Only True Magic

What's in a Name?

2012-02-19T10:40:00.000Z

My latest opus is almost finished, and is with my betas as I type. I'm looking for a release in early March - stay tuned! It's a tortured romance between two businessmen who both want to be the boss. Be prepared to laugh, cry, and want to punch a vicious ex-boyfriend in the face. Repeatedly. My main problem is what to call it.

A title might be the most difficult two or three words that you ever write. It has to be something punchy, intriguing, and memorable. It needs to roll off the tongue. Preferably it'll have at least a double, if not a triple meaning. A play on words is highly desirable. A quick shuffle through Amazon's bestsellers shows Pear Shaped, I've Got Your Number, Wedding Tiers and 11th Hour. Utilising a common expression is always a good idea, because it's already memorable.

I'm eternally envious of Damon Suede's titles. Hot Head, for example, is the name of the website in the book, and it also links in with the fact that the MCs are firemen, one is ginger, and they're both impulsive. Within the narrative they play with the expression 'being hot-headed'. It also hints at the pretty vivid BJ scene - literally hot head - that really gets them together. Plus it's short, snappy and alliterative: perfect. His other titles - Grown Men and Seedy Business - also have multiple meanings that resonate through the narrative. Suede could teach a masterclass.

I've been running the gamut of business-related expressions. I quite like Working Relationship, which does have a double-meaning within the narrative I've written (working together / a relationship that works) but I'm not convinced that it sounds right. A quick search of Amazon shows more books with titles that play on 'business and pleasure' than I care to count. Hostile Takeover? Too aggressive. I'm toying with some kind of play on the expression 'you're not the boss of me' which may be what I eventually go for, as it pretty neatly sums up the dynamic between my MCs - competitive and a little bit bratty. Who says grown men have to be mature?

Shakespeare famously said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. True: but how many people would buy one for their beloved if you changed their name to 'prickly death plant'? Writing a good book is only the start. The greatest novel ever written wouldn't get read if it was buried under a crap cover and a forgettable title. Amazon is a storefront just as surely as your local bricks & mortar bookshop. People trawl through, searching by genre and sub-genre and reviews and popularity, but then what makes them click on one book over another? Cover and title. It needs to look good and sound interested before any potential purchaser will give you even a nanosecond of their time. That's why titles matter, and that's why they may be the hardest three or four words you ever have to write.

_____________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories.
Find all her books on Amazon, ARe, B&N, iTunes, SW, Sony, Kobo, & Diesel

Freedom of Speech and Inciting Hatred

2012-02-14T13:52:00.000Z

An interesting story reached a conclusion (for now) in the UK this week. Three men from Derby, not a million miles from where I live, have been jailed for inciting hatred. These lovely gentlemen posted leaflets through doors and around the town calling for the death and destruction of homosexuals, in the run-up to a Pride event. Resident gay people testified in court that when they got these leaflets pushed through their doors, they feared that they'd been deliberately targeted. They feared for their lives.

The convicted men are the first people to be jailed under a new law which included sexual orientation as a grounds for inciting hatred: a law incepted only weeks before they committed their crime in 2010.

For what these men did, I think they should throw away the key. I've seen some of the leaflets they circulated, and they're sickening. Some of them weren't reproduced in the press under advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions. The men argued that they were only quoting Islamic law, and hadn't done anything wrong.

I'm not getting into what has become an age-old argument about the rights and wrongs of Islamic and Sharia law. I have every sympathy with the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Muslims both in the UK and around the world who all-too-often find themselves villified for something that only a tiny minority of their numbers say and do.

What episodes like this make us confront is how far we can take our right to freedom of speech. Just because I find what these men were saying morally abhorent, does that mean I should demand they lose their right to say it? Well yes and no. Let's face it, we're human beings and we're contrary creatures. It's in our natures. The only way to get everyone to agree all the time is if you banned all communication. I've been on enough web forums in my time to know that some people just like arguing. Hell, I've got friends like that.

So where's the line? If I had a pound for every time I'd told someone to drop dead, or heard it directed at me, I'd be very, very rich. So calling for someone to die isn't any kind of watershed. It's not very nice, but, you know, sticks and stones. I'm still alive, as are all the people I've told to die (as far as I know...!) One of my favourite put-downs is "for twenty quid I could have you shot". If people took me seriously I'd have been banged up a long time ago.

So if one individual making a comment about another individual isn't an incitement to hatred, what is? An individual vs a group? That's what happened in Derby. But look at the football terraces during a match: thousands of people screaming slurs against thousands more, based on nothing more significant than the colour of their shirts and what twenty-two grown men running round in shorts are doing on a field below them. Ask almost all of them, and they'll tell you that they don't really mean that they want any harm to come to their rivals, it's all part of the game.

So maybe it's intent that matters. If I get in a row with someone in a bar and tell them I'm going to kill them, people won't think anything of it. Unless they turn up dead the next day. (Note: I'm not in the habit of bar brawling, this is just an example). But how do you guage intent? Unless I was caught with a sawn-off shotgun stalking the person I'd just said I want to kill, how do you know if I mean it or not? It could have been a throwaway comment, it could mean I've gone back to my lair to plot their demise in a slow and ingenious fashion. Mwuhahahahaha. All I have to say is that I didn't mean it, and you can't prove otherwise unless you find my fingerprints on the murder weapon.

Perhaps then it's rallying other people in committing acts of violence. But if I told you to put your hand in the fire, would you? Just because I rant and rave that doesn't mean that anyone's going to listen to me. Chances are you'd give me a wide berth if you passed me in the street. So maybe the social status of the person calling down the dogs of war needs to be taken into consideration. You'd ignore me, but maybe you'd pay attention to your preacher, or headmaster, or boss. Whatever.

But one of the guys jailed in Derby was a taxi driver. Last time I checked, no-one - but no-one - listens to what cabbies say. They're famous for being startlingly intelligent (why is the Mastermind champion always a taxi driver?) but infamous for waxing lyrical while their passengers roll their eyes and try to ignore them. I'm not going to become so radicalised over the course of a car journey that I hop out of the cab and start wreaking havoc.

This is getting messy, isn't it?

The truth is, I'm not sure what defines the moment when someone has gone too far. When espousing a radical and marginal view can be considered an incitement to hatred. The truth is, we only know it when we see it. When we read a pamphlet or hear someone say something that makes us feel sick to the core. This is not about homophobia, but about hatred in general. I'd have had the same reaction if those men in Derby had called for Jews to be hanged, or women, or - I don't know - people with ginger hair. What I do know is that they can hide behind the veil of religion all they like, but I refuse to believe that a benevolent God would ever create this world and everyone in it for the sole purpose of watching us turn on each other with such venom and bile. That's not love, it's hate. And I'm speaking as an atheist.

_____________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories.
Find all her books on Amazon, ARe, B&N, iTunes, SW, Sony, Kobo, & Diesel

Review: A Pirate's Life For Me - Tricia Owens

2012-02-09T11:25:00.000Z

Ok so I snagged the first book during an Amazon promotion without much expectation of what I was going to get. The premise is far more fantasy than reality: Lucas, wounded from being dumped by his girlfriend, is offered a dream job as part of a troupe of actors on a Caribbean island. He'll be paid handsomely to live in a tropical paradise and participate in an erotic pirate show every night. Sounds like fun, right? Except there's a mix-up, and Lucas ends up being cast for the gay pirate show.

Stop rolling your eyes in the back!! I did exactly the same thing. Don't worry, it gets better.

When Lucas realises, he freaks. Obviously. He begs the boss for a part on the straight show, but they've got a full cast and it doesn't look like anyone's going to be leaving anytime soon. The organiser wants to send him home again. Lucas doesn't want to leave. He's living in a beautiful house on a beautiful island and getting paid to sit on a beach all day. Who would leave? He'll just have to go gay for pay.

Problem is, Lucas has to convince Adam, the pirate captain, and - more importantly - Tyler, Adam's bitchy boyfriend. Tyler hates Lucas' guts, and makes no bones of the fact that he wants him gone. Adam wants to jump Lucas' bones, and makes no secret of that fact, either. As long as Lucas does what Adam tells him, he stays. But Adam isn't carrying slackers, he expects Lucas to participate in every aspect of life on the island - on and off stage.

Some of the set-up is fantastic in the extreme. The gay men in the troupe are pretty much in a 12-man relationship with each other. Partners swap left and right without any emotional commitment or jealousy. The only permanent relationship is between Adam and Tyler, but they're not adverse to inviting guests into their bed. Lucas shares a house with the happy couple, and a room with another of the pirates, Kip, who tries to help ease him into the situation he's found himself in. There's weird initiation ceremonies, and Adam's role as captain extends beyond the show and into the pirates' everyday lives. What Adam says, goes.

There's something a bit Lord of the Flies-ish about some of the scenes where the men go wild in the jungle, and perhaps some of the more outlandish behaviour they indulge in is actually on reflection more possible than one would have initially thought. These are young men, after all, living a life of sun, sea, sex and nothing else. That they've built up their bond into something more resembling a cult than a cast is perhaps not that surprising after all.

The thing that I enjoyed most about this story, however, was not the setting or the action, but the slow development of each character's personality. The characterisations are actually very nuanced and well-drawn. Owens gives each man his own idiolect in order to differentiate who is speaking (for example Kip calls everyone 'bro', Ben calls people 'buddy' and Tyler insists on calling Lucas 'new guy').

Adam's the ultimate alpha, on top in every aspect of his life, and something in Lucas responds to the way that the other man dominates him. The sparks literally fly off the page (or out of my Kindle!) when Lucas clashes with Tyler, who shares deeper similarities with the new guy than mere physical resemblance. Kip is just a genuine guy, who feels for Lucas' position and tries to guide him through the culture shock.

Lucas, for his part, does not suddenly turn around and decide that he loves dick. Thank god. I was dreading that most of all. Actually his confusion about the way he reacts to some of what he sees and experiences feel real and very raw. Realising that you're attracted to your own sex isn't something that happens overnight. By the end of the first book, the most Lucas has done is kiss another man while very drunk at a nightclub, and suck beer off Tyler's stomach in a weird exercise in submission to Adam. There are things that Lucas is deeply uncomfortable with, and Adam's and Tyler's pushing keeps him permanently outside of his comfort zone, without ever going that step too far. That the narrative is told in third person focused on Lucas means we get more insight into his thoughts and feelings, ensuring that the reader is reassured that no matter what he says a part of him wants to be pushed, hell, maybe even needs it, which keeps the dub-con content on the right side of assault.

By the second book Lucas has admitted that he's more than curious about having sex with men, but it's still not something he feels ready to rush into. A romance with Ben, one of the other pirates, places him back in his comfort zone. Ben is a nice guy who doesn't want to push him too hard, and provides some welcome relief from the unrelenting pressure put on Lucas by the island's dominant couple. In the second book we learn more about all of the main characters, particularly Tyler, who is rapidly developing into a very sympathetic character. Yes he's an arse, but underneath all the aggression is a great deal of vulnerability, which Lucas inadvertently taps into.

The end of this book takes us back to the jungle, for a strange midnight game with a gay motorbike gang who clash with the pirates at every opportunity. Obstensibly both teams are on a treasure-hunt for a flag, but the real prize - at least to the bikers - is Lucas' virginity. There's a very dark scene where Lucas is captured by Adam's opposite on the bikers' team (actually Adam's ex, who has a point to prove) and help comes from an unexpected source - but is it too late for Lucas' maidenhood? I'm saying nothing.

This is a genuinely enjoyable series of books, with characters that are real and honest. I can't wait for part three.

A Pirate's Life For Me, Book One and Book Two are available from Amazon.

_____________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories.
Find all her books on Amazon, ARe, B&N, iTunes, SW, Sony, Kobo, & Diesel

MTM Pulled, RWA Releases Statement: Reaction #Rom4All

2012-02-07T10:22:00.000Z

I've just got an email back from RWA directing me to their press release. This states in full that:

RWA members are served by 145 local and special interest chapters, and those chapters are individually incorporated and governed. So long as chapters fulfill their obligations under state law, as well as RWA and chapter bylaws, and their programs and services support the professional interests of career focused romance writers, policy affords them rather broad latitude in determining which programs and services to offer. Absent policy governing chapter-level contests, RWA's board cannot intervene in the decisions of individual chapters.

Romance Writers of America does not condone discrimination of any kind. RWA's policies regarding chapter programs and services will be discussed when the board reconvenes in March.

That's a pretty convenient brushing off of the whole sordid mess. The key words are of course state law. In America, homosexuals are not usually classed as a minority, and it is therefore not illegal to discriminate against us. Of course, that makes no mention of the morality of this kind of discrimination.

Furthermore, on RWI's website, the following notice has also appeared:

After much consideration, RWI regretfully announces the MTM Published Author Contest has been cancelled. All monies and books received from entrants will be returned as soon as possible. We have heard and understood the issues raised, and will take those concerns into consideration should the chapter elect to hold contests in the future. Please note: our contest coordinator, Jackie, is a chapter member who graciously volunteered to collect entries and sort by category. It is unfortunate that she has become the object of personal ridicule and abuse. We recognize the decision to disallow same-sex entries is highly charged. We also opted not to accept YA entries. We do not condone discrimination against individuals of any sort.

Personally I think it's a shame that they've decided to pull the competition, rather than address the concerns of the people that have contacted them about it. As a romance author I believe it's important that opportunities like MTM exist. It seems to me like a knee-jerk "easy out" of the furore that they have found themselves in, when what we really need to happen, and what RWI and RWA should have embraced the opportunity to do, was generate discussion and create a positive outcome to what has been a very distasteful situation.

I've lived in the ghetto and I left it nearly five years ago because I agree wholeheartedly that the queer community is far too fond of retreating behind closed doors and pretending that we aren't second-class citizens (or, heaven help us, glorifying in our role as Other). Yes we are a unique and vibrant community and there is much that I adore with all my heart, but if we want to be counted as first class citizens -- truly counted, not just have lip-service paid to the idea -- then we need to take to the streets, not just once a year at Pride, but every single day.

Here in the UK we are more fortunate than a lot of our American cousins in many ways, but the fact remains that this is a fight that rumbles on, no matter how many times politicians and the right-wing media try and bury it and tell us that we're equal now and should stop our bitching. Where we see discrimination of any kind we should not be afraid to stand up and bawl it out. I don't care if some people think that's petty, when people's rights are being infringed and their lifestyle suppressed then it's no-longer about choosing your fights but doing the right thing, every time.

I believe that most organisations respond best and quickest when you threaten to hit them where it hurts -- their pockets -- and I therefore think that withdrawing membership or boycotting these paid competitions can go a long way towards getting the attention of the directors. However, that does not mean that anything fundamentally changes. I'm still living for the day when I see a corporation genuinely regret alienating a minority. Heavy-handed and sweeping acts of discrimination such as that employed by RWI can be overturned, but one day I'd like to see someone stand up on behalf of one of these companies and genuinely express -- and feel -- some remorse for what they have done. By excluding same-sex pairings from this competition, the slight is not to authors or readers of said fiction (or, rather, it it, but it's a secondary slight) the real problem is that they have implied by default that gay relationships do not constitute 'romance', that we are somehow incapable of love. That is the insidious accusation hovering in the shadows, and it is one that is far-too-often taken as read.

Others have argued that these attitudes can only be challenged effectively from within, and that authors of same-sex romance should seek not to boycott these organisations but engage in a position within them, but honestly, joining an organisation that actively discriminates against against everything that I believe in and represent feels a bit like telling a black person to join the KKK so that the white supremacists realise that they've been wrong all this time.

I am so sick of organisations pandering to what they think are the wants of the queer community in order to get their grubby mitts on our cash, but then consistently fail to understand or sympathise with our position. It's still hard enough growing up gay as it is, and there are an awful lot of queer people out there who seek solace in books - romance especially. For some, it is only within the pages of a novel that they can see hope for their own future. When the world feels like it's against you and you're the only one who's going through what you are, reading a story in which two men, or two women, meet and fall in love without the sky falling in is a gift.

Romance, as a genre, is all about wish-fulfilment, it's an expression of hope: of the endless optimism that we hold in our hearts when we think of love. Yes, even old cynics like me. Romance belongs to us all, and it should be available to us all. Love is the miracle that is attainable for each of us. If the RWI truly believes its own ethos of promoting "excellence in romantic fiction" then I suggest that it refocuses its energies on doing just that, rather than trying to moderate what romance is to begin with. No-one gave them the right to determine what does or does not constitute romance, and if an honest expression of love between two people makes some of them uncomfortable then maybe they need to stop and think hard about why they're working in this genre to begin with. By trying to control what is considered 'legitimate' romance, RWI has only established that it is fundamentally naive about the true nature of the genre that it professes to be expert in.

I have been heartened by the response that this decision has received from across all sectors of society - readers and authors alike, gay or straight or something in between. If a positive has come out of this, then that is it. Ordinary people have stood up in their hundreds and thousands and declared themselves in support of what is, after all, only a minority. It is time that organisations like RWI learnt that picking on the little guy might not be illegal but it is morally reprehensible, and we won't sit back and take it anymore.

_____________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories.
Find all her books on Amazon, ARe, B&N, iTunes, SW, Sony, Kobo, & Diesel

Less than Magic #Rom4All #RWA

2012-02-04T19:53:00.000Z

Some of you may be aware of Romance Writers Ink, a chapter of the national organisation Romance Writers of America. This is a group of female romance writers, published and unpublished, who aim "to promote excellence in romantic fiction, to advance the professional interests of career-focused romance writers through networking and advocacy, to provide a general basis of mentorship to any writer who is actively, and seriously striving to become published and thus establish a career in the romance genre, as well as to provide a camaraderie for writers within the romance publishing industry" [Source].

Read that last line again: to provide a camaraderie for writers within the romance publishing industry. That means they're inclusive, right? Wrong. Because this year their annual competition is not accepting any same-sex submissions. Check out the rules for yourself if you don't believe me - http://rwimagiccontests.wordpress.com/rwi-contests/2012-more-than-magic-rules-information/

I can't begin to think of any good reason for this rule. We're talking romance - love, hearts and candles and flowers, right? That's good stuff, stuff there's far too little of in the world already. For a group who professes to 'promote excellence in romantic fiction' to outlaw LGBTQ books from their little competition seems not only irrational, but at odds with their whole ethos. Who made this decision? Why?

We are informed that the judges of this competition are readers. They don't specify how many, how they're selected, where they're from, etc etc, but I know for a fact that there are readers of queer stories out there: I'm one of them, and I haven't bought all of my books myself. If people have in the past expressed uneasiness with the inclusion of same-sex couples within the entries for the contest, well - actually, I'd tell them where they could shove their uneasiness, but that's just me - what I'd certainly consider doing, if I was the organiser, and I really was spineless enough to cave to that kind of pressure, would be to create separate categories for LGBTQ submissions. That way the elusive 'readers' can choose to read that category or not. Everyone's happy (ish).

Not that I think that a separate category is justified. Just that it's an option that they could have considered before an outright ban.

Can you imagine if they banned interracial couples? Or couples (over the age of consent) with an age gap of more than 10 years? Or any couples over the age of thirty? Or... the list is endless.

Romance is a celebration of love. It's the genre that makes you feel all fuzzy inside, that encourages you to dream. Love is the miracle that is attainable for us all. Collectives of romance authors should understand and respect this fact. Competitions limited to this genre should embrace it fully. Love is boundless and breathless and unexpected and unrestrained. Love just... is. And that's the way it should be. It's a rare enough thing without us settling limits on what makes love 'acceptable'.

Whatever your personal inclinations, I hope you can understand that, dear reader. I hope you're as shocked and appalled by this decision as I am. I hope you share this post, and retweet when you see the hashtag #Rom4all. I hope you email the contest co-ordinator at jackie.rwimagic@netscape.com or the RWA info@rwa.org.

Most of all, I hope if you're a fellow romance writer you abstain from entering their competition. Save your $27 and make a stand. Maybe if we hit them where it hurts the most they'll finally listen to reason.

_____________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories.
Find all her books on Amazon, ARe, B&N, iTunes, SW, Sony, Kobo, & Diesel

Voyeurism & Pornography

2012-02-03T12:20:00.001Z

Despite the title, this is going to be a grown-up post. I'm thinking about the act of watching, the direction of the gaze, and the impact of being the subject.

Yawn. Sorry, stick with me - this stuff is interesting, I promise.

The act of looking, or being looked at, is actually very aggressive. We all know that meeting an animal's eyes implies some kind of power challenge. Try and have a stare-out with your dog and I bet it looks away pretty quickly. Either that or it'll rip your face off. It might be an interesting way of testing who's really the boss in your house... Rotterdam zoo was forced to distribute 'gorilla glasses' after one woman was mauled by their 400lb silverback. Apparently she was turning up every day and staring deep into the animal's eyes. She thought they were bonding. He thought she was a rival and one day he snapped, broke out of his cage and mauled her half to death. The gorilla glasses make it look like you're looking to one side, allowing you to stare directly at the animals without unwittingly endangering your life.

