New Year! Honoring Free Speech on This First Month of 2018

Occasionally I reprint something from my #SharingwithWriters newsletter to this #SharingwithWriters blog because I think it is important enough to reach a broader audience. On this first day of 2018, I think Mindy Phillips Lawrence's Itty Bitty column (a misnomer in this case because it is such not an "itty" topic at all) is important enough to be shouted to the world. Journalists are being murdered and the press, though it is not always right, is being attacked for insidious purposes.  As writers--even if we aren't journalists--we recognize the power of words. As caretakers of those words we should be especially interested in understanding how important they are and stand up to protect them, spoken or written.  History shows us that over all free exercise of speech and press has time and again been the catalyst for nothing less than the protection of humanity itself.   As Salman Rushdie says,

“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

So here is Mindy's "Itty Bitty" contribution for you to do some brushup or just some plain honoring on this, the first day of 2018. 

Writing and the First Amendment 

By Mindy Phillips Lawrence

BILL OF RIGHTS: Amendment One

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It the United States, we have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. For years, we’ve been a sanctuary for writers from other nations who were denied this ability and, in some cases, jailed and executed. They’ve been able to come to America and write, sharing the freedoms we’ve enjoyed since the original Bill of Rights was enacted in 1791. As writers of books, plays, poetry, news articles and memoirs, we can include information that may offend some people. We continue to write the best truth we can find through our research. We can make political statements out loud and in print without being arrested—so far.

Recently, there has been an attempt to weaken these liberties. Press from certain news services have been barred from reporting due to their political bent. Some have not been allowed to speak, or bullied if they do. What do writers do when they see the possibility of having their words deemed unacceptable because of a weakening of the First Amendment?

We’ve been a fresh start for writers coming to us to write in safety. Where do we go if we become unsafe in our own country?

LINKS

Asylum Cities for Writers

https://www.voanews.com/a/asylum-cities-offer-exiled-writers-security-freedom-to-create/3704821.html

Why are Famous Writers Attending the World’s Most Important Security Conference?

http://lithub.com/why-are-famous-writers-attending-the-worlds-most-important-security-conference/

Poet Who Left Iraq for Freedom to Write

http://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/local-education/poet-who-left-iraq-for-freedom-write-speak-springfield/hNOZ0cdPw9I6vszEIR6jHP/

Denial of Access

https://www.rcfp.org/first-amendment-handbook/what-do-if-you-are-denied-access-civil-remedy-denials-access

Politico Reporter Denied Access

https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/ben-schreckinger-denied-access-donald-trump-220836

White House Barring Reporters

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/us/politics/white-house-barring-reporters-from-briefings.html

Media Outlet Ban

http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/14/media/donald-trump-media-blacklist/index.html

10 Influential Authors Who Came to the US as Immigrants

https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2013/0329/10-influential-authors-who-came-to-the-US-as-immigrants/Khaled-Hosseini

MORE ABOUT MINDY


Mindy is an editor and author. She is assembling a book of her past Itty Bitty columns from my #SharingwithWriters newsletter--each complete with resources for curious (and sometimes industrious) authors. It will be launched early in 2018, she promises.  If you would like to keep up with her work or read has past columns, you'll find them in the newsletter archives at  http://howtodoitfrugally.com/newsletter_copies.htm   

You can also subscribe using the link in the upper right column of the page.




MORE ABOUT THE BLOGGER


Howard-Johnson is the author of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. She is also a marketing consultant, editor, and author of the multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers including the award-winning second editions of The Frugal Book Promoter (where she talks more about choosing and the advantages of winning contests and how to use those honors)  and The Frugal Editor. Her latest is in the series is  How to Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically. Learn more on her Amazon profile page, http://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile. Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers is one of her booklets--perfect for inexpensive gift giving--and, another booklet, The Great First Impression Book Proposal helps writers who want to be traditionally published. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including one she encourages authors to read because it will help them convince retailers to host their workshops, presentations, and signings. It is A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. In addition to this blog, she helps writers extend the exposure of their favorite reviews at TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com. She also blogs at all things editing--grammar, formatting and more--at The Frugal, Smart, and Tuned-In Editor (http://TheFrugalEditor.blogspot.com )

Ju-Jitsu, LIbraries, and Your Book: A Marketing Lesson

Today we have a guest blogger of note. I've known Shel Horowitz quite a few years. He's a powerhouse behind subjects like ethics, but today he has his book marketing hat on. He consults on both book marketing and publishing and is the author of eight books including Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers.  This post ran originally on his own blog.

Ju-Jitsu, Libraries and Your Book: A Marketing Lesson

By Shel Horowitz

This month's marketing lesson comes from one of the best examples of marketing ju-jitsu I've ever seen.

In ju-jitsu (a/k/a jiu-jitsu), like many martial arts, you use the strength of your opponent, rather than your own strength, and deflect it back on him or her. You get to still be nonviolent and righteous, while your opponent is lying in a heap on the floor.

Similarly, in marketing ju-jitsu (a term that may have been coined by Max Lenderman in 2001), you can overcome an opponent with far greater resources who can afford to hire wildly talent advertising agencies and saturate the airwaves with the result.

In the business world, the classic examples are car rental giant Avis's "we're only #2 so we try harder" campaign, Volkswagen's Small Wonder ads from the 1960s, and of course, the legendary Smash Big Brother ad that debuted the Apple Macintosh in 1984.

