Not that I am always a perfect observer of this dictum myself. But authors, if someone gives you a 1 star review, bite your tongue. Because if you follow Candace Sams's example in attacking a reviewer for daring to criticise her book, you are likely to end up a public laughing stock. Especially if you continue to keep digging your hole deeper when people try to advise you that your behaviour is ill-advised. If assorted big name editors and authors are pointing at the ensuing trainwreck as a teaching example for baby authors of What Not To Do On The Internet, you really can't claim that it's just Mean Girl readers who don't understand about writing.
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The big news in the romance blogosphere yesterday was that Harlequin/Mills&Boon are opening a digital-only press, Carina Press, which will cover a much broader range of genres than the print divisions do. They'll be publishing more than romance, and in romance they'll be publishing material that wouldn't fit into the print lines. While it doesn't explicitly say so on the website, apparently that will include LGBT, multiracial, and other "non traditional" romances that have already proven popular at the established digital publishers. It will also include things which you might think at first glance would be perfectly traditional Mills & Boon fare, but which don't actually fit into their existing lines -- e.g., if you've got a cross-genre, it won't be necessary to ramp up the romance to make it fit. The other print-related restriction that's gone is story length -- they'll consider a much wider range of manuscript lengths.
Part of the big news is that they've recruited Angela James, former editor-in-chief at Samhain. This is a smart move. Angela has several years of experience at one of the biggest players in the current digital publishing market. This matters, because while Harlequin have been doing well at digitising their print lines, what this represents is a direct move into a different style of digital publishing. Carina Press is digital-only, DRM-free, and following the model of no advance but high royalty rate -- the same model that has become a flourishing niche market over the last decade by being able to cater to genres with a readership too small for mass market but large enough to support excellent small press sales.
Will it succeed? Maybe not. But this is Harlequin we're talking about. They've survived in business for a century by giving the market what it wants, and they've already got good experience in what it takes on the technical side to put together an ebook and sell it. I want to see their royalty rate and contract[*] before signing on the dotted line, and I want to see them in business long enough to look viable before I risk a full-length manuscript with them, but yes, I'm interested.
[* Harlequin is an actual example of "big publishers screw over their authors too". They've improved over the years, under pressure from the RWA and others, but their contracts have at times been examples of Publishing Evil.]
ETA: apparently I can't read, in spite having read the guidelines looking for *and* *expecting* *to* *find* a statement that LGBT was welcome. It's certainly there now. Insufficiently caffeinated this morning, obviously.
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Given comments in comments, it's probably once again time to point to the explanation of "cat-vacuuming" for the benefit of newish readers. This is actually a writing term which originated on an sf writer's group (originally in the form "cat-waxing". More details here:
http://julesjones.livejournal.com/18594.html
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I said two weeks ago that I had pulled out one of the fragments from the Torchwood fanfic folder and started working on it in an attempt to get back into writing at least a little every day. It was mostly only around a hundred words a day, and I skipped two days (once because I got hit by a short but intense cold, and once because I spent the evening watching the relevant episode and some bits of others for research), but I did write regularly and I finished it this afternoon, with around 4700 words in total.
Still not sure if it's worth posting to bramble_jam, but at least I did manage to write consistently for two weeks, which is better than I've done pretty much since I started the day job last year. I'd deliberately picked up a piece of fanfic where I'd be perfectly happy to keep the finished piece on my hard drive and thus there was no pressure to Get It Right. Now to see if I can keep it up with a commercial piece, i.e. that L&M sequel I've been wanting to write for over a year.
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There has been a kerfuffle over the Lambda Literary Foundation erecting a "straights keep out" sign in front of the Lambda awards, not helped by the fact that the wording of said sign appears to also exclude bi and gay women who write m/m (and various other permutations of not-Kinsey0 authors and subject matter found in erotic romance).
One of the responses to the irritation expressed by some of the authors concerned has been "well, you can always set up your own awards for LGBT content books if you don't like what Lambda has done".
That is in fact what is going on. In particular, one of the m/m romance reviewers has set to work. More details at her LiveJournal. If you're interested in LGBTQ fiction, please wander over and see if you're interested in helping, even if just providing useful snippets of information.