Staring at another human being is equally confrontational. If you're sat with friends / family and you happen to stare at someone, for whatever inane reason, chances are that in a matter of seconds they'll start getting uncomfortable and ask you what you're doing: and these are people that know and like you. Now imagine you're walking home after a late night out. You're on your own, the street is dark. A man appears at the other end of the street, walking towards you. As you get closer, you realise that his gaze is fixed directly on you, and doesn't waver. Man or woman, a tenner says you're scared. Why? He's only looking at you. He might be curious about his fellow night-time-wanderer. But the way he's looking at you will have provoked a fight / flight instinct that you can't ignore.

It is ingrained in us to think of eye contact as a sign of dominance, and breaking that contact as a sign of submission. Lovers make and maintain eye contact during intimate moments as a sign of trust. A look is never just a look.

Not all gazes are aggressive: some are desiring. Traditionally, women are the objects of the desiring gaze, they are looked at, they do not look back. Of course desire and aggression are as closely linked as love and hate. Desiring, wanting, is an act of dominance in itself: it is possessive and implies ownership. That doesn't mean that it's unwelcome. Just ask the dowdy girl who walks past a silent building site, moments after Jessica Rabbit's real-life twin has been subject to whistles and catcalls by the same men.

That doesn't mean that women don't look at men in the same way. Increasingly they do, and they're getting more brazen about it. It's part of the "laddish" culture that emerged in the 90s. When the media bemoan the fact that young women no-longer act like ladies they will often cite the example of groups of girls out on the town catcalling at the men. There are words for such women, unpleasant ones. Society at large still tries to supress such behaviour and leave the desiring gaze as the exclusive domain of men. Make of that what you will.

Evidence of the desiring gaze is everywhere. In the novel I'm working on at the moment (97,000 words and counting!!) the narrative is told in third person from Christo's POV as he begins a relationship with Damien, a work colleague. As such, Damien is the object of the gaze, there is far more description of how he looks; acts; dresses than there is of Christo. Across literature as a whole it generally holds true that one character is the object. Whose gaze, though? Who is the person doing the looking?

Well that, dear reader, is you. Literature enables us to indulge in the ultimate act of looking, without being seen to look. There can be no challenge to the implied dominance of the gazer when the subject cannot look back. And that is why literature - romance in particular - has always been a woman's realm. Where else but in a book could a respectable, well-brought-up lady stare with undisguised pleasure at a Mr Darcy or a Heathcliff? In real life she'd be branded a floozy if she so much as fluttered her eyes at such a man, but if that man is fictional then she's free to gawp as much as she likes. Why do you think that image of Colin Firth coming out of the lake is so popular?

Just look at him. Look at that white shirt gone all transparent and clingy. And the way he's looking off-camera allows the real viewer - not the girl on the banks of the lake, but the person watching the film - stare and stare without him ever asserting himself by staring back. Why do you think women (and men) still swoon over that image in their thousands? Whether he likes it or not, Mr Firth has been dressed up as the ultimate piece of man-candy, and despite his broad shoulders and firm chest, it's a completely feminised image.

Authors have been aware of this fact for centuries, and often play about with it. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, more typically known as Fanny Hill, is often credited with being the first pornographic novel written in the English language. It was written by a man - John Cleland - about whose sexuality there have long been rumours. It is the story of a whore, told in first person (in epistolary fashion), narrating her descent into prostitution, her experiences with both men and women, and her relationship with, and ultimate salvation by, a young man named Charles.

In 1748, when this novel was published, one doubts that many women would have been able to get their grubby mits on it. Therefore we must assume that it was written by a man, for men. And here the problem arises, because the whole novel is told from Fanny's POV, and Fanny likes men. A lot. There are sweeping and epic descriptions of every part of the male physique, always couched in the most erotic terms. You have to hunt pretty hard for much description of women once Fanny's initial foray into lesbianism comes to an abrupt halt. In fact, most of the women in the book are described in terms of the grotesque, much like the women in the Victorian homosexual novel Teleny: or, The Reverse of the Medal.

Cleland knew exactly what he was doing. Part of my thesis for my Master's was an analysis of anal eroticism in Fanny Hill. Fanny quickly progresses from non-penetrative lesbianism, to vanilla vaginal sex, to role-play and BDSM before things start to get really interesting. First, Fanny and a friend attend a drag ball: her friend pulls a lovely young man who is convinced that she is really another man in a frock. Then Fanny finds herself in a room in an inn when two young men arrive and are placed in the room next door to her (actually the same room, divided by a thin partition to make the innkeeper more money). She gets herself all excited, thinking what she could do with those men. Then she hears a funny noise... Through a hole in the partition, she sees them kissing, and immediately decides that they must be young lovers and the woman is dressed in drag to avoid recognition. Right until the 'woman' pulls her pants down and gets her cock out.

Cleland doesn't pull any punches with the narrative of the encounter between these two men, which Fanny watches in its entirety. I particularly enjoyed the line: if he was like his mother behind, he was like his father before. The most striking thing about this scene, however, was the tenderness displayed between the men. Fanny's story is one of being objectified for sex. The romance at the end of her narrative is late coming. Penetration, in Fanny's world, is painful: it is the ultimate act of violence. One would think anal penetration would be described as even more so, but that is not the case. It surprises her to see how well the men fit together, and the dominant partner kisses the other man tenderly during the act. Fanny has never had a man be so caring with her - not even her beloved Charles, when he took her virginity. At the point at which it occurs, this scene between the two men is by far the closest thing to lovemaking that has appeared in the novel.

What is Fanny's reaction? She turns to the door to go report them and have them arrested. Had they been caught they would have been tried and (minimally) pilloried. Given that Fanny, as witness to the whole affair, could testify to the 'emission of seed', they may even have been hanged. Sodomy was notoriously difficult to prove without a witness, which is why the death sentence wasn't imposed as often as people suppose. Fanny's evidence could well have secured that. But what happens instead? Our heroine forgot that she'd got up on a chair to peer at them, fell, and knocked herself out on the floorboards. Hilarious? Absolutely. By the time she comes round the men have long gone: warned, no doubt, by the sound of her fall that they'd been discovered. Fanny literally gets slapped in the face for trying to punish the men.

All of this, let us remember, occurs in a book obstensibly written by a man to titillate heterosexual men. Seems unlikely, doesn't it? Is it more likely that the author was deliberately subverting the desires of his readers, so subtly that what he was doing wasn't even noticed until the 1980s? And then there's the fact that we have a (potentially) queer author, writing for straight men in such a way as to encourage them to find other men attractive. Cute, isn't it?

There is a scene from American Dad that I love, where the father of Stan's gay neighbour Terry comes to stay. Terry bottles coming out to his dad (a retired pro footballer), and pretends that Stan's wife Francine is really his wife, and his partner Greg is really with Stan. There's a scene where father and son are "watching a guy plow a girl" together in the den at the father's insistance (because it's what men do) and Stan bursts in to tell him the truth. Tank Bates, football star, doesn't have much patience for the man he considers the queer neighbour. While Terry sits on the couch and cringes, Tank indicates the porn and says "I guess you only like this 50%, huh, fairy? Me, I like this 100%."

Surely that makes him bisexual?? It always struck me as an odd line, but it makes an interesting point: when straight people are watching straight porn, how much of it are they enjoying? I'm not implying that every straight man watching straight porn is really a closet-case getting off on covert sneaks of another man's junk. Maybe, however, as human beings we're programmed to find any display of overt sexuality titillating on some primal level. What else explains the prevalence of straight porn? I doubt there's that many couples out there who watch skin flicks together, not when you think of the millions and millions of images and films there are available. Certainly there are more men (and women) who watch porn alone, one can safely assume. In which case, shouldn't gay / lesbian porn be more popular?

Well it should and it shouldn't. The problem with homosex is that it's percieved as threatening. No man wants to watch two women who genuinely have no interest in him, and no desire for him. Neither do women want to watch men prove that they're redundant. Everyone wants to be wanted, and part of the fantasy of porn is that the people on screen want you - the viewer - that you can climb through the TV and take the place of the guy / girl in question. If I had a pound for every time I've told some guy who's tried it on that I'm gay, only to have him say "it's okay, I'll watch" I'd be a very rich woman. Because that's what I live for. When that generous offer gets knocked back, without fail their attitude changes. I get "oh, you're that kind of lesbian." (Said with a sneer). What, a real one? Yeah, sorry, I am.

It never fails to surprise me how popular m/m romance is with straight women for this very reason. Do they realise that the narratives they're enjoying actively exclude them? Maybe it's safer, especially as many of the women are in their 30s and 40s and married with children. Lusting after an "accessible" (i.e. heterosexual) man, even a fictional one, is still bound up with guilt and overtones of infidelity. Maybe, on a subconscious level, lusting after a man who has no desire for women is the perfect compromise.
_____________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories.
Find all her books on Amazon, ARe, B&N, iTunes, SW, Sony, Kobo, & Diesel

5* Books ~ Jan 2012

2012-01-31T10:31:00.002Z

I'm a Goodreads obsessive - it's official! This week I'm the #2 ranked reader - beaten only by someone who managed 47 books! Overall I'm the #4 reader this month. But how many of them were any good? Here's the best of the bunch from this month, main m/m, you may just find something that you'll love in this little lot - and many of them are FREE.

Gregori's Ghost - Sarah Black -- FREE
A bit ghost story, a bit family saga, a bit love story, this really does have something for everything. A haunted camera passed to Steven Russell by his grandfather leads him to Alexi, a political journalist in the Ukraine, as they uncover the secrets of a Russian atrocity committed during WWII that both of their grandfathers witnessed. Can they lay the ghosts of the past to rest?

Waterways - Kyell Gold
I love, love, love Gold's world. I first discovered him through his collection of short stories Gold Standard (free). He writes anthropomorphic books (i.e. animals who live like humans) and this is the bittersweet story of a young otter who falls in love with a fox from the wrong part of town. It's a nicely-done come of age tale, and the fact that the characters are animals just makes it all the more endaring. Gold puts a lot of attention to detail into his work to make the animal characteristics real (which should make the sex scenes really weird, but somehow it gets over that) and I'm kinda jealous that he has so much more to work with - who knew that an ear-flick or tail movement could be so telling?

Out of Position & Isolation Play - Kyell Gold
Based in the same world as Waterways, these two stories are part of a different series, about an activist, cross-dressing fox and a pro-footballer tiger who fall in love against the odds and their own better judgement. If anything I love this series more than even Waterways and I can't wait for part three (which is a whole year away!!) I also love that all of the animals have a dual-meaning (fox, tiger, otter). The attention to detail is top-notch, as are the popular cultural references given an animalistic twist (Lauren Bacollie is by far my favourite).

Wanting - Piper Vaughn -- FREE
A lovely little story written for the Don't Read in the Closet project. Jonah has been in love with Laurie, his older brother's best friend, since he was thirteen. Heavy on sweet and low on angst (unlike most stories following this model) and with a vicious ex-boyfriend that you just want to climb into the book and punch, this story is perfectly crafted.

Like the Taste of Summer - Kaje Harper -- FREE
Another DRITC effort, about two guys coming together in a small college town in Iowa. The retrospective nature of the narrative ensures a HEA, but how they get there isn't always easy.

_____________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

There's been a Murder in my Garden!

2012-01-27T10:48:00.001Z

No, I don't mean that our resident sparrow hawk has nabbed another of the collared doves and made a bloody mess under the magnolia. That happens on a weekly basis. I am talking about my beloved Sequoia, or giant redwood.

What, you may ask, is such a plant doing in Cheshire, England? Well my great-aunt gave it to my father as a scrawny sapling about fifty years ago. Astonishingly, it flourished, and towers over our family home. I spent my childhood climbing it with my cousins. My grandparents (whose house it was originally; my grandfather built it himself) had two parrots who were taken outside to sit in it every single day. When we inherited one of those parrots (who lived to the ripe old age of 50 himself) even in his dotage he could be found sitting in the topmost branches and squawking at the wind. Parrot with altitude.

Yesterday, however, the benign reign of this impressive plant came to an end. An interfering arse from the council insisted on a report being carried out on the tree, which stated that the roots could one day, potentially, cause problems with the foundations of our house or my uncle's, who lives next door. Because of this, both houses were rendered uninsurable unless the problem was 'recitfied'. The killing crew arrived at 8am this morning.

Redwood roots are problematic. They're pretty shallow, only a few feet deep, but they go on for miles. They can spread as wide as the tree is tall, and this tree is all of ten feet from our back door. Personally, subsidence is a chance I'd be willing to take. Sadly, that's not my decision. Today my parents paid for this noble companion of my childhood to be razed to the ground. I may never forgive them.

Yes, I know, I know. It's a bloody tree. That doesn't mean I didn't have a lump in my throat when I watched the chainsaws close in on it this morning. Redwoods are magnificent plants. They are among the oldest and tallest living things on our planet. One redwood still living today is more than 3,500 years old. That one plant practically pre-dates all of recorded human history. The tallest is 95m high - over twice the height of the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio; two thirds of the height of the Statue of Liberty. By comparison, ours is a baby.

There's my baby, in all it's glory. That is the last picture that will ever be taken of it. By the time I go back tonight it will only be a memory. The squirrels will have to find somewhere else to nest. The tomatoes in the greenhouse might get a bit more sun in future, but that's cold comfort. I can buy tomatoes in the supermarket. When was the last time you saw a sequoia for sale?

Growing up, no-one ever believed my grandparents had a giant redwood in the back garden. It sounds so unlikely, doesn't it? I think that's half the reason I loved it as much as I did. Forget the apple trees and the pear tree and the north-west's most impressive magnolia, it was the redwood that had my heart. If I want to get maudlin about it, I damn well will.

It was a giant Christmas tree in winter, the perfect playground in summer, and I grew up with it as a constant in my life. Call me stupid, but that was one thing that I expected to outlive me. I expected that tree to still be there, watching the world change around it, for centuries to come. My grandparents actually separated the land on which that tree stands from their estate before they died, and left it in joint hands to protect the damn thing. The best laid plans...

The nature of our emotional attachment is complex, and often defies reason. I know people are reading this eulogy and wondering what the hell I've been smoking. God, I'm more upset about this tree being felled than I was when I split up with my ex. I'm not a 'save the earth' type, no long-haired hippy who will give up everything to camp in a forest and fight the loggers. I'm only specifically concerned about this tree. It had so much potential. It was only a baby.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I may have to go write tortured poetry and cry myself to sleep.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Gender Neutral Children

2012-01-25T11:25:00.000Z

There's a story that's been all over the media recently, about a couple who have been raising their child gender neutral. For those who've not heard that term before, it basically means they've refused to tell anyone if little Sasha is a boy or a girl. Now Sasha's five years old and enrolled in school, the secret's out: it's a boy!

Why is this even newsworthy? Well partly, one suspects, because it's been a slowish week, and the Daily Mail had nothing better to get on its high horse about. Let's face it, if you put most parents under the microscope there'd be something the majority thought was questionable about their style.

How has this affected the child in question? Well the tabloids have been quick to quote psychologists who have been saying, very gravely, stuff along the line of "there is no telling what future psychological damage will manifest as a result of this unorthodox upbringing" et cetera.

Let me be the first to call bullshit. As if there's any way on earth that any child can escape socialisation into gendered roles, no matter what their parents' intentions are. Studies have been carried out on this stuff for decades. One of my favourites involved a woman with a very young baby (at the point where they all look the same, no matter what their parents say) leaving said infant in the care of a group of other women on some pretext or other. The sociologist made sure that there was a conveniently-located box of baby toys available, and watched how the women interacted with the child. When the baby was dressed in pink and given a female name, they all cooed and aah-ed and told her that she was beautiful and encouraged her to play with soft toys and pink things. When the same baby was dressed in blue and given a boy's name, you've guessed it, he was told he was a handsome little man and encouraged to play with toy cars and other manly things.

Now little Sasha may have escaped the worst of this, because his parents refused to tell anyone what sex he was. That means that randoms in the street can't disturb the developing ego with comments about what a beautiful little girl or handsome little boy he is. Does surviving without this for the first five years of life make any difference to the psyche of any child? Who knows. Does it have a detrimental effect? Unlikely. After all, what real harm can it do?

The ways that our gendered behaviour is learned, and how it affects us on an individual level, have been the subject of fierce debate for years. We're still not sure how much is innate and how much is acquired - hence the universal interest in feral children, when they turn up. And gendered behaviour isn't fixed, and never has been. We all do some things that are considered typical of our sex, and some that aren't. Personally I won't be seen dead in a dress. My girly-girl sister is a total petrolhead who follows various Grand Prix around the world, and not because she wants to snare herself a millionaire racing driver, but because she wants to dribble over the cars while jabbering on about torque and bhp and goodness knows what else. Everyone's got that kind of dichotomy within them between their physical self and their gendered identity. It's so common that most of us don't even notice it, or think much of it when we do.

Ultimately, despite all the good intentions of his parents, little Sasha will almost certainly end up as socialised as the rest of us. There's just no escaping it. Freud recognised that years ago, when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents. Society and civilisation exist as self-propagating unifying forces: to belong, one must conform. Foucault argued, in more recent years, that to ecsape the effect of socialisation and discover your innate or 'true' self you must indulge in self-alienating behaviours. Now that sounds to me like very good justification for heading off to 'Frisco and getting off your face on acid, but theoretically his thinking is sound. It is only by escaping the bonds of civilisation that we can become the people that we were truly born to be. Sadly, civilisation don't like that. People who breaks its laws are viciously punished, and I'm not just talking murders and psychopaths. Every fourteen year old knows the agony of turning up to school in the wrong pair of shoes and being ostracised for the rest of term.

And Sasha has been socialised by his parents, whether they like to think that or not. His mother, for reasons best known to herself, posted a video of him on YouTube this week, discussing the concept of gendered behaviours. He was more than aware that blue was for boys and pink was for girls, but he considered such stereotypes "silly". Of course he does, he's five years old and that's what he's been told to think. That means exactly squat in the grand scheme of things. But the fact remains that he is aware of what the stereotypes of gendered behaviour are, he understands that they exist and how they apply. That he is being encouraged to disregard them is, in my book, a positive thing. But that kid ain't gender neutral, more gender ambivalent.

I've seen some interestingly outraged responses to this story in the media. A favourite headline has accused the parents of "neutering" their son. Bollocks. Most proscribed gendered behaviours are nonsense anyway. What's Action Man if he's not a doll? He might have shorter hair than Barbie, but otherwise what's the difference? Equally, Barbie's hot pink Hummer is still a toy car, however you dress it up. There's more cross-over in these areas than most people realise. Ultimately most kids' toys are props that encourage imaginative play, that's all. It is the adults that put a gendered spin on these things, and that is what the children in turn pick up.

Who says that a girl should wear pink and a boy should wear blue? Actually up until WWI it was the other way round. I forget what changed it, but in the Victorian era boys would wear frilly pink dresses until they were three or four at least. They still grew up into very reserved, emotionally restrained and standoffish men, for the most part. These days if you tried to put your three year old son in a pink frock (1) he'd refuse, screaming, because it's 'girly' - they pick this stuff up pretty quick, and (2) you'd probably have social services knocking on your door sharpish. At the very least, the neighbours would be horrified.

But why does anyone actually care? So what if little Sasha is raised differently to his classmates. Will Sasha encourage the other boys in his class to start playing with dolls, dress in pink, and generally behave in an effeminate way? Is gender neutrality catching?

The inference is that if Sasha grows up less male, he grows up more female. Heaven forbid, they might even be turning him gay. Now does 'less male' really equate to 'more female'? Are male and female binaries that we vacillate between? Or is gendered identity more of a continuum, a sliding scale? I personally subscibe to the latter view. Manly men, girly men, butch women and femmes exist all around us: some a gay, some are straight, some are neither, or something in between. Gendered identity is fluid, and it is performative. We are all playing a role when we act in typically 'male' or 'female' ways. The burly meathead who spends half his life in the gym bulking up is acting a part just as much as the drag queen performing a routine. In fact, he's taking it far more seriously, because the drag queen's act is ironic. I dare you to ask the next gym bunny you see if his gendered performance is for real.

I bet you anything that Sasha's more feminine ways are bullied out of him sharpish. Human beings are creatures that like to belong, and he'll no doubt conform pretty quickly to what his peers consider acceptable, no matter what his parents think. After all, they're not forcing him to dress in drag and play with dolls: they're just giving him the choice to express himself how he wants. If they try and force him to be less rigid in his identity as he grows up then I'm sure they will damage him: but they'll only be doing to him what they consider that society would have done anyway, just in reverse. As long as he grows up feeling free to wear what he wants, and play how he wants, then I don't see that his unorthodox upbringing will have any detrimental affect on his psyche: if anything, he'll probably emerge a better adjusted person than most of his peers.