In the anti-business world, the day in 1967 Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies threw dollar bills on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange comes to mind, as do many of the Adbusters campaigns, such as Buy Nothing Day.

So what does this kind of guerrilla marketing have to do with libraries? Librarians are thought of as a quiet bunch who rarely make any kind of public stink (though this is actually not true-just ask progressive author and filmmaker Michael Moore, whose book Stupid White Men was saved by a national campaign by librarians).

Well, here's a video (less than three minutes long) outlining a particularly intense use of marketing ju-jitsu: threatened by a Tea Party campaign to defund the library, supporters created a fake campaign in favor of book burning, even saying the event would include live music and refreshments generating massive backlash. They then revealed their true agenda: to raise consciousness that "closing a library is like burning books." This in turn resulted in a massive outpouring of library supporters on Election Day that easily defeated the defunding initiative. And both the book burning announcement and the later clarification got lots of social media buzz and the attention of thee press nationally.

Go watch it now. I'll wait.

Back? Good.

I'd love you to share the takeaways you got in the comments, below. Here are some of mine:

• Memes have a lot of power. Revulsion against book burning is a deep-seated response to centuries of oppression. Whether in 15th-century Spain, 18th-century America, Nazi-era Germany, or the late Ray Bradbury's fictional dystopia Fahrenheit 451, book burning is seen as an attempt to suppress and control thought.


• Reductio ad absurdumarguments-taking a line of thinking past its logical conclusion iinto the realm of the ridiculous-still work.

Even without funding, an organized populace can defeat injustice, especially when we make it a mom-and-apple-pie issue. (This was the approach we used when we saved our local mountain.)

Please share yours in the comments, below.

Shel, I'd like to extend the conversation a tad. I've heard authors say they'd rather not have their books in libraries because people who are borrowing books aren't buying theirs. They forget that libraries promote learning and reading and without those, they wouldn't have any readers at all. And they may never have had the joy of  writing a book. They also don't seem to understand that great word "buzz" that libraries help to create.

 Please do use the comment button and share. About ju-jitsu marketing, libraries, or the challenges of book marketing in general.

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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including the award-winning second edition of, The Frugal Book Promoter: How to get nearly free publicity on your own or by partnering with your publisher; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:

On Imus, Intolerance, Iraq and I

Writers and serious readers should be interested in all the political aspects of free speech because they affect us so vitally.

Two stories on the front page of the LA Times Calendar section seemed calculated to consider this most precious of rights--however inadvertently their juxtaposition may have been. One story was on Imus's firing, the other on PBS's inclination to edit (censor!) the words of our US Soldiers in the documentary "Operation Homecoming." Let's take them one at a time.

I believe in free speech. I hate intolerance. I have been writing about both for the better part of my writing career. So, though I hate to see anything done that tends to strangle an individual's right to say what he or she thinks, I couldn't help but root for the corporate giants who finally seemed to get it right by firing Imus. It seems that if people--and, yes, that includes corporate types with a bottom line to consider--don't stand up to invective then how can we expect the person-in-the-street to act when a leader starts name-calling (and, yes, killing) gypsies, homosexuals, the insane and people with genetic and religious histories different from their own?

On the other hand, if we gag the right of individuals to say what they think because they fear recrimination, how can we maintain our free speech, the thing that sets America above so many other nations?

An example of how that was exemplified in the second story headlined "Soldiers seen, but not heard, on PBS." Here we have a station founded to give our nation alternative programming. Thus we have them offering a series called "America at a Crossroads." Hooray for them.

But then we learn that they have censored the very troops they interviewed for this segment because they are "fearful of triggering scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission." They bleep profanities and smudge graphic images. As in all good literature, the writer may find profanity may essential for an audience to fully understand the character, feel the full range of emotion.

And violence? We get so much that panders to humankind's tendency to enjoy retching during any B-rated movie, but when we get an opportunity to see it where it can help understanding how vile it is in real-life situations like the war in Iraq--the situations we get to vote for or against-- we are told "No, no, no!" As if we are babies, unable to be trusted to make our own decisions.

This has come about because the fines are so stiff that a noncommercial entity like PBS couldn't afford them. So the very public domain that could be trusted to tell it like it is, must withhold and the ones making the big bucks get to calculate say, a $15,000 fine against the huge fees they get for commercials and run whatever they darned (get that darned?) well want as long as the profit margin is great enough.

Is there something wrong with this picture? How do we balance this nation's need for free speech--our individual need for free speech--against an equally important need to stand up against intolerance. I'll tell you how. Personal integrity. Personal interest in trying our best not to use our free speech rights to malign others on the basis of anything other than their deeds.

Does that mean Imus should have been fired? I don't think so. Does that mean we should all quit listening? Absolutely. And that goes for many other crabby radio hosts who have no analytical skills and no ethics. Let's all find something better to do with our time than let a blow-hard incite our least appealing, most undesirable human instincts.
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author THIS IS THE PLACE; HARKENING: A COLLECTION OF STORIES REMEMBERED; TRACINGS, a chapbook of poetry; and two how-to books, THE FRUGAL BOOK PROMOTER: HOW TO DO WHAT YOUR PUBLISHER WON'T; and THE FRUGAL EDITOR: PUT YOUR BEST BOOK FORWARD TO AVOID HUMILIATION AND ENSURE SUCCESS.