Friskbiskit

How I Became an Author of Gay Romance (Extended Dance Mix)

For the intro to my reading at GRL last week I told the story of how I became an author of gay romance. A lot of people who heard it urged me to share my story. I actually have posted about this before, but it was buried at the end of a promo post for All the Colors of Love, so I don't think a lot of people caught it. I'm also taking this opportunity to share the full story, including a few steps along the way that I did not have time to go into for the reading.

All the Colors of Love is the first gay romance I ever wrote, and it changed the course of my career. When I wrote the first draft, all the way back around 2000, 2001, I'd already been writing for about fifteen years and I had three science fiction novels out with Tor. Every single one of them had been a bitter struggle to get words on the page. But this gay young adult romance poured out of me. It was like weights had been lifted from my fingers, and I was free. I knew right then there'd be no going back. 

So I pitched the book to my editor. I told him it was about Antonin, who has a really strange family, and Harry, whose father owns about half the planet. These two boys -- both dealing with a history of abuse, both comic book fans -- become friends, and eventually fall in love with each other, which is when things get really complicated. 

Well, the first thing my editor (James Frenkel of recent harrassment scandal fame) said was, "Do they have to be gay?" I said yes, and then we both decided that he would not be the right editor for this book.

I went in search of markets for gay YA romance. I didn't find any. In fact at that time (circa 2003 or so) there really weren't any paying markets for gay romance written by a woman period, YA or otherwise. However, Yaoi was showing up on the bookshelves in the comics section of the bookstores and there were a handful of original English language boys love publishers, so I started writing manga scripts.

But I still hadn't given up on All the Colors of Love, which I had been revising during this time. When it finally became clear that my agent was not going to represent Colors no matter what I did, I fired him. I walked away from my mainstream publishing career, and was out in the world with no contract, and no agent.

Finally, I caught a break (or so I thought). I sold a script for an historical yaoi manga to Iris Print, an OEL publisher that I had vetted as thoroughly as possible, and it was slated to launch at YaoiCon in 2007. (Yeah, at this point, I'd been in mangaland for quite awhile, and had completely missed the advent of gay erotic romance epublishing 'round about 2004. Oh, the irony.)

I arrived at YaoiCon bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready for the release of my story, The Nimbletons. I fairly floated into the dealer's hall to find  the Iris Print table.

And came up empty. 

Talking to the dealer's hall manager, I found out that the publisher had cancelled her table two weeks before. She was going out of business and had not bothered to notify me or the cover artist, who was also there, wondering what in the hell had happened. 

I remember very clearly standing in the hallway outside that dealer's hall with my dreams in pieces all around me. I was at the nadir of my journey. 

I knew I had to do something right away to make myself feel better because it was all just too awful. Since I'm one of those peculiar people that gets a charge out of doing business, I told myself, "Go back in there and introduce yourself to the first publisher you meet. Give them your card, shake their hand, shmooze. It'll help."

The first table I came to was Torquere.

They invited me to submit a story, and while waiting for the taxi to the airport after the convention, I scribbled the outline for Hero, my very first erotic gay romance, which was published by them the following February. After that I wrote another, and another, up until about a year or so ago, when I looked around and realized the publishing landscape had changed again.

Publishers have finally awoken to the need for positive depictions of LGBT teens in YA literature, and several ebook publishers who specialize in queer romance have opened YA lines. So, finally, I submitted Colors to Harmony Ink, and it was released last month.

All the Colors of Love is my first gay romance, and the book that changed my life. What an amazing gift to share this story at the third annual Gay Rom Lit retreat -- something else that did not exist a few years ago. I want to thank everyone who showed up, and listened, and offered support. Like any other author, I've been on a journey. Your response made me realize I'm finally home.

It's Here! All the Colors of Love: A Gay YA Science Fiction Romance

All the Colors of Love, my first and most recent* gay romance, is finally available to readers everywhere thanks to persistance, lots of support, and Harmony Ink Press!

