No Straight Line

by Jean Roberta

Students in my creative writing classes sometimes ask me how to get published, as though I could give them clear, guaranteed instructions. All I can say is that aspiring writers have to keep writing and keep sending their work to people who could publish it, but probably won’t. Unless the aspiring writer chooses to plunge into self-publishing, which is also not the rainbow that leads to a pot of gold.

My own literary career, such as it is, shows chaos at work, or it shows that I’ve never found a clear path through the ever-changing publishing jungle.

At age eighteen, in my last year of high school, I submitted a short story to a student writing contest run by a major financial institution, Canada Permanent Trust. My story was about an American girl (thinly-disguised me) moving to Canada with her family, and meeting a British boy whose family is moving out. The story is really about changing influences on Canadian culture, which was a popular topic in Centennial Year (1967) and for the rest of the decade.

To my amazement, I won for the province of Saskatchewan, and was flown to Toronto, where I met the other eight provincial winners. The girl from British Columbia won the national prize, but I didn’t complain. Since the contest was clearly meant to tap into Canadian nationalism, and I had only been in the country for two years, it was generous of the judges to reward me at all.

I hoped this major award (with some media coverage) would launch my Literary Career. No such luck.

I wrote a lot of poems, and a few short stories, but didn’t know where to send them. I also made a lot of pen-and-ink drawings, some enhanced with coloured pencil. My mother told me she thought my drawings should be published somewhere, but I didn’t know how to get launched as an illustrator who had never studied visual art beyond high school.

All art, even the most imaginative, comes from somewhere in the artist’s life. However, most of what happened to me in my twenties (the 1970s) seemed unspeakable. I was raped on a university campus before there was any public discussion of universities as hotbeds of sexual abuse, and before male violence was attributed to males -- except in a few radical-fringe feminist circles which were easily discredited. I was in a brief interracial marriage and became a divorced mother.

I didn’t know how to write anything publishable about my experience.

In the 1980s, I sent a batch of poems to a local publisher, who combined them with a very different batch by a woman I had never met to form a slim volume of verse. There was a reason why two unknown poets were thrown together: the Canada Council for the Arts (roughly equivalent to the National Endowment for the Arts in the U.S.) had stopped funding “chapbooks” (slim volumes by individual poets), but they would subsidize small presses that published the work of two or more writers together.

Several of my other poems appeared in small feminist journals which didn’t pay their contributors. Then, oh joy, a one-woman lesbian press accepted my collection of short stories for publication. Unfortunately, I found typos in the text.

I hoped my lesbian stories reflected the current zeitgeist, but the reviews in small queer and feminist publications were contradictory. One reviewer said she liked my stories, but she thought it was unrealistic that none of my characters showed the influence of Second Wave feminism. Another reviewer said she also found merit in my stories, but thought they were too drenched in feminist theory. She thought I should lighten up.

I was living with my young daughter in a housing co-op for low-income single parents, mostly women. The co-op consisted of four small apartment buildings, each with an elected leader who reported to an elected board. I became part of the power structure.

By then, I had a social life in the local lesbian community and a part-time job in a collectively-run alternative bookstore that carried lesbian romances from Cleis Press and post-apocalyptic fantasy novels about all-female societies.

The combination of my life and my reading-matter inspired my long fantasy story about an all-female community which is increasingly divided by cultural/ethical differences among the four quarters of the village. Vesta, my narrator (elected governor of the farmers’ quarter), is desperate to prevent a civil war which would make the women's village vulnerable to the male-dominated tribe nearby.

Vesta is secretly attracted to another member of the Governors’ Council (who runs the hunter/warrior quarter, i.e. the “leatherdykes”) who wants to heat up her sex life. Aside from the mutual attraction, Vesta can see the advantage of a political alliance.

Most of the women who elected Vesta to office are against violence on principle, even in self-defense – and they define “violence” broadly. They refuse to acknowledge the protection the hunter/warriors are providing for the whole village.

The most influential hunter/warriors think the vegetarian peaceniks are amusingly soft and helpless. Needless to say, the mothers in different quarters have vastly different standards of child-raising. The women who don’t have or want children think there are too many in the village.

Job chauvinism in the women’s village takes various forms. The construction workers and mechanics think their skills are absolutely essential, and some of them matronize the cooks and seamstresses as hobbyists, while dismissing the artists and shamans as flaky. The condescension is resented. And not everyone worships the same Goddess.

I wasn’t really making anything up. I hoped this story captured the complexity of contemporary relationships among women.

I sent this piece to the one-dyke publisher who had published my short stories. She wrote back to say that the story needed a lot of work because the narrator was "very weak." She said she would be willing to read a completely revised version.

Apparently, neither “feminist” nor “lesbian” had the same meaning for all readers, even within “lesbian-feminist” circles. I didn’t know how I could write any narrative that would feel authentic and also meet the approval of an editor.

Then I saw a call-for-submissions for lesbian erotica from Lace Publications of Colorado. I wrote and sent off three stories, and was delighted to get a written acceptance from two editors who said all three of my stories were accepted.

Then the publishing company went bust.

History repeated itself ten years later. In 1998, I was blessed with two paid months off work, and I decided to make the most of it. I spent eight-hour days at the brand-new computer that my sweetie and I had acquired, composing a lesbian novel full of sex scenes and local colour. I sandwiched in one of my first three erotic stories as a chapter in the novel.

