m.christian

Measuring Eroticism

By Lisabet Sarai

A while ago, my main erotic romance publisher decided to institute a new system for rating the amount of sex in their books. Like most publishers in the genre, they were already rating each book for “heat”:

Simmering – The sweeter side of romance, but with just enough heat to get your pulse pounding.
Sizzling – Sexy, explicit, and highly imaginative but with an emphasis on sensuality.
Burning – Sexy, creative and hot, almost anything goes – not for shy readers.
Melting – Super X rated with risque and explicit plot lines. For the bold and the brave.
Taboo – Pure, unadulterated erotica, possibly covering extreme imagery – might push the limits of acceptability. Proceed with care, these stories might not have a happy ever after.

However, the powers that be felt that they needed to rank books on another, possibly orthogonal dimension, namely how much sex the book contained. They introduced a “sexometer” rating, running from 1 to 3:

1 – Slow burn with plenty of sexual tension leading up to an explosive climax.
2 – A delicious balance of erotic tension and sexy scenes. More than risque and less than relentless.
3 – My my, how do they keep it up? Non-stop sensual and sexual action throughout

In discussions on the publisher’s author list, I opposed this new rating, for several reasons. First of all, I thought it was a rather superficial measurement, since it was based on the number of sex scenes in the book relative to the book’s overall length. So was it better to have three short scenes? Or one extended scene?

Furthermore, there is the question of how you define a “sex scene”. My recent release The Ingredients of Bliss includes several sexual fantasy sections, in which the heroine is imagining various outrageous activities. Nothing is happening in the physical world at all. Do these count toward the rating? Do we consider sexual interactions between characters other than the main protagonists? Do the participants have to reach orgasm? I know these sound like dumb questions, but the sexometer concept seems to invite them.

I also worried that faced with the sexometer, authors would feel pressured to add more, and more explicit, sexual activity to their books, even when this didn’t fit with the story. We all know “gratuitous sex” when we see it, sex that’s stuck into the middle of a book without justification or narrative function. Personally I find that sort of sex immensely boring. People who don’t probably aren’t paying much attention to the plot or the characters in the first place.

My most serious concern, though, related to the implicit suggestion that the higher a book rated on the sexometer scale, the more erotic the book. I knew from personal experience this was just plain wrong.

I don’t believe you can measure eroticism in any simple or mechanical way. A single glimpse of a girl’s bare midriff or a guy’s hands can propel me into a fever of desire. The same holds for fiction. Indeed, some of my favorite stories are those where the physical sex is held to a bare minimum – or perhaps doesn’t occur at all.

A fine example is Amanda Earl’s “Welcome to the Aphrodisiac Hotel”, originally published in the Cleis Do Not Disturb anthology and part of Amanda’s imminent Coming Together Presents volume, which will benefit AIDS charity GMHC.

The narrator in this tale is having a drink in a hotel lobby bar while observing the other occupants and imagining their sexual lives. There’s no sex in this story at all – only the promise of sex, the delicious potentials and pairings. Nevertheless, I found this tale incredibly arousing.

At this point the waiter arrives. He’s a new waiter and I haven’t had the chance to fantasize about him yet. Probably a college student, making money for school. I love his short curly dark hair, wonder what it would be like to see that luxuriant head of hair between my legs, as he licks at my cunt. Perhaps he enjoys older women. It’s clear he’s in good shape, thanks to the tight hotel-regulation uniform that displays his sweet little ass so well.

I want to rub my hands over the zipper, to watch how his erection flares at the mere touch of my hand through the fabric of his pants. In a soft and sultry voice, he asks the doctor for his drink order. The quiet tones of his syllables whisper over my skin. I can feel my nipples hardening beneath my silk blouse. I’m watching others but I look around briefly and wonder just who might be watching me. That thought sends a jolt of arousal to the damp cavity between my legs.

Another example is M. Christian’s classic “Nighthawks”, which appeared back in 2004 in Alison Tyler’s Down and Dirty collection. This tale, inspired by the Edward Hopper painting of the same name, is set in a city diner, in those dark and lonely hours between midnight and dawn. It’s a luscious exploration of a love affair between a customer and a waitress that is no less ardent and tender for being entirely imaginary.

Just a few days ago, I read another brilliantly erotic tale where sex takes second stage to desire, Preston Avery’s “Won’t Last the Week”, which appears in Tenille Brown’s anthology Can’t Get Enough. The narrator meets the woman of his dreams at a party. They spend the night on the beach, so entranced by one another that they forget to exchange phone numbers. As the week goes on, dreams and fantasies of the lost woman consume the narrator’s life.

It’s clear that the protagonists have sex, but this is barely described. The focus is on the emotions the woman inspires, with her ripe sensuality and her openness to the narrator’s desire.

She isn’t skinny like the girls I usually go for, like my ideal “on paper” woman, but curved and soft and she fits me just right. Her breasts are big with a delicious slope to them, and I know they will overflow my grasp. I could bury my face in the valley between them and never come up for air. I could have seconds and thirds and fourths of her and die a gluttonous happy man. She does everything I lead her into. I don’t ask – words are still lost to us. The first time I lower one of my hands to those gorgeous mounds, hidden between a thin blue cotton shirt, she doesn’t protest of push me away- she arches into me, into my touch, and makes the most beautiful noise in her throat. That moment, those moments, are all that I can feel. The future is as unreal to me as a unicorn on the planet Saturn. That place where names and phone numbers matter is at least a world away.

The beautiful urgency of this story left me in wet wonder. And yet, on the sexometer scale, it probably wouldn’t even make it to 2.

Much of my own recent work, especially my short stories, would score pretty low on the sexometer. “The First Stone”, coming out in a few weeks in Cheyenne Blue’s lesbian collection Forbidden Fruit, has a single sex scene, maybe a page long, in a story of 4500 words. Most of the tale focuses on the build-up, the protagonist’s struggle against her unseemly, implacable and completely inappropriate lust. (The heroine is a nun.) “The Last Amanuensis”, in Remittance Girl’s anthology Written on Skin, barely has any sex at all, though it is shot through with frightening darts of desire. And even in the stories that do include a healthy dose of sucking and fucking, I tend to shine the spotlight on the characters’ emotions and reactions, not on their genitalia.

Okay, so The Ingredients of Bliss received a sexometer rating of 3. Am I proud of that? Not particularly. This romp demanded frequent and outrageous sex, so that was what I wrote. But I’m not sure that it’s any more erotic than (for instance) my short story “Just a Spanking”, which has orgasms but no sex at all.

Eroticism is in the mind of the reader. And I don’t think it can be measured in any objective, cut-and-dried way, any more than you can measure hope, or humor, or God.

Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: Self Or Not?

Before I begin, a bit of disclosure: While the following has
been written in an attempt to be professionally and personally non-biased I am
an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books. 