Amazon Link

Publisher Link

Blurb:

It sucks being the son of a super villain. At home, Harry spends half of his time getting medical treatments and the other half tied up in his father's underwater lair. It was different when his mother was alive, but she disappeared when Harry was six. He can't seem to stay out of trouble at school, and his new roommate, Antonin, thinks he’s a spaz, but somehow Harry has to find a way to stop his father's evil plans.

Antonin Karganilla wants to become a comic book artist, but other than that, being gay is the most normal thing about him. His uncle is an aquatic plant man, his aunt is a molecular biologist back from the dead, and his mom is an overprotective pain in the butt. Antonin's in boarding school and it's starting to look like he and this Harry kid might have a lot in common... and that means a whole new set of problems.

And here's an excerpt:

THE most fucked-up thing of all was that Harry almost felt relieved to find himself once again beneath his father’s thumb. Like returning to familiar surroundings after a whirlwind tour of a bizarre and fabulous land. He knew what was expected of him now. 

He and Antonin boarded a Sears jetliner out of Brussels. Before this, Harry had always been carted around on one of the Old Man’s microjets. He’d never been on a commercial jetliner before. How could something so big—three levels, each with at least a hundred rows in four sections—feel so small? The air had a flat, recycled smell, and people jostled him in the narrow aisle as everyone tried to heave their luggage into the overhead compartments and find their places. Antonin had taken advantage of a last-minute cancellation and gotten them seats in one of the side sections. 

“You take the window seat,” Antonin told Harry as he tried to maneuver his suitcase over his head to reach the luggage compartment. “You’ll want to say good-bye to the sun.” 

Harry took Antonin’s suitcase from him, put it in the compartment, and shoved his duffel bag in after it. He didn’t protest Antonin’s offer, eyeing the tiny seats dubiously. At least this way, if he was smashed up against someone, it would be Antonin. Maybe Antonin would fall asleep, and his head would just kind of accidentally wind up on Harry’s shoulder… and maybe Harry would pretend to fall asleep too, and he could rest his head on top of Antonin’s and let his hand just sort of droop down, onto Antonin’s thigh…. “How long is this flight?” he asked. 

“About three hours.” 

“Is that all?”

 

I'm ridiculously proud of this book. It changed the whole direction of my career. At the start of this post I called it my first and most recent book.* Why?

Well, way back when, in the early naughts, I wrote the first draft of this story and it was the first time I'd written a gay romance. The experience was unlike any other writing I'd ever done at that point. I had more fun with it than with my previous books. I felt free. At the time I was as surprised as anyone else to discover that my true calling was to write about guys in love with other guys, but I knew there was no going back. 

Sadly, when I pitched the book to my big seven editor, the first thing he asked me was, "Do they have to be gay?" Things didn't get better from there. My agent didn't think there was much market for gay romance, since most romance readers are women (I got that a lot in those days, and sometimes still do). After it recieved one rejection he declined to shop it further. 

If it had just been this one book, I probably would have let it go and gone back to writing strong female protagonists. But it was so much more than that. While all of this was going on I had also discovered slash fanfiction, and realized that I was not the only woman who loved gay romance. I can be quite stubborn when my heart is involved and I knew that I was not going to be working with this editor and this agent for long, because the vast majority of books I'd be writing from that point on would also be gay romance. 

I fired the agent and started exploring markets for gay romance. At the time, there wasn't much. Erotic romance epublishing was still relatively new and also had not yet twigged to the fact that there was a big market for gay romance among female romance readers. And when those markets did open up, well, since they were erotic romance, I could hardly send them my YA story. But I did start writing gay erotic romance and publishing regularly.

I set All the Colors of Love aside for several years, thinking that the book that had changed my life might never find it's own market. And then the tides shifted, and people woke up to the fact that young gay people need books that reflect who they are. And Harmony Ink and other LGBTQ YA imprints started springing up. And one day I looked around and realized, hey, there's a market for this book now. 

And here we are. :)

I want to thank everyone who's been by my side through this journey. You know who you are, and I hope you know that your support and belief, in me and in Colors, made today possible.