And yes, the point here is to cover *all* of LGBTQ, not just the G. If you're into femmeslash, or books that showcase bi characters, or books with trans heroes and heroines, or books that are queer, you're wanted too.
(For those who don't know Elisa -- she's an Italian romance fan who reads and reviews in English as well as Italian.)
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I've been so snowed under by real life for the past few months that I've not bothered to look at markets at all. But I've got a bit of spare time this weekend, so I've been poking around. Some items of potential interest to self and/or friends:
Bywater Books writing contest -- $20 entry fee, first prize $1000 and publication, novels about lesbians (*not* a romance-only or erotica publisher, although they'll consider both). Deadline 31 October every year.
From ERA's collection of submission guidelines:
Better Sex erotic fiction contest -- no entry fee but you grant them non-exclusive publication rights, prizes from $100 up, 3000 words.
Sex in the City -- Maxim Jakubowski's new anthology series, each volume themed around a specific city, payment 75 pounds for 5-6000 words, deadline 1 November, snailmail submissions only. Primarily het, will consider bi, gay/lesbian will be a very hard sell. (I would *really* like to write something for this, but doubt I will manage to do so in time.)
Fishnet -- still going, but has recently changed length requirements. Currently paying 5c/word for short stories, any orientation.
Surprise anthology -- short stories, 100 word flash fiction and poetry. I could dig out that drabble I wrote years ago, and try it on them. Deadline 1 December 2009. Note that this is a brand-new publisher -- writer beware, as they ask for information that would be useful to identity thieves.
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I'm doing very little blog-hopping these days, so I didn't see the latest piece of erotic romance industry news until a couple of days after the faecal matter impacted the air circulatory device. New epublisher Quartet Press has closed, before it even opened.
This is significant news, because this wasn't your typical "it would be fun and easy and profitable to be an epublisher" epub start-up. Quartet Press was set up by people who had some relevant experience, and who had the nous to headhunt a highly respected chief editor from an established epublisher. I wasn't paying much attention to it, because I haven't been paying much attention to the market at all for the last year other than what my own publisher is up to, but I did sit up and pay attention when I heard about them recruiting Angela James.
My own uninformed reaction to their progress was that they appeared to have the background that indicated a fairly low likelihood of the management going batshit insane (an unhappily common occurrence in this publishing sector), that it appeared to be a serious business venture by people who understood what they were getting into, and thus I thought they had a better chance than most start-ups of making it through the first year, that nevertheless I didn't understand why all the love for them from some of the blogs before they'd even opened, particularly as their background was skewed print rather than ebook, and that I really didn't like what I eventually heard about their royalty payment structure and their rationale for it.
I wouldn't have submitted a novel to them, even if I'd had something available at the time. Established publishers crash and burn, yes, and established publishers screw over their authors, sometimes in very bad ways. But the odds of something bad happening are a lot worse at a start-up, and I would not risk a novel at a start-up if I had a chance of selling it somewhere else. Yes, I sold several manuscripts to Loose Id before they opened for business, but I understood the risk I was taking, and back at the start of 2004 publishers willing to look at m/m romance were nearly as rare as hen's teeth.
What I might have been willing to risk at Quartet was a short story, or even a novella that wasn't suitable for Loose Id. And one of the reasons I might have been prepared to gamble at least that much of my material is what I referred to above -- that the people involved appeared to be treating it as a serious business venture. I thought that there was a high risk that the publisher wouldn't make it -- but that there was a fairly low risk that the management would simply disappear, or hold books hostage, or publicly post the real names of any authors who dared to criticise them during the final tailspin, or any of the other idiocies authors and readers in this genre can tell you about.
And indeed, it appears that they have closed the operation down cleanly, accepting responsibility for their actions, and reverting rights to authors immediately so that they can get on with trying to sell the manuscripts to another publishers. It's not a good situation for an author to be in, but it's a *much* better situation than simply being left in limbo, or being stalked and smeared and even physically threatened. It's early days yet, but for now this is looking a lot less messy for the authors than some past failed publishers.