Now, with that out of the way…

So, should you stay with the traditional model of working
with a publisher or go the self-publishing route?

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been thinking – a lot — about
this.  The arguments for stepping
out on your own are certainly alluring, to put it mildly: being able to keep
every dime you make – instead of being paid a royalty – and having total and
complete control of your work being the big two. 

But after putting on my thinking cap – ponder, ponder, ponder — I’ve come to a few conclusions that are
going to keep me and my work with publishers for quite some time.

As always, take what I’m going to say there with a hefty
dose of sodium chloride: what works for
me … well, works for me and maybe not you.

Being on both sides
of the publishing fence – as a writer, editor, and now publisher (even as a
Associate Publisher) — has given me a pretty unique view of the world of not
just writing books, working to get them out into the world, but also a pretty good
glimpse at the clockwork mechanisms than run the whole shebang. 

For example, there’s been a long tradition of writers if not
actively hating then loudly grumbling about their publishers.  You name it and writers will bitch
about it: the covers, the publicity (or lack of), royalties … ad
infinitum.  Okay, I have to admit
more than a few grouches have been mine but with (and I really hate to say
this) age has come a change in my perspective.  No, I don’t think publishers should be
given carte blanch to do with as they
please and, absolutely, I think that writers should always have the freedom to
speak up if things are not to their liking, but that also doesn’t mean that
publisher’s are hand-wringing villains cackling at taking advantage of poor,
unfortunate authors.

It took finding a good publisher to change my mind … that
and seeing the business from the other side.  While there are a lot of things that separate a good
publisher from a poor one the most important one is that a good – and maybe
even great – publisher understands the business

Case in point: authors love to bitch about their covers –
but a publisher that takes the time to look at what is selling, what isn’t
selling, what distributors will and won’t accept, and creates a cover
accordingly is actually doing the author a service.  Yes, the cover may not be an accurate scene from the book,
but it – if it works — should tease and tantalize enough to get people to buy
it.  By the way, since this is
supposed to be about publisher versus self-publishing keep in mind that you
would not know what sells and what doesn’t – by the way, the amazon best
sellers list is not a good indication – and so will be operating pretty much in
the dark. 

Authors often work from ego – and there is nothing wrong
with that – but far too often what they want, and what will actually sell, are
polar opposites.  They want to see
their work like books they admire … but they also may be completely ignorant
of the fact that while those books look nice they simply don’t leap off the
shelves.

Being in the trenches of publishing, looking at the numbers
myself, is very sobering.  Just
take social networking.  For people
in self-publishing it’s the end-all, be-all — you can’t succeed, they say,
without it.  But while exposure is
important, many of your FaceBook friends will not buy your book.  The people who will buy your book are
looking for erotica they will enjoy – and if your cover, your marketing, your whatever,
doesn’t speak their language then they simply won’t cough up the bucks.  It’s a sobering though that many
bestselling erotica books are written by authors who don’t play the social
networking game … at all.

Yes, when you self publish you have complete and total
control – but that also means you have no access to a publisher’s experience:
you will have to do everything from scratch, from learning how to get your book
on amazon, iTunes, etc. to dealing with cover art specs and ebook
formatting.  Sure, when you
self-publish you keep every dime – but you could very well spend it and more in
time doing what a publisher does.

And marketing … I totally agree that publishers should do
more of it, but publishers have never been good at that, even before the ebook
revolution.  But even a little
publicity from a publisher can work wonders: many authors are discovered not
via advertising or marketing but because their book was put out by a publisher whose
catalog had a best seller in it.

If you self-publish then you are a single voice yelling as
loud as you can – and these days there are a lot of single voices yelling as
loud as they can – and against this din a lot of readers, and reviewers, are
turning a bit deaf.  It may be hard
to hear but being with a publisher still carries a lot of weight when it comes
to getting noticed. 

Sure, if you’re a huge author then going the
self-publishing route may make a lot of sense, but think of it this way: huge
or not, with a publisher your mailing list, fans, and miscellaneous contacts will
not be the only way people will hear about you and your book – and the cost of
getting more would probably be the same as the bucks a publisher would take. 

In the end, though, the decision is yours.  If I could leave you with anything,
though, is that while there are many publishers out there worthy of scorn there
actually are many that not only know what they are doing – though experience
and observation – and who can do a lot for you.  Often their advice may be hard to take, but if you trust
them they can be a great help – and perhaps the difference between writing a
book that doesn’t sell … and one that does.

A Very Special Confession

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006YGDE6G/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

A bow to the fantastic WriteSex site, where this column first appeared

My name is Chris – though my pseudonym is usually M.Christian – and I have a confession to make.

I’ve written – and write – a…what’s the technical term? Oh, yeah: shitload
of erotica. Some 400 published stories, 12 or so collections, 7 novels.
I’ve also edited around 25 anthologies. I even have the honor of being
an Associate Publisher for Renaissance eBooks, whose Sizzler Editions
erotica imprint has some 1,300 titles out there.

I’ve written sexually explicit gay stories, lesbian stories, trans
stories, bisexual stories, BDSM stories, tales exploring just about
every kind of fetish, you name it and I can all but guarantee that I’ve
written about it. I like to joke that a friend of mine challenged me to
write a story to a ridiculously particular specification: a queer
vampire sport tale. My answer? “Casey, The Bat.” Which I actually did
write…though I dropped the vampire part of it.

Don’t worry; I’m getting to the point. I can write just about anything for anyone – but here comes the confession:

I’ve never, ever written about what actually turns me – what turns Chris – on.

This kind of makes me a rather rare beast in the world of
professional smut writing. In fact it’s pretty common for other erotica
writers to – to be polite about it – look down their noses at the fact
that I write about anything other than my own actual or desired sexual
peccadilloes. Some have even been outright rude about it: claiming that
I’m somehow insulting to their interests and/or orientations and
shouldn’t write anything except what I am and what I like.

To be honest, in moments of self-doubt I have thought the very same
thing. Am I profiting off the sexuality of other people? Am I a
parasite, too cowardly to put my own kinks and passions out into the
world? Am I short-changing myself as a writer by refusing to put myself
out there?

For the record, I’m a hetero guy who – mostly – likes sexually
dominant women. I also find my head turned pretty quickly when a large,
curvy woman walks by. That said, I’ve had wonderful times with women of
every size, shape, ethnicity, and interest.

So why do I find it so hard to say all that in my writing? The
question has been bugging me for a while, so I put on my thinking cap.
Part of the answer, I’ve come to understand, relates directly to chronic
depression: it’s much less of an emotional gamble to hide behind a
curtain of story than to risk getting my own intimate desires and
passions stomped flat by a critical review or other negative reaction
from readers. I can handle critical reviews of a story – that’s
par for the course in professional writing – but it’s a good question
as to whether I could handle critical reviews of my life.