 

Getting a Book Scanned: Not as hard as you might think

Sweet!

I've been wanting to do something about getting my first novel, The Nature of Smoke (coincidentally a prequel to tomorrow's release, All the Colors of Love) back into print, but I no longer had files for the book. I don't have time to type it all in again (and the thought of doing that makes me want to jab a sharp stick in my eye anyway). So I did a little research and found ou tthat getting a book scanned is really not a big deal.

I went with Bound Book Scanning. The only other companies I could find reviews for were 1DollarScan, which only does pdf and I need Word files, and Blue Leaf. Blue Leaf has conditions about the kind of books they'll scan. Apparently they used to prohibit "trashy romance novels." Now they have a more general policy against sex and violence. Well, fuck that. While they're deciding if they want to be a book scanning company or a moral authority, I have work to do -- sexy, violent work.

Anyway, I went with Bound Book and I just got my files back today -- seven days after I sent the book in. I have an unformatted Word doc, a formatted Word doc, and a pdf, all of which look pretty damn good. For my purposes, the unformatted Word doc will probably be the most useful, because I'll want to reformat it myself anyway, after proofing it. There are bound to be some errors. In fact, the formatted Word scan is entertaining as hell for the endless different ways in which it gets both my name and the title wrong. Hilarious.

I went with the destructive scan (One trade paperback gave its life for the good of the whole novel, just like Spock.) and the whole thing ran me about $35. Nice when things turnout to be both cheap and easy.

Gay Romance Readers Survey: Demographics and Buying Habits

I'm teaching a three-hour class on LGBT Romance at the upcoming residency for the Seton Hill University's Writing Popular Fiction MFA program and while preparing my lecture I realized I didn't have much in the way of verifiable demographic information about readers of gay romance. Searching the internet I found lots of conjecture, but apart from Jessewave's diverse and informative polls, very little in the way of hard data.

So I decided to conduct a survey of the members of the GoodReads M/M Romance Group. The response was sensational. In less than a month I got over 1500 responses. I am deeply grateful to everyone who took the time to answer the survey. Your help has been instrumental in preparing the very best class on our genre that I can present.

Below are the results of the survey, but first, a note about wording, in particular, my choice of the word "purchase" in several of the questions.  Many readers have pointed out that through libraries, giveaways, and free fiction offerings, they read many more gay romance books than they buy. I appreciate that distinction and in fact, it is something I gave quite a bit of thought to when I put the survey together. Ultimately, because the class I'm teaching is for a commercial fiction writing program, I decided to go with information regarding books readers are buying, as opposed to reading. That said, I think a followup survey looking into gay romance reading habits would be a fascinating project.

Finally, if you have any obsevations or questions regarding the survey, please don't hesitate to leave a comment.

Now on to the survey:

A Sale!

It's official! I just got the completed contract back and my m/m erotic romantic comedy short story, Alex in Wonderland will be published by Etopia Press. I'm so excited!

Here's a little blurb for the story to whet your appetite:

What can go wrong in a sex club called Wonderland? Plenty, as Alex is about to find out. Still, when morning comes, the worst night of his life might just turn out to be the best after all.

 

The Espresso Book Machine: On its Way to a Drugstore Near You

Finally, the Espresso Book Machine is breaking out of its niche in libraries and a smattering of book stores. According to this article culled from my weekly RWA eNotes Newsletter, a long-awaited development in our ever-changing publishing industry is about to break.  

On Demand Books, the makers of the device that can print and bind a book in as little as five minutes, has partnered with Kodak to piggyback on the Kodak Picture Kiosks located in some 105,000 locations globally. CVS is the major chain mentioned at the moment, but my guess is these will soon pop up all over the place, especially since On Demand Books has also joined up with ReaderLink, which distrubutes books to grocery stores and other general retail outlets.

This is exciting. It could revitalize booksales in grocery and drug stores -- places everyone has to go. That puts books in the paths of folks who might not yet know they want to read them, and that's how commercial fiction thrives. It also presents an alternative for those who are still not comfortable reading ebooks, or don't wish to shell out for an ereader or smartphone.