I printed off the 56K manuscript, stuffed it into a manila envelope and mailed it to Masquerade Books in New York. This was the one erotic publisher I knew of. No answer.

After several months, I sent a follow-up email, and got a response from an editor who informed me that while there was much to admire in my novel, she had rejected it a long time before.

I re-read this message several times to find its essential meaning. An erotic editor (my third, so to speak) had found something to admire in my writing. But she had rejected my whole novel, including the story-within-the-story, without letting me know.

This seemed like a coded message from the Oracle of Delphi: portentious but hard to understand.

Then Masquerade disappeared into thin air, like Lace Publications.

I joined the Erotic Readers Association, as it was called then, and felt the warmth of an on-line community. The public site included calls-for-submissions, including one for stories about lesbians and their sex toys.

This call amazed me. I was a veteran of the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s, in which women could be exiled to Siberia for suggesting that womyn-loving womyn could enjoy any device that resembled a penis. So I wrote a story that featured a hand-carved, well-shellacked wooden dildo, artfully designed not to look like anything available in sex shops.

I mailed my story to California editor Alison Tyler, who reported in the ERA lists that since the publisher, Masquerade, was deceased, the anthology might have to be cancelled. Bummer.

To my relief, a British publisher offered to publish, and my story was accepted with almost no revisions. In due course, a paperback copy of Batteries Not Included was mailed to me. I was between the covers with famous sex-writers!

Since then, I’ve gone beyond lesbian erotica, and have had a variety of sexually-explicit stories in print anthologies as well as a novella and a few single-author collections. From time to time, I write and submit a non-erotic story in response to a call-for-submissions, and some of these have been published.

I still can’t predict which of my stories are more likely to be accepted, and which will offend or disappoint an editor or a reviewer. Realism or authenticity (from my viewpoint) seems to be no excuse.

When submitting something I’ve written, now usually by email, I’m reminded of a little rhyme I first heard in childhood:

“I shoot an arrow in the air,
And where it lands, I know not where.”
--------------------------

Learning from Reading

There are two common paths to coaching, I’ve found.  There’s the expert who has tons of personal experience and then transitions into coaching — think of a tennis star who has had years of competitions and tournaments and, when she can no longer physically keep up with the younger players, transitions to coaching.  Then there are the experts who have little to no personal experience, but are able to excellently coach others in the field — I used to take personal training from a bodybuilder, but when he was ill for a couple weeks, a really out-of-shape colleague of his (who had never been a bodybuilder) became my personal trainer and worked me just as hard, giving me tips that the bodybuilder never mentioned.

Personal experience in a field doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite for coaching.  Instead, it takes a deep understanding of the field — the rules, both written and unwritten, the techniques, and the strategies — and a keen sense of observation to identify weaknesses and strengths.

As I’ve mentioned a few times here on Oh Get A Grip, I’ve got a publishing company that specializes in erotica and erotic romance.  In its initial planning stages, the company was going to specialize in gay erotica and nothing else, but then expanded to include MM romance and then to include all romantic pairings.  I soon thought I was out of my league — I just don’t write romance.  I write erotica with highly charged feelings of lust that border on love… so it’s romance-ish, but I don’t do traditional erotic romance.  I know the basic structure of the romance plot and I know how to write it… but, weirdly, I can’t seem to do it when I try it myself.

So with the publisher, when I started taking on some editing roles, I was worried I’d be over my head real fast.  What I found interesting is that, while I can’t write a romance, I definitely know how to read a romance with an eye for coaching and editing.  I’m able to identify areas that can be expanded or condensed to heighten emotions and build up for the right emotional payoff, I can help an author manage the right dynamic between the romantic leads (because, more often than not, in romances the leads are antagonists to each other for the bulk of the story), and I can give the author workable suggestions for structural edits to set the right pacing.

This fortnight here on Oh Get A Grip is “What are you reading?” And other than the obligatory Star Trek book, which right now is Star Trek: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight by Dayton Ward, I’ve been reading nothing but erotic romances.  And most of them are of the MF variety — so for a gay guy who’s never been with a woman, this has been an interesting couple of months of reading. I’ve read straight erotica and erotic romance before, but I think in the past two months I’ve read more of it than in the last ten years.

I’ve always sort of thought that the best coaches are the ones that have the most personal experience. After all, when I was taking personal training at the gym, it of course seems more logical to take my lessons from the body builder who regularly wins competitions than from the guy that looks like a desk jockey that hasn’t played a sport in decades… yet it was that desk jockey that I found more helpful as a trainer than the body builder. In the world of literature, I recall reading that Donald Maass, agent extraordinaire, doesn’t write books and has no desire to write books, yet he keenly understands what makes a bestseller and how an author can fix a book to make it excel.

While I hold no illusions that I’m the erotic romance equivalent of Donald Maass, I do find some resemblances.  The authors I work with have thanked me for the edits, saying that I’ve got a keen eye for their story.  I seem to be able to coach an author in writing a romance so that it becomes a riveting book… yet I have no desire to write an actual romance.  Any time that I feel I want to try, I end up with erotica with hints of love, which is something different than romance.

I can't do it... but I can coach it.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is The President And The Rentboy (co-written with Sandra Claire). He is also the publisher and co-founder of Deep Desires Press, a publisher of erotica and high-heat-level erotic romance. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.

