From The Guardian:

When you write fiction there’s only one thing you really want: feedback. OK, before that there’s JK Rowling style levels of treehouse-building remuneration, but once that hope has been dashed by a disappointing advance or a crushing royalty statement, then it’s feedback. This can take many forms, from thoughtful broadsheet reviews to eclectic Amazon comments to emails from readers. Of course, if you write in a genre called werewolf erotica you might find the former a little thin on the ground. Then again, you might receive a 30-page court document assessing whether or not your work has literary merit, instead.

. . . .

[F]rom 2003 until 2008 I wrote six novels for erotica “by women for women” imprint Black Lace Books using the pseudonym Mathilde Madden. Three of those novels were a trilogy about werewolves and werewolf hunters and their tragic, forbidden, hairy love.

The books did OK, which at this level of publishing is almost indistinguishable from them sinking utterly and without trace. And they gained a tiny number of (mostly) dismissive reviews on Amazon. But I liked them, I was proud of them and that was that.

. . . .

Until yesterday, when an article popped up in my Facebook news feed revealing that a Californian prison inmate called Andres Martinez had won a two-year legal battle to be allowed to read one of my books, The Silver Crown, in prison. After Martinez’s request for the book had been denied because of its depictions of sex and violence, he had gone to court and an American judge had carefully worked his way through the whole thing to deduce whether or not it had literary merit. And then ruled that it did. I’m not a lawyer, but I assume that means that it is now the law that I have literary merit.

The court report includes a full plot synopsis, that is probably more detailed and well put together than the one I produced when I proposed the actual book. It goes on to ask the opinion of a creative writing teacher, who seems to like it, and is quoted as saying its themes of freedom are proof of its “literary merit” and that it has “characteristics of literary fiction”. And “considerable effort went into the creation of the book, and the plot is more than a sham.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian and thanks to Shiv for the tip.

From The Wall Street Journal:

In 2003, one new romance novel with an Amish theme was published. This year at least 86 are being released. Five of the top 10 best sellers on a recent list of Christian fiction were Amish titles, and the novels regularly hit mainstream best-seller lists. The top three authors of Amish romance novels—Beverly Lewis, Cindy Woodsmall and Wanda Brunstetter—have sold among them more than 24 million books.

Dubbed “bonnet rippers” by journalists who have suggested that the books are a kind of “Fifty Shades of Grey” for church ladies, Amish romance novels are written and read mostly, but not exclusively, by evangelical Christian women. “Getting Dirty in Dutch Country” is how a headline in Bloomberg Businessweek described the genre.

But evangelical erotica this is not. The stories feature suitors whose suspenders stay put. “The longer he stood so close to her, the stronger the need to kiss her lips became,” writes Ms. Woodsmall of her hero’s thoughts in “When the Heart Cries.” “But he was afraid she might not appreciate that move.”

Readers of Amish fiction are looking not for racy stories, but for romances in which the trinity of modesty, chastity and fidelity reign. While the books often feature a female protagonist that falls in love with a man outside of her community, the relationship always remains sweetly romantic.

. . . .

Amish fiction joins Ancestry.com, “Downton Abbey,” heirloom tomatoes and vintage clothing in depositing us gently in the past without requiring us to loosen the vice grip on our iPhones. In what French theorist Gilles Lipovetsky has called our “hypermodern times,” characterized by a high velocity of technological and social change, many people become enamored of things perceived as old, or having a direct connection to history. Ironically, given that the genre’s allure is its rootedness in the simple life, Amish fiction owes its enormous success in part to the speed of hypermodern publishing. More than 150 self-published Amish e-books have been put out since 2010.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire) and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

From About.com:

Donna Fasano’s books have sold nearly 4 million copies worldwide and have been published in nearly two dozen languages. Originally published by a traditional publisher, Fasano decided to go the self-publishing route — and is now making a living off her books.

. . . .

Donna, you were originally traditionally published by Harlequin – what were the factors that made you make the switch to self-publishing?
As a traditionally-published author, I had understood the industry-wide idea that self-publishing wasn’t just frowned upon, it was taboo. I was led to believe that no one who self-published was seen as professional, and no one who self-published was ever expected to actually succeed, make a name for herself, or earn a living. If it hadn’t been for a tragedy in my personal life, I never, ever would have considered self-publishing my books.

. . . .

While playing around on the internet, I stumbled across some traditionally published authors who had begun self-publishing their work. These were women I knew, some of them were friends I had made over the years. These authors were swimming against the tide, so to speak. What fascinated me most was that they were not drowning! Some of them were gliding through the water like dolphins. I decided, if they could do it, so could I.

