More writing links

Delilah Dawson weighs in about the current SFWA sexism issues. Jim Hines responds to Malzberg and Resnick’s complaints about anonymous attacks with a list of criticisms with authors’ names attached. Seanan McGuire also speaks up about Resnick/Malzberg’s insistence she’s a “lady author” and lady authors shouldn’t be offended at being called lady authors.
At this point, I will break from links to tackle a particular point Resnick/Malzberg brought up (and I’m sure they’re not alone), that romance covers have lots of scantily clad men on them. A fair point, but it’s a different genre, where the hotness of the characters is often an important part of the story (even when you have an SF story with a romance, it’s not the same). And in the world we live in, near-naked pictures of men simply don’t have the same effect as near-naked pictures of women. The cultural overtones are very different (I’m pretty sure women don’t see half as many online ads with implausibly endowed men as I do of implausibly endowed women).
•An article at American Journalism Review on whether to use email in interviews.
•Various news sites attempt to curb trolling in comments.
•Therin Knite on picking a genre when marketing your story.
•Are contracts selling your soul legally enforceable?
•Speaking of sexist images, here’s some mucho sexist Marvel shirts.
•I’ve blogged before about Google’s digitization plans for out of print (but not necessarily out of copyright) books. Now it seems the French are putting copyrighted works into a database and allowing publishers to negotiate for digital rights. It’s supposedly a service to make unavailable books available, but authors have found books of their that are still in print in the ReLire database. More here.
•The Justice Department says Apple was the ringleader in an e-book price-fixing scheme.
•The drawbacks to using family names or names of pets, etc. as password recovery tools. A recent article in the SFWA bulletin made a similar point and suggested making up names instead.