converted Frisch’s Big Boy with a few colorful blankets and sombreros and piñatas tacked to the walls for “atmosphere.” The food was authentic, though, and we always got good reviews in the newspaper.

I started each shift by cutting dozens of limes into wheels for garnishes, mixing five-gallon tanks of margaritas, and generally prepping the bar for what we called “Fiesta Hour.”

Between 2PM and 7PM, you could buy jumbo margaritas and well drinks for half-price, and you could eat fresh tortilla chips and homemade salsa for free. In theory, the cheap drinks and free snacks were supposed to stimulate customers’ appetites. In theory, they would then order a plate of rellenos or enchiladas or pollo con salsa verde. In practice, however, quite a few patrons regularly came in strictly for the cut-rate tequila buzz and comp munchies.

One of those patrons was a guy named Marco.

Mid-thirties, tall and thin, stringy blond hair, big Adam’s apple, still lived with his parents.

He always ordered multiple margaritas on the rocks (light on the ice; he got more booze that way), multiple baskets of chips, and multiple tubs of hot and mild salsa. He never bought anything off the menu, and he never tipped me a dime.

But those weren't the main reasons I dreaded seeing him.

You see, Marco was a self-proclaimed perfumier. He had a “laboratory” set up in his basement, where he distilled oils and essences, spices and extracts--all sorts of exotic and volatile concoctions designed to titillate the human olfactory nerve. Drop-by-drop, Mad Scientist Marco filled tiny glass vials with these precious potions of his, and then mounted the vials in a briefcase for display. Sometimes he brought the briefcase to the bar with him.

There was only one problem with Marco’s fragrances: they didn’t smell very good. In fact, they stunk.

That’s not just my opinion. Everybody who ever smelled Marco’s products said they stunk. Popping the cork on one of his bottles was like unleashing the hounds of perfume hell. Imagine an elevator full of blue-haired, lipstick-toothed octogenarians, whose senses of smell died sometime during the Carter administration. Add a couple of funeral sprays, some rubbing alcohol, and maybe a dash of Pine Sol. Shake well.

Oh, he occasionally sold one of those vile vials, to a kindly cocktail server or a nearby customer who took pity on him. I even bought a bottle one time, only to pitch it in the dumpster on my way home.

Unfortunately, our patronage only encouraged him. He kept making more of that kerosene cologne, kept trying to hawk it during Fiesta Hour. Eventually, the restaurant owner had a talk with him. Marco didn’t come in very often after that.

Marco’s dream was to be a famous perfume designer. The way I see it, he went about it all wrong.

Shouldn’t you know a little bit about chemistry? Shouldn't you be aware of how various substances might interact with human glandular secretions? Shouldn’t you maybe spend some time in Paris or New York or somewhere studying with masters of the trade? Shouldn’t you analyze popular scents on a molecular level to see just what it is about them that turns people on?

Marco didn’t do any of that. Marco bought some smelly stuff through the mail, pumped it into amateurish-looking containers, tried to sell it from a briefcase at the cantina.

And he wanted to call himself a perfumier.

Sorry, Marco, but you have to earn that title.

Just as, in my opinion, writers have to earn the title of published author.

Anyone who can scratch out words on a page can have those words printed and bound and put up for sale on sites like Amazon. To me, that type of publishing is tantamount to bottling perfume from a basement lab and selling it from a briefcase in a bar.

In other words, it’s very likely that the end product will stink.

I was at a writer’s conference one time, outside smoking a cigarette, when a fellow attendee strolled up and asked for a light.

“What kind of stuff do you write?” he asked.

“Hardboiled. I’m working on a private eye novel.”

“Anything published yet?”

“Not yet. I’m still looking for an agent. How ‘bout you?”

“Yeah, I have a book out.”

“Really? Who’s the publisher?”

He named a certain POD outfit. "Here, let me give you one of my cards...”