. . . .

What were some of the challenges?
One of the biggest obstacles I had to overcome was the ingrained idea that becoming an Independent Author (or Indie Author, as we tend to call ourselves) meant that I was lowering the bar, that I was moving to the seedy side of town, that I would be looked upon as a hack. Uploading that first book to a self-publishing service was scary, but I was determined to dive in and start swimming.

Today, if a new indie author asked me for a piece of advice, I would emphatically state that, once one copy of a self-published book is sold, the author is just as much a professional as aNew York Times Bestselling author.

. . . .

The “good”? Well, first and foremost, I’d have to say the earnings are the best thing about self-publishing. I am making more money as an Indie Author than I did writing for Harlequin. Another good thing is that I can write whatever I choose. I’m currently putting together a cookbook, and my next project is either going to be a three-book mystery series or a stand-alone novel that will be more women’s fiction than romance. The freedom is wonderful.

Link to the rest at About.com

From Dear Author:

When I started this series, I was working toward a consideration of why certain types Romance novels and authors are so popular right now, especially when they have generated so much controversy and even divisiveness among readers. I started with the assertion that Romance, because it covers the territory of love, marriage, family, and relationships more generally, is very much a genre concerned with how power between individuals — and between individuals and society – is defined, granted, taken, exchanged, balanced, and otherwise negotiated in a way that is ultimately resolved into significant, even lifelong, mutual love and happiness.

Because Romance is a genre that in part grew out of sentimental fiction (inclusive of the so-called sensational novels), which itself grew out of captivity narratives (among other genres, including amatory fiction), the genre’s literary ancestry is rich and diverse, but also pretty consistent in its engagement with certain tropes, character types, literary devices, and archetypes that flow through more than 300 years of immensely popular texts populated, voiced, and/or written by women.

One of these devices – that of captivity – is especially robust in its persistence, and as I traced (in a much more simplified and superficial way than the topic deserves) the history of what are commonly referred to as North American Indian Captivity Narratives, I wanted to show how the device has adapted to different genres while still raising some of the same issues around how women (particularly women from Western societies) are both insiders and outsiders to the social power structure. Characteristics such as race, class, education, family history, and other forms of social capital will shift the insider-outsider balance, but the dynamic itself is always central to these narratives.

. . . .

One of the main differences between the original Indian captivity narratives and Romance’s adaptation, is that the heroine of yore was supposed to be “redeemed” to her original home, unchanged but not unchallenged by her experience. Indeed, she was supposed to be stronger and steadier in her religious and cultural convictions, as well as more “pure” in her spiritual mission. What often happened, however, is that the time she spent among people different from herself created a temporary bridge between her culture and theirs, such that the reader could vicariously experience the immersion of the heroine in this different cultural space.

. . . .

But one important similarity I see is the way in which the Romance genre often treats courtship like journey into a new and different territory, one that requires a stripping away of certain layers to the heroine and hero (in straight Romance, at least; I think m/m requires its own conversation), and a reformation, in a way, of the individuals as they become a couple. In those books where the power between the hero and heroine is represented as most equitable, the change may be less drastic. In those books where either the power appears to be most inequitable, change may be more drastic, and depending on how the power is configured, its negotiation will require different changes from each partner.

The lack of a power imbalance between hero and heroine does not necessarily mean there will be no conflict in the relationship. In some cases, if you have a two alphas, for example, you may have more conflict between the protagonists, precisely because there is more power on both sides to negotiate.

. . . .

Historically speaking, books that bring their protagonists into the greatest conflict and extremity are often seen as close to or even exceeding the genre’s boundaries – take the derisively named category of “bodice rippers,” for example. However, my position is precisely the opposite: that these books are at the very heart of the work the genre is doing vis a vis investigating how two people who often come from very different backgrounds and positions of social power can form a happy, well-balanced romantic unit. That these books take these dynamics to an extreme does not make them any less core Romance to me – in fact, I think that these are the books that are most overtly, explicitly, and intensely performing the social, gender, and sexual power negotiations that the genre continues to replay.

. . . .

[H]ave readers become too fluent in genre? One thing that seems to be a real strength among Romance readers is the ease with which we can become adept at knowing the kind of books we like and translate genre shorthand when an author doesn’t necessarily spell it out. But with this kind of fluency can also come the laziness of thinking we know what a book is going to give us – positive or negative – before reading it. We take shortcuts as readers, not necessarily giving a new book a chance because it has too familiar elements. We may no longer read as closely or as carefully, failing to interrogate things that wouldn’t really sit right if we really thought about them, refusing to be challenged by the possibility of a different perspective or interpretation. So have we started to shortchange ourselves and the genre by relying too heavily on reader fluency?

