Members Find New Appeal in Virtual Meetings
CWC branches launched cyber meetings soon after the pandemic began, discovering almost immediately that the technology opened the door to excellent speakers who lived too far away to give in-person presentations, but had no problem appearing from the comfort of their homes.
The California Writers Club has long maintained the practice that any CWC member of any branch may attend a meeting of any other CWC branch for the same price as the host club members, and some clubs have no additional charge for club meetings. Others may charge a small fee. Note that this applies only to meetings and not to contests, submissions to a club’s newsletter, or any other activity a CWC branch may organize.
To find programs, interested members can go to the calwriters.org website and search branch offerings by clicking on the name of any branch or branches.
Branches and Members Get Busy
Book tours we prepped for at killer pace have slid through our fingers. Face-to-face meetings have gone on hiatus. Several branches have expanded their social media programs. One started a writing contest, followed by plans for an anthology of fiction about pandemics. One member leads a homegrown team that has turned out 5000 masks. Many of us found time for that writing project we could never quite get around to before.
For inspiration and kindred spirits, check out branch social media activities and contests by clicking on each branch under the Branches tab at calwriters.org. Remember that with social media, you don’t necessarily have to seek a branch where you live.
Meanwhile, we look forward our next face-to-face meetings – after the crisis passes – to reunite, reconnect, and jubilate with the friends who rode through the fire together with us.
Authors Guild Protests
Loss of Copyright Protection
We report this March 2020 item from the Authors Guild as an extremely important issue that commands the attention of all writers.
“The Authors Guild is appalled by the Internet Archive’s (IA) announcement that it is now making millions of in-copyright books freely available online without restriction on its Open Library site under the guise of a National Emergency Library. IA has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away indiscriminately without consent of the publisher or author. We are shocked that the Internet Archive would use the Covid-19 epidemic as an excuse to push copyright law further out to the edges, and in doing so, harm authors, many of whom are already struggling.
“With mean writing incomes of only $20,300 a year (https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/authors-guild-survey-shows-drastic-42-percent-decline-in-authors-earnings-in-last-decade/) prior to the crisis, authors, like others, are now struggling all the more—from cancelled book tours and loss of freelance work, income supplementing jobs, and speaking engagements. And now they are supposed to swallow this new pill, which robs them of their rights to introduce their books to digital formats as many hundreds of midlist authors do when their books go out of print, and which all but guarantees that author incomes and publisher revenues will decline even further.
“READ MORE at https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/internet-archives-uncontrolled-digital-lending/).”