But then I had an eye-opening revelation. As I said, I’ve written –
and write – stories about all kinds of interests, inclinations,
passions, orientations, genders, ethnicities, ages, cultures…okay, I
won’t belabor it. But the point is that I’ve also been extremely blessed
to have sold everything I’ve ever written. Not only that, but I’ve had
beautiful compliments from people saying my work has touched them and
that they never, ever, would have realized that the desires of the
story’s narrator and those of the writer weren’t one and the same.

Which, in a nice little turn-around, leads me to say that my name is
Chris – though my pseudonym is usually M.Christian – and I have yet
another confession to make.

Yes, I don’t get sexually excited when I write. Yes, I have never
written about what turns me on. Yes, I always write under a name that’s
not my legal one.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel when I write. Far from
it: absolutely, I have no idea what actual gay sex is like for the
participants; positively, I have not an inkling of what many fetishes
feel like inside the minds of those who have them; definitely, I have no
clue what it’s like to have sex as a woman…

I do, however, know what sex is like. The mechanics, yeah, but more
importantly I work very hard to understand the emotions of sex and
sexuality through the raw examination of my own life: the heart-racing
nerves, the whispering self-doubts, the pulse-pounding tremors of hope,
the bittersweetness of it, the bliss, the sorrows and the warmth of it,
the dreams and memories…

I’m working on a story right now, part of a new collection. It’s
erotic – duh – but it’s also about hope, redemption, change, and
acceptance. I have no experience with the kind of physical sex that
takes place in this story but every time I close its file after a few
hours of work, tears are burning my cheeks. In part, this emotional
investment is about trying to recapture the transcendent joy I’ve felt
reading the work of writers I admire.

When I read manuscripts as an anthology editor, or as an Associate
Publisher, a common mistake I see in them is a dedication to technical
accuracy favored over emotion. These stories are correct down to the
smallest detail – either because they were written from life or from an
exactingly fact-checked sexual imagination – but at the end, I as the
reader feel…nothing.

I’m not perfect – far from it – but while I may lack direct
experience in a lot of what I write, I do work very, very hard to put
real human depth into whatever I do. I may not take the superficial risk
of putting the mechanics of my sexuality into stories and books but I
take a greater chance by using the full range of my emotional life in
everything I create.

I freely admit that I don’t write about my own sexual interests and
experiences. That may – in some people’s minds – disqualify me from
being what they consider an “honest” erotica writer, but after much work
and introspection I contest that while I may keep my sex life to
myself, I work very hard to bring as much of my own, deeply personal,
self to bear upon each story as I can.

They say that confession is good for the soul. But I humbly wish to
add to that while confession is fine and dandy, trying to touch people –
beyond their sex organs – is ever better…for your own soul as well as
the souls of anyone reading your work.

Worth a Thousand Words: My Life with Tumblr

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006YGDE6G/ref=cm_sw_su_dp

A bow to the fantastic WriteSex site, where this column first appeared

It may come as a surprise, but far too often authors—people who are
supposedly very comfortable with words!—have days when they just don’t
want to write at all.

It’s a common mistake writers make when they begin to think about
social media, marketing, and all that other fun stuff: this idea that
words are the be-all and end-all for them. They force themselves far too
often to script tweet after tweet, Facebook post after Facebook
post…until they just can’t write another line of original content, even
if only to say “Look at my book!” Worse, they come to feel that because
they’ve burnt out on writing tweets and posts and marketing copy, they
have failed. They think about all the potential readers they have lost;
markets they haven’t tapped; piles of beguiling words they should have
written—because are they not supposed to be endless fonts of text?
(Spoiler: no.)

Fortunately for you if you’re one of these writers, there are some
great options for social networking that don’t require you to write a
word. They are wordless yet powerful, simple yet evocative, easy yet
poignant.

In short, Facebook and Twitter are not the only games in town when it
comes to keeping yourself and your writing in the public eye.

I’m talking about using pictures rather than words. Using
Flicker, Instagram, Pinterest or Tumblr to make your point, catch your
Twitter followers’ imaginations, engage them emotionally in a way that
leaves a favorable impression of you in their minds. An image-sharing
tool like these can help you reach out to others, and save you a
thousand words of writing, every day.

There are quite a few image-sharing venues out there—and while your
mileage and social media needs may vary, in my experience they’ve
basically boiled down to just one. Allow me: Flickr is ridiculously
clunky and doesn’t share well with others—just spend a few minutes
trying to either find an image or a keyword, or pass along a photo.
Pain. In. The…youknowwhatImean. Instagram is fine and dandy for
taking snapshots of your dinner, your dog, your kids, your whatever…but
when it comes to sharing what you snap, or using images from other
sources, it’s not exactly user-friendly.

This basically leaves us with two choices, if you want to save those
thousands of words: Pinterest and Tumblr. I’ve tried both and the choice
was extremely easy to make—it comes down to one thing: sex.

Let’s face it, when you’re an author of erotica and erotic romance,
you are dealing with—in one way or another—characters having sex. Like
lots of erotica authors, I’ve learned to (sigh) deal with platforms like
Facebook that will wish you into the cornfield for showing—or in some
cases even talking about—something as threatening as a nipple.
We deal with Facebook because we have to. But an open-minded
image-sharing social media venue is a bit like Twitter: the more the
merrier.

Pinterest doesn’t like sex…at all. I used to have a Pinterest account
but then I began to get messages, here and there to start, but then
tons: each one about a posted image of mine that was removed due to the
dreaded Terms of Service. A few were obvious, but then the images they
were yanking became and more innocent. Bye-bye Pinterest.

Tumblr isn’t perfect—far from it—but even after being purchased by
the search engine deity Yahoo, I can count on the fingers of one hand
the times it has caused me any kind of headache. Mostly they will reject
anything that really pushes a button—think of the deadly erotica sins,
but with pictures, and you know what I mean (hate speech, rape,
bestiality, incest, underage, pee or poo, etc).

In a nutshell, Tumblr is easy, fun, and—best of all—a rather
effective social media tool that also neatly and simply integrates into
Twitter and Facebook…and, no, I do not own stock.

The way it works couldn’t be less complicated: you can create any
number of Tumblrs—think folders—(even with an “age appropriate” warning
if you want), and then design them with any one of a huge number of
themes. From your master dashboard you can see—and tweak —all the
separate Tumblrs you’ve created. The themes are a blast, and the
interface takes very little skill to navigate.

As for what Tumblrs you should create…well, that’s up to you. Like
food? Make a nice edibles Tumblr (and they have an app that lets you to
take shots of your meals if that’s what you’re into). Like history?
Create a vintage photo site. Love sex? Well, it’s pretty obvious about
what you can do with that.