This is why it's important to think hard about submitting to a start-up. It's not just the high probability of the publisher closing down within the year -- it's how well they'll handle it if it happens. Even if you're willing to take the risk with a new publisher, you need to be choosy as to which ones.
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Was away for a long weekend, which amongst other things involved going to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) watervole's for the day. This was good in itself, but I also stopped off on the way to spend half an hour walking around Badbury Rings to research it as a possible story setting, and came away with an actual story idea to go with the setting, which I was then able to talk over with watervole. Also have another story idea from talking ideas through with her in an effort to generate something that will hit the 20-30k range and not require the sort of intense focus to write that both L&M3 and the urban fairy story will need. I really need something along those lines to ease myself back into writing when I finally got some free time in a couple of months.
The bad bit is that I pulled out my Palm on the way down to the SouthWet to scribble some story notes, and found that it was misbehaving in a way that suggests that it may be terminally ill. Not good, because I get on very well with the handwriting recognition software on that Palm, and the version on later models is apparently nowhere near as good. I have another Palm IIIxe bought as an emergency back-up, but I'm not sure where it is in the backwash of the Great Unpacking. And the plan was to use the Palm to do some note scribbling during my lunch break at work this week. :-( I don't want to use the work computer, for a number of reasons which include but are not limited to "there is no such thing as a secret file on a machine that belongs to your employer".
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![[info - personal]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) desperance asked in a comment to a previous post if I'd describe my ergonomic set-up. It got a bit long for a comment, and I thought other people might be interested. However, it's a bit long, so it's under a cut.
( Read more... )
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Still failing to get on with the next book, in spite of knowing perfectly well what the plot is and having done a large chunk of research for it *last* *year*. It involves lots of May-December nookie. And angst. And comfort nookie for the angst. I would enjoy writing this so much. Unfortunately, what my life contains at the moment is Day Job and Unpacking After The Move.
A more cheerful reason for failing to get on with my hot gay romance novel is that later this week I shall have hot gay romance tv series. Or at least radio series, as this week it's the radio plays for Torchwood's new season, followed by the five-parter tv mini-series all next week. Pretty boys kissing on primetime tv. Nom nom nom. Shallow, me?
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The words are not flowing this weekend. I have all of 500 new words since yesterday morning. This is not because I do not have time or mental energy. This is because the story has not gone quite where I was expecting it to go, and the scene that I should be writing now has no obvious hook from where I left off two weekends ago. Yes, it is a sex scene, no, it is not a gratuitous sex scene. It is there to further the characterisation and demonstrate some of the ways in which the relationship has changed in the three years they've been married. I can't just dump it.
And even after I've arm-wrestled the draft back on track, the *next* chapter is going to find that it has nowhere to slot into. All because there was not a big family row about something after all. Or at least there wasn't one at the end of the evening. There is going to be one the next day, but that change in timing changes a lot of other things as well. I think I just Jossed myself by accident.
And no, I can't go back and rewrite the last couple of chapters to make them go the way I'd planned. It works better this way, at least for the bit already written. Now I just have to work out where to go from here.
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I'm doing my US tax return. I'm acting as agent for a couple of payments for a friend, because I have both a US bank account and a UK bank account, which makes it a lot easier for me to deal with small royalty cheques in either currency. This means I need to know how to handle those payments on my US tax return, and I knew I'd seen a quick summary of this topic on one of the agent blogs I follow. Pity I didn't bookmark it at the time.
A certain amount of Googling later, I found it on Pubrants:
http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2008/01/god-bless-international-tax-attorneys.html
There are useful bits in the comments thread as well. Also some idiotic bits -- it's a blog with open comments. :-)
I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who is already well ensconced in the US tax system, but it's also likely to be useful to Brits who are trying to work out which bits of paper they need and why if they're to avoid the 30% withholding tax on royalties from US publishers. For that, there's also an excellent blog post by Alex Beecroft on the Britwriters blog, Your ITIN and you.
(No, I am *not* willing to act as transfer agent for anyone else.)