Mavericks, Collectives, Small Presses, and Business Empires

by Jean Roberta

Like Annabeth, I was already writing when “vanity press” publications and books produced by amateur writers were widely treated like a joke. Publishing one’s own work seemed too much like masturbating in public. The results (as far as I could see) usually showed a lack of professional skills as well as perspective. Years ago, a ragged man knocked on my door with a box of books, his own autobiographical manifesto, which he considered absolutely unique. He didn’t know how else to sell copies.

To give another example, a lesbian newsletter was irregularly produced in the 1980s by a woman who seemed to type it on a manual typewriter; she lived alone on an isolated acreage in Ontario. To say this journal was “grassroots” would be an understatement. It was carried by one alternative bookstore in my town in Saskatchewan. I bought the newsletter faithfully because 1) it contained news that I could use in my own local lesbian newsletter, and 2) the writer was the ex-partner of someone I knew. She complained in the newsletter about forced conformity, even in the counterculture.

This seemed to be a coded reference to rejection by other lesbian-feminist and leftist types who ran the watering holes which refused to carry the newsletter. (The ex explained some of this to me.) It was single-spaced, hard-to-read, badly spelled, ungrammatical, and copied on paper in loud colours, with nothing to break up the lines of type. The writer seemed proud that she had not “sold out” to any slick corporation in Toronto or New York. I wished her luck, but I didn’t want to become the same kind of maverick.

Dealing with publishers, however, has been an adventure in itself. Luckily, I never wrote anything for Ellora’s Cave, so I wasn’t involved in the wreck of that big ship. However, I tried to sell my first erotic novel to Masquerade in New York just when it was going bust, and before 2000, I got no response to several erotic stories that I mailed to publishers in faraway cities after reading calls-for-submissions on the site of the Erotic Readers Association.

In the early aughts, I got a delightful letter from England, saying that my novel was accepted! My jaw dropped when I read the fine print. The publisher would control the layout, the editing, and the cover art, but I would be expected to pay them several hundred pounds for this service. It sounded like the worst of all options, for me. I refused.

Luckily, I got stories accepted by Cleis Press in California and Black Lace in the UK (the same Black Lace, imprint of Virgin Publishing, part of Richard Branson’s business empire, that published Lisabet’s work). Adrienne Benedicks, who was then running Erotic Readers, recommended my lesbian stories to a Black Lace editor named Kerri Sharp, and Kerri let me know I could send them to her by email rather than mail them to London from the middle of Canada. Kerri chose two of my stories for one anthology, but asked me to choose a different pen-name for one. It all felt very sexy.

As Lisabet and others have said, however, selling to Black Lace was like selling one’s soul to the devil. They paid very well, even by the standards of 2000-2005, and they didn’t want those stories to be resold anywhere else. (I asked, and was told that would be a breach of contract.)

The current trend seems to be for erotic publishers to pay pitifully small amounts (flat fees or percentages of low retail prices) for work that they don’t control. So, theoretically, one could resell the same work for more small amounts. (I’m impressed that the current incarnation of Cleis Press still offers $100 U.S. for a story in an anthology.)

A little over a year ago, I joined Excessica, which seems like a nice hybrid of self-publishing and traditional publishing. So far, I’ve had two previously-published stories added to the Excessica catalogue, and I paid a cover artist to make me a cover from stock images. (I think I got my money’s worth.) If and when I publish something new there, I will get it edited first.

My current frustration with publishers is based on some very slow-moving projects. My story for an erotic anthology based on the work of Jules Verne was tentatively accepted many months ago, then the editor responded to my query by saying that a series of disasters had delayed things. She said I could pull my story from the pile, but I wondered where else I could sell something intended for such a specific context. Then the publisher sent me a contract! I signed it and sent it back promptly, but that was months ago, and I have not had an update since.

Early in the new year, I sent out a flurry of queries to editors and small publishers about stories of mine which seemed to disappear into cyberspace. Several recipients didn’t respond at all. Others said they are aiming for publication in late spring 2017.

I’m aware that small publishers are like small boats in a stormy ocean, and they are undoubtedly under pressure by forces they can’t control. Any writer who self-publishes effectively becomes a small publisher, and I’ve been reluctant to take on more than I can handle.

However, the stigma on self-publishing in general seems to be gone. If and when I venture into those waters, I won’t be photocopying hand-typed pages on construction paper left over from a kindergarten class. Thank the Goddess.

The Reluctant Hustler

Sacchi Green


“Hustler” generally has a pejorative connotation, with the sense of swindling someone, or at least tricking them for profit. A pool hustler may or may not be cheating—is it even possible to cheat at pool? (Obviously I’ve never played it.) In any case he’s likely to conceal just how expert he is until his “mark” has agreed to big stakes. But the hustler has to work for his money, and the most positive definition of the term is something like “an enterprising person determined to succeed; go-getter.” This would apply as readily to a pool player as to a business executive or politician clawing his way to the top, and we may even have a spark of admiration for those who make it.

Then there are those who try, but don’t make it. And those who pretend to try.  That last is my category.  As with all writers, our “hustle” isn’t an attempt to swindle anybody, but just to get them to for god’s sake buy our freaking books! We, of course, think our books are supremely worth reading, and even paying for, so we’re not trying to deceive anyone, or not exactly. We’re just trying to convince them. Or at least get them to notice the existence of our books!

