your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
JK Rowling, with her level of transphobia defies the JK Rowling author of the Harry Potter books.
there's a level of disconnect that is too vast and wide to defy logic.
so i posit: putting aside the labor from editors, there is no way JK Rowling wrote alone the Harry Potter books.
sure, there's no question she had a hand in them but it seems to me that there's a heart and mind missing in her that it's in those books.
there's no way JK Rowling is the sole author of the Harry Potter books.
13 barn owls in a trenchcoat
@blogdiva Wait, I'm not defending her, but this is normal for fiction sales.
Unless it's work for hire (ghost writing, James Pattinson novels, house "authors" etc.), the publisher almost never owns the copyright, they merely license regional rights.
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
JK Rowling, just like Google, Youtube, Facebook are all MEDIA stories.
so it's a good moment to get a refresher from the SNL sketch banned from syndication by NBC after it first aired in the 1990s
https://invidious.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=nh6Hf5_ZYPI
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your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
back to Rowling:
there's so many holes in her story as a writer.
how do you go from a nobody broke mom to a billionaire author just like that?
because one of the things i learned early on about Rowling's books was that in the US the publishers didn't get to own her copyright. she leased the books thru a company that manages her titles.
how did a nobody broke mom get to set that up for managing her worldwide publishing rights?
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your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
ALSO i have never bought the story of JK Rowling being an out of luck woman who was abandoned by her husband and had to raise their kid(s) alone, while on welfare and writing the novel.
UK's dole was absolutely the opposite of USA's intentionally dysfunctional system. everybody in the UK has been on the dole at one point or another because that's your right. it's not the exploitative & humiliating experience Reagan & Clinton made it to be.
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your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
i remember when Stephen Moyer from True Blood talked about going to the unemployment office in the UK because that's what you do in between jobs and Americans lost their minds. that's what we used to do before Clinton expedited the cannibalization of unemployment benefits in this country.
so it's interesting to me that this was a selling point in the US. that Simon & Schuster felt they had to sell JK Rowling as this helpless nobody of a single mom who had to write this novel to make ends meet 🧵
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
it was weird but it's one of those things that you shrug off.
but then it's the same story with the Google guys... oh! they just coded that in their dormitory rooms.
then there's story of the Youtube guys... oh! they were just nerds tinkering with FLV
then there's the infamous story of Facebook... oh! he just got together with his buddies and coded this in his dad's garage
it's not lost on me all these MEDIA success stories happened around the same time —end of 1990s into end of aughts.
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your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
5. funny some of y'all think that publishers act in the best interest of their writers. especially after the Mickey Mouse amendment.
6. writers are expendable unless you make yourself a publisher and a literal ghost-writing mill like James Patterson.
7. or you become a franchise broker of your own work like JK Rowling.
James Patterson is basically a franchise but because he is also his own publisher it is not immediately apparent.
JK Rowling, on the other hand... 🧵
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
thinking about the obsession of tech bros & media people to sell themselves as nobodies who had to claw their way up to fame & fortune is one of those things that have kept me up at night.
why do that? why sell that lie?
it's more than just to tap into the rugged individualism that's part of the American gaslighting (dream) project.
there is an intentional HIDING of the means of success of these peoples.
the rich really want us to BELIEVE capitalism will make this happen to us.
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your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
JK Rowling's origin story doesn't make sense
neither do the origin stories of Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Chad Hurley, Stephen Chen, Jawed Karim, Mark Zuckerberg.
to those who followed me at Xitter: remember when i did a few searches for my "Apartheidboi" thread? it's what got me banned the first time. but now everybody knows he's an Afrikaaner.
Rowling's edifice of lies hasn't been tumbled. that's why she's defiant. she's gotten away with the lies this long, she thinks she's untouchable. /🧵
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
so this blew up. let me consolidate some replies here:
1. the whole point about this post was how Rowling was marketed here in the US and how that marketing seems to have shielded her from scrutiny; very much like the successful Silicon Valley techbros who have been scoobie dooed as raging fascists. in other words, that's not a coincidence.
2. it seems impossible to speak of the Potter books without a disclaimer of how racists, sexist, etc they are 🙄 well... /🧵
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
3. should go without saying but looks like i have to say it: the encoded white supremacy is why it is viewed as a valuable asset by US publishers, not in spite of.
4. nobody has billionaire levels of success unless they uphold the violence of white supremacist, patriarchal capitalists. yes, not capitalism but capitalists; the people who make others rich so they are insulated from the consequences of their violence. such rich includes all your fave Black & brown billionaires. all of them. 🧵
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
you need lawyers for those articles of incorporation. now you need an accountant to deal with your personal and your business expenses and liabilities.
i haven't even reached the point of discussing a writing rep, an editor and all that publishing jazz.
yet hers was a fairy tale story sold about an out of luck broke mom that wrote a fairy tale in 8 books and became a billionaire.
just like the fairy tale of Google, but with PhD candidates & kids of USSR scientists the USMIL poached 🧵
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
or the story of the guys from YouTube one of whom oh so happened to have been banging one of the daughters of the richest man in California; a guy who made his money from media and the MIC.
or the story of Facebook that oh so happens to have been seeded by InQTel, the CIA's investment company.
all these successes are MEDIA successes and all of their origin stories where always presented as fairy tales.
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your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
so all am saying is that there has to be more to the JK Rowling story that we do not know because nobody has bothered to really look into. not her past, but her hidden network of family, friends and acquaintences who ultimately are the ones responsible for her fairy tale.
my old friend Chris Rabb wrote a book called INVISIBLE CAPITAL. he might be the state rep in PA for some of y'all.
anyways, it's a quick read. go buy it and read it. it completely shifted how i look at EVERYTHING. 🧵
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
Chris' premise is very simple: there are no fairy tales. there are no self-made men or women.
everybody has a network of family, people, acquaintances that connect them to other people and, in the end, to resources.
resources aren't just money. resources are knowledge, experience, tools, housing, work spaces, transportation, health care, education... the list goes on.
and there is the real hard cash & capital of 'angel investment' that you could get from those in the network... 🧵
your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
now, mind you, am a broke single mom. so this isn't about that.
but it's because am broke, i know how much money it takes to try to engage a lawyer to represent you as a nobody.
there was no Legalzoom back in the day and even today i wouldn't use that.
you need to know your lawyers.
yes, it takes more than one.
in the US alone, you need one for every coast/bar to help you navigate the US biz labyrinth.
that's why you get writing reps. they're basically your biz partners & your HR
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your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦
8. JK Rowling LEASES her books and titles to publishers, movie companies, theme parks. THAT is what puts her apart from all her peers.
that's huge and massive from a creative class worker PoV.
that she got USA's big media companies to bend to her knee like that is truly unheard of. they are paying her RENTS for the privilege of saying they print her books.
it's like that Archer where Lana charges the office guys for the benefit of lying about having banged her.
good for her... sort of.
Clifton Royston
The Bill Gates fans used to like to sell that story too:
Harvard drop-out nobody starts company, sells software to IBM, becomes mega-billionaire.
Over time it became better known that his grandfather was a bank president, his father was a rich lawyer, his mother was a banker and sat on several boards of directors, and that he got the initial contact at IBM because his mother sat on the United Way board of directors with IBM's CEO John Opel and bugged him about it.
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