This week on [REALITY CHECK], my friends Jeanie Johnson and Jayha Leigh of Beautiful Trouble Publishing are here to share insight into something you may have experienced--or will experience if people don't change their attitude, which is unlikely on a world-wide basis.
Some of you may have done this, and if so, all I can say is: What goes around, comes around.

In a way J & J talk about an uglier side of jumping on the bandwagon, which is what I discussed in a previous [REALITY CHECK]. You may also want to (re)visit my post, "What's in a Name? Your Reputation."

If you don't know J & J, this is their official bio:

The Jeanie and Jayha
Two pens...one-of-a-kind adventures...zero apologies.

A kickass tag-team bound together by the pen, Jeanie (the shagalicious wordslinger) and Jayha (the ninja master of h*ll no’s) are forces of nature that will either leave you begging for mercy or begging for more.

We are women who have brains we aren't afraid to use; feelings we aren't afraid to express; and, middle fingers that we aren’t afraid to extend. We pen stories that push all kinds of boundaries and we don’t apologize for it.

So! With that said, get ready for some direct, honest talk. These ladies nice, caring, and funny as hell, but they are not going sugarcoat anything when it comes to talking about what they care about, and they care about writing and publishing. Don't believe me? Read their post from the last time they visited!

J & J will be back again in April with another dose of publishing reality, so don't miss it!

“Clique Clack”
by Jeanie Johnson and Jayha Leigh

“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1895)
Scottish essayist, poet and novelist, resting place, Samoa.

At the end of the 1980’s the eighth grade was behind us and that’s where Jayha and I thought it was going to stay. At least that’s where we wanted it to stay. With our demanding schedules there are many things we don’t recall, however, we do recall that we didn’t get a lot of the stuff we wanted. It wasn’t like we wanted all that much. Jayha just wanted Taimak who played Leroy Green in The Last Dragon (1985). I just wanted to marry John Taylor from Duran Duran. Well, we all know how that turned out. Taimak’s surname isn’t Leigh and John’s surname isn’t Johnson. 

Fast forward a whole bunch of years and here comes the eighth grade to haunt us all over again. We’re not being bombarded by the fashion, the big hair or the music but by the junior high school clique mentality.

While we may not mix it up on social media as much as other authors, we’ve noticed a rise in the number of cliques. These cliques don’t merely exist; they stir the pot. Appreciative of good, old-fashioned pot-stirring, we don’t dis the pot-stirring. We merely dis those who stir the pot without knowledge of the ingredients or how they’re being used. The “he said/she said/they said” crowd has a lot of weight and they don’t mind throwing it, and their opinions, around. As our superheroines and heroes have taught us, unchecked power rarely leads to good things, especially when it’s combined with an unchecked ego, a healthy dose of “don’t give a damn” and a shortage of common decency.

Perhaps you’re not concerned, as you’ve not cliqued up by design. Ironically, your clique-less status makes you part of the “don’t-want-to-be-part-of-a-clique” clique. You might not want to believe it (in much the same way that Jayha doesn’t want to believe that she can no longer fit into a size 8 shoe), but as Milli Vanilli lip-synced, “Girl, you know it’s true.”

With the numerous challenges we face as writers (deadlines/edits/coffee shortage/having to fly coach to a workshop) it is a sad truth that cliques have to be one of our concerns. For some, especially those who are fortunate enough to not give a flying f*ck (i.e. because you are rolling in the dough), cliques aren’t a concern. However, for the vast majority of writers, the truth is that cliques will affect us. Readers get together and analyze, dissect, nitpick and ultimately review an author’s prose. And where does all of this take place? All over social media, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, the websites of third party vendors, your own personal website…basically, every damn where!

As writers we don’t mind readers going Jacques Cousteau with our prose, however sometimes a cock is simply a cock and not a metaphor for anything. What we do mind however are the cliques that don’t bother to read, analyze, or even purchase an author’s work but have no problem calling them everything but a child of God all over social media. And for what? Because that particular author isn’t friends with their favorite author? Really? One would hope that a real friend of an author would be honest with her/him and tell her/him their work is bullsh*t/needs editing or a believable plot. Instead, we find that many readers (and authors) clique up and use their energy bashing other authors…or the reviewers that rated them high.

We’d like to have a magic wand and undo the Clique Nation, but alas, we don’t. (NB: Actually, Jayha would rather have a super yacht and I’d rather have a pimped out submarine, but for the sake of this blog post, we’ll go with magic wand.) 

So, how do we deal with cliques out of control? With grace? With dignity? With a baseball bat? Jayha would like to deal with them by not acknowledging their presence in her universe. Regardless of how we choose to deal with cliques, the truth is that we have to deal with them, so the baseball bat and ignoring them aren’t really options. As writers, we do our best to not sweat the small stuff, but what happens when you’re faced with a sh*t-storm of “small stuff?”

Where do you draw the line? When is the correct time to respond to these individuals who only want to drag you down to their level? When do you stop taking “it” and say something to the cliques? If you do acknowledge the fuggary and say something, how do you deal with the backlash? It’s not just the name-calling and finger-pointing but the black-balling from publishing houses because you’ve told a popular author that not only does her/his sh*t stink, but so does her/his prose. It’s the “me and my friends are going to buy one copy of your book and pirate the h*ll out of it” costing you royalties, your publisher their investment, and jeopardizing your future writing career. It’s the “my homies are going to make it their life’s mission to follow you around all over the Internet and post bad reviews, use innuendo to malign your character, and generally make it so difficult that you just throw in the pen and cease being competition for me.”

These are just some examples of how the backlash will affect you. We didn’t talk about how it affects your writing partner, your publishing company, and your fellow authors at your publishing company.

Still, even with the potential for backlash, Jayha and I’ve learned that you cannot simply ignore the fuggary around you even when it’s not your business, because at worst, you tell lies with your silence; at best, you condemn yourself, because in the eyes of many, your silence conceals your guilt.

At some point you will say something, and it’s okay. Recall, even Jesus kicked over some tables in the Temple.

The crime isn’t in saying something; it’s in how you say what you say. FLOTUS knows how to get her point across without saying a word. Being an author, you’ll want to use words because it’s hard to give someone side eye over the internet.

Still, when you do say something, regardless of how politely you tell someone to f*ck off, there’s a chance you’ll be accused of simply being too unsophisticated to understand the business. Or maybe that’s just us. We might be Southern, but it doesn’t take sophistication to understand when someone’s just being a bitch for no damn reason. According to data we’ve analyzed, the average book is priced below twenty dollars. Manners, however, are still free, and yet so few individuals opt to put manners to use. In the age of social media, it’s more important than ever to mind your manners, because later, you might want to try and get a job/position that requires credibility, discretion, honor, and/or courage. You cannot corral the words of others, but you can corral your own. 

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©2013. Zetta Brown is the author of several published short stories and the novel Messalina: Devourer of Men. If you like this post, then stop by Zetta’s Desk or Zetta’s House of Random Thoughts.