Children are expressive creatures, endlessly imaginative and generally accepting of the world as it is presented to them. It's adults that fuck them up. One of my favourite short stories makes exactly that point - Thomas Kearnes' This House is Not a Home. It's less than 1000 words: read it. I insist. It's brilliant. Then think twice the next time you encourage a child to act in a proscribed manner.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Writing a Bestseller

2012-01-24T11:28:00.000Z

A fellow indie pointed me towards a very tongue-in-cheek website that calculates if your book's going to be a bestseller or not. Just upload 7000 characters of your story, select your genre, and presto! Instant feedback. I stuck in the opening chapters of my WIP and would you look at that, 20/20. Apparently I'm writing the perfect romance.

Of course this formula works by calculating word complexity and average sentence length, and compares each sample with overall trends in genre. It therefore means everything and nothing. It means stylistically I'm bang on, but says nothing about the actual plot. It couldn't. So much of what makes a good book is subjective - just look at the number of 1* reviews the "classics" get if you don't believe me.

That doesn't mean I'm not being just a little bit smug about it. I only put in the sample for a giggle, thinking my paranoia could have free rein when I got a score back of 1/20. Instead I got another screenprint that I can frame. Happiness is.

Christo & Damien are coming close to release: stay tuned for more details in the upcoming weeks. Word count currently stands at 80,000 (320 pages) but there's room for a little bit more yet. I'm working with betas to polish up the storyline at the moment. I'm also trying to decide on a title (why oh why is that always the last thing that seems to fall into place?) Be prepared for lots of angst, lots of drama, and lots of really hot sex.

In other news...I've been interviewed like crazy again. Check out Author Interrupted and Siefken Publications!

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Hitting the Right Keys: Writing Sex

2012-01-22T19:22:00.000Z

Yes, I'm going to talk about sex. In detail. If you're prudish, I suggest you click here instead: Fluffy Kittens. (Actually it's worth clicking for a giggle).

In specific, I want to talk about the different ways that men and women write about sex. I write m/m romance, and I read that genre an awful lot. Purely for research purposes, you understand... Now this is an odd genre to be in, both as a reader and a writer, because straight women just love, love, love to read and write this stuff. M/M is not the domain of gay men. Not for the most part, anyway.

That I'm a dyke writing in the genre is, for the moment, irrelevant. Just chalk it up to another of my oddities.

Now I can read any book in the genre and I guarantee you that by the sex scene I will know if the author is a man or a woman. Why? Completely different style of narrative, so different that it overarches any differences in authorial voice. The individual is subsumed by their gender when they get down to the knitty-gritty. These differences are obvious in several areas:

1. Measurements
If a man is writing about dick, I guarantee he'll give you a measurement. A women, conversely, will not. It's a fact. Somewhere in a book written by a man will be a mention of someone's "eight-inch rod" or some-such. Women will use descriptors such as long and thick, but they won't put a number on it. I've read books written by men that will give you both the length and the girth, in inches and centimetres. The old joke is true, size matters to men. For women it's almost an irrelevance. It ain't the size of the boat, it's the motion of the ocean, no doubt.

2. Foreskins
What are they? What are they for? The extent of my experience with this strange appendage is discovering one very, very drunken night that they will stretch for an awfully long way, and then make a very satisfying snap when they're released and they ping back into position. But men seem to think that they're very, very important. When the author is female, there will be little to no mention of foreskins at all. If a man is writing you'll know in a second if a man is cut or uncut, and if uncut, how it moves, how it feels, at what point it rolls back, everything.

3. Euphemisms
You'd expect these to be the domain of the women, right? Wrong. Most women will stick to pretty basic terms - cock, dick, even penis. If you're reading a book with a "mammoth dong" in it, then I bet you anything a man wrote it. Personally I couldn't bring myself to use an expression like that without dying laughing, but men have no such qualms. Sometimes I think euphemisms can work brilliantly - one of my favourites described one man's member as a "beer can". Instantly you know exactly what the author means: bloody thick. Men are much more in-your-face with the whole penis thing all over: women will focus much more readily on the body as a whole, rather than individual parts. Men like to (forgive me) slap you in the face with it, but they'll manage to be both coarser and less offensive with their language.

4. Hook-Ups
Generally speaking, women like their romance. They want to see a relationship, or at least the potential for one, between the two (or three, or four...) characters who are getting it on. This can backfire into the dreaded insta-love, but the other option is unthinkable: brainless animal sex. As a rule, if you're reading a story where two guys go at it in an alleyway thirty seconds after meeting each other for the first time, it's a male fantasy. If afterwards they kiss passionately, exchange numbers, and declare that they've been searching for each other all their lives, it's female.

Why does any of this actually matter? Well as an author, it means I need to be sensitive to what my demographic wants to read. For every man who buys a book in this genre, I bet there's ten women. Certainly the women are more vocal members of forums, and leave more reviews in any case. So as an author, trying to sell as many books as I can and get as many good reviews to boot, I need to please the women. (And suddenly the reason why a dyke might write in this genre becomes obvious...this stuff is a bona fide chick magnet). That there are more women than men makes sense, if you think about it. The men can go out there and actually do it: the women just want the fantasy.

So to keep the ladies happy all I need to do is get two guys together in as mushy and then as erotic as way as possible, keeping my vocabulary simple and a little bit vague, right? Wrong again. Because the rules of what does and doesn't go in gay sex in this genre are pretty strict. As in I've seen a book get absolutely decimated in reviews purely because the two characters do it without lube. Seriously. Here's how it goes down:

Instant and permanent hard-on
Lots of foreplay
More pre-cum than you would imagine it was possible for one man to produce (although I'm no expert...)
Optional (brief) reference to foreskin here
Lots of lubricant
Introduction of digits into anal passage: commencing with one and working up to three - no more, no less
The main event
Hard-on remains
Ability to shoot again almost immediately mandatory

These aren't men, they're supermen. Even I know that a lot of what I've just listed is minimally unlikely, if not impossible. At least, after the age of twenty. This ain't gay sex, it's a fantasy of gay sex. A bit like how straight men imagine two women go at it.

Truth: despite popular preconceptions, most men do not get hard every time the wind changes.
Truth: foreplay is for pussies. Literally.
Truth: there isn't always lube. Spit works perfectly well, and sometimes it's fun to just go at it and ride the burn.
Truth: a lot of this prep work is nonsense, unless you're dealing with a tight-assed virgin. Plus, who set the rule that says three fingers is the right amount? Why not two, or four?

Suddenly what is possible in this genre - and will be popular - is restricted to a pretty narrow premise.

This does raise some interesting ideas about men and women. These days it's popular to imagine that modern, liberated women enjoy pornography and sex as much as men. In their own way, they do. But it's far from the same way. Romance is as much the modern woman's porn as it was the Victorian woman's. The descriptions of the act itself are far more graphic, but all the fluff around it is the same. Ultimately women crave a connection, they want love, not just sex. Maybe we haven't evolved that far after all.

That doesn't mean that men don't want love. Of course they do, and they enjoy the stories written by and for women just as much as women enjoy the stories written by and for men. What this comes down to is the age-old truth that all romance is fantasy. In real life the cowboy who's been in love with his best friend since, like, for ever is just as likely to get his ass kicked as licked if he confesses his feelings. Probably more likely. In real life, the best sex you've ever had is just as likely to come from a one-night-stand who'll never call you back as with someone you're going to spend the rest of eternity with. Actually one of my favourite one-liners has more than a little truth in it: Why are the best lays always the biggest dicks?

Of course, not every book in this genre is a formulaic cliche. There are some outstanding works out there, stuff that will genuinely move you, will change the way you think about love and relationships. And there is never a right or wrong way to enjoy sex - providing all parties are consenting adults, of course! What works for one person won't work for another, and that's the way it should be. Diversity is everything, it's what makes us human, and nowhere are we more diverse than in bed. I just think it's interesting to see the ways the two sexes think about and react to sex and relationships, and to realise that we're not always as liberated and evolved as we like to think we are.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

The Name on My Lips ~ Flash Fiction

2012-01-11T13:36:00.000Z

Life is more tragic than anything that can be written. It is the most fantastic, perplexing, monstrously-beautiful thing. Simply being alive is more frightening than dying a thousand deaths. That’s what you told me, that’s exactly what you said. I know your words so well because after you’d fallen asleep I wrote them down, in pencil at first, but it smudged so when I ran my finger across the lines that I feared they’d become illegible. I re-wrote them in pen, so that when I feel the page I can mark each word by the indent in the paper, and for too long now they’ve been all that I’ve got left of you. You were the indent in my life, you changed me, marked me forever. Sometimes, Heaven knows, I’ve desperately tried to erase you, I’ve tried to rub you out, anything so it wouldn’t hurt as much, but all I was doing was re-opening a wound that healed in time, but still left a scar. Forgive me, my love, for being so young and so, so foolish.

Death is no barrier between souls. I hope you believed that, in your final hours. I console myself that you did, because then you wouldn’t have been afraid. You never seemed afraid, but I was; I was afraid that you were protecting me, that you felt that you needed to be strong. I’m sorry that I was weak. I’m sorry that I cried to see you grow infirm before my eyes. I never saw you cry, I hope because you never did. It is a thought that haunts me now that I too am dying, that you felt unable to confide in me, because you would have been unable to console me once you’d finished speaking.

Pain was your friend. You said it reminded you who you were, and what you needed to say. Drugs took you away from me, so you refused them. Now that I too am in pain – constant, crippling pain – I understand how important our last months were to you, that you would endure it. I hope that, had it been me, I would have made the same decision. As your illness took hold I saw daily my foe Pain etched across your face, no matter how you tried to hide it. It was there in your clenched fist, in your stricken breath and your haunted eyes. I didn’t care for Pain’s friendship; I would have rather a life with you filled with things unsaid, than those last, terrible months. I knew all those things that you wanted to tell me, but I refuse to believe that you suffered in vain. I cling to the thought that you needed to say them for your own peace of mind, and not mine.

You had always been so proud: of your appearance, your achievements, your relationship with me. You kept your dignity while your body lost its battle with sickness, and although it hurt you to become as helpless as a newborn babe, you never grew bitter. I admit that sometimes I want to bar everyone from my room until I am dead, because I cannot stand the daily indignities that accompany the journey to death. It is in the darkest of moments that I remember your pride, and your humility. You understood in a way that I cannot how even the worst things that happen to our bodies cannot touch our souls.

I hope you never felt that I pitied you. I tried so hard to be compassionate, but now, when all I see are pitying glances, I dread that you knew what that feels like. I hope that my desperate need to be useful to you didn’t seem like duty. I hope that you saw nothing but love and affection in my eyes, and that you never had to think about people feeling sorry for you. I feel ungrateful every time I rail against it, but I despise knowing that my carers only tend to me because someone has to; I am just another job that needs doing. If you knew nothing else, if I can tell you nothing else, let me tell you that you were never a chore, and I never pitied you – I loved you too much for that.

All that sustains me is the hope that I will see you again. The very idea of you makes death seem preferable, almost welcome. Perhaps that is why I cannot understand why you were so optimistic about your own demise. Even if you believed, as you said, that we would meet each other again, that terrible wait lay ahead of you, with no one to meet you when you arrived. I made sure that you didn’t die alone, but you were alone when you entered death. What does dying feel like? It is something I have wondered more and more frequently as the moment draws near. Did you think about it too, in the dark nights when I had fallen asleep on a chair by your bed? As much as I try, I cannot picture what it could be like, I cannot believe that moving from this world to the next can be anything but painful. Perhaps what scares me the most is that all of this is an illusion, that once I die that will be the end of me. I can’t imagine how terrible it must be to not exist, and I can’t believe that a love as strong as ours can just end so completely that it would be like it never even was.

Do the dead remember their lives, or is death just another form of birth, and we start again at the beginning? I dread that you won’t remember me, or recognise me. I’m so very different from the person you said goodbye to all those years ago. Time has been cruel to me, but you will always be beautiful. Perhaps your compensation for dying young is that you can be as beautiful in the next life as you were in this. Even if you are there, and you do remember, how will you find me? Will you be waiting on some existential platform for me to arrive, or will we have to seek each other out? This world is a big place, and I can’t imagine the next one being any smaller. How then can I have hope that I will find you, among so many others who are also looking desperately for their loved ones?

I am dying, and I am scared. I am alone, but there could be no one to comfort me even if I weren’t. I know now how hard you struggled to protect me from the horrors that we all must face. I know that it is too late now to say all those things that I left unsaid, but I have to try. I am ashamed that your death scared me more than it did you, that when you struggled to speak I tried to silence those words you needed so desperately to say. I finally understand why you said them; they were not to console me then, but now. You knew I was mortal, even when I believed in immortality. Even as I watched you wasting away I never imagined that something so horrible could happen to me, and I am so, so humiliated that as much as I loved you, I thought as little of you as that.

Life is more tragic than anything that can be written. That’s what you told me, that’s what you said. Death is no barrier, pain is a friend. I cannot make all of your words come true, no matter how much I believe in them. Death is a barrier, I know that because soon I will be dead, and buried, and forgotten. Worst of all, I know that when I die you will too, because I am the only person who could keep you alive. Pain is not my friend. I know now all those things that didn’t concern me when I was young and healthy, but Pain strips my knowledge away, it takes over my body and my mind until I scream, and then the scream is all I can hear, or think, or know. Pain takes you away from me. Life is not tragic. Life is the most fantastic, perplexing, monstrously-beautiful, many-coloured, multi-faceted, living, breathing thing. Tragedy gives life its colour; it is when facing loss that we want love; destruction makes us crave harmony; death forces us to cling to life. I do not want to die.

Life is no more tragic than anything that can be written. I know now how true that is, because I have written this, that you might live on. Before you died you struggled to ensure that my life would carry on, and now I am returning that honour. My death needn’t be yours. Your words will survive, printed on paper as they have been for so long now, to console others who face their own demons, and doubts, and deaths. Perhaps this is truly how we survive, in our words, if not our deeds. The greatest acts of bravery are happening every day, and nobody notices. Yours will be honoured, you will be exalted, and for the first time in years, more people than I will know of your name.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

The Adoption ~ Flash Fiction

2012-01-09T20:09:00.000Z

Sofia was of an age where it was cool to hate everyone, regardless of the rights or wrongs of the ways in which they treat you. She couldn’t remember her real mother, the bitch who had abandoned her; her adoptive family were the only one she had ever known. Even though they had always been good to her, treating her better even than if she had been their own, her being a much-longed-for child, it was still considered apt to hate them. She had never considered them as anything less than her parents, and they took her pseudo-angst as the compliment that it was.

Erin had always longed for a baby. She was a simple girl, from a small town, and her hopes and dreams began and ended with marriage and children. The former had been simple enough, her having married her childhood sweetheart, as all simple girls do. He was a good enough man, and she had never thought of looking further afield, once she had found him. After the wedding they just assumed that the timing was wrong, that they were working too hard, that God would provide in His own good time. After several years of concerted effort she began to resent her body, for not providing for her husband. She had failed as a woman. After five years had passed she resented him, for failing her in the only truly manly thing she had ever asked of him. She wondered if she had been right not to stray when she was a young girl, she cursed the simplicity that believed in a simple life. After five years she resented making love, as it never resulted in anything. Long before the pleasure had evaporated from the act, it had become a pointless toil, an impossible uphill struggle towards an unobtainable goal. She could never relax and enjoy it; she was always too busy wondering which one of them was the failure; whose body was not performing according to nature. She wondered if Darwin was right about the survival of the fittest – and what happened to the soul wedded to calamity? Were they both unfit, or was one of them being held back? She was sure it was not her, she felt in her blood and bones and flesh that she could bear a child, if only she had the opportunity.

Leon was desperate for a happy life. All he had wanted was his sweetheart and his home. Anything else was a bonus. But she was manic, so desperate for children that she seemed to stop caring for him. When they were first married it wasn’t something that either of them really thought about. The timing was wrong, they were both working hard, the house wasn’t secure and they hadn’t held down jobs for long enough to think of planning a family. They had no savings. After several years he wondered if he was failing her in some way, being unable to provide her with the only thing that she had ever asked of him. They made love nightly for a two-week period every month, when she had calculated that she was at her most fertile. Each time the fruitless humping and sweating and aching under the terrible burden of having to produce something from it afterwards. He never told her, but many times he was unable to even finish the act, and he pretended. She was so consumed in the mechanics that she didn’t even seem to notice. After five years he slipped, he longed to know just once more what sex felt like when it was being had for its own sake. He ran into an old flame, a girl from before he met his wife, whom she knew nothing about. He had four unforgettably free months, which reawakened him to sex, to life, to himself. He knew that he loved his wife, and he called it off. Three months later she told him she was pregnant.

Natasha was frightened. She hadn’t planned on a baby, and certainly not without a husband. As certain as she was that she didn’t want it, she was just as certain that she didn’t want to kill it. All life is sacred, her parents had taught her that. She was lonely when she began the affair, that was all. By the time he called it off she had already had enough. Now she would be the girl with the reputation. She would have to move. When he suggested it, it seemed like the only possible thing to do. She hid the pregnancy as best she could, acted like a stranger when she met him and his wife at the hospital. She was alone for the birth, and only cried a little when they took her beautiful daughter away from her. It was the best thing. With the money they gave her she was free to start a new life, a long way away from where she had grown up, and where her daughter was going to be raised. Many years had passed, but she still cried a little, every day.

Sofia never really wondered about her birth mother. She knew that she was a woman from the same town, who had got into trouble with a married man and who had left as soon as the adoption papers were signed. Sometimes she wondered about her father though, the married man who must be somewhere close, never guessing that he had a daughter not far away. When she was in the town she would look at the men, wondering if she looked like any of them, wondering if this one or that might be him, wondering if she would ever know. She had seen her birth certificate: the father’s name was blank. She wondered if she would one day meet a man and feel an affinity with him, look into his eyes and see her own staring back. The only man she had ever really resembled was her adoptive father; which was lucky, if you think about it. It meant that people didn’t know unless she told them. They had always been honest with her about what they knew, how they got her, but she wasn’t always so keen to be honest herself. Sometimes she just wished she was a normal kid, so that all the question marks in her life would disappear.

Erin had hated her husband when he said they should adopt. That he had already found a child for them only made it worse – it was shock and surprise only that prevented her from refusing. She had never known that he thought the situation to be so hopeless, and it only confirmed to her that it must be him that was at fault, that maybe he was afraid that if he didn’t get her pregnant then she’d leave him to find a man who was up to the task. Maybe she would have. He was much more excited than she was. The mother he had found was some slut from the cheap end of town, who said she had lived there all her life and gone to the same school as them both, but she never remembered her. She had been sleeping with a married man and got caught out. Sometimes she cast around all the married men that she knew, wondering which one of them it was that had fathered her daughter unawares. She was always looking for men that resembled her daughter. It was strange, but she had never found any. Maybe he had moved away to prevent his wife hearing about the affair. This was only a small town after all.

Leon couldn’t believe that she didn’t see it. As far as he knew it was a standing joke in town that the only married man who looked like his daughter was him. Perhaps it is true that the last thing you see is that which is closest. He was torn with guilt every time he looked at his daughter, saw her searching, questioning, seeking a father in every corner of town. He had lied to her her whole life, and he hated himself for it. He longed for the truth to set him free. But he loved his wife. The truth would certainly set her free too – free from him. She would never stand the humiliation of it. Already people were talking, whispering, nudging, smirking. Before long she would find out, and she would leave him. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. Oddly enough, she was amenable to his suggestion of moving; maybe she had sensed something wasn’t right, maybe she knew and wanted to get away from the place where it happened and the people that knew. Maybe she was just tired of being the small town girl. A place was settled and they relocated swiftly. His daughter hated changing schools, but maybe one day she would forgive him. Once they had gone he felt such relief as he hadn’t felt since he had ended the affair, all those years ago. He had been given a second chance.

Natasha was unhappy. Her new start had gone badly, she hated her job and the money had long since run out. She was lonely, and she missed her child. It hurt more as the years passed, not less, and as she counted each birthday she longed more for contact with her. She felt that she should explain everything, tell her why she wished she could take it all back. One day she made a decision; she wrote a very long and painful letter, and she posted it. She only hoped that her daughter would forgive her.

Lord Shrivam ~ Flash Fiction

2012-01-07T22:49:00.000Z

Lord Shrivam woke early, pulled on a mauve dressing robe and made his way downstairs to the breakfast room. The servants brought him his two soft-boiled eggs, three slices of dry toast and a pot of tea, only breaking the silence when he bade them good morning. They agreed and left him with his copy of the Times and the deafening sound of silence that closed down around him and suffocated.

Lady Shrivam woke late and took her breakfast in bed, rashers of bacon, toast with dripping and a fried egg with a copy of the latest romance. It wasn’t just his wife’s crass taste that offended him, but it was high on his list. She chattered nonsense to a maid he paid to listen to it, anything to stop her speaking to him. He hated the sound of her high, girlish voice even more than he hated the silence that accompanied him.

