If you mess up, don't sue people who point it out

An award that does not get anyone sued

This is a very sad story from the world of writing. A couple of years ago a company set up an awards scheme for British writers called the Brit Writers Awards. Their company's business was making money from helping starting writers, but the awards appear to have been genuinely to support new writers, and the first ones went well. I really have no problem with their aiming to make money from the services they offer to authors if they're upfront about it.

Unfortunately, after a couple of years, things started going a little wrong. I have no information on what happened, but my suspicion is that they weren't making enough money out of the business to keep things going properly. At this point, when people were starting to get disappointed and suspicious, a well respected authors' site published some comments about this situation - only to be threatened with legal action.

This really isn't good enough. The people running the company need to accept responsibility for their mess, and to accept that people will flag it up. They should answer the questions being posed to them. But most of all, they should desist from threats of legal action, which simply make it look as if they guilty of more dubious dealings than they really are.

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