Where do you get your pictures? You can certainly take them yourself
or upload them from your various devices, but where Tumblr becomes a
real social media machine is in reposting. Once you create your account
just look for other Tumblrs by interests or keywords and then hit that
little follow button. Then, when you look at your dashboard, you’ll see a
nice stream of pictures that you can like, share, or repost to your own
various Tumblr incarnations. Plus, the more people you follow, the more
people will follow you.

Just to give you an idea, I started—rather lazily—my dozen or so Tumblrs four or so years ago and now my main one, Rude Mechanicals, has close to 4,000 followers. You can imagine the reach you could have if you really put some work into it.

And if you want to see how far that reach extends, you can go back
and look at your posts to see how many times they’ve been liked or
reposted. It’s harder to tell when it’s a reposted picture but it can
also be very heartwarming to see that, for instance, when you post about
a good review or a new book announcement, dozens of people liked your
news or, even better, shared it with their own vast audience.

What’s also fun about Tumblr is the auto-forward feature. It’s not
perfect, as there are some periodic glitches, but all in all it works
rather well. When you set up your separate Tumblrs you can then select
an option where—if you choose—you can also send any image to Twitter or
to Facebook.  That increases the number of people your image will potentially reach. It can even go to a Facebook page you’ve created. Neat!

One trick I use is to click the handy “like” button to create an
inventory of images and then—once or twice a day—go back into my list of
likes to repost them to my appropriate sites…with or without Twitter or
Facebook reposting as I see fit. Tumblrs also feature RSS, which means
you can subscribe to one of them through an aggregator like Feedly.

What’s also neat about Tumblr is its flexibility: you can post images
(duh) but you can also embed video (from YouTube or wherever) and post
text, quotations, links, chat streams, and audio.

Let your eyes do the walking and let the images they find do the
talking. Image-sharing tools like Tumblr are a super easy way to fulfill
your need for social media presence without having to write anything.

#

M.Christian has become an acknowledged master of erotica, with more than 400 stories, 10 novels (including The Very Bloody Marys, Brushes and The Painted Doll). Nearly a dozen collections of his own work (Technorotica, In Control, Lambda nominee Dirty Words, The Bachelor Machine), more than two dozen anthologies (Best S/M Erotica series, My Love for All That is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes Erotica, The Burning Pen, and with Maxim Jakubowksi The Mammoth Book of Tales from the Road).  His work is regularly selected for Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and others. His extensive knowledge of erotica as writer, editor, anthologist and publisher resulted in the bestselling guide How To Write And Sell Erotica.  He can be found in a number of places online, not least of which is mchristian.com.

Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: Meet Me Halfway



(thanks to the great WriteSex site, where this first appeared) 

Meet Me Halfway

Let’s open with a joke: a guy pleads with god over and over: “Please,
Lord, let me win the lottery.” Finally, god answers: “Meet me halfway –
buy a ticket!”

Back when publishers only put out – gasp – actually
printed-on-paper books I was known as a writer who would give anything I
did that extra mile: readings, interviews, PR events, press releases …
you name it, I’d do it. To be honest, I’ve always had a small advantage
in that my (unfinished) degree was in advertising and I’ve
less-than-secretly really enjoyed creating all kinds of PR stuff. I’ve
always felt that a good ad, or marketing plan, can be just as fun and
creative as actually writing the book itself.

Sure, some of my PR stuff has gotten me (ahem) in some trouble …
though I still contest that the “other” M.Christian who staged that
rather infamous plagiarism claim over the novel Me2 was at fault and not me, the one-and-only; or that my claim to amputate a finger as a stunt for Finger’s Breadth was totally taken out of context…

Anyway, the fact is I’ve always looked at publishers as people to
work with when it comes to trying to get the word out about my books.
Sure, some publishers have been more responsive and accepting than
others and, yes, I still have bruises from working with a few who
couldn’t have cared less about me and my books, but in the end most of
them have been extremely happy to see my excitement when one of their
editions hit the shelves.

Duh, things have changed a lot since then – but in many ways things
haven’t changed at all. Books are still books, even if they are now
digital files and not dead trees, and bookstores are still in the
business of selling those books, even if they’re now Amazon, iBooks, and
Kobo instead of brick-and-mortar establishments … and publishers still
want to work with authors who want to work with them.

Not going into the whole publisher-versus-self-publishing thing (in a word: don’t) one thing that has
totally changed is the importance of marketing, social media, and
public relations. Simply put, it’s gone from being somewhat necessary to
absolutely essential.

But this post isn’t about Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs and the
rest of that stuff. Instead I want to talk about how you work with a
publisher: what they do, what you do, and how to make it all work for
the best.

A very common myth is that publishers are finger-steepling,
mustache-twirling villains who pay for their volcano lairs and
diamond-collared Persian cats with the sweat of writers. Okay, a few do,
but the good ones started as writers themselves and have simply worked
their way up to being in a position to try and help other writers – and,
sure, make some bucks along the way.

Another common myth is that publishers don’t care about their
writers. Okay, let’s be honest: a writer who sells a lot of books is
definitely going to get the lion’s share of attention, but a good
publisher knows that any book in their catalogue can be the one to go
from one sale a month to ten a day.

There’s a very important factor: publishers deal with a lot of
writers – some of whom have written dozens of books while others have
two or three … or only one. With that many titles you can’t really
expect a publisher to be able to give you 100% attention 100% of the
time. Yes, they want you to succeed – they have a vested interest in
your success, after all – but they have to try and bring that same level
of success to as many of their writers and books as possible.

That does not let them off the hook when it comes to doing their jobs. A good publisher, most importantly, knows the business
of publishing. Often this means they have to do things that authors
don’t like: saving money on covers (or refusing to use your aunt’s
watercolors as cover art), asking for changes to books or titles,
requiring authors to think about social media and audience, asking for
copyedited or clean manuscripts … and so forth. They do this not because
they enjoy watching a writer cringe, but because they have lots of
experience with what won’t sell, what might sell, what is worth a lot of time and what isn’t.

Believe it or not, publishers are also people: they work very hard –
too hard in some cases – to be the publisher they, as writers, would
want to work with. As such, they don’t just want to make a book a
runaway bestseller; they want to make that book’s author excited and
happy about their work.

Personal disclosure time: yes, I am a writer but I also have the
honor of being an Associate Publisher for Renaissance eBooks. To put it
mildly, it has been an eye-opening experience to start out looking at
publishers as a writer, and end up looking at writers as a publisher.

During all this I try to remember my own excitement of when my books
came out, and all the plans and strategies and so forth I had the
pleasure of putting together. It was stressful and depressing more often
than not, but then there were the wonderful moments when I felt the
publisher was also thrilled about me and my work. As a publisher, I’ve
tried to return to the favor to other writers.

Did you feel a “but” coming? Well, you should because sitting on the
other side of the fence I’ve noticed that a few – not a lot, thankfully,
but still far too many – writers want to win the lottery but won’t buy a
flipping ticket.