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I've been too busy to stop by Absolute Write for a while, so I've only just seen this detailed posting from Samhain's submissions co-ordinator with a very detailed look at what each of their editors is currently interested in acquiring:
http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3397507&postcount=728
One of the points there is that they're very interested in getting more submissions of good m/m material. Angela James has also mentioned this, and Samhain aren't the only ones -- Treva's been saying that Loose Id would love to get more m/m as well, and I've seen other houses also saying this, although I can't remember off the top of my head which ones. The one exception is Ellora's Cave, which going by a leaked internal email appears to have dropped m/m as a genre they're interested in publishing.
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Earlier today I posted a poll on the subject of the word "mana" and whether it was a real world word or a made-up word, and where it had come from. This is because I'd seen something on my flist which gave me reason for thought on whether what I'm writing is what someone else is reading. [*] Someone on one of the sf/f writing groups asked about using the word, and whether it would feel too much like a reference to a particular role-playing card game. This surprised me, because while I can see that it's a logical choice of word to use to describe a points-based magic system in a game, it's not the first, second, or even any association the word would trip for me.
The comments got even more interesting. At least one person assumed it was a mis-spelling of the Biblical word "manna". I can see that -- it's the sort of thing you might well assume if you'd not encountered the word before, although I was mildly surprised that someone on an sf-writing group would be completely unfamiliar with the word.
Then I stumbled into the comments by people who thought that mana was a word that had been made up by RPG designers, and may well have thought that it was made up by the designers of one particular RPG. At which point my brain broke, because mana is a) a real word, describing a real world concept, and b) was popularised in science fiction and fantasy writing at least as far back as Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" series in the 70s. Niven's use isn't absolutely identical with the Polynesian concept of mana, but it's a thoughtful take on some of the implications of the concept. Like sweh, I first encountered it in "What good is a glass dagger?" in the anthology "The Flight of the Horse", probably around 1980 in my case. Given my taste for reading mythology collections when I was a small child, I probably encountered the concept a lot earlier than that, and in its original form, but "Glass Dagger" is the first place I specifically remember it.
My reaction to this was twofold. a) My god, I'm getting old, the youngsters don't know this stuff any more, b) er, does *my* generation know it, or am I an outlier?
This matters to me as a writer. This is the sort of stuff I pick up and use, either in deliberate homage to previous writers, or to ground my work in the real world, to give it the associations and layers that add depth to a story. But it doesn't *work* if half my audience reads the word "mana" and thinks I'm ripping off an RPG. I can deal with an audience simply not noticing the layers because they've never heard the word before, but I'd really rather not be giving them the impression that I'm simply ripping stuff wholesale from someone else's copyrighted work because I can't be bothered to make up my own vocabulary. I can write fanfic for that, thank you, and be open about nicking someone else's toys because they are so shiny. Or write an open pastiche. (Let's discuss the origins and spread of the word "ansible", shall we?)
And now I'm wondering what else I've taken for granted as being transparent to my intended audience, when it's just not so...
[* No, this is not a veiled reference to one of the current LJ flamewars, even if the damn thing has just turned up in the thread I'm referencing. Do not bring that here, please.]
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There are Bad Publishers out there who will try to scare inexperienced authors into putting up with abuse by threatening them with being put on the industry blacklist. As lots of more experienced authors will point out, there is no such blacklist. If your writing's good enough to be interesting to one publisher, it's good enough to be interesting to another, because there really aren't many niches that are small enough that there's just one publisher and its tentacles.
So yes, blacklists are mostly not an issue. Mostly. Because there is one way to get on a blacklist. That way is to behave so appallingly badly in public that every editor in your genre decides independently that they do not want to have anything to do with you ever again, in case *they* have to deal with the crazy. Editors do not like having to deal with the crazy. They can always find another author who doesn't do what Kevin W. Reardon aka Cole Adams appears to have done, which is to suggest to an editor suffering from depression that he should commit suicide, and follow that up with a death threat. All because said editor had a one line unfavourable comment about Reardon's short story in a post commenting about stories he was considering for a reprint anthology.