He finished breakfasting and met with his valet in his closet, a brief encounter, not that any of them were ever long enough, something to stave off the quiet and to empty his coffers a little faster. He let the threat of unemployment hang in the air afterwards, mocking him soundlessly. He wondered to himself where the gardener was, if he was going mad, if his wife suspected, knew, cared.

She took an age to dress, harrying her maid back and forth between wardrobe and bed, selecting and reselecting outfits that made little impression, and were never right even though he’d picked them for her himself. She had never felt passion like the kind of which she read. She had never even felt wanted. She wondered briefly where the gardener was, if her husband knew, if he cared.

He padded noiselessly around the house, his slippered feet softly grazing the carpet where they touched, pausing frequently to stare out of the windows, to watch the butler open lattices and clear plates. A deep laugh emanated from the bowels of the house, shocking the silence into defence. Were they mocking him, those quiet and all-seeing few who catered to his every need?

She tripped merrily down the stairs, jewels jingling, nails scraping the banister, skirts rustling. The noise made her feel better, reassured her. There was nothing so destructive as the still that accompanied her husband. With every speechless encounter she felt herself drowning, sucked into the cold and menacing intent she imagined lurked behind his tightly pressed lips. Sometimes she longed to scream, just to get a reaction.

He met the gardener by the back door, encouraged him to detour into the stables. Wondered where the groom was. A horse nickered softly, a quiet, mocking noise that seemed to reverberate long after he had pulled up his trousers and left. Things were simpler when he was a boy, when all the borders did it. If a cow is deprived of salt it will lick it from the ground. Where are those boys now, what did they grow into? Had all their fathers tricked them into marriage too, with hollow promises that things would change, that they had done the same, but that they loved their wives? Did any of them ever love the women they were tied to?

She settled uneasily in the parlour room, picked unhappily at a tapestry that she had undone and restarted more times than she could count. It was supposed to be Cupid, but she couldn’t picture him, having never met him herself. She remembered her mother’s words, how she had promised that her husband would love her, that she would be happy. She said nothing of being married to a ghost. She remembered the girls she had grown up with, their shared dreams of a Heathcliff or a Darcy, and she wondered how many of them had actually got what they wanted. She pricked her finger with the needle and cried out, watched the fleck of blood stain the cherub’s bow. It seemed a bad omen and she threw the thing from her.

He settled uneasily on the edge of his chair at the dining table, smiled stiffly at her across its length, picked unhappily at a stain on his trouser leg. Seeing her made him feel dirty, guilty, like a failure. He couldn’t even have children with her. He wondered for the thousandth time that day if she suspected, if she cared. He had felt like this since the earliest days of their marriage, since he spent their wedding night with a waiter he tipped handsomely for his pleasure. There was no one in this world to love him, if he couldn’t love her.

She braced herself steadily against the back of her chair, awaiting the onslaught that he would hurl noiselessly at her. With every tight sip, pinched breath and bitter mouthful he would accuse her more. Her husband did not love her and she was sure that the world must know it. Servants talked, her friends and family talked, everyone in society must talk, but her husband never did. So much talking, except for where it mattered! She wished there was something to say, but there never was. She finished her meal in silence, afraid even to meet his eyes.

He passed the groom in the orchard but let him go, tired of paying for favours that were too dearly bought. All he wanted was someone to hold and kiss, but those things were priceless. Each time cost him dearer than the last, and he was heartsick with it. He climbed the stairs wearily, undressed in the dark and slid softly into bed beside her. Her back was turned. Left with no alternative, he pulled her gently to him in a tender embrace. She kept her back turned, but curled her arms around his. It wasn’t what either of them wanted, they had left it too late for that, but it was better than nothing, and that was all either of them could hope for.

All Romance eBooks

2012-01-06T15:26:00.000Z

...is my new favourite website.

I have been meaning to publish there since the beginning of December, but never seemed to get round to it. Last weekend I decided to rectify that, and oh my I'm glad I did. As I type, these are my statistics:

Blood & Ash - rated 5*
#1 in Vampires & Werewolves
#1 in Sci-fi & Fantasy
#4 in Gay Books overall

Fire & Ice
#3 in Sci-fi & Fantasy

Danny's Boy - rated 4*
#1 in Family & Relationships

Four Chances
#1 in Anthologies & Bundles

Check out my Facebook page for a never-ending series of screenprints! I seem to have finally found my platform. I have made more in four days than I made in my first four months on Amazon.

In other news Four Chances has taken off on iTunes. Fire & Ice dipped in and out of the Australian chart back in November, but Four Chances has blown that out of the water. Statistics up to today:

American Chart
First entry 09 Dec #9
High point 15 Dec #7

UK Chart
First entry 14 Dec #5
High point 14 Dec #5

Australian Chart
First entry 11 Dec #24
High point 20 Dec #1 (woop!)

Canadian Chart
First entry 02 Jan #20
High point 02 Jan #20

Who knows why a book takes off where and when it does? I'm sure it helped on ARe that all of my books were included in the 'Recommended New Releases' circular distributed by Wildfire. iTunes...not a clue. Blood & Ash is currently #2 in Gay books on Smashwords and has been since Christmas Day.

I am eternally thrilled and grateful for each and every reader that I get. If you leave me a good review I'll be a friend for life. Speaking of which, I got two fantastic reviews for Blood & Ash and Fire & Ice on Amazon over Christmas. I think the one for Blood & Ash does a better job of summarising the novel than my synopsis does - author beaten at her own game by reviewer!

I am sure that some of this success is a direct result of the Kindle Select programme rolling out in December. For those of you who don't know, Amazon.com has implemented a new feature for Prime members, who can now loan one Kindle book a month for free. All of the Amazon authors were given the opportunity to join the programme, in return for offering Amazon exclusivity. I passed on the offer, but many, many other authors have taken them up on it. Noticed a sudden decrease in the number of available titles on B&N, iTunes, et al? Well that's why. Does that make the books of the three of us that are left easier to find? You bet your ass it does. Every author I've spoken to who remained with the other channels has reported an upswing in sales, and we are all thrilled.

I'm still typing away furiously at the next project, which is headed full-steam towards 50,000 words and probably has another 30k left in it. Not bad for something I thought would be maybe a 15k short story!

And in other exciting news, I'm looking into getting new covers for the Lost Realm series. I can't wait!!

After that I promise, promise, promise that I'll devote every waking second to the conclusion of the Lost Realm trilogy. Book three has been racing around in my head for months and is almost at the point where it's demanding to be written. Watch this space...

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Gay Vets and Other Political Stuff

2012-01-03T22:44:00.000Z

I would like to share a video. Even if you don't read the rest of this post, watch this. It's brilliant.

I'm not going to rant on about Mitt Romney, because TBH I've not paid him that much attention. I am a bad, bad homosexual. But I'm also English, he's not really shown up on my radar that often. This video is a beaut, though, for a number of reasons. Firstly you've got the obvious class parallels - they're the same age, but while one of them was risking his life as a soldier in Vietnam the other was safely ensconced in college. One of them in in a sharp suit, earns a fortune, is a presidential candidate hopeful and doesn't look like he's ever done a hard day's work in his life. The other is dressed in plaid and a baseball cap and looks like he's lived every one of his years. Interestingly, if you described their appearances, which one would most people guess was gay?

I'm not getting into the rights and wrongs of the Vietnam war, or any war for that matter. Those arguments are long and convoluted and someone will always disagree with you. I walk a line somewhere between agreeing that it was shameful and thinking that the overly-sentimental poetry that it inspired is equally shameful, in its own way. The point is that this man has fought for his country (I'm not going to get into the issue of conscription for the minute) and his country hasn't fought for him. Worse, it refuses to consider fighting for him in the future. You can see the exact moment when Romney realises that he's made a terrible mistake with this bloke. He dies a bit behind the eyes. This is a nation, let us not forget, that has only in the last few months repealed DADT. I bet they weren't asking this guy if he was gay when they were forcing his generation to go to war.

Romney gets a lot of flack for the part the Mormons played in repealing gay marriage in California. I think it's probably a bit simplistic to lay all the blame at his door, or credit him with enough influence to halt the church's donations to anti-gay movements if he so chose. That doesn't mean that I don't think he was influential in pushing that agenda. Just that he probably isn't powerful enough to stop it. I'd like to see how he'd react if a state tried to invalidate his marriage, however. Or any other churches' marriages, for that matter. Imagine if someone tried to nullify all mixed-race marriages. Or all cross-generational ones. Marriage is and should always be considered first and foremost an affirmation of love, in whatever form it takes. As long as both parties are consenting adults then why not?

Of course marriage also impinges on other spheres - financial ones. Do you know how much extra tax a same-sex couple denied the right of marriage can pay over a lifetime? Think of all the spousal benefits that straight couples are afforded by the government, and try and put a monetary figure on them. Is it really any wonder that there is so much opposition to same-sex marriage in government? Think about it in terms of investment and return: say I "invest" 20% of my salary each year via tax, expecting to reap certain rewards (for example, in the UK the NHS service, schools, pensions and all the rest of it). Well I got 18 years of schooling out of it, although the standard was a little dubious in places. I then got some subsidy towards university for my Bachelor's degree. (I attended when tuition fees were a "nominal" £3k). I paid for my Master's myself, thank you government. Unless I get hit by a bus that's basically it for me until I reach pensionable age (which for my generation will be never).

Compare that with one of my friends. We went to the same school and college. She married her childhood sweetheart (vomit). They spawned my beautiful and brilliant godson. She availed herself of all manner of NHS treatment from the moment of conception to birth and beyond. She even got free dental treatment. She gets child tax credits and rebates and goodness knows what else. This is not someone who had a child to mooch off the state, this is someone who earns more than me. She isn't entitled to any kind of 'hardship' benefit, but still the government lavishes money - or rewards of some kind - on her, her husband and her son. The government actively rewards following the heterosexual paradigm of marriage and children, as some of the members of the lower echelons of society are all-too aware. It galls that I hand over my hard-earned wages to help raise the next generation of Vicky Pollards.

The cold, hard truth of the matter is that gay people are being prevented from marrying in order to fund the benefits traditionally presented to heterosexual couples. Now the tide is turning and some countries and states are bowing to reason and allowing gay marriage (or "civil partnerships" - whatever they are), there is suddenly a big concern about how many of these benefits are also transferable. That is the question that Mitt was being asked by our vet - why can't his husband have the same rights and benefits that his wife would have (were he to have one)? It's a valid question, and the politicians know it. That's why they don't like it. You can dance around the wording of the constitution as much as you want, what it comes down to is cold, hard cash. Let's face it, the founding fathers had no qualms about dozens of practices that we would find questionable if not downright obscene today (slavery, anyone?).

In a time of recession, particularly, there is more incentive than ever to quash the gay marriage and equal rights movement in these spheres. Much is made of the fact that we are a tiny, tiny minority (the British government is fond of publishing reports calculating that we are "only" 1% of the population). Whether 1% or 10% or, hell, 40%, the point is that a minority is subsidising the masses. Trying to artificially reduce our numbers actually makes that more outrageous, not less.

Of course, some will argue that not all straight people benefit from tax breaks awarded on marriage or childbirth. No, they're not. But they have an option to do so. Should they be lucky enough to meet someone who wants to marry them, and who they want to marry, they can. Should they be cursed with children, at least they get some government cashback to compensate.

Yes, gay couples can and do have children, more so now than ever, and that is A Good Thing. That doesn't mean we get the same benefits, and that's the point. Moreover, if we choose not to reproduce we get significantly less than our straight counterparts. And when a man has been asked by his country to risk his life in a foreign land fighting a stupid, ideological war that was doomed to failure from the offset, then I think the least that country can do is offer his partner the same advantages as it lavishes on the partners of his comrades in arms.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Charitable Thoughts

2012-01-01T22:29:00.000Z

A new year, a new start, and I'm thinking a lot about charity. I've noticed an increase in ads urging me to give to every cause from water for Africa to blankets for the dogs' home, no doubt capitalising on the flush of guilt that usually accompanies Christmas and New Year excesses. For just £1 a month I can put children through school, build wells and villages, prevent a whole host of animals from being needlessly put down, and help the blind to see. (Or buy the short-sighted new glasses, anyway).

It is too easy at this time of year to spend a fortune on tat, eat too much, throw too much food away, and generally feel very self-satisfied with our lot. But this is not a "what are you doing, you skinflint?" post. I hate being told that I should do anything, charity or not. I do a bit of consumer feedback, surveys etc (I get to see all the film trailers months before the film is out!!) and I recall doing one for a major charity about 6mo ago, for a new TV ad. When faced with questions like "What does this advert make you feel?" My first response was something along the lines of "this charity is clearly given too much money". Forgive me, but if I am going to donate £1 a month -- or whatever amount I choose -- then I want to know that as much of that £1 as possible is going to a good cause, not to their next glossy primetime slot touting for even more cash.

I am a firm believer that charity begins at home, or as close to it as possible. I want to see where my money is going and be sure that it is doing some good. I'd much rather buy a copy of the Big Issue than donate to Oxfam, for example. I can see the person that I'm benefiting that way. And there is no way in hell I'm giving my hard earned cash to save a species that can't even be coaxed into bonking in a zoo. Pandas clearly want to be left alone to die. Thankfully not everyone is like me, or some causes would be in big trouble, not least the pandas.

I have before me the bright yellow local Times of a small Scottish community, which will remain nameless because the area is very close to my heart and I have a lot of family and history tied up with it. This fortnightly missive contains a wealth of information about what is happening in the local area, and every issue I am staggered by the generosity of people who are giving time and money not to impress, but because it's the right thing to do. More significantly, this is not a wealthy community by any means. Being so small, the call for white collar professionals is low. A handful of teachers, a doctor. That's about it. Most of the people work in construction, retail or the nursing home. There's a farming community but honestly they stick with it more for the tradition than the cash. I don't know of anyone who can afford to work the land and husband animals full time. There's not even a resident vet, despite the number of small crofters.

These are not people with a great deal of spare cash to flash around. They're not poor, but they're not rich, either, just like most people. Yet not an issue goes by without some act of charity catching my eye. The most memorable this year was two girls who turned 21 within a day or two of each other, who asked that instead of presents, donations were made in their names to a charity of their choice. How many 21 year olds do you know who would be that selfless? Let me tell you now, I wouldn't have done it. And yet in this community it wasn't that unusual. Most of their teenagers and young adults spend a great deal of time doing mad and brave things for charity.

There might be a good reason for this. This is a very isolated community: the nearest city is over an hour's drive away, and there's only five buses a week that go there. The only place to get a drink is in the bar of one of the handful of hotels that cater to tourists in the summer. The cinema arrives on the back of a bus once every couple of months, sets up in the school carpark and shows one film. There's no ice rink or shopping centre or any of the usual things that teenagers need to survive. There are stunning beaches, miles of moorland and mountains to explore, lochs to fish in and even an Iron Age settlement. You can see all the fifteen-year-olds rolling their eyes now, can't you?

Perhaps it's this lack of stimulus that makes them turn to charity work. After all, if Cancer Research will let you go skydiving in return for a donation, why not? And the Duke of Edinburgh scheme gets you out of the house. Lots of their students go on exchange trips and fascinating gap years.

The role of the church is also no doubt significant. This community, whose numbers can be measured in four figures, are ministed to by three Free Churches of Scotland, a Church of Scotland (yes it is a different thing), a Free Presbyterian Church, two Episcopal Churches and a Catholic. That's a lot of God to go round. Now the church and I have a history, and I can't say I'm a fan of any organised religion, stress on organised. The miracle of faith staggers me, but I've read the Bible, cover to cover, and personally I don't buy it. The local Jehovah's Witnesses have blacklisted my house since I invited two of them in to discuss the true name of God one time. This devil can certainly quote the scriptures. But I digress...

Astonishingly, this is an increasingly secular community. My mother still fondly recalls the summer that she was ostracised for pegging out the washing on a Sunday. (And trust me, the weather is so volatile up there that if you get a good drying day, you take it.) I know one woman who hasn't cut her hair in her life, because her church forbids it. She's 95. I'm sure that the presence of the church does encourage some to give more of their time and money, but it's not all church events that are recorded in their newsletter. Not even mainly.

No, what I think makes a difference is that a lot of the money is raised for local causes. In a community of have-littles there is a sense of achievement in providing for the have-nones. It no doubt helps that everyone is affected by these acts of charity, either directly or indirectly. Which brings me full circle to paying over the odds for my Big Issue. I don't have monthly direct debits or regular charities that I support, but when I do put my hand in my pocket I want to know that I've made a difference, not made some fat cat richer.

I admire the charitable efforts of this community because there's something Utopian about it: a community pulling together and all helping each other out, pooling their resources and ensuring that their more vulnerable members don't flounder. It's nice, as we head full steam into the second decade of the twenty-first century, to know that that attitude is still alive and well in the more isolated pockets of the western world. Charity doesn't have to be extravagant, or even public. Sometimes the little things make all the difference, and they don't even have to be monetary. I remember a conversation I had with a homeless girl about five years ago, when I gave more of my time than my money, who told me that the thing that hurt the most was the number of people who passed her without even acknowledging that she was there. I never, ever pass a homeless person who speaks to me without speaking back: even if I've honestly got no cash on me I tell them that. I might be the only person to speak nicely to them that day.

I know that everyone's still feeling the pinch of recession, everyone's struggling. But if you're reading this then I guarantee that there are thousands of people worse off than you are, even in your own community. Charity has developed into some abstract concept tied in with images of starving children and dirty water on some distant continent. It's not that simple or, often, that dramatic. Kindness is about more than putting your hand in your pocket once in a while. Sometimes it is the little things that cost us nothing and mean nothing to us that are the most significant. Charity can ultimately benefit us all and hell, if I have got the God thing wrong then it can't hurt in the next life, can it? Without it, you might come back as a cockroach...

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T15:57:00.000Z

By the time you read this...I will be drunk. I have to do something, I've turned 17 for the 11th time today. (No, I'm not 28. Count again). It's depressing.

I'm not making a new year resolution. I never stick to them anyway. 2012 is set to be an eventful enough year as it it. In the next twelve months I'm going to publish at least 2 more novels, celebrate my first anniversary as an author, and buy a house. That's more than enough excitement for one person, who is creeping ever closer to what used to be pensionable age.

In deference to my age I'm spending this evening with my extended family: the friends that I've known since high school. This September we celebrated our Sweet 16th, that's how long we've all know each other. Terrifying. And we now have our very own metronome counting down the years: my three year old godson, child of a pair of highschool sweethearts (vomit).

Until then, I think I'd better have a nap. Don't want to fall asleep and miss my kiss at midnight!

Until next year...

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Starting Over ~ The Death of Romance

2011-12-28T18:15:00.000Z

I've been thinking a lot recently about romance -- or, more accurately, how romance ends. I have read so many books this year that end with a HEA that, often, seems to fall flat. I know romance is all about two people getting together and staying that way for the ever and ever that only fiction allows, but I seem to have read the same story a hundred different ways in the last six months. Boy A meets Boy B (it's mainly m/m romance I've been reading), there's a nanosecond of angst and then all their problems magically fall away and they swan off into the sunset.

Let me be the first to call bullshit. Not only is this not representative and not realistic, but I honestly think it damages all the really good HEAs that are out there. It makes the HEA predictable at best -- mandatory at worst. Not every story can have a HEA, not even romance. That is the lesson that a lot of people seem to have forgotten. If it is going to have a HEA, at least make it one I can believe in. Would Wuthering Heights still be considered a classic if Cathy and Heathcliff had run off together into the night after Cathy proclaimed in her most melodramatic fashion: "I am Heathcliff!" Doubtful. Why? Because Victorian society would never have stood for it. Hell, they barely stood for it as it was. I am not a proponent of the view that romance needs to turn into fantasy in order to work. Suspension of disbelief, yes. Rewriting real life into something completely alien, no. Not unless you're deliberately setting your story in a fantasy world. If it's supposed to be contemporary, then make it so. I'd much rather see a couple beat the odds than have the odds just magically erased by an overly-sentimental author.

But I'm not just ranting: I'm putting my money where my mouth is. The novel I'm working on at the minute is in many ways a response piece to some of the more cliched stories I've read. It starts with a perfect relationship, two guys who meet at university, aged 20, who fall in love and live happily ever after. In their case, 'ever after' last precisely eight years. How do you move on when the fairytale ends? What do you do when the fantasy fails you? This is the question that I am posing.

Christo and John's relationship doesn't end with infidelity, betrayal, or tragedy of any kind. That is the saddest thing about it. Sometimes love just fades, as quickly and as mysteriously as it appeared in the first place. Sometimes people grow apart, and it's no-one's fault. There's no-one to blame, no anger or bitterness or recrimination. Only loss, and sorrow. How do you move on from that? How do you find the faith to love again when you've had a perfect relationship and it fell apart so easily? Why would you take a chance on another relationship when you've already lost everything once already?

