On the Horror Writer’s Association

In this post, my adventures navigating the hurdles (technological, mostly) of the Horror Writer’s Association.

At first glance you’d think the primary member organisation representing horror fiction would be well appointed and resourced, but as you get deeper into working with it you realise a few things.

Book publishing is a small slice of entertainment. Horror is a small slice of book publishing. And even though horror has plenty of superstars, those people don’t need anything from a member organisation representing the interests of horror authors because their marketing exists on a whole other level.

So it was with initial surprise but eventual understanding that I saw the extent to which the whole thing is put together with spit and shoe polish.

The website looks like it was designed in 2002 and has been built on steadily since then. It now resembles the US tax code, with so many sections, pages, FAQs, references and instructions it ends up saying the same thing multiple times in places you’d never think to look while you spend half a day scouring areas with ambiguous names for information you later learn is in there somewhere in some form half a dozen times.

There are multiple people who work on the site, the newsletter and the awards and you have no idea what they do or who’ll respond until you fill out some form or submit a question to some generic email address, and everyone who emails you back uses Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail.

There’s a members-only secured area behind the main site that’s built on some system called Wild Apricot which behaves, looks and performs like it was programmed when Geocities was still hot (although the website for it looks slick enough – maybe the HWA are just using the dodgy free subscription build).

When I finally figured out the Byzantine procedure to submit Falling to the Bram Stoker Awards I saw that there was a provision for you to email every member of the Association, asking them to read and recommend you for the award. The member listing page shows the first 50 members, their location, social media link and email address if they’ve included it, then you select a drop down box to view the next 50 members, and so on.

I couldn’t find anywhere to simply export a .csv of the whole list and thought it was just as obscure a function as any other I’d had in my dealings with their online presence, so I emailed a support contact and was basically told ‘yeah, sorry, we know it sucks’ and that there was no way to export or extract email addresses.

I had to quite literally copy the 50 members off the page, paste them into a spreadsheet, use the drop down to access the next 50 members and so on – for about 1,300 people – as does every other member who wants to publicise their Bram Stoker Awards entry to other members.

I’ve contacted them about submitting a new release for the newsletter, but there’s another section the editor suggested I submit it to (which is someone else entirely), and then there’s an online submission form to submit new release information as well which I did, later getting an email from someone else entirely saying I didn’t upload a picture properly (even though I did according to their instructions). There’s someone else in charge of advertising in the newsletter which I thought I might do, and now I have the names of about eight people in my head that I’ve been dealing with.

In the most recent newsletter the editor warns everyone to back up, cheerily sharing news about the recent computer crash where she lost five years of photos, emails and everything else.

I understand it’s a volunteer organisation but every one of those 1,300 members pays $50 a year, yet it’s still all run on the smell of an oily rag by people who appear to have day jobs but sit in their pyjamas in their home offices on their phones and laptops maintaining it all.

I’m not criticising it at all, and one day I might love everything about the HWA if this goes anywhere. I’m just surprised….