The rise of “social media” has held out hope for ways to do this, which of course leads to publishers urging authors to get out there and hustle, to have web sites, write blogs, get reviews, make “book trailer” videos, flog the titles and covers of their books on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads, etc., etc. If you’re not doing those things, you’re not doing your part to sell your books, and if your books don’t sell, you don’t continue to get published. It’s not personal, it’s business, and, in fact, I understand, and don’t hold it against them. But I also understand, at this point, that the best I can do is make the motions of hustling.

I’m on Facebook, and enjoy it, but well over half of my “friends” are other writers rather than book-purchasing readers. I have a blog, and when I began it I posted essays about writing and various other themes that I found interesting, besides news about my books. I never figured out how to attract readers to it, or even tried much to figure that out, but I’d get comments from time to time, especially when I posted free stories. Eventually comments became rare, even when my stats indicated a modest number of readers, and I fell into mostly just posting about my new books coming out, with occasionally a review or reference to someone else’s book. At this point I get more “hits” than I used to, sometimes inexplicably, as when, fairly often, my stats cite a one-day flood of hits from Russia, but there’s no indication that many people are actually reading my posts (although the free stories do pretty well.) The most hits for specific pages are for my Calls for Submission for new anthologies, and I’m still getting an amazing number looking for my CFS for Best Lesbian Erotica 16—renamed, this year, Best Lesbian Erotica 20th Anniversary Edition—routed through my publisher’s web site. The deadline for submissions is long, long past, of course—in fact I just got my box of the new books from the publisher, and the official release date is February 9th—so I guess the folks come to my blog to see if I’m taking submissions for the next one. I have no idea whether I’ll be editing the next one, and I expect the publisher (new to me because the business was sold last year) won’t decide on that until they see how this one sells.

The new publisher, or rather the new owner of the old publisher, has its own new publicity people, with their not exactly new ideas, so I make an attempt to cooperate. I’m already out ahead of them in some areas, like doing readings; I’ve done those for years because I enjoy them, and so do my writers, but I only do them in places I can get to fairly easily, and where at least three or four of my writers are close enough to join me.  Fortunately those places include New York and New England; unfortunately they don’t include the west coast. I’m already in the habit of doing book give-aways on Goodreads and on a site or two where potential readers gather, although it’s getting harder and harder to get any takers when I offer free books on Facebook for potential reviews. I did a blog tour for my last book, with my writers participating, and I’m organizing one for this new book, too, more to give the writers some attention than to promote sales. Do any of these activities actually sell books? Probably not, with the possible exception of readings in New York, and even then I think the people who buy them would have bought them anyway. But at least I can tell the eager staff at my publisher that I’m doing things.

And there are things that I don’t, as yet, do. I got an e-mail from an enthusiastic young intern at my publisher’s office who had the great “new” idea of short book videos, so I said I’d try, but it hasn’t worked out yet. I don’t have the tech chops, but I thought I might do a voice-over montage of all the BLE covers since the first one in 1996, so I asked her to get me good files of the covers to use—and haven’t heard back. I did check out the link she gave me to the ones already done by my fellow editors, and I’ve done it again recently. In two months Rachel Kramer Bussel’s video has had 48 viewers. In one month, Sinclair Sexsmith’s video has had 6 viewers. Somehow I don’t think the absence of one by me is a big loss to anyone, but I may still try.

So here I am, a reluctant hustler. You might say that I’m hustling my publisher by appearing to do things but not in a big enough way. I don’t know. When it comes to the positive kind of hustling, the go-getter kind, what I’m good at is getting good writers together, and sometimes helping potentially good writers be really good ones. As far as selling the books goes, all I can really do is make sure they’re worth reading. If there’s any way to hustle or swindle anyone into buying books, I don’t know what it is, which is just as well; this way I don’t have to decide whether to take the high road or the low. But if anyone does happen to know a trick that works…        

I Cut My Teeth on Adultery (Erotica)

by Giselle Renarde

When I started writing erotica almost 10 years ago, I was in an adulterous relationship. You know this. I wrote about it two weeks ago. That's probably why so much of my early work focused on the emotions (and actions) around infidelity.

I wonder how many erotica writers are readers who went pro? I can think of at least two other erotica authors who, like me, started their careers on a dare. I didn't read erotica (much less romance), so I never knew what was expected of me. I wrote my experience and I wrote what appealed to me. A lot of that fiction involved cheating.

Didn't take long to realize I wasn't producing the kind of work publishers wanted. I submitted my early books all around town. I got rejected. Not surprising, considering I have no fucking CLUE what I was doing.

But I always read publishers' guidelines with an eagle eye, and I started realizing I COULDN'T submit my books to a number of imprints. "All the usual no-nos" seemed to include not only incest, underage sex and bestiality, but INFIDELITY too.

Good thing Selena Kitt created eXcessica fairly early in my career. Selena gave eager consideration to the kinds of manuscripts that were often rejected by other houses, not on the basis of quality or style, but content. I'm so glad I came across eXcessica's call for submissions in 2008. It's one of the only publishers I still work with after all this time (and, trust me, I have worked with A LOT of houses).

I don't know who else would have published my Audrey and Lawrence collection, for instance, which is ALL ADULTERY ALL THE TIME.