The initiative is due to launch later this year in the U.S. and expand globally in 2013.

 

Loose Id, Live!

My publisher, Loose Id, has just launched their new website and it's awesome. Clean new look, nice shiny new features like a wishlist and the ability to like and share books on social media.

And many, many titles are on sale right now too. So go check it out!

Incredibly Belated PayPal Update

Okay, so on the off chance you haven't already heard, Paypal changed their acceotable use policy. A couple of highlights:

First and foremost, we are going to focus this policy only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text.

In addition, the policy will be focused on individual books, not on entire “classes” of books. Instead of demanding that e-book publishers remove all books in a category, we will provide notice to the seller of the specific e-books, if any, that we believe violate our policy.  We are working with e-book publishers on a process that will provide any affected site operator or author the opportunity to respond to and challenge a notice that an e-book violates the policy.

In my opinion, this is the best possible outcome we could reasonably expect. And it happened because people spoke up. This is what I love about the internet, for all it's flaws, it provides a public arena in which the powerful can be held accountable for their actions, and nowadays, it's about the only tool we have to keep companies like PayPal in check.

I want to thank everyone who was involved in bringing about this outcome. Don't ever let anyone tell you you can't make a difference. You just did.

Now I'm closing my petition drive contest and I'll be announcing the final winner on that thread shortly.

Will PayPal Reverse It's Censorship Decision?

Just saw this article in TechCrunch:

The last meeting between the EFF and PayPal was on Friday, and its activism director, Rainey Reitman, told TechCrunch that she left with a “good feeling,” with PayPal’s general counsel indicating that they would be “discussing it internally and might even be able to make a public statement in the next week.”

The EFF, she notes, specifically has requested that PayPal “update their policy so that this type of legal fiction would not be affected.”

Not counting them chicken's before they hatch, but it is an encouraging sign.

S.V. Rowle's Pocket Guide to the PayPal Censorship Debacle

Here's a great resource from author S.V. Rowle that compiles a bunch of the posts that have been written about the PayPal censorship issue. Check it out.

Contest: Stop Censorship, Win a Book

Update 6: I have a new post up about PayPal's response to the response to their actions and Visa's stand on the matter. The ACLU of California has an open letter to PayPal that you can sign, and I'm expanding the contest to include that letter and direct letters to PayPal (provided you haven't already won.) So if you haven't yet, speak up, and don't forget to leave a post here when you do. 

Update 5: Our third winner, Vicki, has already read all of my books (I love her), so she's graciously stepping aside and letting one of the others in her group of five win. I'll announce who in the comments in just a moment.

The PayPal Censorship story continues to get wider coverage. It's now been written about on the Independent and on MSNBC's tech blog. You can find links to these stories and more, as well as an open letter to Visa, on the Banned Writers site.

Update 4: We gained some important allies today. The American Bookseller's Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) wrote a letter to PayPal protesting their policy. Go read it. It will make you cheer.

And if you haven't checked out Banned Writers yet, do so. Lots of good stuff going on in the comments thread there. For example, a call from Eden Connor for guest bloggers and for contributors to an edgy erotica anthology. 

And here's another reason to cheer: we have our fourth winner today! Thank you everyone who has signed the petition, helped spread the word and kept this ball rolling!

Update 3: Wow! I was offline all day today, catching up with work and when I got back I saw a bunch of new comments in the queue. A new winner has been announced and we are well on our way to the next giveaway! You guys are amazing. { }

In other news, I want to direct your attention to this interesting post by Erica Pike, which casts doubt on whether the credit card companies are involved in this at all. It may be all PayPal, in which case, I think we're in better shape, since they are easier to replace with an alternate service.

Got to go back to proofreading now. See you later, babes!

Update 2: Our second winner has been announced! Thank you everyone for speaking up. I <3 you! I have a couple more comments awaiting approval, and if you haven't signed yet, or if you already did and haven't commented here yet, there's still more chances to win. :)

 

Update: Our first winner has been announced! See comments for details. When another five sign the petition and leave a comment here, I'll give away another book. Big hugs to everyone who's participated so far. You are awesome!