Enter Damien. He holds the same position as Christo in the same company, and they're both openly gay, but there the similarities end. Damien's the guy with a different man on his arm for every event, he's smooth and arrogant and always impeccably turned out. Christo hates him. But god, he's gorgeous. Damien could be exactly what Christo needs to get him over John, but he knows it, the bastard.

It's only going to be a fling. Nothing serious, nothing that will affect their working relationship, or the rest of their lives. So why are they fighting through the night rather than letting go and walking away? Why does Damien's secretive nature bug Christo so much? And why does he even care that the other man might not be as tough as he pretends to be?

It's not perfect -- far from it. They don't trust each other, they don't know each other and hell, half the time they don't even like each other very much. They both know that this is a mistake, that it can only end one way, and they're better off getting out. This can only end badly, right?

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Merry Christmas!!

2011-12-24T12:54:00.000Z

Season of goodwill, peace on earth, joy to the world, and little drummer boys. Ho ho ho.

This year I'd like to offer all my followers a present ~ a free copy of my first novel, Blood & Ash. Just follow the link and type in code AE28J at the checkout. Coupon expires after Boxing Day (Dec 26th to you Americans!) so get going!

I've had an exceptional year, and I'd like to share some of my good fortune. I've picked you all up along the way, but how many of you were there at the beginning? On 26 June 2011 I stopped dreaming and hit 'publish' on my first book. I hoped maybe I'd get some sales, but I didn't have much of an idea how many copies I'd sell. Imagine my surprise on the first day when I sold 5 books.

For those of you who have never published a book, you will never understand the sheer, unbridled joy that accompanies seeing your book available on Amazon. Hell, I was thrilled when I made my first proof copy and put it on my Kindle. It's a feeling that I'll never get tired of.

Since Blood & Ash was published I've released four more books. Half-way through writing the sequel I realised that to get the ending I wanted I needed to give a peripheral character a backstory. Fenton: The Loneliest Vampire was born. Fire & Ice, the second novel in the Lost Realm series, was released in October. Finally, I've also written two contemporary books: Danny's Boy was released in August, and Four Chances: A Short Story Quartet in November.

Then I had the nerve-wracking experience of waiting for my first reviews to come in. I am thrilled to announce that every single book I've written has been rated 5* at least once. Fire & Ice and Four Chances have been rated exclusively 5*.

I've also started this blog, got myself a facebook fan page, a twitter account and joined goodreads. I've made friends and yes, fans, in my first six months. I've been interviewed, I've interviewed others, I've seen my books ranked #1 in genre on Amazon and iTunes, and I distribute with ten different channels. I've even been nominated for an award by the Goodreads M/M Group. (Please, please tell me you voted!!)

So what's next? Well in 2012 I intend to publish at least two novels: a WIP with the working title of 'Christo & Damien' ~ check out goodreads for extracts. This story started life as a short for my Four Chances collection, but it grew and grew and is still growing. I am also going to conclude the Lost Realm trilogy, and bring Fenton's story to a close. Fans of the character had better bow down and worship Joann, who has hounded me on goodreads to give him the ending that he deserves. Fenton's Absolution will be published alongside the concluding part of the trilogy.

Once the Lost Realm series is complete I'm looking into publishing the entire collection in paperback, probably around summer 2012. After that...who knows? I've got something completely different in the pipeline, a traditional sci-fi story, and dozens more ideas all clamouring to be born.

I'd like to thank each and every one of you for sticking with me this year, and promise that 2012 will be even more exciting.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Vote for Fenton!!

2011-12-21T12:42:00.000Z

Yes, Fenton: the Loneliest Vampire has been nominated for a Goodreads M/M Romance group 2011 Member's Choice award. The category is Best Title. I'm absurdly excited ~ not least because it's about the only category Damon Suede's not nominated for! I stand a chance!!

And I get to show off a pretty rainbow banner! Woop!

For those who don't know, the Goodreads M/M Romance group is, erm, dedicated to M/M Romance. It's a wonderfully eclectic and vibrant group, and I insist that anyone on goodreads who enjoys the genre join. Almost 5,000 members can't be wrong!

If you fancy checking out all the categories and all the nominations, you can vote here. Don't forget me!!

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Guest Post ~ Serendipity

2011-12-19T21:07:00.000Z

Our previous gest poster discussed the need for patience when bringing a novel to fruition. Here, Gloria Galloway writes about getting the perfect lucky break.

~^~

Serendipity

Dead By My Side is the story of two homicide detectives (Tony and Julia) who have been partners for more than twelve years. Julia is killed in the line of duty, comes back to haunt him, and they team up again to solve crime.

I learned the true meaning of the word serendipity while embarking on my journey to publication.

~When I'd written 70 pages of my manuscript, I loved my story and my characters, but I knew nothing about police procedure. I was talking to my manicurist, who had been there from the start of my project, and I mentioned this to her. She said "I think there is a CSI guy who gets his hair done in this salon. Let me ask him if he'd be willing to help you." And he did! Ken Wight has been one of my technical advisors for the last three years.

~My book has a serial killer in it, and I knew nothing about forensics or autopsies. My daughter e-mailed me one day that she'd gotten an advertisement for a writers' weekend retreat at the Lake Tahoe home of a former editor of Random House (Jennifer Basye Sander). She invites three writers and the time is devoted to relaxing and writing. We signed up for a weekend in October. The third writer was actually scheduled for September, but the retreat was cancelled at the last minute and she ended up coming to our retreat. We were all sitting around the fireplace on a Saturday night and Jennifer asked us to read from our projects. I read from my manuscript and mentioned that I was frustrated because I knew nothing about forensics. To which the third writer spoke up and said that her best friend had just retired and she was a former deputy coroner of the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department! Well, Kym Davis enthusiastically agreed to help me and she became my second technical adviser and best friend over the last three years!

~I received an e-mail from a friend when my manuscript was close to completion. She told me about a 'community police academy' being put on by a neighboring county. Since I was not a resident of the community, I hesitated contacting them, but my daughter convinced me to give it a try. The deputy coordinating the program was happy to sign us up. I met the deputy at the first meeting and she asked what my book was about. She said she loved crime dramas and asked if she could read it. A couple of months later, I received a call from her that a screenwriter friend of hers wanted to read it as well. Author/screenwriter, Ron Montana and I are currently working on a screenplay which we hope to pitch to Hollywood as a major motion picture or television series.

~This journey has not been without its heartache. The first draft of the manuscript did not include Julia’s funeral and I decided to add it. I asked Kym Davis if she could read the scene. She agreed to look it over and then told me she’d actually lost a former partner (Sheriff’s Deputy Vu Nguyen) who was killed in the line of duty in 2007. My daughter was hired as a librarian at Kaplan College in Sacramento in January of 2011. The college has a criminal justice program and in February they dedicated a Firearms Training Simulator to the memory of Vu Nguyen. My daughter met Deputy Nguyen’s wife and some of his fellow officers.

~I met Kym Davis after I’d named the characters in my book. Davis is the name I gave to a character in Chapter 8 (Sheriff Davis). Kym Davis’s husband’s name is Geno. I named Tony’s brother-in-law Gino. What’s even more eerie is that Kym’s nickname for her Italian husband is “Diego.” I started out writing historical romances and my first story took place in Mexico during the time of Maximilian. I had named my heroine’s father Diego!

__________________________________________

Gloria Galloway makes her home in Northern California. She has had a life-long fascination with the spectral world. Her story came together after extensive research of police procedure, crime scene investigation and studies of the criminal mind. She collaborated with experts in the field, including a crime scene investigator and a former deputy coroner of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.

Dead By My Side is available in paperback and on Amazon Kindle ~ Prime members can borrow the book for free!

Guest Post ~ Lisa's Way and Patience

2011-12-14T18:55:00.002Z

I've invited a couple of other authors to write guest posts for this blog. Here Robert Collins discusses the need for taking your time when creating a novel.

LISA’S WAY & PATIENCE

The story of my latest release, Lisa's Way, started when I was in high school. A friend and I had this idea of a post-apocalypse story in which our friends and us would be the main characters. We were all supposed to contribute chapters. I was the one in our group that was the aspiring writer, so I ended up writing most everyone else's chapters.

A year or so after high school I realized the "real people as characters" notion wouldn't work. I took to fictionalizing the characters. The first draft of that novel wasn't very good. There were a couple of problems. First, the novel had a few main characters. I needed to find one that would be "the" main character. As I revised the story, it became clear that Lisa Herbert was the main character. She was the one with the passion to rebuild. She was the one with the smarts to get the job done.

The other problem was with me. I knew how to construct a story, but hadn't actually done much of it. I spent a few years writing fan fiction, and a few more working on selling my first short stories. I began to learn my craft and my art. I took another run at Lisa and her world.

I had the idea that perhaps the best way to tell her story was through short stories. I actually sold two of the several stories I wrote. The trouble with this idea was the background needed for a reader to understand what was going on. Too much info dump slows a short story. More experience led me back to the notion of telling Lisa's story as a novel. That led to another question: how was Lisa going to get it done? How was she going to go about rebuilding society?

In 1992 I started publishing my Touring Kansas Counties booklets. The booklets were not only about things to see, but also had town histories in them. The history of a couple of the counties touched on the Santa Fe Trail. I read up on the Trail. I learned how it was a route of commerce rather than emigration, and how important that commerce was on the frontier. That was it! Trade would be the means by which Lisa would attempt to rebuild society. The final piece of the puzzle came when I changed the setting from Earth to human colonies in outer space. That whole period, from first draft to finished novel, took about 15 years or so. I then tried to sell Lisa's Way to major publishers; no luck. I tried a few small presses, including the one that took my first novel; still no luck.

The novel was accepted by eTreasures Publishing in late 2008. It was supposed to appear in the spring of 2009. Spring came and went; computer problems, I was told. But it would be out in the summer. In July the ebook came out; still no print copy, and I heard very little from the publisher. In December I once again checked to see if there was a release date. Someone at the press replied that the publisher was seriously ill. The publisher recovered and the print version came out in February of 2009. A year later the founder sold the press to a new owner due to her illness.

In the meantime, I started a FB page for the novel. An artist friend who I'd lost touch with years ago reconnected with me. I used to have book giveaways for FB posts. He posted and won a copy of Lisa's Way. He liked it, his daughter liked it, and he asked about doing covers for my books. Once the contract with eTreasures expired (three years after the signing date), I had him get to work. His paying work came
ahead of my request, but in the end the work was done. At the end of November the new edition came out in print and as an ebook, 28 years after the original idea planted the seed.

A writer needs to be patient. It's not enough to have ideas. You need to have the skill to turn those ideas into stories. Sometimes it takes learning how to write. A story may not come together until you read up on history. It might take becoming friends with someone to allow you to create an interesting character. Maybe you just have to live life before you're ready to tackle a certain plot. Don't get into a hurry. When you're ready, you will write that story. At times you might be ready at that moment. Other times you aren't. If
you're meant to be a writer, the stories will come to you. Keep writing, and one day you'll be able to finish the one that keeps getting away.

____________________________________________
Robert Collins is the author of three SF novels, Monitor, Lisa's Way and Expert Assistance. the coming-of-age novel True Friends, and biographies of "Bleeding Kansas" leader Jim Lane, and a Kansas Civil War General. Robert has had a variety of stories and articles published in periodicals such as Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine; Tales of the Talisman; Space Westerns; Sorcerous Signals; Wild West; and Model Railroader.

Find Robert online on Amazon, Smashwords, Facebook, and his Blog.

Christo & Damien ~ WIP Extract

2011-12-12T11:16:00.001Z

Here's an extract from the new novel I'm working on, due out early 2012. Proving that there's nothing cuter than two dumb men and a very wise child.

~^~

Christo heard the intercom buzz as he was brushing his teeth and he frowned at his reflection in the mirror. Who on earth…? Not June, she had her own key, and today wasn’t her day anyway. Intrigued, he cocked an ear, listening for the door as he gargled and spat. He heard the lock open and he padded into the lounge, wiping sleep from his eyes, watching Damien greet his visitor.

A harassed-looking woman stood in the doorway, laden with an assortment of bags which she handed unceremoniously to Damien before kneeling at his feet. Startled, Christo stepped forward to see that she had bent to speak to a small child who had been standing beside and slightly behind her. As she told the girl to be on her best behaviour Damien turned, caught Christo’s eye and grimaced.

The woman rose, talking nineteen-to-the-dozen, reeling off a list of instructions regarding feeding, napping and appropriate TV shows, apologising over and over with each new stipulation. Noticing that Damien wasn’t paying attention her eyes followed his line of vision and she paused mid-sentence with a single ‘oh’ as she spied Christo. The child darted back behind her legs and peered out at him warily.

“Hi,” Christo stammered, wishing he’d put more clothes on.

She shot a meaningful look in Damien’s direction. “I’m sorry,” she said defensively in answer to a reproach that he hadn’t uttered. “I’m desperate.”

“It’s fine,” Damien reassured her. “Go, or you’ll be late.”

“Later, you mean.” She pushed the child into the room and towards Damien. “You be good,” she warned, kissing the top of her head.

“She’ll be fine,” Damien smiled, taking the girl’s hand. “Now go.”

“Sorry,” she mouthed again, nodded at Christo, and bustled out.

Damien and the child eyed each other, came to some unspoken understanding and she toddled over to scramble onto the sofa. Damien turned on a cartoon channel for her and deposited the bags he’d been given onto the worktop. Christo padded over to him as he started to unpack a seemingly endless supply of toys and books and clothes, giving him a quizzical look.

“That was Ali,” Damien explained. “She’s like my best friend. Her babysitter bailed on her.”

“And she trusts you with her daughter?” Christo raised his eyebrows but kept his tone light so Damien would know that he was only teasing.

“You heard her, she’s desperate.” He grinned.

“So what’s her name?” Christo nodded at the dark head of hair just visible at the arm of the sofa.

“Jess.” Damien’s face softened as he looked in the girl’s direction.

“How old?”

“Five.”

“She’s cute.”

Damien nodded. “She’s going to be a real heartbreaker when she’s older. Her mums are already dreading the day she brings a boy home.”

Christo couldn’t keep the surprise off his face.

“What?” Damien grinned at him. “Don’t tell me you don’t know any gay parents?”

“Not well,” Christo admitted.

“Did you never think of having any?”

Christo nodded.

“So what happened?”

He shrugged. “We talked about it, but, I don’t know,” he squirmed, “don’t you think it’s kinda selfish?”

“How so?”

“What if they get bullied? It’s hard enough growing up as it is, without being different.”

“Yes, but you grew up different. I did. We survived.”

“It’s not the same, being different yourself. I always worried I’d be foisting my own difference on my kid – if I had one. It didn’t seem fair.”

“I don’t think it matters, not as long as the kid knows that it’s loved.” He looked back at Jess. “At least Ali and Sam will never turn their backs on her. She’ll never have to worry about being rejected, however she turns out.”

Christo nodded. “There is that,” he agreed, wondering how they got onto this conversation, and what on earth they were going to do with a five year old all day. “Is she Ali’s or Sam’s?” He asked curiously.

“She’s theirs.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Ali’s.”

“She doesn’t look like her.” Christo recalled the woman’s dirty blonde hair, blue eyes and fresh complexion. She was definitely the earth mother type, whereas from what he’d seen of her daughter she was all poise and grace, even at five years old. Her long dark locks tumbled messily across the side of the sofa, almost waist-length when she was standing. Damien was right, she would be beautiful when she was older, he could already see the lines of her high cheekbones, the bronze refracted in her large brown eyes.

“So what are we going to do with her?” Christo asked uneasily.

“I thought we could go to the zoo. Would you like that sweetheart?” He called to the child.

Wide eyes peered around the edge of the couch.

“Do you want to go to the zoo and see the animals?”

She nodded, once, and darted back behind the cushions.

“Doesn’t talk much, does she?” Christo grinned.

“It’s you, she’s shy. You wait until she gets used to you.”

“What if she hates me?” Christo asked, suddenly anxious. He wasn’t good with kids, they unnerved him.

“She’ll love you,” Damien promised, drawing him in for a kiss. “Who wouldn’t?”

Christo squirmed. “Not in front of her,” he whispered.

“Why not? Children are the most accepting creatures in the world at that age. Besides, she’s not even looking.”

Christo turned in his arms and glanced at the couch. A tiny arm patted the cushions, but the cartoons on the TV were clearly holding her attention. He protested again half-heartedly as Damien nuzzled his jaw.

“I’m sorry about this,” Damien murmured against his lips. “It’s not exactly what I had in mind either.”

“It’s fine. Honestly. I’ve not been to the zoo in years.”

“What’s your favourite animal?”

“The tigers.” Christo’s eyes lit up.

Damien smiled indulgently, leaning against the counter and looping his arms around Christo’s waist. Christo leant into him, steadying himself against Damien’s shoulders.

“Why tigers?” He asked between kisses.

“They’re just…beautiful. I always wanted a pet one as a kid.”

“And what would you have called your pet tiger?”

“Shere Khan, of course.”

“Of course.” He snickered.

“Don’t tease me,” Christo scolded, slapping his chest playfully.

“Did you never want a black panther to keep it company?”

“Totally.”

“Shere Khan was a baddie.”

Christo leapt out of Damien’s arms as he realised that the little person had started listening. Damien rubbed his shoulder reassuringly as he stepped over to the sofa and swung the child up, holding her easily on his hip.

“He was a baddie, wasn’t he sweetheart? Who did you like best?”

“Blue.” Tiny hands snaked around Damien’s neck.

“Baloo,” he corrected.

She nodded and buried her face in his shoulder as they approached Christo. He tickled her with his free hand and she squealed.

“Aren’t you going to say hello to Christo?” He prompted. “Don’t tell me you’re shy?”

She shook her head violently, small fingers twined in his hair.

Damien tutted playfully. “Christo, this is Jessie. I know I told you she was a big girl, but she’s acting like a baby today.”

“Am not a baby.” Brown eyes glared at him reproachfully.

“Well you’re acting like one. Say hello to Christo.”

“’Lo,” She mumbled unwillingly.

“Hello,” Christo smiled.

“You like the baddie,” she reproved him.

“Not the real baddie. I meant I like the tigers in the zoo.”

She didn’t look convinced.

“What animals do you like?” He countered, trying to steer the conversation away from goodies and baddies.

“Ponies.” She gave him a gap-toothed grin.

“What about the elephants?” Damien prompted. “You like the elephants, don’t you remember?”

She gave him a disdainful look. “I like ponies better.”

Christo laughed at the surprised expression on Damien’s face. “That’s you told.”

“Come here,” Damien growled, grabbing Christo with his free arm and pulling him into his side. “Can we go to the zoo and show Christo the tigers?” He asked the child.

She studied them both for a moment. “Okay,” she relented, nodding slowly.

“Good girl.” Damien kissed her cheek.

Christo smiled as he watched him. Damien was so good with her, so at ease. He made a natural parent. Damien turned his head and caught Christo’s eye. “What?” He asked, smirking.

“He wants a kiss,” a tiny voice piped up.

They both looked at her.

“He does!” She insisted.

“Well in that case,” Damien turned to Christo, sliding his hand up his back to clasp his neck.

Chriso squeaked a warning.

Soft lips covered Christo’s as Damien’s long fingers raked through his short hair. Christo shut up and closed his eyes. They broke apart and both turned to look at their young charge.

“Told you so.”

KDP Select

2011-12-09T21:12:00.000Z

So earlier this week us indies woke up and logged onto the KDP Reporting section (where Amazon tells us how many books we've sold ~ trust me, this is the first thing every indie does every morning!) and discovered to our amazement that we were being offered a share of $500,000 in the month of December. Of course, the community forum went into meltdown.

Basically, what has happened is that Amazon has extended its Prime feature to include a book loaning service from its Kindle store. People sign up to Amazon Prime to get benefits on P&P charges and rates, among other things, but Amazon intends to extend this. From this month each member gets one free loan book per month from the Kindle store. The cost set aside for this is $500,000, for a maximum of 100,000 books. (That's 100,000 Prime members who might or might not avail themselves of this subscription, but whose money has been added to the pot in case they do).

The way Amazon is working out the price to the author is as an equal share of the $500,000 for each book borrowed. So if every person in Prime takes out a book in December then each author who has a borrowed book will receive $5 per copy. If you've had 1000 books borrowed that's $5k for the month, and so on.

Sounds like a great idea, right? Well, as always, there are pros and cons to this. Having been debating this issue fiercely in the KDP community forum, here's the facts as I see them.