Link to the rest at Dear Author

From USA Today:

And now we here from another of those overachieving romance authors who writes about a gazillion novels in a week … (yes, I’m exaggerating. That’s what I do on Sundays.) But, still, Laura Kaye’s new release, South of Surrender, is just the beginning of the upcoming books bearing her name.

. . . .

I thought I’d share some of what I’ve given up to pursue my dream of becoming a published romance author.

• Sleep. Yeah. I used to be an eight-hours-a-night-or-I’m-a-zombie type person. And not the good kind of zombie! Now, to fit writing in, I don’t get nearly as much sleep as I used to. For most of my writing career, I’ve worked a full-time job, and I have two young daughters (ages 9 and 6), which meant that my main writing hours were from when the girls went to bed around 8 p.m. until 1-2 in the morning. Now I average about five to six hours of sleep most days. I’m not always sure this is always a good thing, but it’s definitely a change over the past few years.

. . . .

• ”Free time.” It was sometimes true in my college teaching job that there was always something I could be doing for work: grading, reading a new book in my field, preparing a lecture, research. But that’s even more the case in my writing career. There is never a time when there’s not something I could be doing. If it’s not writing, it’s social media, or blogging, or updating my website. Mostly, it’s amazingly fun, and I rarely feel like it’s a “job,” but it can be challenging to always feel like you should be doing something! Type-A personalities, unite!

. . . .

• My day job. I have a great day job as a professor of history at the U.S. Naval Academy. This year, I have taken a year’s leave of absence to try out writing full time … and I’m loving it! I wake up every day excited to dive into my stories, interact with my fans, and cheer on my writer friends. This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever done, and I’m very likely walking away from a very cool job for which I spent seven years preparing at the end of 2013. It’s a little scary but exciting!

• The thought “I don’t want to go to work today.” I’ve definitely had that thought in other jobs, but here’s the thing: Writing doesn’t feel like a “job” to me. It definitely is. Conceptually, I often think of what I’m doing as being comparable to running a small business. But it never feels like work. I mean, I get to spend the day telling stories and thinking of hot heroes and playing with my imagination and making stuff up that people enjoy, no less. That’s a privilege to do. I finally get what Oprah was talking about when she used to say to find your passion.

Link to the rest at USA Today and thanks to Meryl for the tip.

From author India Drummond on The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing:

Funny thing happened when I went to Amazon last week to browse for something new to read. I noticed that there is a whole new mess of categories, subcategories, and what they’re calling “character categories” and even “theme categories”.

How exciting! It’s always good to have more specific and better categories. The question was how to get in them.These categories are not available via KDP. A fellow fantasy author told me she wrote to Amazon to ask them to put her books into the one of the new categories. They rather inexplicably told her that they couldn’t, that the books in the categories must be non-KDP books, because they didn’t show those choices in their control panel.

After some experimentation, I think I may have found the secret.

Here are the new categories for fantasy:

. . . .

One thing you may notice if you’re a fantasy author is that they’ve now dumped “contemporary” and “paranormal” together into one category called “Paranormal and Urban”. So if you used Contemporary Fantasy as a category before as well as Paranormal Fantasy, you’ll want to choose another.

. . . .

Here are the genre / character /theme categories:

Fantasy:

Sci-Fi:

Romance:

Now, how do indie authors get into these categories if those choices aren’t shown in KDP?

. . . .

I did some experimenting with my keywords inside the KDP for Ordinary Angels. (They used to show up as ‘tags’, but as you’ve probably noticed, Amazon has stopped readers from being able to view and use tags on its main website.)

Here’s where I mean:

(The categories I chose for this book are Romance > Paranormal and Fantasy > Paranormal, which is why it shows up as Paranormal / Paranormal above.) I chose the first four tags aiming at those character lists, the next one as a generic search term, and the last two aiming at theMystery genre category.

A few days later, this shows up on the book’s page:

 

Link to a lot more at The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing

From The Atlantic:

Chick lit—hot pink covers featuring martini glasses and Manolos, stylish city girl heroines navigating the urban jungle in search of love and career—seems to have gone the way of Friends and the dotcom bubble. “A visit to any chain bookstore will testify that its heyday has definitely passed,” says Salon, quoting an editor who says, “We’ve pretty much stopped publishing chick lit.”

“[T]he bloom is off the “chick lit” rose,” agrees The Economist.