Okay, so you know I'm up in arms over this PayPal censorship thing, and I think you should be too. This is a financial institution dictating allowable content in fiction, and it doesn't matter if you read, write, or approve of the content in question, as a reader and a free-thinking person, you don't want to let that happen.

You may have heard that there's a petition. Here it is.

I encourage you to sign it. In fact, I think it is so important for people to speak up on this matter, that I'm going to run a contest for the next week, and maybe longer depending on how things play out. If you sign the petition and leave a comment here stating that you've done so, you will be entered to win a free copy of one of my books, your choice. Every time I get five signatures, I'll do a random selection and one of those five will win. 

Please make your voice heard. This affects all of us. 

PayPal is Watching You

I'm reading a lot of posts today about PayPal and their (so far) mostly successful efforts to censor certain themes in erotica.

You don't need me to tell you that if it's incest, bestiality, and rape today, it will be something else tomorrow, and that if it can happen in erotica then it can happen in erotic romance any second now. This is how it works. The first to be targeted are the most vulnerable. And since incest, rape, and bestiality are all things which, if you're into them you may not want to be identified as being into them, they are easy targets.

So if you haven't yet, please sign the petition voicing your opposition to PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard's policies. And here's a post from J.S. Wayne with some other suggestions for actions you can take, including email addresses for Paypal so you can contact them directly. 

Remittance Girl has a great post here and one of the points she makes, that I'd like to reiterate, is that erotica is written and read predominately by women. So what is really happening here is, once again, the suppression of women's sexual imaginations. When you take into consideration how saturated our culture is with hetero male sexual imaginings, it becomes painfully clear that part of what it means to be a woman in our culture is to be denied your own sexual agency. Our sexuality is only acceptable when mediated by a male viewpoint.

Maybe that's why a book like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which has two rapes in it, is okay, but an indy-published eroticized rape fantasy authored by a woman is a threat to public decency.

What's most maddening of all about this is that everything we are talking about is fiction. You know, NOT REAL. It exists only in our minds. But a lot of people seem to have a really hard time with that distinction. No matter how many studies prove otherwise, they believe that there is a direct correlation between what a person fantasizes about and what they want to have happen in real life.

I've been yelling that this is not so for years. I've pointed it out the many times women came under attack for writing m/m, and I'll point it out again now. Fiction is a funhouse mirror that allows us the distance and safety we need to explore feelings our culture does not permit us to safely experience in other ways. Reading about violence can offer catharsis for intense emotional pain. A rape fantasy can be about being absolved of responsibility for having sex. Those elements and any others function for different readers in different ways and that is just one of the reasons why freedom of expression is vital for a thriving literature. 

The deep irony of all of this is that in claiming to "protect" us from obscenity, what censorship really does is deny us the safest outlet for exploration we could have.

I'm grateful that my publisher, Loose Id, has had the foresight not to do business through PayPal. I do have three of my freebie ficlets up on Smashwords, and one of them is The Cats Will Play, a Stan and Gus story wherein Billy Pipps engages in some interspecies bondage sex play. I'm pretty sure that getting tied up and having his dick licked by cats with psychic mind-control powers is not what Coker or the authors of the Paypal policy have in mind when they say bestiality, but it is sex with animals, and they're not shape shifters so there's no ducking out that way. I guess the only place it will be available now is right here.

How to Alienate Readers, Foster Piracy, and Lose Sales Part 2, the Exciting Conclusion

Okay, so I had a response from All Romance eBooks help desk this morning. They sent me to a different page where I was able to download Adobe's Digital Edition application despite the fact that I'm running Lion and the other page didn't recognize Lion. (Thus the "your system's not up to date" accusation. Hmm, Adobe, project much?) So anyway, I downloaded the damn application and that part worked.