Minimum price per book
You will be guaranteed a minimum of $5 per book loaned in this month. At the end of Dec the Jan pot will be announced and you can calculate the new minimum, but I wouldn't have thought it will stray far from the $5 for the next several months at least. So if you've got a book languishing on the Amazon bookshelf that barely shifts a copy a week, this might be a decent gamble. Yes, you might get nothing, but what's new? There's no guarantees in this business anyway. At most you might be gambling with $10 a month.

The exciting thing about this system is that there's no maximum per book. It's only $5 per copy if every person in Prime gets involved in this, and what are the chances of that? Realistically speaking, probably less than half will take this up in the first month, making the return per book more like $10. If yours is the only book borrowed, you'll get the entire pot. (Give up now on that, I know of at least 4 authors who between them have already racked up a couple of dozen loans). The potential, however, is huge.

Make a book free
As a sweetener, Amazon will allow participating authors to make another book free for a 5 day period. I've already explored in earlier blogs the benefit of doing this if you can, and giving indies the ability to do this - even if it is only for a limited time - is a huge plus. I know of several indies who've racked up 20,000+ downloads in a five-day period with free books. That's a massive instant market of people whose attention can then be directed towards your other books.

Limited downloads
Each Prime member can only download one book per month. As libraries go, that's pretty naff, and I can't see it staying that low if this thing is to really catch on. It does mean that chances are the people who participate are going to want to download an expensive book, one they've thought twice about paying for in the past. That prices most indies (who don't usually stray far from the $2.99 mark) out of the market. The download limit also makes it more likely that people are going to want to borrow books that they're pretty sure they'll like, from big-name authors, rather than take a chance on an unknown.

However, all is not lost. If more people are borrowing the expensive books, then I predict that sales of the cheaper books will increase. If I've got $10 to spoil myself with on Amazon, and I can borrow one book on top of that, I'm going to borrow the $10 book and buy three or four cheaper ones instead. Anyone would.

Exclusivity
This is the point that's really put the cat among the pigeons. In return for joining KDP Select, you have to give Amazon 90 days' exclusivity, automatically renewed unless you opt back out. The general reaction has been - ouch! An entire quarter handed to Amazon on a platter. Is it worth it? What if nothing comes of it? What if no-one borrows your book?

It's a gamble. A huge one. Most indies I know distribute to Amazon and Smashwords as a minimum. SW has a distribution network which includes B&N, iTunes, Sony, Kobo and so on. That's a lot of branches you're cutting off by going with Amazon. Of course, Amazon is the biggest fish in the pond. Compared to the others it's a bloody shark, but does that really mean that you want to let them have your book exclusively? Even if sales on the other channels are low, there's a moral quandary too: if everyone grants Amazon exclusivity, then it really can do what it wants. There are already enough rumbles about Amazon's heavy-handed behaviour at times. If we all put all of our eggs in this basket, then we could end up in real trouble in the future.

Personally, I'm a great believer in healthy competition. The idea of any commercial monopoly makes me uneasy, as fond as I am of Amazon. SW is a really exciting and innovative platform, and while it has its issues, I don't think I want to stop distributing with them. In fact I had a bumper month in Nov through the SW distribution channel. (Did you know I was #22 on the Australian iTunes chart at one point? Me neither...)

It is still very much early days with this new system. I know some who have enrolled, and some who are still sitting on the fence. My bum is firmly parked on the post between my house and number 86. I can see the potential advantages of this system, but I'm wary of the exclusivity angle, for both financial and slightly more moral reasons. In fact, I've already earmarked this weekend to get my books listed on All Romance eBooks...links coming soon! My business model is that the more channels I distribute through, the more chance I have of making sales. I calculated in the Self-Pub Tips & Tricks series that you need to sell 48 books a day at $2.99 to earn a median salary. I didn't say anything about all those sales coming from one source. I've got 5 books available, through about 8-9 different channels. One copy of each book per day per channel and there's my medial salary. Take that, Amazon!

One thing I would say...those who sign up early stand to reap the biggest rewards. Your exact split of the pot depends on how many of your books are loaned, and how many books are borrowed in total. In these early months I doubt even half of the Prime members take this offer up, meaning that each share is going to be greater. Let Amazon tweak this and in a couple of months I guarantee that almost every member will be borrowing a book a month (and no doubt more, if Amazon decides to up the limit). I think if you've got something brand new that you're planning to put out in the next week or so anyway then it may well be worth giving this a go, but I have no intention of pulling any of my books from distributors where they're already available. I'm working on a new novel that will be out early in 2012, and depending on how this goes I might let Amazon have it for the first 90 days as a trial, but for now I'm watching the figures of those who have already signed up and seeing if they think that this is a worthwhile venture.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

5* Books from 2011

2011-12-04T13:06:00.000Z

No, not mine! The handy thing about Goodreads is that I can keep tabs on the books I've read this year. I've challenged myself to 175 before the year's out (up from 120 originally!!) and I'm closing in on it. I thought I'd give some other authors some webspace by reviewing (briefly) every book I've rated 5* this year (in no particular order). Best of all, a lot of them are free.

Bonds of Fire - Sophie Duncan
What can I say, baby dragons! I was hooked. A feel-good story, heavy on romantic and cute. FREE.

Don't Read in the Closet Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Special Edition - Various Authors
A collective effort by the Goodreads M/M Romance Group. Each anthology has good and bad stories, of course, but as a group effort I couldn't award it anything less than 5*, and there truly are some gems within these volumes. Plus, they're all FREE.

Kissing Sherlock Holmes - T.D. McKinney & Terry Wylis
I've always been quite fond of the Holmes stories, and fascinated by his relationship with his biographer, the good Dr. Watson. This story takes all of those raised eyebrows and just goes at it: Holmes and Watson are in love, but Holmes has got himself engaged while in pursuit of a spy, and they need to solve the mystery before Watson gets taken out. A bit silly but pretty in-keeping with the style of the original stories, and beautifully done.

Hot Head - Damon Suede
If I could give one 6* review in my life, it would go to this book. It's that good. I'm a sucker for angst at the best of times, and love it when I'm reading something that makes my stomach lurch. Well reading this book felt more like I was having my guts drawn out of my navel inch by torturous inch. Reading this book is a physical experience, and it was all I could do to stop myself from starting it all over again the second I finished it.

Smashwords Style Guide - Mark Coker
No, it's not romantic, it's not even fiction, but if you are ever formatting a book using MS Word then this book is a must read. FREE.

A Not-So-Grimm Fairytale - Ann Somerville
Based, as you can guess, on the Grimm-style fairytales, this book is silly, irreverent and amusing. Some people don't get the humour - hence mixed reviews - but I thought it was hysterical. FREE.

E Squared - Matt Beaumont
For anyone who has worked in an office, E was the perfect satire. E Squared didn't disappoint, it was a sequel I was longing for, and it's just as silly - and as funny - as the first. The epic return of Simon Horne, the closeted, self-aggrandising account manager, was worth every penny alone.

Jealousy: A Love Story - Katey Hawthorne
Spin-off sequel to Equilibrium, this short can be read as a stand-alone (as I read it). An established couple work through some issues when a new boy arrives and starts making eyes at one of them. Lots of cute. FREE.

Forgotten Soul - Natasha Duncan-Drake
Don't judge this book by its cover! John is an escort who offers his services to the vampire population, but his involvement doesn't stop there. An interesting twist on the vampire-mortal lover trope, with a surprising and satisfying ending. FREE.

Navy Days - Ken Smith
A collection of shorts charting a week in the life of the biggest tart in the navy. Never mind that it's hot: this collection is hilarious. The author told me that one man emailed him to tell him that he'd never laughed so much with an erection, and reading this, I know why. FREE.

The Persian - Gordon Watt
A murder-mystery set in London. This book is dark and gritty and the ending is just plain disturbing, but the plot will keep you guessing as the author poses questions about just how far someone will go for art. FREE.

A Delicate Game - Sasha L. Miller
Beautiful brothers who are also spies play a dangerous game of seduction and espionage. When they fall in love, will they be able to break their self-imposed "one night only" rule? FREE.

Fire From Heaven - Mary Renault
A re-reading of an old favourite. The first in Renault's Alexander the Great trilogy, this story charts Alexander's childhood and adolescence up to the death of his father, Philip II. Renault is a hugely under-appreciated author, and this book displays all of her considerable talent.

Spoils of War - Aleksandr Voinov
Nice appropriation of the Achilles / Patroclus myth. FREE.

Indestructible - Elkica Lond
An old trope - fallen angel and his angelic lover try and make their relationship work despite the eternal war waging around them. This story puts an interesting spin on that model as they battle for a human soul. FREE.

When Women Were Warriors Book I & Book III - Catherine M. Wilson
I omitted Book II as I found it a bit stilted. These are quiet, introspective books, about a woman who longs to be a warrior, and the stranger that she trusts to teach her everything that she needs to know. Lots of deep questions about the nature of love and war and life and death.

Robin Hood - J. Walker McSpadden
This collection was a childhood favourite, and I was thrilled to rediscover it with my Kindle. I've always loved the old Robin Hood stories, and they need no introduction now.

The Story of the Night - Colm Toibin
This is one of those books that I always felt that I 'should' read, and when I eventually got round to it I was so glad that I did. Set against the Falkland War and the rise of the AIDS epidemic, this is a very personal and deeply moving account of one man's attempt to find acceptance and belonging.

33A.D. - David McAfee
A vampire novel in the more traditional sense. Set in Jerusalem in the year of the Crucifixion, this novel nicely combines vampire folklore with Christian mythology to put a whole new spin on how Christ met his end.

Voyage East - Tom Williams
Actually the first couple of chapters of William's The White Rajah (which I gave 4*) this is the fictional account of real-life gentleman adventurer James Brooke. Told in 'memoir' form by his (fictional) lover John Williamson, the full story is guilty of telling more than showing, but is still a worthwhile read. Personally I think the memoir style was to the detriment of the story, as to prevent it from seeming anachronistic a lot of the story had to be omitted or only alluded to. FREE.

The Book of the Nine Ides - Benjamin Goshko
I wasn't sure what I was getting with this book, but it really is something special. It's the story of Ashley, a gender dysphoric, who sees demons. Or does she? This really is a nice play on the dichotomy of madness and 'second-sight' and I get the impression that Ashley's story is far from over.

13:55 Eastern Standard Time - Nick Alexander
A collection of short stories about different people across the world, whose stories all link together, demonstrating how easy it is to affect the lives of perfect strangers. I love Alexander's writing, and this collection did not disappoint.

City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass, City of Fallen Angels - Cassandra Clare
I loved this whole series and devoured it within a fortnight. It's got everything: good and evil, star-crossed lovers, vampires, mages and forbidden love. YA fantasy at its best.

The Carpet People - Terry Pratchett
I remember reading this in primary school when I was about 8 and it always stuck with me. All these years later, it still didn't disappoint. I confess to not being much of a Pratchett fan, but this story enchanted me as much as it did when I was a child.

Heart and Soul - Jeanette Grey
A standard friends-to-lovers story with a nice touch at the end. Should have been cheesy as hell, but somehow it was just endearing. Heavy on sweet. FREE.

A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Another childhood favourite that has stood the test of time. The little girl in the garret who wakes up to find her world transformed. Magical.

A Land of Ash - Various Authors
This collection of shorts starts with a very simple premise: the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone National Park has errupted. These stories tell of the aftermath of an event that cataclysmic, and show the best and the worst of human nature. Terrifying because one day it's all probably going to come true. FREE.

The Virginian - Owen Wister
I confess to doing a whole study on queer cowboys at uni and never actually reading this book. I decided to rectify that, and I have to say I loved this story. It was one of my late grandfather's favourite books, so reading it was an emotional experience for a number of reasons, but this quiet, understated book got right under my skin and stayed there. The chapter where the Virginian is baiting the preacher is one of the funniest things I've read all year and had me laughing out loud.

Better than Easy & Sleight of Hand - Nick Alexander
Part of the 50 Reasons series. Better than Easy (#4) charts Mark's attempts to settle down with his partner and buy a gite. Sleight of Hand (#5) sees Mark moving back to England to care for a seriously ill friend. Both books raise interesting questions about fidelity and trust - with surprising answers - and are probably more realistic than most romance novels for the resolutions they offer. Untimately Mark's obsession with (in)fidelity is show as misplaced at best - hypocritical at worst - and the final resolution is all the more satisfying because it's possible. 50 Reasons is not a fairytale, but that makes it all the more magical because when the characters do get it right, you just know that it's forever.

British Flash - Various Authors
As the title suggests, a collection of short (2-3 pages) pieces on being LGTBQ in Britain today. Although short, each piece is well-written and provides an honest view into life in the British queer community. FREE.

Inventing the Victorians - Matthew Sweet
Based on Foucaultian thinking, Sweet argues that our impression of the Victorians is a fiction invented firstly by them, and then propagated by subsequent generations. As an advocate of Foucault's thinking I was always going to enjoy this book but Sweet's careful analysis of the Victorian myths of righteousness, morality and religious fervour is a treat to read.

Brushback - Jamie Scofield
A treat of a book. I'm not usually into detective stories, but this one had me gripped. The characters are believable and the will-they-won't-they romance between Evan and Roman is moving and sweetly sentimental. Can't wait for a sequel.

Hamelin's Child - DJ Bennett
A dark and disturbing tale about an ordinary boy suckered into prostitution and heroin addiction against his will. Certainly not an easy read, but this book raises important questions about the choices we all make, and how easy it is for any of us to fall into the abyss.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Cyber Monday Ebook Deals

2011-11-28T19:37:00.002Z

Today is apparently the day to go shopping online, so while you're stressing out about what you're going to get your great aunt Mavis for Christmas, why not pick up a little something for yourself? I've got everything from guilt-free freebies to a very special treat. Go on, you know you want to...

In Search of Lucy - Lia Fairchild

Romance / Contemporary Lit - $2.99

The Terminal Diner - Mary Pat Hyland

Suspense - $2.99

Ask Me if I'm Happy - Kimberly Menozzi

Women's Fiction - $4.99

Dinner at Crazy Alice's - Stan Graham

Horror - $4.99

Drinking Beer, Telling Stories - Walt Lamberg

Military Fiction - $0.99

The Unscheduled Stops - Sinead MacDughlas

Short Stories - FREE

Loyalties - Wendi Kelly & Deborah Dorchak

Paranormal / Fantasy

My Sexy Alpha Bad Boy - Darlene Gibbs

YA Romance - $4.99

Smilodon - Alan Nayes

Action & Adventure - $2.99

Blue Bells of Scotland - Laura Vosika

Medieval Adventure / Time Travel - $2.99

Four Chances - Kate Aaron

Gay - $0.99

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #10: Conclusions

2011-11-27T17:39:00.000Z

So we've come to the end of our journey. I'm going to use this last post to tie up all of the points I've made so far into a "must have" checklist. I'm also going to throw in a few bits and pieces that didn't really fit anywhere else, and give you some pointers on what to do once your book starts selling in order to maintain your momentum. The rest is down to you, so good luck!

Getting your book ready
Never spend too long preparing your book for publication. Hire an editor if you can, or alternatively get as many people as possible to proof it for you. If you don't know how to use an apostrophe or a semi-colon then learn. Now. Make sure your cover is as slick as you can possibly make it. Make sure you stick to the conventions of your genre. Write a perfect blurb and tag, tag, tag. Work out what you're trying to achieve and price your book accordingly. Only once you've done all of this are you anywhere near ready to press "publish".

Make it discoverable
Don't rely on purchases from friends and family. Using tags, Shelfari, your author profile and social networks get the news out there about your book. Start a blog and keep it up-to-date and interesting. Join review sites such as Goodreads and Librarything. Consider other networks, like LinkedIn and Kindleboards. Wherever you decide to participate make sure that you do just that - don't just shill your book.

Interact with other authors
Join the KDP boards, ePC and the Book Marketing Network. Work with other authors to promote each other's work. It will pay dividends in the long run. On the KDP boards especially the authors are a friendly, approachable lot who will spend a lot of their spare time helping you if you ask.

Social Networking
Get on Twitter and Facebook as a must. Remember to engage with your audience, be witty or relevant or interesting. Don't make it all about your book or you will put people off sharpish. A good way of keeping track of where people are mentioning you is to set up google alerts. Type in your key phrases, e.g. your author name and your book titles and google will send you a daily email of new sites it's found that mention you. Don't forget to put specific searches in "inverted commas". That way if someone comments about you on a site you're not a member of you can still find it.

Publish everywhere you can
Don't limit yourself to Amazon alone. It might be the daddy, but all those other sites will give you valuable webspace, even if you don't make any sales there. Remember, it doesn't cost you anything to let people distribute your book.

Make yourself the celebrity
It's not all about your book, it's about you. Sell yourself and your book(s) will take care of themselves. Make yourself interesting and funny and engaging. Do interviews wherever you can.

Stand out from the crowd
There's a million indies out there all doing exactly what you're trying to do, so make yourself unique. It doesn't matter how you do it, just do it. ML Stewart had the right idea with his blog. It's hilarious. He's got a great persona, and a brilliant USP (Unique Selling Point). Who cares what he's like in real life or if what he writes is true or not, it makes him different. I'm telling you about him now because of that.

Play the internet
Get a personal site set up (even if it's only a blog like this one) and then drive traffic to it, and keep them coming back. Update regularly, and make sure that you do everything you can to improve your SEO so that more and more people find you. Get as many links to your site and your book out there as you can.

Once your book has been published, if you've followed all of my Tips & Tricks you should be seeing sales coming in. The volume of those sales is dependent on a million factors, including how well you market and, ultimately, how good your book is. I know it's the great unmentionable, but if you've written a crappy book then you're never going to be a multimillionaire bestselling author, no matter what you do. That is the cold, hard truth, and every indie needs to hear it and accept it. Sometimes books take a long time to get noticed and really take off, and there is no point losing heart waiting for that to happen, just keep plugging away as you are doing and remain hopeful. Some books just sink and die and there's nothing anyone can do to revive them. Sometimes books that really don't deserve it end up being inexplicable bestsellers. Whether your book is a bestseller or not, at some point you are going to have to deal with every indie's worst nightmare / wet dream: reviews.

Reviews
Do not, ever, under any circumstance, shill for reviews. No-one wants to hear that your nan loved your book, and believe me, they'll be able to tell if it was her who wrote it. A gushing 5* review can do more damage to a book than a dozen spiteful 1* ones. It took a month for me to get my first review of Blood & Ash ~ 5*, but this review all-but killed the book. I have since spoken to the reviewer on facebook, but at the time I swear I didn't know her. (BTW, I have never mentioned the review to her. She left an honest opinion of my book and I am eternally grateful to her for that. It's not her fault if people interpret that differently). You wouldn't guess that I didn't know her from the review, and that's the problem when a review seems too good, it doesn't seem real. In comparison my first review of Fenton (which I waited 5 weeks for) coincided with a spike in sales. Why? It's also 5*, but it started with a complaint that my blurb wasn't clear. Because that reviewer had faulted my book in the review, people knew that it was genuine.

Sometimes reviews come in astonishingly quickly. This is generally a bad thing, because again, they seem false. I got my first review of Four Chances within hours of the book going live. Again it was 5*, but thankfully it doesn't seem to have harmed the book at all. In fact, quite the reverse. Within 24 hours of Four Chances going live I had 3 reviews, all 5* ~ 1 on Amazon and 2 on goodreads. Dumb luck? Maybe. Canny networking? More likely. This is my fifth book and I would hope that the cogs are so well-oiled by now that I can generate interest in my book and get people to buy it and leave feedback on it. It would appear that I am right.
As a rule, genuine readers with no vested interest in the book will leave a review for 1 of 3 reasons:
1. The loved it so much that they simply have to tell others all about it
2. They hated it so much that they simply have to tell others all about it
3. They belong to a review site and they review everything as par of the course

My first ever review for Danny's Boy was a 2* left on goodreads, but wouldn't you know it the person who left it was part of the "new literati" and copied it onto Librarything and their own blog and god knows where else. At the time I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. That review is everywhere, and it haunts my sleep. Once I'd climbed down off the ceiling I read it properly and realised that the book had been marked down because my pronouns were confusing. (It's not always easy to make it clear who is doing what when you're writing "he kissed him"). I re-read it and wouldn't you know, the reviewer was right. Danny's Boy got a full edit and re-write, focusing on the pronouns. Yes that shitty review is still out there, but I know that my book is now a far superior product as a result.

Fenton has had no less than three 1* reviews (to date!). I knew that this book was going to be divisive because the main character is asexual, and not everyone is going to get on board with that or understand it. Imagine my reaction when I got a very, very wordy 1* review that, after a lot of waffle, came down to the fact that Fenton does not conform to the conventions of a short story. You have to learn to let that kind of nonsense roll off you like water off a duck's back or you'll go insane. Another 1* review repeated the entire plot without any kind of spoiler warning and then at the end put "not recommended". What are you supposed to do with that??? The third just left 1* without leaving a review - harsh in the extreme.