Okay, I promise I won’t turn this into a “get off my lawn” rant but I
do have a few words for advice for dealing with publishers – and how to
making the transition from A Writer to A Cherished Author.

For one thing, always remember you are just one of many writers a
publisher has to deal with. Yes, you have rights and a publisher should
always respect and care about you and your work – but being demanding or
a prima donna will get you nothing.

A good publisher will work very hard on marketing, promotions,
exposure, new ways of doing anything, etc. – but, and this is extremely
important, you need to as well. In short, buy a ticket!

Don’t have a website? Make one! Don’t have a Facebook page? Create
one! Don’t have a Twitter feed? Sign up! Don’t have a Goodreads,
RedRoom, etc., presence? Get moving!

The same goes for following your publisher’s social media links and
such. Sign up and friend and favor them, and when your book comes out
let your publisher know that you are excited and happy about it. Tell
them of your marketing plans, send them your press releases, talk to
them about the ways you are working to reach your audience … don’t just
sit back and wait for them to do all the work.

Social media is timeless: your book might sell tomorrow or next year,
which means that your marketing and such should also never stop. It
breaks my heart when authors decide that their book is a failure when
they don’t immediately see a fat royalty check – when the fact is the
book is a failure because it is they who have given up on it.
Publishers feel the same way: none of them want to hear that they
screwed up by not making a book a bestseller when the author walked away
from the title after a few months.

I could go on, and I will in more columns, but let’s wind down by
restating the point of this post: working with a publisher is a
partnership. They have duties and responsibilities but you, the author,
have to step up and enthusiastically show that you, too, want to make
your book into a magical, hotter-than-hot, golden ticket.

Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: Thinking Outside Your Box

(a hearty thanks goes out to the wonderful K.D. Grace, on whose blog this piece first appeared)

Thinking Outside Your Box…
Or Writing Isn’t Always About Writing

Sure, we may all want to just cuddle in our little garrets, a purring pile of fur in
our laps, leather patches on our sleeves, a pipe at the ready, and do nothing
but write masterpieces all day and night – with periodic breaks for
binge-drinking and soon-to-be legendary sexual escapades – but the fact of the
matter is that being a writer has totally, completely, changed.

I’m not just talking about the need to be a marketing genius and a publicity
guru – spending, it feels too often, more time tweeting about Facebook, or
Facebooking about tweeting, than actually writing – but that authors really
need to be creative when it comes to not just getting the word out about their
work but actually making money.

A lot of people who claim to be marketing geniuses and publicity gurus will say
that talking about you and your work as loud as possible, as often as possible,
is the trick … but have you heard the joke about how to make money with
marketing and PR? Punchline: get people to pay you to be a marketing genius
and/or a publicity guru. In short: just screaming at the top of the tweety lungs
or burying everyone under Facebook posts just won’t do it.

Not that having some form of presence online isn’t essential – far from it: if
people can’t find you, after all, then they can’t buy your books. But there’s a
big difference between being known and making everyone run for the hills – or
at least stop up their9 ears – anytime you say or do anything online.

Balance is the key: don’t just talk about your books or your writing – because,
honesty, very few people care about that … even your readers – instead fine a
subject that interests you and write about that as well. Give yourself some
dimension, some personality, some vulnerability, something … interesting, and
not that you are not just an arrogant scream-engine of me-me-me-me. Food, travel,
art, history, politics … you pick it, but most of all have fun with it.
Forced sincerity is just about as bad as incessant narcissism.

Okay, that’s all been said before – but one thing a lot of writers never think
about is actually getting out from behind their computers – or out of their
garret to tie in the opening to this. Sure, writing may far too often be a
solitary thing but putting yourself out there – in the (gasp) real world – can
open all kinds of doors. I’m not just talking publicity-that-can-sometimes-equal-book-sales,
either: there’s money to be made in all kinds of far-too-often overlooked
corners.

Not to turn this to (ahem) myself: but in addition to trying to do as many
readings and appearances as I can manage … or stand … I also teach classes.
One, it gets me out of the damned house and out into the (shudder) real world,
but it also, hopefully, shows people that I am not just a writer. Okay, a lot
of what I teach – from sex ed subjects to … well, writing – has to do with my
books and stories but it also allows me to become more than a virtual person.

By teaching classes and doing readings and stuff-like-that-there I’d made a lot
of great connections, met real-life-human-beings, and have seen a considerable
jump in book sales. Now don’t let me mislead you that this has been easy: there
are a lot of people out there who perform, teach, lecture, what-have-you
already so often it means almost starting a brand new career … scary and
frustrating doesn’t even begin to describe it. But, in the end, the rewards
have more than made up for the headaches.

Now you don’t have to read, or teach, or whatever: the main point of this is to
think outside of your little writing box. If you write historical fiction then
think about conducting tours of your city and it’s fascinating secrets and back
alleys; if you write SF then think about starting a science discussion group –
or even joining one. Like art? How about becoming a museum docent? Write
mysteries? Then organize a murder party – or just attend one.

You don’t have to make you and your work the focus of what you are doing. As in
the virtual world, connections can come from all kinds of unexpected directions
– which can then even lead to new opportunities … both for your writing but also
as a never-before-thought-of-cash stream.

My classes and lectures and whatever have not just brought be friends, booksales, totally new publicity venues, but also ($$) cash!

It’s also a great way of balancing my inherent shyness with the need to get out
there and be a person – which always helps not just sell whatever products you
happen to be selling but can also be extremely good for (not to get too
metaphysical or something) the soul: sure, we all might want to be left alone
in our little garrets to writer, write, write but the fact is that writing can
be very emotionally difficult …. to put it mildly. But thinking outside of
your box you can not just reach new, potential, readers but also possibly find
friends and an unexpected support system.

Teaching may not be for you, readings may not be for you … but I’m sure if
you put your wonderfully creative mind to it I’m sure you can think of a way to
not just get the word out about your work but also enrich yourself as a person.
It might be painful at first, but – believe me – it’ll be more than worth it.

Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: Let’s All Sing Like the Birdies Sing… Tweet! Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!

(the following post first appeared on WriteSex)

Okay, to be honest: I used to be extremely anti-Twitter.

It’s not like I’ve done a complete turnaround—far from
it—but I’ve begun to use it more seriously, and …I have to grudgingly
admit that it can be an effective social media tool.

While I am still fairly new to tweet-tweet-tweeting, I
can’t but help notice a lot of authors making what I think are serious
mistakes. Part of that, of course, is because twitter is
counterintuitive to the way writers think. Unlike blogs and other forms
of social media, twitter is ephemeral: tweets coming and going in the
space of a few seconds…with few people taking the time to backtrack on
what anyone is saying.