Well, that's a bit of a lie, because many of my short stories involving adultery WERE published... but not by erotic romance imprints. They were published in anthologies of literary erotica. They were published on websites like Oysters and Chocolate, Ruthie's Club, and others whose names I've forgotten because they fell out of existence long ago.

Readers enjoyed my adultery. Comment sections teemed with accolades. I don't say that to brag. Trust me: glowing reviews are not the norm, in my writing life. But maybe that's why I found it so perplexing that all these indie erotica publishers that were popping up in the days before self-publishing was the respectable profession it is today (?) wouldn't look at manuscripts involving infidelity.

I guess they knew what they were doing.

Except for all the ones that crashed and burned...

Anyway, as I mentioned two weeks ago, my newest novel is also about an extramarital affair. I just can't get enough adultery, I guess. Those illicit affair feelings still fascinate me, and I'm sure they always will, since I was involved with a married man during my formative years.

Nowadays, I appreciate adultery more through the lens of fiction. In real life, my story sounds a bit like Lisabet's: Sweet and I are technically in an open relationship, but we've been together more than 7 years and I haven't wanted anyone else. Neither as she, as far as I'm aware. Even when we talk about other people we might be attracted to, it all feels very pie-in-the-sky.

The other day, I came across my short story Secret Mercy. It's about a young woman hooking up with a married ex:

At nineteen, Mercedes thought she was the only woman of her kind, unparalleled in the civilized world, leading a life of opulent vulgarity. By twenty-three, she’d realized she wasn’t the only woman in the world to sleep with a married man.

For Mercedes, hooking up with her ex is out of the question (at first) not because he's still married, but because now she's engaged to another guy. What makes Simon exciting? Why does she decide to go for it?

Because he offers cash. That's new.

Secret Mercy begins:

It happens when we fear there’s nothing special about us: we allow our secrets to make us special. With our secrets, we set ourselves apart from the crowd. And when the secrets we’re hiding are known by all, or when we realize our misdeeds are so commonplace our secrets aren’t even all that remarkable, we set out to make new secrets. They make us feel important, unique. And the more insidious our secrets, the more distinctive we feel.

You can read this story in my free ebook 6 Erotic Shorts, if you haven't already.

To Market, to Market

The first time I remember trying to write for a particular market, I was living in England with my parents and younger sisters for a year. (Many topics ago, I wrote a post here about how I missed a chance to apply for a writing job for the London Daily Telegraph during that time. Sigh.)

I was 22, and hoping to start a writing career. After all, I had won a major student writing award in my last year of high school, so it seemed I wasn’t completely lacking in talent.

I read magazines, hoping to break into that market. Several of them were aimed at women, and they were full of articles on cooking, fashion, home decorating, plus some fiction about “love” (courtship, marriage and childraising). I thought I knew what was expected. I wrote a story to send to a particular journal. (I can’t remember the title of my story or of the magazine, and that’s probably just as well.)

My story was written in first-person, and it featured a doormat devoted wife who is willing to do anything to save her marriage. She discovers that her husband is cheating, so she decides to work really hard to win him back. She doesn’t want to lose her Man, no matter what. She loves him desperately! By the end of the story, there is no evidence that the husband has given up the other woman, but the narrator is hopeful.

I sent this piece off. Several weeks later, I got a personal reply. The editor thought that since I came from Canada, I might try sending my stories to magazines there. She also said that her readers might find the narrator’s attitude disturbing and offensive. Editor said she would consider taking another look at the story if I revised it.

I tried, but since the crisis in the marriage (the husband’s cheating) seemed essential to the plot, I left it in. I also thought the editor would not accept a heroine who slams the door and starts a new life as a divorcee, so I had her stay, after struggling with her feelings and her options. The story was rejected again. It has never been published.

Like the hapless wife in my story, I struggled with my feelings and my options. Should I keep trying to gain some acceptance from a publishing industry that seemed completely oblivious to me? Was I a fool or a masochist? On the other hand, if I decided never to send another story to another editor, would I be acting like a bratty child?

Back in Canada, I got a few poems published in feminist poetry magazines, and eventually got a few stories published in locally-published anthologies. These stories were based on my own experience, and they undoubtedly had more of an authentic vibe than my story about the wife who wants to stay married forever, no matter what. My own marriage lasted less than three years.

Eventually, I read some sexually-explicit stories. I had already discovered that, strangely enough, editors generally seemed to prefer my writing when it was at least loosely based on something I knew than on my understanding of what would “sell.” However, I thought that “erotica” had to have a high ratio of sex scenes to plot.

A certain editor (who was/is known for being blunt) wrote on one of my printed stories: “Enough sex, already.” I thought about this, and realized that after I had thrown the characters together once, and given them umpteen orgasms apiece, the intelligent reader could assume that a pattern had been set. There was no need to beat it to death.

Like others here, I find calls-for-submissions inspiring. Could I write a story about X or Y that includes explicit sex? I’ve been surprised at how often the call acts as fertilizer, and the seed of a story sends out some tentative shoots, usually when the deadline is staring me in the face. I’ve learned that even when the story is based on a theme proposed by an editor, it won’t work unless it comes from somewhere deeper inside me than a perception that submissive wives or alpha males or vampires or billionaires are selling well this year.

