The feedback is getting more and more cut-throat, but having been aware and reporting on this since Thursday, I’m over it; the entire situation is just getting sadder and sadder.
Not only does Lori Jareo claim to have a journalism degree, but her huband and WordTech partner/co-founder Kevin Walzer used to work for the Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization, according to an article about WordTech Communications in Poets & Writers magazine. Journalism is not a field that is typically ignorant of copyright law – why did it not occur to either of them that publishing a work explicitly set in a galaxy they did not own was a bad idea?
Although Amazon has yet to remove the listing for Another Hope, they did delete the many ‘reviews’ that did not address the actual work. And perhaps most disturbingly of all, the sales rank has jumped from #35,860 on Saturday to #13,371 on Sunday. (For comparison, the sales ranks of the latest licensed fiction releases, Republic Commando:Triple Zero and Outbound Flight, are fluxuating in the 1000 range.)
I expect Another Hope will be gone by Monday evening (though I said that about Friday as well.) The message left on the website earlier leads me to believe that LFL has served a C&D and is leaving the business end to WordTech for the moment.
But that’s just more of the same. Whatever they were thinking back in July 2005, they know better now; thenaberriegirls.com no longer works at all.
Anyway, the best post today is this thoughtful analysis of the situation by Chris Meadows.
Meanwhile, Playing in George’s Sandbox, a thread at TFN’s FanFic forum, explores (in-between yet more outrage) the possible repercussions for the SW fanfic community in general. In short: Don’t go flushing your WIPs down the toilet quite yet.
Yes, Jareo did something phenomenally stupid, but demonizing the woman more isn’t going to help anyone. She knows. We all know. All we can do it wait and see, and I expect Jareo, WordTech and the Print-On-Demand industry, not Star Wars fandom, to take the brunt of the fallout.