This means that quantity is key to tweeting; zapping out a
tweet, say, every few days or weeks or only when you have a book or
story coming out is pretty much pointless. Even if you have a huge
audience of loyal followers, tweeting infrequently means that you will
have an very small percentage of that audience who happen to be looking
at their Twitter feed for your short pearls of wisdom, or important book
announcements, the moment you send them—and that moment, O infrequent
tweeter, is the only one you’ve given yourself. To make effective use of
Twitter you not only need to tweet every day, you need to tweet several
times a day.

And then there’s the question of what you’re
tweeting. Yes, you need to talk about your writing; yes, you need to
post book announcements; yes, you need to praise your publisher; yes,
you need to scream about good reviews…but you also need to come across
as a person. So, share interesting information about yourself, share
pieces of your writing that you aren’t necessarily trying to sell, talk
to your followers as if they were friends (though, not necessarily the
kind of friends to whom you’d say anything), rather than potential customers…get my drift? Your followers are interested in your work, but they’re also interested in you.

One thing I’ve been doing—though probably not as much as I
should—is a Fun Fact thread: sharing tidbits about little ol’ me that
people might find interesting. Hopefully it makes my feed seem a lot
less stridently I’M A WRITER READ MY WRITINGS and more human,
intriguing, and engaging.

Fortunately, frequent tweeting with varied messages isn’t
as hard as it sounds. You don’t have log in to  your twitter account
multiple times and send out each tweet manually. With the right tool you
can post a half dozen tweets or more all at the same time, and have
them sent out every few hours. One of the best tools I’ve found for this
(and, no, this isn’t a commercial) is called Hootsuite; it’s a
web-based twitter aggregator that allows me to post, schedule, track,
and do other fun things, and from more than one Twitter account (which
is handy, since I work for a publisher and send out tweets about myself
as well about them). The scheduling feature is very handy: I can create
multiple tweets and then copy and paste them into Hootsuite’s
scheduler—and program them to pop up over the span of a few hours or
even days.

Of course, you don’t want the tweets to be mind-numbingly
similar and spammy. No one—ever—wants to listen to a commercial, let
alone the same one several times a day. So flooding your poor followers
with nothing but BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK BUY MY BOOK is not going to
sell a single copy, and will more than likely get you unfollowed. Give
the repeated content some variety, switch the words around, say the same
thing in different words, etc.

Here are four tweets I sent out for one of my books when Sizzler Editions was giving it away free one weekend:

He drank blood but wasn’t a
vampire. Even he didn’t know what he was! Free 14-16thh Manlove novel
@MChristianzobop http://amzn.com/B00CWNRFYM

#Free 14-16th #Manlove #Vampire classic complete in one ebook Running Dry by @MChristianzobop http://amzn.com/B00CWNRFYM

Like #Manlove #Paranormal
#Romance? M. Christian blazes a new trail in Running Dry only
@MChristianzobop http://amzn.com/B00CWNRFYM

#Free this weekend only Lambda Finalist M. Christian’s gay vampire classic Running Dry http://amzn.com/B00CWNRFYM

In addition to varying the wording of what is essentially
the same information, you can parcel out different bits of information
about the same event, in a way that’s easy for late-afternoon or evening
tweet-readers to catch up on whatever you’d posted in the morning. Say
you were going to a convention where you would be on a panel and also
reading. Don’t write one tweet about it. Write a tweet about the fact
that you will be there and the dates; another about being on the panel
and when it is scheduled; a third about your reading, and when and
where.

Another feature of Twitter (and other social media
platforms) that a lot of people ignore when sending out info is
autosharing. In short, this means that whatever you post to one place
gets automatically shared to others. Let’s say I have a blog. Using RSS
Graffiti, whatever I post there is picked up on Facebook. Let’s also say
I have a Tumblr (I actually have seven). With Tumblr’s built-in system I
can share (or not) what I post on it to Twitter and then to Facebook.
There is also a setting in Twitter that passes your tweets along to
Facebook as well. These settings let you decide what’s automatically
reposted where, so your aunt Betty doesn’t end up hearing about your new
erotic novel unless you want her to.

It can be a tad confusing—to put it mildly—but it saves a
lot of time and effort to automate these things. That said, one word of
warning: you want to be careful with a quantity-driven thing like
Twitter that you don’t choke your slower-rate social media places like
Facebook with too many autoshared reposts—that’ll start to get pretty
spammy. Hootsuite, nicely, allows me to post to Facebook as well as
Twitter, so I can vary the number of posts I send out to match the
nature of the media venue. It may take a bit of trial and error to get
this all balanced for rate and time and such but it’s really worth the
investment.

Pay attention, as well, to hashtags…though the #trick with
#these is #not to overuse #them as your post will look really #silly.
You can check trending tags and use those—but all that means is that
yours will compete with millions of others. Far better to use them only
for what you are really writing about, and then only a few per post.

And retweet items you find important, amusing or interesting. Remember, Twitter is supposed to be social media: meaning that the goal isn’t to talk at people but to them. Tweeting a lot but not actually communicating useful or interesting information is going to get you zilch.

Relatedly, don’t, as too many people do, ignore retweets of your tweets or mentions of your name. It’s not a quid pro quo
situation, but it’s nice to pause and acknowledge that someone cared
enough to spread your tweets further out into the world. Being ignored,
specially by a writer whose career, or books, you have retweeted or
shared…well, it doesn’t take much of that for a “follow” to turn into an
“unfollow.”

Sure, Twitter too often sounds like a parrot who’s been
sitting next to the television for too long and is about as deep as a
Justin Bieber song—but the fact remains that, if you approach it
intelligently and efficiently, it can be a valuable source of marketing
for writers.

Just, as with all social media, try not to get sucked into
spending so much time playing with it that you don’t #get #any #writing
#done…

Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: Self Or Not?

Before I begin, a bit of disclosure: While the following has
been written in an attempt to be professionally and personally non-biased I am
an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books. 

Now, with that out of the way…

So, should you stay with the traditional model of working
with a publisher or go the self-publishing route?

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t been thinking – a lot — about
this.  The arguments for stepping
out on your own are certainly alluring, to put it mildly: being able to keep
every dime you make – instead of being paid a royalty – and having total and
complete control of your work being the big two. 

But after putting on my thinking cap – ponder, ponder, ponder — I’ve come to a few conclusions that are
going to keep me and my work with publishers for quite some time.

As always, take what I’m going to say there with a hefty
dose of sodium chloride: what works for
me … well, works for me and maybe not you.

Being on both sides
of the publishing fence – as a writer, editor, and now publisher (even as a
Associate Publisher) — has given me a pretty unique view of the world of not
just writing books, working to get them out into the world, but also a pretty good
glimpse at the clockwork mechanisms than run the whole shebang. 