It's possible that the guy's being framed by someone else posting under his name, but the timeline suggests it's real. [*] More details at http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1249222.html
ETA: Poppy Z Brite has a particularly lucid summary of what happened:
http://docbrite.livejournal.com/656896.html
[*The editor in question confirms in a comment at my post on EREC that there's solid evidence it's really Reardon: "Please note that I asked the publisher of the anthology to speak to the author. He did so and received word back, confirming this was not a case of 'sock-puppetry.'" ]
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My publisher is moving webhost and having a major revamp of the website. Amongst other things this means that the site is up and down at the moment and will be for another day or two (which I am sulking about because with perfect timing it went offline just as I got a rave review of Lord and Master from AztecLady that should have sold a few copies).
Along with this, there are new guidelines up, which may interest some of you. *If* the change has propagated to your corner of the intertubes, you'll find them here:
http://www.loose-id.net/submissions.aspx
Of note: "Stories of 55,000 - 75,000 words will receive an advance and be automatically considered for print." It's not a very big advance (my novels would typically earn out in the first month), but it's there.
"we're reopening submissions to contemporaries and historicals that are sufficiently erotic to meet our desire to have readers squirming in their seats." Yes, that does mean straight contemporaries, both senses of straight. If you've got a pure contemporary that's het and hot, they'll look at it.
ETA: just to clarify -- they've always welcomed LGBT and various other flavours of contemporary and historical not well catered for by mainstream publishers (such as multi-cultural and BBW). But it was very hard to place a heterosexual contemporary or historical with no other sub-genre appeal with LI over the last couple of years, and now they're re-opening submissions for those.
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I know it's several days past when everyone else was doing this, but I was away from home and my net access was flaky, which made it difficult to check one or two things. Anyway, here is a look at what I did with writing and reading in 2008.
Wrote: very little as far as fiction goes. Around 23 kwords on the third of the set of three novelettes that I intended to use as a sequel to Lord and Master (of which 2 and 3 actually ended up in the published book, and 1 went on my website). 7 kwords on the L&M short story written specifically for my website. 6 kwords on the third L&M book.
And then there was the sudden outbreak of fanfic after five years of feeling no urge to fanfic at all. Only one complete story, and that a very short one, but there are notes for several more. Apparently Torchwood reaches the parts other fandoms cannot.
So only 40 kwords, even counting scraps and notes. That's the least I've written for years. Looking for a day job, and then getting one and having to learn it, basically killed my writing in 2008. It wasn't the loss of writing time, but the loss of mental energy. I could have found time to write 300 words of fiction a day. I just couldn't find the 300 words.
One book published in 2008, being the aforementioned Lord and Master sequel. I also put two shorts in the series up on my website.
And four books went out of print. The Syndicate series first went on sale through Loose Id in 2004, and was withdrawn from sale in June 2008. The three main books were part of Loose Id's initial lineup, having been contracted a couple of months before the LI site formally opened in July 2008. So yes, Loose Id were selling m/m romance novels right from the start, back when most romance publishers wouldn't touch them. The first two books had been published before, at an erotica micropress, but that was an erotica publisher rather than a romance publisher. Four years in print was a decent enough run, especially as part of the series had been previously published anyway, so they're now on my website as a giveaway rather than looking for another publisher.
I did write a few essay type blog posts, notably My Book was a number 1 Bestseller on Amazon! (and why it doesn't mean anything), Conversation with the genre -- plagiarism, allusion, and intertextuality, Welcome to the Panopticon, little author, No, actually, it's because I prefer cock, Writing: Culture Clash, and Pushing envelopes.
I've been reasonably consistent about keeping a log of the books I've read this year, although I've only written reviews for a minority of them. It looks as if I read around 22-25 books last year, depending on what you count. This is really not good, because a writer needs to read, but my reading did pick up towards the end of the year. And the reason why is that I finally got the hang of ebooks. Yes, yes, I'm published in ebooks, but I always found reading them to be a lot harder than reading treeware. And then predatrix asked if I was interested in buying her Cybook, and trying it out for a week led me to the discovery that I can read it on the bus without feeling sick, unlike treeware. Sitting on a bus for an hour a day, with an ebook device that *doesn't* give me a headache to use, boosted my reading rate rather noticeably.