None of us can really ignore the zeitgeist, so I’m sure I am influenced by what I read. I rarely have time to read just for pleasure, but I am often asked to review erotica, and I like doing that, so I usually have a TBR pile to tackle in my spare time between stacks of student assignments to grade.

The presence of standard tropes and clichés in erotica and erotic romance makes the exceptions stand out, and those are the books that continue to haunt me after I’ve read the last page.

So I continue to try to find a place among exceptional writers of erotica, the ones who can transform the clichés and pour unexpected amounts of raw feeling – and even social commentary and philosophical depth -- into plots that can be filed in recognizable categories (“paranormal erotic romance,” “urban fantasy”).

As a student of literature, I’ve noticed that the most successful (or most studied) authors of the past were usually stranger in their time than they seem to later generations, because they started trends instead of following them. Quite a few of them had their submissions rejected over and over before they found visionary publishers who were willing to take the risk. Even those authors were not completely original. They must have been influenced by the culture they lived in because it was part of the air they breathed.

So I continue to try to develop stories that originate in memories or dreams into something that an editor might accept. I’ve often been lucky on the second try. I sometimes ask myself whether I have sold out, but then the question is: sold what? My first erotic stories were written in response to calls-for-submissions. It seems that the market and I have worked out a compromise.

Into the Ether

by Jean Roberta

Like several of my fellow-Grippers, I don’t expect to earn a living from my published work, but I can’t honestly say the money doesn’t count. Getting paid is the sign of a professional rather than an amateur, and I treasure every little payment.

The frustrations I’ve experienced can be classified thus: 1) editors from Jupiter, or some other planet than the one I live on, and 2) mysterious selection process (more than one editor, submission being considered for many months, possibly stolen by aliens), and 3) publishers that go bust.

Examples of Issue #1 include an editor who highlighted every use of “she” and “and” in my story, and told me the story could not be accepted with these words included, and an editor who insisted that my story was not “up to” the literary standards she expected because the characters did not make a clear-enough distinction between polyamory and bisexuality. (They were arguing, and emotions were running high. In my experience, emotional heat is inversely proportionate to intellectual clarity.) Then there was the editor who told me never to write fantasy erotica ever again because she didn’t like it. (She also didn’t like BDSM. Go figure.)

Then there was the exciting anthology of erotic horror edited by a male-and-female team who accepted my story as well as several by writers who specialized in horror or spec-fic. This introduced me to a whole new community of writers, and I enjoyed our conversations in the Yahoogroup set up by the editors. But we waited for publication. . and waited. . and waited. Eventually, so many of the other writers withdrew their stories that I knew the anthology was doomed. It never saw the light of day.

I’m glad to say that most of my submissions are answered nowadays, one way or another. This was not always the case. When I first began sending out erotic stories (and I was not an unpublished writer, just new to this genre), I got no responses whatsoever for the first year. None. I had no idea whether my story submissions, or my bulky novel manuscript (snail-mailed at my expense, of course) ever arrived.

I still have a copy of a letter I fired off to an editor in 1999, after a year of silence. I wrote it in heat, let it mellow overnight, revised it the next day, then sent it off. I pointed out that I wasn’t expecting acceptance or a critique, just timely communication. I explained that most of my friends and acquaintances had a fairly mainstream opinion of erotica (that it was mostly written and published by porn-addicts in dirty raincoats) and that unprofessional behaviour by an editor did nothing to dislodge their prejudice. I pointed out that I was neither ungrammatical nor unwashed nor completely unpublished, and that I deserved at least a postcard with a formula rejection message on it. I explained that the town where I live is accessible to the Canadian postal system.

Finally, I got a written response: a scrawled note from the editor, saying that all her papers had been lost in a house fire. My sweetie asked if I believed that. I told her it didn’t matter. I had demanded a response, and I got it. However, I never sent anything to that editor again, lest her whole city go up in smoke.

Regarding Issue #3, I now have a Dead Publishers shelf in my office in the local university where I teach, and I’ve discussed some of the dearly departed in my post for the blog of the Erotic Readers and Writers Association, here:

http://www.erotica-readers.blogspot.com

I could easily expand on this topic. I have more anecdotes in store, for anyone who wants to hear them.

The publishing biz in general has seemed unstable for quite a few years now, yet small niche publishers continue to be launched like brave little rowboats on a choppy sea. In general, publishers have my gratitude, since I lack the sheer courage or recklessness to self-publish.

So far, the frustrations of being a freelance writer are outweighed by my hope and satisfaction. These emotional conditions are visually represented: in my new office (as of summer 2013) my Dead Publishers shelf holds a modest pile of paper, but my brag shelf--which holds all the books to which I’ve contributed--stretches from wall to wall.

Authors Are So Neurotic

by Giselle Renarde

Let's get all deep and psychological, k?

I've got two novels sitting at the back of my hard drive.  I wrote them.  It took aaaaaages.  Now all I need is to edit the hell out of them before sending them out to publishers.  Every so often I open one of the files, thinking, "This is it.  I'm going at this thing, hardcore!"  I read one chapter, make some changes... and then I shut it down.

I like these books.  I mean, I REALLY like them.  It's not like I'm putting off editing because I think it's going to be difficult and time-consuming (though, realistically, it probably will be).

So, why am I procrastinating?

Because, once I'm finised with the edits, I'll have to decide what to do with these manuscripts.

