History
According to Todd McCaffrey, the organization immediately "acquired great status in its efforts to help J.R.R. Tolkien get fair recompense in America for pirated sales of The Lord of the Rings."
SFWA sponsors the Writer Beware Blog, the public face of their Committee on Writing Scams, to expose problems and pitfalls that face aspiring writers. Writer Beware also receives sponsorship from the Mystery Writers of America. Its mission is to raise awareness of the prevalence of fraud and other questionable activities in and around the publishing industry.
As part of this mission, SFWA members submitted an 'unpublishable' manuscript to independent publishing house PublishAmerica, to test their claimed editorial rigor. When PublishAmerica offered to send them a contract to publish Atlanta Nights, they revealed the hoax, and PublishAmerica withdrew the contract offer. SFWA subsequently listed the book for sale through a Print On Demand service, with all profits to benefit their Emergency Medical Fund.
In 2009, SFWA joined the Open Book Alliance to oppose the Google Book Settlement.
Read more about this topic: Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Of America
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)