Here's hoping that 2009 will see an improvement on the word count for both writing and reading.
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Had an email from Loose Id today saying the renewal contract for Lord and Master is in the post. I thought it was already on the auto-renewing contract, but since I'm a couple of hundred miles from my hardcopy files I can't check. Hard to believe it's almost two years since the book first went on sale. It's now making me feel guilty about the utter lack of progress on the current WnotIP, which is L&M3. I did a few hundred words a couple of days before Christmas, and have done nothing since until this morning when I opened the file over breakfast to see if the new section makes sense when I read it cold.
I'm also a couple of hundred miles from my home net access, which means I'm still not getting a chance to do anything more than a quick skim. I *have* seen the posts about a potential nine-and-sixty-ways setup, and am interested but will get to them when my access is more reliable.
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Well, I now know not to ever read a live-blogging review of one of my books... It wasn't one of my books that got eviscerated over at Dear Author this weekend, but it was a book by someone I've known a long time. It makes it rather more flinch-inducing than if it had been a stranger's book.
I'm not sure what to think about this, partly because I can't be completely detached over this particular example. I'm of the general view that authors need to learn to deal with critical and even abusive reviews (and to understand that the two are not identical), but I think live-blogging reviews have the potential to cross the line from snarking the book to snarking the author even when the reviewers are normally very clear on the difference, simply because they are immediate and off the cuff. I rather think that the best thing to do is to stay well away from one if you've got any emotional involvement at all.
ETA: This thread is now on screened comments which will be unscreened as and when I am around to do so, and disemvowelling will be applied if it becomes necessary. I apologise to those commentators who can disagree without being abusive, but some of the private email I'm getting suggests that it's now attracting drive-bys.
If you have come here from somewhere else, understand this: I am not a member of the Cult of Nice. I do not think readers should adhere to "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all" when discussing books. I do think that authors should consider whether they can handle adverse comment before reading it -- and that the particular form of comment I referred to up there has the potential to get under the skin of authors who are normally able to deal with adverse comment.
If you are reading that last sentence in the original post as anything other than having an implied "lest ye be tempted to be stupid in public" clause, and you post a comment, you may not get the reaction from me that you were expecting. Whichever side you think you're on.
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It's that time of the month again. Royalty statement time. Time for me to bore you all again with the mantra of "8 copies in the first month is not a bestselling book, whatever your publisher may be telling you".
My royalty statement this month is showing the effects of the financial turndown. Either that, or it's something I said or failed to say on a blog somewhere, and I've caused more than my usual number of "never buying one of *her* books again" moments... Either way, numbers are definitely down slightly across my titles.
That means one book just missed out on reaching 1000 copies sold since it first came out, when I'd expected it to hit that mark this month. On the other hand, Lord and Master has just squeezed past the 1500 mark. And I'm still getting a tiny trickle of sales reports on the last few copies of the treeware edition of The Syndicate, which was formally taken out of print back in June.
Titles vary in how successful they are, even with the same author, publisher and genre. But at this point I'm going to be disappointed if one of my titles doesn't manage 500 copies in the first year. 500 copies is a respectable enough number in small press publishing.
I've been around long enough to be on at least one or two people's auto-buy lists, but in erotic romance ebooks, people mostly seem to buy by publisher. Do your homework on sales levels when checking out a potential publisher. "Good sales" isn't enough. Nor is "bestselling". What are the actual numbers behind those phrases? The hard number behind one publisher's "wonderful performance" may be what another house considers a poor level of sales.
The place with the highest overall sales isn't necessarily the best place for your book. There may be issues with the standard contract, there may be issues with getting paid in a format that doesn't involve massive taxes or currency conversion fees if you live in a different country, they may not publish the genre you write. If sales numbers were my only consideration, I'd learn to write het so I could sell to the mainstream. But sales is one of the factors that goes into the mix, and when it's your book at stake, you want hard and spiky numbers, not warm and fuzzy phrases.
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