For example, there’s been a long tradition of writers if not
actively hating then loudly grumbling about their publishers.  You name it and writers will bitch
about it: the covers, the publicity (or lack of), royalties … ad
infinitum.  Okay, I have to admit
more than a few grouches have been mine but with (and I really hate to say
this) age has come a change in my perspective.  No, I don’t think publishers should be
given carte blanch to do with as they
please and, absolutely, I think that writers should always have the freedom to
speak up if things are not to their liking, but that also doesn’t mean that
publisher’s are hand-wringing villains cackling at taking advantage of poor,
unfortunate authors.

It took finding a good publisher to change my mind … that
and seeing the business from the other side.  While there are a lot of things that separate a good
publisher from a poor one the most important one is that a good – and maybe
even great – publisher understands the business

Case in point: authors love to bitch about their covers –
but a publisher that takes the time to look at what is selling, what isn’t
selling, what distributors will and won’t accept, and creates a cover
accordingly is actually doing the author a service.  Yes, the cover may not be an accurate scene from the book,
but it – if it works — should tease and tantalize enough to get people to buy
it.  By the way, since this is
supposed to be about publisher versus self-publishing keep in mind that you
would not know what sells and what doesn’t – by the way, the amazon best
sellers list is not a good indication – and so will be operating pretty much in
the dark. 

Authors often work from ego – and there is nothing wrong
with that – but far too often what they want, and what will actually sell, are
polar opposites.  They want to see
their work like books they admire … but they also may be completely ignorant
of the fact that while those books look nice they simply don’t leap off the
shelves.

Being in the trenches of publishing, looking at the numbers
myself, is very sobering.  Just
take social networking.  For people
in self-publishing it’s the end-all, be-all — you can’t succeed, they say,
without it.  But while exposure is
important, many of your FaceBook friends will not buy your book.  The people who will buy your book are
looking for erotica they will enjoy – and if your cover, your marketing, your whatever,
doesn’t speak their language then they simply won’t cough up the bucks.  It’s a sobering though that many
bestselling erotica books are written by authors who don’t play the social
networking game … at all.

Yes, when you self publish you have complete and total
control – but that also means you have no access to a publisher’s experience:
you will have to do everything from scratch, from learning how to get your book
on amazon, iTunes, etc. to dealing with cover art specs and ebook
formatting.  Sure, when you
self-publish you keep every dime – but you could very well spend it and more in
time doing what a publisher does.

And marketing … I totally agree that publishers should do
more of it, but publishers have never been good at that, even before the ebook
revolution.  But even a little
publicity from a publisher can work wonders: many authors are discovered not
via advertising or marketing but because their book was put out by a publisher whose
catalog had a best seller in it.

If you self-publish then you are a single voice yelling as
loud as you can – and these days there are a lot of single voices yelling as
loud as they can – and against this din a lot of readers, and reviewers, are
turning a bit deaf.  It may be hard
to hear but being with a publisher still carries a lot of weight when it comes
to getting noticed. 

Sure, if you’re a huge author then going the
self-publishing route may make a lot of sense, but think of it this way: huge
or not, with a publisher your mailing list, fans, and miscellaneous contacts will
not be the only way people will hear about you and your book – and the cost of
getting more would probably be the same as the bucks a publisher would take. 

In the end, though, the decision is yours.  If I could leave you with anything,
though, is that while there are many publishers out there worthy of scorn there
actually are many that not only know what they are doing – though experience
and observation – and who can do a lot for you.  Often their advice may be hard to take, but if you trust
them they can be a great help – and perhaps the difference between writing a
book that doesn’t sell … and one that does.

Confessions of A Literary Streetwalker: "A Cookie Full Of Arsenic"

Ever seen Sweet Smell of Success
If you haven’t then you should: because, even though the film was shot
in 1957, it rings far too much, and far too loudly, in 2013.

In a nutshell, Sweet Smell of Success (directed
by Alexander Mackendrick from a script by the amazing Clifford Odets
and Ernest Lehman) is about the all-powerful columnist J.J. Hunsecker
(Burt Lancaster) – who can make or break anyone and anything he wants —
and the desperate press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), who loses
everything for trying to curry favor with Hunsecker for … well, that Sweet Smell of Success.

So
… 1957 to 2013.  A lot’s changed, that’s for sure.  But recently
rewatching this, one of my all-time favorite films, gave me a very
uncomfortable chill.  But first a bit of history (stop that groaning):
you see, J.J. Hunsecker was based – more than thinly – on another
all-powerful columnist, the man who once said, about the who he was, and
the power he wielded as, ” I’m just a son of a bitch.”

There was even a word, created by Robert Heinlein of all people, to describe a person like this: winchell – for the man himself — Walter Winchell.

A
book, movie, star, politician – anyone who wanted success would do, and
frequently did, anything for both Walter and his fictional doppelganger
J.J. Hunsecker.  Their power was absolute … even a rumor, a fraction
of a sentence could mean the difference between headlines and the morgue
of a dead career.  As Hunsecker puts it to a poor entertainer who
crossed him: “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.”

Welcome
to 2012: we have iPhones, Ipads, Nooks, Kindle’s, 4G, Bluetooth,
Facebook, Twitter … in many ways we’re just a food pill away from
every futuristic fantasy ever put-to-pulp.  But there’s a problem …
and it’s a big one.

I think it’s time to bring winchell back … not the man, of course, even if that were possible, but the word.  Yes, a lot has changed from Walter and Sweet Smell of Success but, sadly, as the old cliché goes: “the more things change the more they stay the same.”

The
Internet has altered – quite literally – everything, but in many ways
the speed, and totality, of its change has made a lot of people, writers
to readers to just-plain-surfers, desperate for benchmarks: a place or
person to go to that, they hope, will be there in the morning.

For writers this often means an editor, site, or just another writer.  In the ‘biz’ these people are called names:
meaning that mentioning by them seems to have a kind of rub-for-luck
power for other writers – with the ultimate prize being (gasp) noticed by
them.  Sadly, this make-or-break mojo is occasionally true – though a
surprising large number of these “names” are only divine in their
twisted little minds.

I’ve
said it before and so, naturally, I have to say it again: writing
anything – smut to whatever you want to create – is damned hard work:
all of us writers put our heart and souls down on the digital page and
then send it out into a far-too-frequently uncaring digital universe. 
No writer … let me say that again with vehement emphasis … is better than any other writer
Sure, a few get paid more, have more books or stories published, but
the work involved is the same – as is their history: name any … well, name and you will see a person who, once upon a time, was sitting in the dark with nothing but hopes and dreams. 

Which is why these … winchells give
me unpleasant flashbacks to Lancaster telling Curtis: “Son, I don’t
relish shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun, so why don’t you just
shuffle along?”

Honestly, I will get
to the point: never forget that what you are doing, as a writer, is
special and wonderful.  Yeah, you might be rough around the edges; sure,
you may be years away from stepping out of the shadows and into the
blinding light of being (gasp) a name yourself; but you deserve respect.