Do I send them to publishers I've worked with before?  Makes sense. The possibility of getting a contract is higher at houses where I've already established roots.  But maybe I should take a chance by sending them somewhere new.  Is new better?  The grass is always greener at that other publishing house.  Oh, if I get in there, just image the distribution, the sales!  Imagine finally being able to pay the rent AND eat more than oatmeal for every meal!

Except, it never works out that way.

I've been here before.  I've sent my work to that perfect publisher, been accepted, and felt thrilled because this is it!  This is the book that'll hit the big-time!

And then... it doesn't.  We authors have such high hopes, but they never seem to pan out.  I've heard from writers contracted by the big publishing houses that they've never earned out their advances.  Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better.

Regardless of publisher, once a book is up for sale you've got to market the hell out of it.  Still, if nobody's interested, they're not going to buy.  And if you've worked your ass off on a manuscript and nobody buys it, how do you feel?  That's right--like a failure.

Take The Red Satin Collection as an example.  My trans lesbian Christmas erotic romance won the 2012 Rainbow Award for Best Transgender Romance/Erotic Romance, but... I won't even tell you how few copies sell.  It's too embarrassing.

So, do I feel proud that my book won an award, or ashamed because nobody buys it?  I'll give you one guess.

Or what if a book sells really well, but the whole world hates it?

I've been there, too.

My book Stacy's Dad has got it Going On was an Amazon bestseller.  It hit the ground running.  And then the reader reviews came in: "OMG so boring! Worst book ever!"  That might even be a direct quote.  I tried to put it out of my head.  Professional reviews were highly complimentary, but readers hated it.  (Seems odd to distinguist between readers and reviewers, since the readers are posting reviews and reviewers are obviously reading the books.)

And once that title became plagued by 1-star reviews, that was it.  Sales dried up.  The end.

It's no wonder I'm procrastinating when it comes to getting these two lying-in-wait novels on the market.  In my mind, they're either going to sell and be hated, or be loved and barely earn me enough to buy oatmeal.  Those are the only options.

And they wonder why authors are so neurotic?

--
Giselle Renarde  
Canada just got hotter!

Visit me online
http://donutsdesires.blogspot.com
http://www.wix.com/gisellerenarde/erotica
http://twitter.com/GiselleRenarde

Inappropriate Masochism

By Kim Dare.


Masochism - I suppose the same could be said of any form of writing for publication, but what I’m talking about is specifically those writers who write for publication and then make their lives far more difficult and painful than they need to.

I have nothing against a little bit of masochism at the right time and in the right place – but while seeking publication is probably not the best time to indulge in it.

Rejection hurts in a very nasty way – and it doesn’t matter if it’s from a publisher or a reviewer. Reviewers are tricky – you can’t please all the people all the time, it’s easy to get glowing and scathing reviews for the same book.

But why invite more rejection from publishers than is absolutely necessary?

I’ve been writing for what feels like forever, but I’ve only been writing with a serious intent to publish for about sixteen months (it was a New Years resolution for 2008 to be exact). So, I’m no expert on anything, but I suppose what I’m advocating is somewhere in the middle of what everyone else has been saying.

I’m not saying you should write to the market as such – mostly because I’m very bad at it. My characters tend to do whatever they hell they want no matter what I’d been planning for them.

Trying to force those characters to do one thing when they obviously want to do something else is painful for me – and not in a fun way. So I don’t stress myself out over making sure they do something the market will approve of. If they do something my current publisher won’t accept – then I’ll look for somewhere else to send them. I’d rather do that than compromise the project or the characters.

But that brings me to the other side of the story – what I do believe in, is submitting each project to the right market. As Jude said – know the guidelines and follow them. And send the story to the place that is most likely to accept it. Then, if you get a letter back saying it’s rejected because it’s too X or there’s not enough Y in it, next time you send them something – try to send them something with less X or more Y.

Meanwhile try to find a publisher who likes more X than Y in their stories, who’ll be more likely to accept your previous story. Don’t keep hitting the same publisher over the head with what they don’t want – you’ll be the one who ends up with a headache!

I tend to work with all sorts of different story ideas milling around in my head and on my to-do lists at the same time. (I assume that most writers are the same.)

If there’s one of those story ideas that has a better chance of being accepted by a certain publisher or for a certain call than another story idea, I think its common sense send off the one they are more likely to accept and keep the other one for another day and another publisher.

There’s no reason to invite rejection by making getting published any harder than it has to be. I don’t think I’m advocating writing for the market as such – but maybe I’m saying that it sometimes makes sense to concentrate on those story ideas that are more acceptable to the market you’re aiming for at the moment?

As for myself?

I’ve had one or two stories that haven’t been accepted into the projects I first had planned for them, but so far everything I’ve submitted for publication has found its rightful home somewhere.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just lucky in that I happen to be writing the kind of stories that the publishers I’ve chosen to submit to are accepting at the moment. Maybe that will change - Markets fluctuate after all.

I like kink, romance and happy endings, and that’s what I write. If the demand for BDSM erotic romance dries up, I’ll be in trouble. I may have to re-think and make a few painful realisations about my chances for continued publication.

But until then, I’m keeping the masochism strictly for play time!

Kim Dare.
Kink, love and a happy ending. Do you Dare?

A Porno By Any Other Name...