He handed me a business card and walked away. He avoided me for the duration of the conference, preferring instead to hang around with other “published authors.” I felt like grabbing him by the collar and shouting you’re not published either, you punk, but of course I didn’t. Anyway, I doubt my harsh words would have penetrated his cloud of arrogance.

There are no shortcuts to becoming a published author. You have to earn the title by landing a contract with a legitimate publisher, and that can take years of hard work.

Some folks would rather throw up a lab in the basement and start hawking product right away (throw up and hawk being the key words there).

That’s their choice, I suppose, but I really don’t see the point.

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Then they must have adjusted it since I last heard.
"... authors with no financial or ownership interest in the company..."

Are they calling this the "Charles Ardai Rule?" ;)

For the Canadians here, the Crime Writers of Canada has no such rule. I understand in the US the volume of entries would be overwhelming and that's not the case for us, yet. Of course, a thousand bucks would be a pretty big advance or royalty payment here - especially if the royalties had to be paid out in a single year.

Last year in Canada one of our top literary awards, The Stephen Leacock (for humour/satire) was won by a self-published book.
I don't know if MWA calls it that, but everyone else does. That's exactly the rule they used to toss his book from consideration last year.

I realize judging is a thankless job and a Herculean task, but if you're supposed to picking the "best" books, should you you be that fussy about their origins?
No, you shouldn't be. There should be a method to cull the submissions that's fair to everyone.

I think we all agree that publishing in five years is going to look very different than it does now, so for an organization to hand over the eligibility requirements to "publishers" may not work. We'll have to see how things shake out.
John M:

I don't know if Charles himself is a member, but Hardcase Crime is on the list of approved publishers.
Don't you remember the story from last year? His book was disqualified and it wasn't from Hard Case Crime, it was from another imprint that used the same distributor.

It may be a unique case or it may be tip of the iceberg stuff, depending on how publishing changes.
That can be directly translated to self-published authors as well. People assume that no one would self-publish unless they weren't good enough to get published by a traditional publisher, big or small, yet that's not necessarily the case. Unfortunately, the quality of the story itself is never given a chance since the self-published author is discredited immediately just for being self-published, never mind the reasons why.

I'm sure self-published authors get tired of being told they're not really published because they didn't follow the "correct" route. There's chauvinism, yes, but also bigotry.
Would you say the same thing about the medical profession, I wonder? Would you want an unlicensed physician as your own surgeon?
Are writers licensed? Are writers regulated by the government? Are stories a matter of life and death?

There's no vetting process for writing that is going to assure quality the same way a surgeons' schooling will (and even that schooling isn't going to guarantee greatness). What qualifies as good writing is highly subjective. What qualifies as a surgical success is not.

I've heard this comparison before and it's time it dies, because it's not a good one.
John, I'd be interested to know your rationale for supporting credentialism in the medical profession--and presumably in the auto mechanics profession and a zillion other fields--but not in the writing profession.

It seems to be that you think writing is too highly subjective for anyone to assess it properly. What is your evidence for such an astonishing belief?
I'm sure you mean the other John, but as he says, what qualifies as a surgical success isn't quite as subjective as what qualifies as an artistic success. The consequences of badly done medical procedures or improperly repaired cars are a lot more serious than the consequences of badly done art.

My wife is an engineer and one of the main reasons for requriing the qualifications is so they can be taken away if an engineer really screws up. If I write a bad book (as a number of amazon reviews will tell you I already have) I can hope to do better next time. No bridges fell down or power plants overloaded.
It's an analogy, meaning it's not going to be a perfect comparison. Michael Connelly uses architecture as an analogy for fiction writing. That's going to suffer from the same drawbacks if you get too literal, focus on the trees, not the forest, but the analogy is still instructive.

The fact remains there are these people in publishing whose job it is to confer writing credentials via agency representation or publication. Do they do a perfect job? No. But even surgeons make mistakes. Do they have any objective criteria to use along with the subjective? Certainly. Fiction writing is a craft, after all.

That mistakes are sometimes made doesn't discredit the entire profession of literary agents or editors.

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