I
have a simple rule.  Okay, it might be a little harsh but it keeps me
going in the face of trying to get out there into the big, wide, and
far-too-uncaring world: ignore me and I ignore you. 

Facebook
likes and comments, twitter responses, by the way, don’t count.  That’s
not communication – at least not to me (not to sound like a crotchety
old man).  If I write anyone – an editor, site, or just another writer –
and I don’t get an answer then I wish you into the cornfield.  The same
goes with rude responses … like the writer who asked me to promote
her book.  I said that I would if she’d promote mine as well.  Quid pro quo, right?  She never wrote back – not even after a few polite suggestions for mutual exposure  … so I hope she likes popcorn.

Being
rude, not answering messages, playing the “are you a name? If not then
screw you” game: there is no reason for this behavior.  Never!

Instead of trying to suck to up names or
support them and their sites with a pathetic fantasy that you, too, may
actually be seen by them, find some real, true, and good friends:
people who will hold your hand when it gets dark and scary; who will
bring you along no matter where they go; who understand the bumps in the
road because they, too, are on the same path; who will understand
kindness but also karma – that good begets good. 

Being a winchell may taste good, at first: being able to consider yourself better than other writers, to associate with other names in
the business, to be able to make – or break – anyone who want for
whatever reason you have … but there’s a great Hollywood expression
that rings in my head just as loudly as any line from Sweet Smell of Success:

Always
be nice to the people you meet on the way up, because those are the
very same people you’ll be meeting on the way back down.

In closing, remember that anyone, anywhere – name or
not — who doesn’t treat you with at least professional equality,
mutual respect, or just simple human politeness is, to quote from Sweet Smell of Success: “A cookie full of arsenic.”

Confessions of a Literary Streetwalker: Writing Coaches and Teachers

(thanks to WriteSex, where this article originally appeared)

For new writers, the temptation is obvious: after all, if you don’t know something, shouldn’t you seek out a way to learn about it? The question of how to educate yourself as a writer is a necessary and important one, of course, but an often-invisible second question follows: how do you sift through the piles of would-be writing coaches, teachers and other purveyors of advice to find the ones who will lead you toward genuinely better writing? The problem isn’t that there are over-eager teachers galore, but that far too many of them are preaching from ignorance—or just dully quoting what others have already said.

This is particularly true of erotic romance. Now, I have to admit I’ve been more than a bit spoiled by other genres, where you can write about whatever you want without much of a chance—beyond clumsy writing—of getting rejected for not toeing the line, so approaching erotic romance has been a bit more of a challenge. Romance authors, after all, have been told time and time again that there is a very precise, almost exacting, Way of Doing Things … and if you don’t, then bye-bye book deal.

But times have changed, and while a few stubborn publishers still want erotic romantic fiction that follows established formulas, the quantum leap of digital publishing has totally shaken up by-the-numbers approaches to romance writing. Without going too much into it (maybe in another column…), because ebooks are so much easier to produce, publishers can take wonderful risks on new authors and concepts, meaning that they don’t have to wring their hands in fright that the new title they greenlit will go bust and possibly take the whole company with it.

Because of this freedom, erotic romance can be so much more than it ever was: experimental, innovative, unique, challenging, etc. These are no longer the Words of Death when it comes to putting together a book.

One of the great, underlying tasks of teaching—one I love, but with some reverence and an occasional pang of dread—is challenging the boring, formulaic, way that so many talk about writing (which is also to say that a huge part of the reason I love to teach is that it’s a weird form of revenge against all the bad writing teachers I’ve had over the years). There are, however, far too many writing teachers who relentlessly parrot that erotic romance has to follow a strict formula to be successful. They spell out this formula in stomach-cramping detail: what has to happen to each and every character, in each and every chapter, in each and every book.

This is not to say that new authors should put their hands over their ears any time someone offers up advice on romance writing; there is, after all, a huge difference between a teacher who inspires from experience and one who is just a conduit between you and a textbook. A publisher, for instance, who looks at their catalogue and can see what is selling for the moment—they’re worth listening to. On the other hand, one who sets down unbending rules on what Not To Do and What To Do, regardless of the changing interests of readers or the innovations of writers, is only mumbling at you through the sand in which their head is lodged. Case in point: I once had a erotic romance novel rejected by a major publisher not because of the writing, the plot, the characters, or the setting but because it was about a painter and, according to this publisher, “books about painters don’t sell.” Needless to say, I didn’t let this feedback stop me from sending the book to a different publisher—where it sold quite well.

The A-to-B-to-C form of teaching writing is likened to cutting up a frog: certainly an efficient way of finding out (ewwwww) the contents of an amphibian … but totally useless as a way of creating your own. A good test of a writing instructor, by the way, is how you feel at the end of the class or how-to book: if you’re shaking like a leaf that you might have made—or will make—some kind of horrible erotic-romance-writing mistake, then the lesson was a bad one … but if you leave feeling elated, inspired, confident and ready to build your story into something powerful then, you guessed it, the class was good.

Folks have come to me with questions like “Can I start my story with an email?” “Can I start with the weather?” “Can my setting be in a foreign country?” “Can I write about an artist?” I think you can guess what my answer always is: just write! One, you can always change it later and, two (most importantly) write what you want to read: don’t suffocate your creativity with formulas, set-in-stone rules, mandatory character arcs and Hero’s Journeys, or any standardized thing that isn’t relevant to what’s really happening in your story. Instead, think of writing—especially erotic romance—as creation. Sure, you’re going to make some mistakes, but everyone does. That’s what learning is all about. Taking class after class after class doesn’t write books: you do! Taking class after class after class doesn’t even make you a better writer: you do!

Sure, you should seek out some teachers—especially when you are ready to step into the completely terrifying world of publishing—but don’t think that there is a guru out there who has all the answers, who is the Sacred Keeper of the Great Romance Writing Secret. If they were, wouldn’t they be sitting on their yacht sipping immaculately prepared daiquiris?

The best advice, the best lesson that anyone can give a writer, is the simplest: write. Create stories and books and on and on and on until it begins to flow and the words aren’t words anymore but just notes in a composition, until plot and character and setting and dialogue aren’t separate things but part of a greater, beautiful, whole. Once you can hold what you wrote in your hand—or on the screen—and say to yourself that what you have created is good, then you can study the lessons of how to put it out into the world.

But, until then, do everything you can to keep yourself inspired, enthusiastic, creative, thrilled, and excited about writing—by staying away from the tired idea of formulas … and keep that frog intact.

Hot Chilli Erotica

Hot Chilli Erotica

Categories

Babysitting the Baumgartners - The Movie
From Adam & Eve - Based on the Book by New York Times Bestselling Authors Selena Kitt

Categories

Archives

Pin It on Pinterest