So how do you deal with reviews? You read the good ones and you put them on your blog, your facebook, you tweet them, you print them off into great bloody banners and you hire light aircraft to fly them all over the world. You hug them next to you as you fall asleep. They are the reason why you are a writer, after all.

You read the bad ones, and you calm down. You leave it long enough that you can read them again in a more rational frame of mind, and then you go back and you analyse them. Do they have a valid point? If so, that reviewer has done you a favour and you need to amend whatever it is that displeased them. If their point isn't clear, or isn't valid: if they just didn't get your book, or didn't like your style, or your characters, or hell, you, then let it go. It's easier said than done, but for the sake of your sanity you have to. Check out my earlier blog Pity The Reviewer if you want to feel better about yourself. Check out the list of literary classics at the bottom with their count of 1* reviews. Those of us who have them had better wear them with pride: we are part of an elite club.

Accept, above all, that your book cannot be all things to all people, and move on.

Opinion is divided as to the extent to which you should engage with your reviewers. I mentioned in Guerrilla Marketing how Damon Suede used goodreads to connect with readers and reviewers to positive effect. On sites like goodreads I recommend it, because author-reader communication is part of the point and is encouraged by all. On sites such as Amazon I would steer clear of it. I left a positive review for a book on Amazon because I do review occasionally just for the hell of it, and the author left a comment on it, very polite, thanking me for my review and telling me when the next book was out. I was mortally offended. Irrational as it might seem, I had never considered that the author would try and interact with me (she wasn't an indie either, BTW) and somehow I just felt it was wrong of her to comment on my review of her book. My review wasn't for her, it was for other readers. I would never review another book of hers as a result, because it now feels like she's "spying" on the reviews. What if I hated the next one??

Yes this is all paranoid nonsense, but it matters. Before interacting with a reviewer - even one who has left a glowing review - consider the forum where they left the review in the first place. If it's not a reader-author forum, I'd just smile and leave it be.

Never engage with a negative review. Wherever you get them. However abusive and unfair and spiteful. In fact, especially if they're abusive or unfair or spiteful. As difficult as it is, let it go. Everyone has a right to their opinion and they are entitled to air it. Getting involved in a discussion about it makes you look paranoid and aggressive and will generate more bad publicity than anything else you could do short of strangling a kitten and posting the footage on youtube. Don't waste your time trying to get Amazon or wherever to take the review down, or get others to comment on it on your behalf. Check out the Amazon bestsellers - there are always a number of them that have average ratings of less than 3*, and they're still selling in shedloads. Credit readers with a bit of sense: if someone leaves an aggressive, irrational outburst against your book then they'll see it for what it is and ignore it. I love reading 1* reviews, they're genuinely the most entertaining thing ever, and I'll happily waste hours on Amazon trawling through the lowest-ranked bestsellers and chuckling over their reviews. I even buy some of those books as a result.

The best and last piece of advice that I'm going to give you is one that I've said before but is worth repeating and repeating again. Write more books. You're a writer, aren't you? Well get going then. I've demonstrated the maths in earlier posts showing why it's a financially sound idea. My little piece above about the success I've had with the launch of Four Chances should demonstrate that point. Four Chances is my fifth book. My others have launched OK, but nothing like this one. I'm #40 in the hot new releases section and #1 in gay short stories. That makes my book officially an Amazon bestseller (in its own small way!). That sort of thing doesn't happen on its own. I have networked like crazy for every release, and the cumilative effect of them all is this launch. There are people listening to what I'm saying now that weren't back in June when Blood & Ash went live. There are people that I know will buy pretty much whatever I choose to publish, and will probably review it favourably too. They will tell their friends about it. I've already got new followers on my facebook and goodreads pages since Four Chances went live, and it's only been out for a week. (Two days ahead of schedule, thanks to Amazon being far too efficient!) I planned the launch for 21/11/11. Imagine my dismay when I saw it had gone live on 19/11/11. I had to do some serious emergency networking, but it worked, because people are looking out for me now. I got my first sale within half an hour of firing off a load of emergency tweets and posts, and my first review only hours later.

Now Four Chances is live I'm concentrating on another work. It was going to be the 5th story in Four Chances (so I'd have needed a different title!) but it grew and grew and I'm letting it develop in its own time now. It's another contemporary m/m story, about two star-crossed businessmen. My readers and betas are already begging me for a HEA. I've promised nothing. I will update this blog with extracts and teasers soon, but until then I'll leave you with some choice extracts from my reviews. After all, this is my blog, and I want to show off. Someday soon you will have quotes of your own to show off, if you haven't already. Good luck.

Lost Realm ~ Blood & Ash, Fenton: the Loneliest Vampire, Fire & Ice
4* ~ "First time I've ever read anything like this...Can't wait to find out what's happening next. Recommended." (Goodreads)
4* ~ " It was a story of loss and heartache. The setting and scenery were meticulously described, so much so, that at times, it felt like I was there with the characters." (Smashwords)
4* ~ "Wonderfully, artfully written. Kate Aaron is a talent. A vivid writer." (Smashwords)
4* ~ "The asexuality is an interesting perspective and even in less than 8000 words, I found myself rooting for Fenton." (Amazon US)
5* ~ "Just finished reading Fire & Ice and absolutely loved it!!! ...Can't wait to read the next book (hopefully there will be another book!)" (Goodreads)
5* ~ "It very accurately portrayed asexuality and all of its frustrations, with the vampires thrown well into the mix. I highly recommend it!" (Amazon US)
5* ~ "...it was quite an unusual approach to the vampire and fairy worlds, I shall definitely be looking out for the sequel." (Amazon UK)

Four Chances: A Short Story Quartet
5* ~ "This is a great deal for the price. Four stories about four different relationships. Sometimes love can conquer all, sometimes it isn't enough." (Amazon US)
5* ~ "Now and then we get to read an anthology where all stories are great. This one is one of those...This probably is more realistic than most m/m romance out there." (Goodreads)
5* ~ "Can’t say enough about this... I think my heart hurts too much. Four Chances is a must read." (Goodreads)

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Black Friday Books

2011-11-25T14:53:00.000Z

Eaten too much turkey? Well grab yourself one of these books, relax and enjoy the rest of the holiday!!

Four Chances: A Short Story Quartet - Kate Aaron $0.99
The Amazon #1 Bestseller. Lust, Love, Longing, Loss, four erotic tales of attraction and angst; seduction and separation.
Genre: Gay (m/m)

Also by the same author:
Blood & Ash - gay fantasy
Fenton: the Loneliest Vampire - gay fantasy
Fire & Ice - gay fantasy
Danny's Boy - gay contemporary

Big Dragons Don't Cry - C. M. Barrett - $0.99
Big Dragons Don't Cry is a delightful fantasy that offers imaginative characters, spectacular imagery, laugh-out-loud dialog, and a killer plot.
Genre: Fantasy

Also by the same author:
Animals Have Feelings Too - Non-fic
Dance with Clouds - Fantasy

Cleanse Fire - Anastasia V. Pergakis - $4.99
Cleanse Fire is a fun, fast read full of adventure and romance, heartbreak and honor, danger and happily ever afters.
Genre: Fantasy / Adventure

Hope for the Holidays - Dana Taylor - $0.99
Three uplifting and enjoyable holiday stories.
Genre: Seasonal / Christian

Also by the same author:
Royal Rebel - Historical / Adventure
Ever-flowing Streams of Healing Energy - Spiritual Healing
Ain't Love Grand? - Romance
That Devil Moon - Romance

Life is But a Dream: On the Lake - Cheryl Shireman - $2.99
Thought provoking, sometimes frightening, and often funny, Life Is But a Dream is the story of a woman redefining herself and taking control of her life.
Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Also by the same author:
Indie Chicks: 25 Women, 25 Personal Stories - Short Story Anthology
Life is But a Dream: In the Mountains - Contemporary Fiction
You Don't Need a Prince: A Letter to My Daughter - Women's Writing
Broken Resolutions - Women's Fiction

My Enchanted Life - Laura Eno - $2.99
An American teen finds herself thrust into a world she never knew existed in England's magical community of Wode Gate.
Genre: Fantasy

Also by the same author:
Stone of Destiny - Romance
Realms of the Red Rabbit - Fantasy / Adventure
Realms of the Red Rabbit - Jake - Fantasy / Adventure
Don't Fall Asleep - Sci-fi / Adventure
Seducer of her Dreams - Romance

Transport Tales, Volume 1: Novan - PJ Port - $3.99
A collection of erotic sci-fi romantic tales, with mostly polite language.
Genre: Sci-fi / Romance

Also by the same author:
Assorted Shorts - Short Stories
To Touch Ice - Romance

Shades of Night - R. G. Porter - $2.99
If mystery, danger and vampires excite you,then this is a must read!
Genre: Paranormal Romance

Also by the same author:
Shadow of the Wolf - Paranormal Romance

Death Wish Book 1: The Vamp Saga - Danielle Blanchard Benson - $1.99 (Sale)
A new breed of vampire sits at the top of the food chain and they’re hungry for something more than mortal blood.
Genre: Parnormal / Urban Fantasy

Also by the same author:
Forever 27 - Fantasy
The Beautiful People Book 1: The Proposal - Contemporary / Romance
The Beautiful People Book 2: The Hook Up - Contemporary - Romance
The Beautiful People Book 3: Heartbreaks and Lust Aches - Contemp. / Romance
The Beautiful People Book 4: Red Carpet Dreams - Contemporary - Romance

The Book of Lost Souls - Michelle Muto - $0.99
When teen witch Ivy MacTavish changes a lizard into her date for a Halloween dance, everything turns to chaos.
Genre: YA Urban Fantasy
Also by the same author:
Don't Fear the Reaper - YA Horror

Shrike - Jeff Carlson - $4.99
Shrike is the story of one young woman's overcoming tremendous physical, emotional and logistical adversity to defeat evil incarnate.
Genre: Crime

The Bridge Club - Patricia Sands - $2.99
How far would you go to help a close friend? Is there a place where you might draw the line and simply have to say no?
Genre: Women's Fiction

Chosen - Jolea M. Harrison - $0.99
Chosen is a fantasy adventure - location; Hell, Purgatory, the Demon’s Lair, and Hell is everything it’s cracked up to be.
Genre: Fantasy / Adventure

Finally, if you can't make your mind up and want a little bit of everything...

Holiday Collection - The Indie Eclective - $0.99
“The Holiday Collection” is the second anthology of short stories from the Indie Eclective: A group of nine authors crossing genres. These holiday-themed stories range from serious to humorous, and all express the sentiments of the season in their own “Eclective” way.

Enjoy & Happy Holidays!

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #9: SEO

2011-11-24T18:29:00.000Z

I've mentioned this enough times...here comes the basics. This stuff is most useful if you've got your own website, but is also handy if you're just running a blog (like me). Remember that a lot of this gets pretty technical if you get into the whys and wherefores of what works and what doesn't. I'm not even going to pretend that I understand any more than the basics of it, I'm just going to tell you what works and what doesn't. For further information, consult a tech geek.

Blog
Even if you've got your own website, get a blog on it. This gives you a platform to add content on a regular basis, and it will expand your website. Without it you're probably not going to have more than half a dozen pages on your site. With it, over time you could generate hundreds or even thousands. Search engines love new content, and the more pages you have, the more you can cross link them to each other. Search engines love that, too. Plus, a blog is a platform that people can interact with, meaning you've got more chance of hooking their interest and getting them to return to you again and again.

Be unique
Google bots look for relevant, unique content. If you publish your blog on your website and on another platform then you run the risk of one of them being automatically discounted by google because it's duplicate information. Equally, you need to keep the content of each page of your website / blog unique. Don't post the same things over and over, because search engines are only looking for the most relevant sites, and will ignore duplication. Equally, ignore repetative wording. Don't publish the blurb of your book on every single page of your site, no matter how good it is, because it will lower the uniqueness of all of your pages in google's eyes.

Use footer links
At the bottom of most big websites you'll see a list of links: About Us, Our Prices, T&Cs, etc etc. These links are repeated on every page and cross reference the website back and forth with itself. Footer links are a way that big companies get plain text links onto their pages when they're probably using JavaScript or Flash for the rest of their site. If you've got a site similar to this blog it's not such a big deal, as long as you employ plain text links, like this on each page. Footer links are a great way of doing this without having to remember to do it every time you create a new page.

Make multiple pages
See all my pages at the top (Home, My Books, KDP Blogtour, Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks)? Well search engines love these because they love taking you to the most relevant page for your search. Google "Kate Aaron" and it'll take you to my Amazon author page, not to Amazon's homepage. Same here: if someone is looking for self-publishing information, google might take them directly to that page. Useful if we're six months down the line and I'm currently blogging about the colour of my dog's eyes. (Brown with a blue spot, btw). Make sure you put keywords within the webpage titles so that they rank higher.

Use keywords
All over this blog I've repeated certain words and phrases again and again: "self-publishing", "indie author", "selling your book". These are the kind of thing that people type into google day-in, day-out. The more I have, the more relevant my site looks in google's eyes. I can do that pretty organically while I'm writing this series, but at other times I might have to think about where I'm going to use them a bit more. Consider what the target audience of your site is: you'd better have one. Everyone thinks that blogs are just there for people to wax lyrical about whatever takes their fancy. NEWSFLASH: Unless you're Brad Pitt no-one cares what you ate for breakfast, or what you think about Coronation Street. Keep your audience in mind at all times. If you're writing gay vampire books, you'd better be blogging about gay stuff or vampire stuff (or both). And so on. (We are discounting this series from that for a minute because this is a Public Service and therefore allowed). By all means throw in the odd post about other stuff just to let people know who you are and what you're like, but keep the majority of it relevant. It'll be much easier to use keywords organically if you do.

Build backlinks
The biggest factor that will generate search engine traffic to your site is backlinks from other sites. Let's say that each link to a particular domain (e.g. Amazon.com) counts as 1 vote. Just stop and think for a second how many links there must be out there in the big, wide world that lead back to Amazon.com. Think of all the affiliate sales people plugging away all over the net, indies like you and me who are frantically linking to our books, everyone who has a marketplace seller account, everyone who is showing their friend a new book or DVD by emailing them a link to have a look...it's staggering. That's how many votes Amazon has got in google's eyes, and why it appears without fail at the top of nearly every search for consumer goods. Now think about how many links there are out there to your pitiful offering. Suddenly it pales in comparison, doesn't it? Don't worry, all is not lost. Get those links out there. I showed you in Social Networking 101 how to link your blog, twitter, facebook, goodreads, amazon author page and all the rest together using plug-ins and RSS feeds. Make sure that you keep them going - RSS feeds will automatically update, but don't forget to tweet from your blog / website; post to your facebook wall and all the rest. Get friends and network contacts to post your links about. Link swap with people who run other websites, and never miss an opportunity to drop a link on a forum (as a sig line is a non-offensive way of doing it) or even on your emails. You'll generate more links than you'd realise. Make sure you always have great content that other people will want to link to. If someone finds an interesting post on a blog they'll share it with their social networks, who might share it on, and so on. Make people laugh / cry / think, or teach them something valuable, and they'll share it with others.

Google has a great SEO Starter Guide (pdf) which will give you more in-depth information on stuff like metadata and tags. This is more useful if you've built your own website than if you're using a third party blog hosting service, but it's still worth a look. Google explains it all far better than me, which is why I've linked to it rather than repeated it.

So we're coming to the end of the series...I hope you've all learnt something new (I know I have!) and I hope it proves useful when you're marketing your book(s). And please remember to remember me when you're #1 on the Kindle store!

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #10: Conclusions, coming soon...

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #8: Guerrilla Marketing

2011-11-22T13:27:00.001Z

Sometimes you need to do something a bit different to get noticed. With so many authors out there all trying the same things to get attention, it's difficult to stand out from the crowd. Sometimes it's difficult even reaching readers through the mass of authors. Anyone who's done a twitter exchance will know that most of their followers at first are other authors hoping for a follow back. *Not* your target audience. Not that authors aren't readers, but they don't care about your book, they care about their own. They're never going to be receptive to your advances.

So how to get noticed? Here follows a list of off-the-wall suggestions for making your voice heard. Some will work, some won't. Depending on where you live, some might get you arrested, so please, all advice is given with the best of intentions, but don't sue me if you get nicked. You're a grown-up, take responsibility for your own actions.

Give a book away
This can be mean making the first book in your series free, or a short story. See my earlier posts about what happened when Fenton went free at Amazon US. (It's still free, btw. What are you waiting for??) It could mean doing a promo on your own blog or website on launch day. It could mean holding a competition to win free copies. It could mean putting a coupon in the back of one book offering a free copy of another. There are a million ways of doing this.

Why does this work? Simply, people like a freebie. It gets bums on seats, so to speak, it gets people reading your book. If they like it, they might buy another. It's a gamble, but in volume it's usually one that works. Just be warned ~ people have very little respect for free stuff. They might help themselves to a copy of your book and then never read it, or not read it for months. They are more likely to be harsher in any review of it (makes no sense to me, but that's the way it is). Of course, you are losing royalties. But they might be royalties that you'd have never had anyway.

Tap your local media
If you're anything like me, you grew up in Shitsville, Nowhere, where a duck farting is news. These places have rags that are desperate for local interest stories. Call up the press office and offer your services for interview. It might only be two columns on a slow Wednesday, but it's something. Try local radio stations too, and local bookshops if you're published in paper. Do book signing and "meet the author" events.

Put up posters
These can be on bulletin boards at work, in local libraries and bookshops, anywhere that you can think of. Coffee shops, bus stops, you name it. Places where people congregate. Make an appointment with your doctor and when the receptionist abandons you for hours on end (she will) plaster your book cover all over her noticeboards. That'll teach her. Go to Vistaprint for reasonably priced posters, flyers, banners, postcards, business cards etc etc. You don't have to put up A4 posters everywhere: leave little A5 flyers on display tables in bookshops; leave business cards in bars and coffee shops and restaurants and hotels. You can get away with anything if you're brazen enough, just don't sue me when you're done for flyposting!

Get a QR code
Don't know what that is? It's this:

You've seen these, haven't you? They're popping up everywhere. iPhones read them. If you've got an iphone, read this one ~ it's genuine (and no, it won't put a virus on your phone or take you to a porn site). These are great because they'll take you straight to a specified URL. To make your own go here. KILLER TIP ~ these things are most often read with Apple devices: so if your book's on iTunes (and if not, why not? get yourself over to Smashwords sharpish!) make the QR code lead to your book's page on the iTunes site. Presto! Instant sale. Alternatively link to a page on your blog or website and give away a free short story (even a flash piece) with links to your other works from there.

Again, QR codes work best in places where people congregate. I am not telling you to print them onto sticky paper and put them up on your local bus stop. I'm certainly not allowing you to use my blog as a legal defence if you do. You're an adult ~ use your own imagination as to where these can go.

Pimp your library
I already mentioned putting flyers up in your local library. Ask them about a book signing or an author event. Maybe give a talk about self-publishing. Donate a couple of copies of your book to them. You know those flyers and business cards you invested in? They'd fit just perfectly inside library books of the same genre as your own...Not at the front, dufus, the librarian will open the book to stamp it! Bookmarks instead of flyers work even better. Bookshops and charity shops are usually receptive to you leaving some free bookmarks with them for customers to pick up.

Take advantage of students
Live in a college town? Get yourself down to the arts department and plaster their noticeboards with your work. Don't get arrested for loitering. Speak to someone in charge and see if you can do a talk on self-publishing, or authorship in general. Colleges love that shit.

Turn yourself into a walking advert
Who needs the Gucci winter collection when you can do your shopping in a T-shirt with your book cover on it? Or carry a bag with a link to your website. (God love Vistaprint!) What about a bumper sticker for your car? Hell, make a sandwich board and go round your town centre crying O-ye, O-ye, if you think it'll help. It'll get you attention, if nothing else.

Join up with other indies
Got an indie friend in the same genre who's selling better than you? Beg and plead and offer to have their babies if you can have a chapter of your book in the back of theirs. "Liked this author? You might also like..." kinda thing. You can always return the favour for them. Remember: other indies are not the enemy! Get others to include you in their blogs, twitter, facebook, goodreads and all the rest.

Put your book on your website
I mean your whole book. The one you're trying to sell. I know, I know, this seems totally alien. Stay with me...the success of the bigger bookshops such as B&N comes from the fact that they have created an environment where people want to linger and read. They let them pick up books from their shelves and read as much as they want before committing to a purchase. That doesn't mean that everyone goes into B&N, finds the book they want and stays there reading the whole damn thing. They might read a chapter or two, but eventually they'll buy it to finish at home. This is a similar theory. Reading too much on a computer screen is uncomfortable on the eyes: no-one, but no-one, is going to read an entire novel that way. So put the whole thing on your site, and at the end of each chapter give them a little nudge - "read this on your Kindle at..." etc. with all your links. The people who get into the book will eventually want to read it more at their leisure and they will buy it, even though they can have it for free from your site. Trust me. Just disable the right click "copy all" function if you can ;-)

Become an expert
Trust me, everyone is an expert on something (or thinks they are...) You might know an awful lot about the Death's Head Moth, or quilting, or growing giant pumpkins. Whatever it is, your knowledge will be useful to someone. Join HARO (Help A Reporter Online). Here journalists who are looking for specific experts gather for sources. In return for your expert knowledge, you can usually wangle a line at the bottom about your book. Especially helps if your book is relevant to the topic in hand, but it doesn't have to be. Think about it: I could go on there as an "expert" in self-publishing. Or in queer theory. Or literary theory. They're all relevant to my writing and they're all something I can wax lyrical about. You can pay for advanced membership of HARO, but even with the free membership you'll get three emails a day with relevant requests for experts.