Well I have news. Yes, chick lit is dead (or dying, at least). But in its place, we now have a new genre. Call it “farm lit.”

In farm lit books, our heroines ditch the big cities beloved in chick lit—New York, Chicago, LA—in favor of slower, more rural existences, scrappily learning to raise goats on idyllic Vermont farms or healing their broken hearts by opening cupcake bakeries in their sweet Southern hometowns. Instead of sipping $16 appletinis with the girls, they’re mucking out barns and learning to knit. Instead of pining after Mr. Big, they’re falling for the hunky farmer next door.

. . . .

In Australia this new genre is apparently known as “chook lit” (chook is Australian slang for chicken). Down Under, chook lit is “publishing’s latest phenomenon, with rural romances outselling other fiction.”

But even bigger than the novels, it seems, is the farm lit memoir. Call it the “career girl’s gone Green Acres” narrative, it inevitably involves a journalist or other hard-charging type who repairs to the countryside, either to follow a dream or a man, or to escape a calamity (debt, divorce).

. . . .

So many of chick lit’s tropes—stilettos! Fighting for your big break in journalism! Cute i-bankers! The hottest new nightclub in the Meatpacking District!—were part of a boomtime economy. These days, we’re mostly wearing flats, journalism is breathing its last gasps, we’d rather throw i-bankers in jail than date them, and cupcake baking seems a lot more fun (and cheaper!) than clubbing.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic and thanks to Meryl for the tip.

From Dear Author:

When I began reading romances in the 80s, they were almost all historicals. Books were set during the American Revolution, the early settlement days, the Gilded Age.  They were medievals, regencies, and the old West.  They featured horse racers, steel magnates, and pirates on the high seas.  I read everyone from Phoebe Conn to Judith McNaught to Megan McKinney.  Even my favorite contemporary authors wrote historicals like Jayne Ann Krentz (aka Amanda Quick) and Elizabeth Lowell.  The variety in the 80s and 90s was tremendous and while it was largely Caucasion, there were the occasional portrayals of Native Americans (Susan Johnson’s Absorakees were the best).

Today’s historicals are largely rooted in the Regency era, with few deviations.  The feel of the stories are largely the same, constrained as authors are by the standards and mores of the time.  Some authors have tried for high concept such as Regency Bachelor (Vicky Dreiling) or Regency Charlie’s Angels ( ) or Regency Brady Bunch (Kiernan Kramer). And while there are a few really wonderful Regency authors, I cannot live on five or six historical authors alone and the genre cannot survive without a steady influx of new authors anxious to share their stories with the world.  Self publishing isn’t likely to save us. Any historical author worth her salt is likely to be picked up by a publishing house in the last five years.

The historical romance genre is dying.  We only need to look at the numbers to confirm this as a truth.  In the end of the year summary of book sales, PW(1) reported that the highest selling ebook historical was A Night Like This by Julia Quinn with 66,192.  What’s even worse is that there wasn’t a new author on that list of bestselling historical ebooks.

. . . .

I’m not going to launch a historical romance campaign.  I think I’m actively looking for the historical romance genre to die.  For Regency dukes to molder into dust.  For dashing  earls to be crushed.  Only then can the genre reinvent itself.  I don’t want to save the historical romance genre. I want it to die and from the ashes, maybe then, a new and fresh historical voices will arise unconstrained by both reader, editor and agent expectations.

Link to the rest at Dear Author

As a reminder, PG doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he posts.

From The Telegraph:

Over the weekend, without warning, Amazon removed the ability of anything rated “adult” to show up in a search on its main website. Upmarket porn is still there; but to find it, you have to go into the books or Kindle section and search specifically for the title you’re looking for.

Previously, this sort of filtering had only been applied to books which contained things like incest, and quite right too, but now it’s across the board on all erotic fiction. Even 50 Shades of Grey, one of the most ubiquitous books in the world right now, is caught by the filter.

. . . .

The grumbles of writers in the erotica industry are well founded. “We sell a huge amount of books through Amazon, yet we’re treated with utter contempt. We aren’t even allowed to classify our books,” said another. She directed me to a blog post which makes the argument in detail:

With over 86,000 titles in “Erotica” on Amazon, that means there’s twice as many erotic e-books as scifi … Romance has 120k titles, and 15 subgenres. Fantasy, with its 56k titles has 10 subgenres. Poetry, 43k titles, 11 subgenres. [Yet] Erotica gets no subgenres, no way of distinguishing itself. There’s no heat levels, no way of knowing if you’re getting contemporary, fantasy, or taboo.

Link to the rest at The Telegraph and thanks to Marina for the tip.