By Helen E. H. Madden

I have a dirty little secret. When Lisabet asked us all to pick days for our posts, I deliberately picked Friday so I could crib notes off of everyone else before writing my own post. Then I toss all that in the trash and pull something out of my... assets, shall we say?

Anyway, in regards to this week's topic, I have recently had several discussions on erotica - what it is, what it isn't, what I read, what I avoid like the plague, etc. Many of these conversations have been had with other writers and podcasters (in and out of the genre). All of the discussions have been intelligent, and most hysterically funny, and after having debating the finer aspects of what is supposed to be the erotica genre, I can definitely tell you this:

I don't know jack about this stuff.

For starters, what is erotica? I looked it up once. Dictionary.com offers multiple definitions - literature or art dealing with sexual love; literature or art intended to arouse sexual desire; creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire (i.e. porn). I don't know about these definitions. Do they really reflect how and what **I** write? Keep in mind, I churn out a story a week for my so-called erotica podcast, so I do write a lot. Yeah I write about sexual love... maybe one out of every six stories. And yeah, maybe I'm out to make horn-dogs out of my readers... one out of every eight stories. As for the creative activity with no value other than to stimulate said horn-dogs to a frenzy?

Are you frikkin' kidding me?! Screw Dictionary.com if they think my writing doesn't have artistic value! And actually, screw them if they think porn doesn't have any artistic value.

Definitions for genre suck. How can anyone define what a genre is? I have said in the past that I am not a huge fan of the porn genre (Sex Trek VI: The Undiscovered Booty pretty much killed the genre for me), but that was before all the debating I've done on what the difference between erotica and porn is (it's not just the lighing!). Now I can't tell what is and isn't porn anymore. The super-talented Jay Lygon, who writes the hottest and smartest m/m BDSM I've ever seen, swears upon his mother's grave that what he writes is porn. I would just call it damn good story telling (it has plot! it has characterization! I love plot and characterization!!) that makes me attack my husband the moment he walks into the door (it has naked men being kinky! I love naked men being kinky!). And I do not kid on the whole it has plot, it has characterization thing. Jay's Chaos Magic has one of the most intriguing ideas behind it - a man recognizes the divine in certain people and they literally become his gods as a result. How that affects his life and his attempts to grow past an abusive relationship make for intriguing reading. I'd call it contemporary fantasy (with a healthy side-order of lust and kink) and put it on the same shelf with Laurell K. Hamilton, but to Jay? It's porn, and he's proud of it.

Then we come to Nobilis of the Nobilis Erotica Podcast. Nobilis defines his work as erotica. His stories have plenty of sex in them. In fact, his latest serial on the podcast was about spaceships powered by orgasms. On the surface, that sounds pretty porny, right? Maybe even Sex Trek VI porny. But the world-building behind it (how are the pilots selected and trained, how does their job affect their relationships) is pretty damned impressive. What really impressed me though was recently hearing Nobilis talk about how he finally realized he could write entire chapters without having any sex in them.

Tell me, if you don't have sex in every chapter, is it still erotica?

I could go on and on about other writers and what they call what they do, but it all comes back to the same thing. Different writers define their writing by their own terms. Then they must find a publisher who is willing to take their square peg story and stuff it into a round hole definition of a genre.

Aaaaaaah! See, that's the trick. Finding the publisher who's willing to do that. So many of our OGG bloggers this week all said the same thing. I don't write what other people write. I don't write what publishers say they're looking for. And this can be a real pain in the patootie. Or at least it used to be a real pain in the patootie, before the evolution of internet book stores and the e-book.

Now the e-book industry isn't perfect, but it has the delightful advantage of allowing individual books to be tagged with multiple genre labels, and this is key. If I write an m/m, BDSM, dark fantasy with yaoi elements story (Demon By Day, anyone?), then my book can be listed under: m/m, BDSM, dark fantasy, and yaoi. As long as the publisher sets the tags correctly, anybody browsing those categories will find my book. That's the beauty of the online bookstore. It isn't that we no longer need the stinkin' genres. We don't need the stinking shelves!

And for a freak-a-zoid like me, that's a godsend. I can write all the fantasy/horror/science fiction/romance/mystery/comedy/hard core porn that I like! And by producing my own podcast or maybe self-publishing my own book, I don't even have to answer to a publisher!! I can write anything, ANYTHING, and get it out there. I just have to find a way to let people know my writing exists, and the internet with all its social media tools like Twitter and MySpace and Yahoo Groups and everything else makes that possible too. No longer do we writers have to be pigeon-holed into what will and won't sell!! No longer must we be slaves to such narrow definitions of what constitutes erotica vs. romance vs. porn! If I want to write about punk lesbian mermaids who fall in love with paraplegics, I CAN! If I want to write about luscious plus-sized women being seduced by fuzzy green tentacle monsters, I can do that too! If I want to write a touching romantic story about clown sex, guess what!! I already did it, baby!! And YOU!! Yes you, the discerning consumer of great literature that you are, can find all of these goodies thanks to the wonders of e-books and podcasting and the internet!! Brothers and sisters, let me hear you say "HALLELUJAH AND PRAISE THE INTERTUBES!! I AM A SLAVE TO GENRES NO MORE!!!!!"

Uh... eh? What? What was this week's topic?

Oh yeah! Favorite genres. Um, I like science fiction, horror, fantasy and the occasional naughty tale. Thank you for asking ;)