But when I tried to open the file for the ebook I purchased, it still didn't work. Digital Edition didn't recognize it. Well, I'd say there was a pattern here except I've been pretty skeptical about this file all along. It looked to me like a link to a page where the actual download would happen, not the ebook itself. So I decided to try downloading the book again, using Firefox this time, instead of Safari, which I have been using because it's fully featured in Lion.  

Sure enough, the link led me to another page where I was able to download the real file. And it opened in Digital Edition. Finally. Why didn't the link work properly on Safari? Damned if I know.

Now, in the meantime, ARe had confirmed my fear that Stanza won't open a secure epub file. They recommended using Blue Fire, which I already have -- I have seven different ereading applications on my phone. Their advice was to use iTunes to transfer the book to Blue Fire. I couldn't figure out how to do that, so I fell back on my tried and true method of emailing the file as an attachment, opening it in my phone and selecting an app. Stanza was listed! Woo hoo! I tried opening it with Stanza and was told it wasn't compatible. Boo! So, I'm reading it on Blue Fire, which isn't terrible. I have my black background and grey text, but not the font and the line spacing I want, but I guess I'll survive.

The thing is, I've purchased lots of other ebooks, none for more that ten dollars, ever. And every single one of those behaved the way I wanted it to -- downloaded, and opened in the app of my choice -- with no issues. So why did I just spend 13 bucks to work like a dog and wind up with something less than what I actually wanted? Because some companies would rather control my choice of reading platform and wage an ineffective battle against piracy than ever get my return business.

How to Alienate Readers, Foster Piracy, and Lose Sales

So, the university program I teach with is doing Jo Nesbo's book The Snowman for the group reading at the residency coming up in January. I've been asked to lead one of the discussion groups. Today I decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and get a copy of the book.

The university does not pay for my copy, by the way. I was already doing some browsing on Amazon, so I looked it up and was dismayed to find that the mass market is not available yet. Hard covers are a pain in my ass. They take up a ton of room, they're heavy, and they hurt when I fall asleep reading and drop them on my face.

Okay, so, fine. For a book I'm going to be analyzing, I'd prefer a hard copy that I can mark up, but, I can mark up an ebook too, and its better than hauling around a hard cover.  But I don't want an Amazon one because I don't like Amazon's attempts to constantly herd me into only buying stuff from them that I can only read on their devices and applications. Also, I read my ebooks on my iPhone and their reading application is far inferior to my fave, Stanza. I read at night. I need a night view. I like to be able to adjust the font face, and the background, and the text colors, and the line spacing so that it's comfortable for me. Fine, I'm picky, but so what? 

So I hie over to my favorite ebook reseller, All Romance eBooks/Omnilit. They have the ebook. It's $12.99! For an ebook! Jeez! Well, fine, I suck it up and I buy the book. But its not available in epub. Just secure epub. Rrrr. Fine. I buy it anyway.

That turns out to be a big mistake because once the file is downloaded, it turns out to be a bunch of gobbledy gook that wont open in Stanza or any of my other applications. I just spent thirteen bucks for nothing. And the first thing I did was not to file a help ticket with ARe/Omnilit (though I have now) but to go to Google and search for a free download.

The only thing holding me back from going through with that is that the only site I could find wants me to install a .exe file that may just eat my hard drive or something. So, I go back to ARe/Omnilit, read thier faq, follow the link to the application they recommend for reading secure epub files and... that website informs me that my system is not up to date enough to download their software, despite the fact that I'm running lion on a MacBook Air I bought a month and a half ago.

For the love of god, people! I just want to read the fucking book on my phone, with a black background, Cochin font in grey, with the lines spaced at 1.25. What's the big fucking deal?

At this point, I'm at the mercy of ARe's tech support that I didn't just throw 13 bucks down the drain, and I'm reasonalby confident that they'll do right by me in the end. I'd just as soon get a refund now, if I can't read the damn thing on Stanza. And you know what I'll do then? Go to the library.

Broken Cover Art!

I just got the finalized cover art for Broken and it's this beautiful image from P.L. Nunn. I'm a big fan of hers so I was really excited when I found out she was doing the art. I'm very happy with it.