Be nice to fans
You will get them. I promise. I have several, and it still makes me grin like a fool when they contact me. Offer them additional freebies, and engage with them properly (not just "thank you for liking my book"). These people can be fiercely loyal, and they are the best marketing tool that you will ever have. 90% of advertising is word of mouth, and there is nothing so strong as the endorsement of a book by one reader to another. Whatever else you do, and however mundane your everyday life is, to people who like your writing you're a kind of celebrity, as surreal as that may seem. If your readers feel strongly about your work, and more importantly like you as a person and feel that they know you to some exent, they will go out of their way to promote you all over the place ~ and these people can have influence in a massive number of networks that you haven't even tapped. You are never, ever too busy to answer a message from a fan - even if it's just a tweet - because you never know where it might lead. If someone leaves you a positive review on Goodreads then be sure to "like" it.

An example of this in action: an author called Damon Suede has written a book called Hot Head. I'd never heard of him or it until two weeks ago, when the moderator of the Goodreads M/M Romance group sent a group-wide email announcing that it had been nominated for the goodreads romance book of the year award, and was the only m/m book nominated to boot. Damon is a member of the group, hence the support from the moderator. I voted for it in the first round. I then decided that I should probably read the book I'm voting for, or at least have a look at it on Amazon, so I did. I spent £5 on it (about $7.50) and wouldn't you know it's genuinely the best book I've read all year. Mr Suede now has my cash and it can all end there. However as I'd discovered it through goodreads I rated it and was moved enough by it to leave a review. The next day he "liked" it. My heart warmed. I copied the review and also left it on Amazon. I recommended it to people who were looking for book suggestions on the Amazon message boards. I'm now blogging about it. (Seriously, buy it. It's a fantastic book). This is a book that has 1000+ 5* reviews on goodreads alone. The author doesn't need to engage with any of them, the book is clearly selling well enough on its own. But because he did I've gone a couple of steps further than I otherwise would have done, and who knows, he may get some more sales as a result. Multiply that by 1000 and suddenly that's a lot of sales and a lot of money. And I might never have heard of it at all if he wasn't part of the same goodreads group as me.

Lesson for the day?
Never underestimate the domino effect of readers communicating with readers.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #7: Paid Advertising

2011-11-20T20:06:00.000Z

When all else fails you can always buy advertising. Every website and its founder is queuing up to take your money off you, so make sure you do some research beforehand.

First things first, set your goal.
What do you want to achieve? Yes, I know you want to sell a million copies of your book, but aside from that. How much money can you afford to spend? Are you prepared to write the advertising costs off as a necessary loss, or do you want to actually turn a profit from your campaign? How long are you prepared to commit to a campaign? All of these factors will impact on what is possible, and what will work for you. All I'm going to do here is run through the most popular options, giving the pros and cons for each. You need to work out the answers to the questions posed above to decide which route is best for you.

Google Adwords
The daddy of all search engines has it's own advertising feature (see those blue boxes on the right whenever you enter a search? That's what you'll be buying). Your first decision will be to go with pay per view or pay per click advertising. Which you go for is a bit of a gamble. If you pay per view you'll be charged a set rate for a set number of impressions (the number of times an ad is shown) e.g. for simplicity let's say $1 per 10,000 impressions. With pay per click you'll only be charged when someone actually clicks on the link on your ad, say $1 per click. You then set a daily budget, let's say $20, and a timescale for how long you want your ad to run, let's say a week. Now with pay per view google will generate up to 200,000 impressions each day. You might get 200,000 clicks from that, you might get none. With pay per click google will generate as many impressions as it takes for you to get 20 clicks. This could be after 20 impressions, or 2 million.

The pros to pay per impression is that if you've got an ad with a high click volume you'll get more clicks for your money. The con is that you could be paying for nothing, because no-one might be clicking. The pros to pay per click is that you're only paying when someone actually engages with your ad, so you have a better chance of seeing a return on your money, but the con is that you could end up with far fewer clicks than the other method, depending on how successful your ad is.

Note that google will charge you up to your limit, and all impressions are generated in response to a relevant search. When you design your ad you'll associate keywords with it (google has a great tool which will guide you in picking the most popular keywords as you do this) e.g. I might run an ad for Blood & Ash and I might assign a keyword "gay vampire". Every time someone types that phrase into google there is a chance that google will show an impression of my ad. Hence why you make your keywords both as generic and as specific as possible (not always easy). If there aren't enough relevant searches made in a day to show your set number of impressions, or you don't get that many clicks, you'll only be charged for what you've actually used.

As a general rule if you're paying for impressions then make your tagwords as specific as you can, if you're paying per click you can afford to be a bit more general.

Your ad is a living, breathing thing. If you're not happy with it you can always change the wording. The best ad campaign I ever ran described Blood & Ash as "Brokeback Mountain meets Twilight." Not entirely true, but not entirely a lie, either. Entirely successful though. Standing on the shoulders of giants is always a good idea.

The biggest advantage to advertising with google is that it's the most popular search engine on the net, ergo you have the biggest possible audience (which you can limit to area if you so desire). In addition, people are only on google because they're looking for something, making them open to any suggestions that your ad may make. They aren't on google to stay on google, but to get to somewhere else. Just make sure that somewhere else is your book page.

Facebook
The social networking giant also has an advertising feature. I've already stated that I don't think a facebook fan page is the best place to start making your name as an author. I am equally doubtful that facebook advertising is the way to get people to your book, either. Unlike google, facebook is an end in itself, the people on there are networking, or spying, or playing games. They are not looking to go elsewhere. Be honest, how many times have you clicked on a facebook ad? And how many of those times did you click by accident and immediately go back to where you were?

The facebook marketing tool works in the same way as google's, although you get the added bonus of having an image included as standard, so if you do decide to go down this route, your decisions are pretty much the same as with google adwords: pay per click, and pay per impression. Facebook also uses it's users' "likes" to generate more options to narrow your target audience. Be warned, facebook's payment reporting isn't as slick as google's, I found it pretty difficult to see exactly what I had spent on any particular day, and as facebook will just take the money from your paypal accout when your bill is due it's all too easy to spend more than you anticipated.

Kindleboards
This has to be the daddy of kindle reader networks. They have two advertising options, a banner ad across the top of the site, or being the "book of the day". The banner will set you back $40 per day, book of the day $35, with an option to save a bit if you buy several days at once. Both options are heavily subscribed: at the time of writing the banner ads are fully booked until Mar 2012, and book of the day until Sep 2012, so this isn't a short-term idea.

The pros are that this is *the* place where kindle owners meet to discuss books. The site gets 80-100,000 page views per day (figures as of 2010.) The banner ad will rotate on every page of the site, generating approx. 40,000 hits (there are 2 banners per day in equal rotation). That's $1 per every 1000 impressions, which might seem a bit steep compared to google / facebook's rates, but you are already right in front of your target audience, which in some eyes justifies the premium. Kindleboards will also provide you with satatistical data about your ad after it has run. The book of the day features at the top of every page, smaller than the banner ad, and gets about 50,000 impressions. If you use the site as a member and have a thread in the Book Bazaar they'll sticky it for the day so that it's always at the top while your book is being promoted, encouraging more discussion. I have shamelessly borrowed Kindleboards' graph showing the book ranking figures of 13 "books of the day" for your information.

Source: Kindleboards

Now no-one promises that your book will become a bestseller, but this clearly demonstrates that advertising in the right place can really help. Although it is worth pointing out that the lowest starting ranking was about 115,000. That's maybe a sale every other day. There is no data for the effect that this advertising has on books that are struggling with total obscurity.

There are other places that are worth considering. I have given a summary of the three biggest sites, but there are dozens of others. Kindle Nation has a number of "sponsorship" options, starting at $59.99 and running to $399.99 (which includes paying for a Kindle Fire for a members' competition). So not cheap, but again you're speaking directly to your target audience, and their options are more flexible than a small ad on a website.

Blogs are also worth considering. Every blogger and his dog is trying to turn a profit these days (except me ~ see, no ads!!) and some of the bigger ones are very, very popular. Kindle Author runs a sponsorship programme for $75 per day. Looking at the sales stats of some of those authors from the past week the effect, if there is one, is not lasting. Most of them have sales ranks lower than me, and I've not forked out $75 on advertising this week. Or at all, for that matter. The problem with Kindle Author is that every author and his dog is on there, but I'm not sure how many readers that site actually attracts. Google blogs in your genre (e.g. I might google "vampire book blog" or "mm romance blog") and have a look at the top sites. How many followers do they have, how many pageviews do they generate? Again, you're speaking directly to your target audience by advertising with them, and the vast majority of them have advertising options.

The big question, which everyone wants an answer to, is does paid advertising work? There's no hard-and-fast answer to that. A correctly applied ad campaign can be very, very effective. Another ad campaign might sink without trace. So many people spend so much time flitting about on the internet that getting their attention and holding it is always difficult. Consider where they are starting (i.e. the place where you are advertising) and make sure that it's somewhere that people will be willing to leave ~ like a search engine, rather than a social networking site. Think long and hard about how to target your audience as specifically as possible, and what the best way of reaching them is. Then write an ad that they simply cannot not click on.

No ad campaign, wherever you launch it, will guarantee you success. If it could, we'd all be doing it. Sometimes all the networking and the advertising that you do will fall on deaf ears. Sometimes you need to do something drastic. #8: Guerrilla Marketing, coming soon...

Four Chances: A Short Story Quartet

2011-11-19T13:52:00.004Z

~~ Now Available from Amazon & Smashwords ~~

Lust, love, longing, loss...Four erotic tales of attraction and angst; seduction and separation.

LUST

Mark is hiding a terrible, shameful secret. Nobody knows, not even Adam, his best friend. When a teambuilding exercise forces him to confront his darkest fears, Mark finds himself in a situation that's out of his control. He needs a hero: will Adam be the man to rescue him?

LOVE
Jason and Archie have been at it for months: ever since they started rooming together. Sex comes easily, but Jason knows that he wants more. He finally plucks up the courage to tell Archie how he feels, but Archie isn't alone. Has Jason left it too late for love?

LONGING
Alex loves his partner of two years with all his heart, but Nick's possessiveness is suffocating him. Their relationship is at crisis point when Alex heads off for a night on the town. He's not looking for anything other than a good time with his friends, but a steamy encounter with a beautiful dancer might be too much to resist.

LOSS

At twenty-one, Tom has finally got his life the way he wants it. He's just started his dream job as a fireman, and he's mastered the art of having affairs without falling in love and making a fool of himself. His reaction to Mike, his new boss, is purely physical. Isn't it?

36,000 words (145 pages)

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #6: Social Networking 101

2011-11-17T14:25:00.000Z

So you're on twitter, facebook, goodreads and god knows where else. You've got a blog. What next?

Firstly, get all of your networks linked. Sites like twitter and facebook have loads of plug-ins that will let you link your other sites to them (see those links on the right prompting you to 'like' this blog, or follow me on twitter?) Every time someone clicks that they 'like' this blog, a link to it will appear on their facebook wall. All of their friends will see it, and there's another hyperlink back to my blog in cyberspace. I regularly tweet updates from this blog, and my facebook page is automatically linked to my twitter account via an RSS feed, so whatever I post on facebook also gets tweeted. All of these accounts also link back to my Amazon and goodreads author pages and automatically update there.

Once you've done that the wheels are in motion for you to be able to cross-promote your different networks with a minimum of effort. This way you are ensuring that you are reaching all of your followers, however they choose to follow you. Now you just need the rest of the internet to get on board and start helping you. Firstly, ping your blog. No, that's not a euphemism. In lay-speak, 'pinging' your blog means that you're sending it to the search engines directly, rather than waiting for their bots to come to you. Very useful when you're working with a medium that updates pretty regularly. (You are updating your blog regularly, aren't you?) Use sites like Ping-O-Matic! or Ping My Blog, all you have to do is add your URL and they'll tell the search engines all about you. The handy thing with these sites is that they also feed blog-specific search engines, as well as the more generic ones.

You should already be engaging with people on twitter, facebook and all the rest, and participating in discussions on sites like goodreads. Getting a bit overwhelmed? Well help is at hand! Thanks to a lovely little site called Social Oomph you can schedule tweets in advance. Very handy if (like me) the majority of your audience lives in a different time zone to you. No more getting up at 3am to tweet! Social Oomph has loads of great technology to really help you get the most out of your twitter account. Some of it is subscription-only, but there's enough available for free that you can utilise at the beginning while you decide how far you're going to take it. Another handy site is Manage Flitter, which will show you who is and who isn't following you, and how active those people are. A word of warning: twitter dislikes you mass unfollowing people, so it's not a good idea to go onto a site like that and delete 100 accounts at a time. Plus, it just makes you look antisocial. However it is useful to see if you're following people who haven't tweeted in the last six months. After all, what's the point of following them anymore?

Never underestimate the power of retweeting. Look which of the people that you follow have the biggest number of followers. Retweet their tweets, and chances are they'll return the favour.

If you haven't already, link your twitter account to your mobile. That way if you're scheduling updates you can stay on top of them when people tweet back or retweet them. After all they have no way of knowing that your tweet was scheduled, they think you're online and they're trying to talk to you. Ignoring them is rude. (You can tell twitter not to text you in the middle of the night so you won't get woken up at 4am to read a tweet saying something inane like "I agree").

Don't forget to use all of those tweet and share buttons on your Amazon page, B&N, Smashwords and everywhere else either. Remind people about your books - just don't do it all the time! Remember the golden rule - be interesting. One of the most successful twitter campaigns I ran was when I scheduled a series of tweets each repeating one of the top 10 jokes from this year's Edinburgh Fringe. Number 1 ("I needed a password with eight characters so I picked 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves'") got retweeted across the globe and my number of followers spiked.

Give up on the idea of having 5,000 followers who will all head straight off to Amazon and buy your book if you prompt them enough. It's not gonna happen. What you need to do is use social networking to get people interested enough in you to follow up on that. Pique their curiosity. Twitter is great for driving visitors to my blog (how many of you came from there?) and this blog is a much better platform for pushing my books. Here I have unlimited webspace to grab people's attention and get them hooked on my writing.

Market subtlely. If you're part of a forum such as Kindleboards then don't forget to use your signature line to link to your books. It's an unobtrusive way of promoting your books, and if you engage properly you should be able to get people interested enough to want to see what you've written. For other forums that don't automatically include a sig line you can still make one. A little basic HTML will make it look more professional. See how I can make a LINK that highlights a word and will go to another website? You can do that yourself, using the below code (which I've had to add as an image because otherwise the webpage will 'read' it and just display the link!):

(I know it's small, click on it and it'll go bigger!!)

The advantage to all of these links darting about and cross-referencing each other is that search engines love them. The more you have, the more you will appear in google et al, and the higher up the ranking you'll be.

You don't have to interact with readers all the time: when was the last time you spoke to another author? The indie community is a vibrant and welcoming place, so if you're not a part of it - why not? (This advice comes from the biggest cynic on the planet. I don't do cute and cuddly. I don't do holding hands and gathering round the campfire to sing songs. If I can get involved, so can you.) The author forum on Amazon's KDP platform is excellent: there is more help and information on there than I can ever impart in a hundred blog posts. See the top tab next to Bookshelf and Reports, the one called Community? Get in there, get there now! Another great platform is ePC, they've got some teething trouble with the forums, which are very slow to update, but if you post your books in the categories where you're told to they will roll them out across the web and help you with your SEO. Scroll to the bottom of this screen and you'll see their banner ad for some of their authors' books - yours truly included.

Remember: there is no competition between authors. No-one is making a reader pick one book and stick with it for life. So someone is outselling you in your category: the people who buy their books might buy yours next. The indies I have spoken to are without exception friendly and helpful people who will give you all the advice that you could ever need.

There are other - slightly underhand - ways that indies help each other. If you've been studying the way that Amazon works, you'll have noticed that the first and hardest hurdle you have to cross is getting initial sales. Once your book hits the top 20,000 or so across the paid Kindle store (easier than it sounds: a couple of sales a day will get you in this ballpark) you will notice that you suddenly rank in the Top 100 of a string of weird and wonderful sub-genres, the existence of which you'd never noticed before. This means that if someone is browsing by that genre, Amazon will present them with your book. Get onto the first page (Top 12) of those sub-genres and chances are that sales will start to beget sales. If your book is popular Amazon will pick it up and start to actively promote it for you.

So how do you get those initial sales? You can tweet until your fingers bleed, but there's a much easier way. Get a list of people - ideally you want about 50 - and 'gift' them your book from Amazon. To do this go to your book page and underneath 'buy this book' you will see 'send this book as a gift'. You need to warn your receievers that they are going to get an email from Amazon gifting the book, because it doesn't count as a sale until they log on and accept it. The more people you can get to accept the book on the same day, the better (because ranking is updated hourly). This will cost you money - you actually have to buy the book for the full purchase price every time you gift it - but think of this as an advertising cost. If you gift 50 books at $2.99 it will cost you $150 but you'll get $100 back in royalties. You can spend $50 in a single week advertising on google, and this will get you a far better return.

If it works, your book will rocket up the rankings and appear in the Top 100 (usually the Top 12) in a number of different categories. Once you've got that kind of visibility, you just have to cross everything you've got and hope that people browsing those categories think your book looks interesting and buy it themselves. Chances are, they will. Those sales will keep your book high in the rankings, meaning that more people will see it and buy it, and so on. The Amazon model pretty much guarantees that sales beget sales.

There are other ways of helping yourself out. Generate some excitement before a new release. If you're not thinking about marketing until after your book is published then you've already missed the boat. Start a month in advance, reminding people that the book is coming soon, the date it will be published, the title, what it's about. Add sample chapters to your blog and to goodreads. Garner as much interest as you can, and then on release day go all out on every network that you can telling people that it's arrived and urging them to go out there and be the first to buy it. People like being the first anything, so some will take you up on that if you prompt them.

Whatever forums you engage with, remember the golden rules:

Engage with others and participate fully
Be interesting
Make sure your contributions add value
Do favours for other people - they'll return them
Don't just shill your book(s)
Keep your communication audience-appropriate (there's no point advertising your book to other authors)
Link all of your accounts to each other and cross-promote them

There are other ways of getting more out of social networks, blogs and search engines, but these usually cost money. Stay tuned for #7: Paid Advertising, coming soon...

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #5: Selling Yourself

2011-11-15T13:12:00.000Z

This is the hardest thing that most people will ever have to do. It's relatively easy to market your latest book, but marketing yourself is much more difficult. It feels egotistical and just wrong. The fact of the matter is that you are an author: that makes you a kind of celebrity, however unlikely that seems. Start acting like one!

No, I don't mean wear sunglasses indoors and talk about yourself in the third person. You're an author, not a pretentious tosser. You can spend all of eternity marketing your most recent book, but all of that will go to waste as soon as you start marketing your next book. Or the one after. The key to this is making your name known in its own right, that way people will look for you, not one specific title.

Of course, I am assuming that you have written more than one book. Let's face it, you're not going to have written the next To Kill a Mockingbird, so if you want to make anything like serious money out of this venture you'd better have written more than one. Or be planning to. Why? Well the numbers speak for themselves. Let us assume that you sell one book per day, at $2.99. That gives you an annual income of approximately $730 per year. It's a holiday, but it's not a retirement fund. Now say you have two books that each sell one copy a day, at the same price. That's $1460 a year. That's a month's rent or a mortgage payment. Twelve books selling a copy a day and suddenly you can afford to go part-time at work, giving you more time to write, which means that you can publish more books. The effect snowballs.

It has been calculated that to earn a median salary of $35,000p.a. you need to be selling about 48 books at $2.99 per day, or 290 at $0.99. I know to most people they seem like completely unobtainable, pie-in-the-sky figures. But they're not. Honest. Not if you've got several books available. 48 copies a day of one title is hard ~ damn hard. With those kind of sales figures you'd be pretty close to the top 100 across the Kindle store, and most people are never going to reach those lofty heights. But if you've got two books available, that's 24 copies of each one (1 an hour). If you've got four, that's only 12 copies of each book. And so on.

That doesn't mean that I am advocating just hammering books out and throwing them onto the web. People have to like your books for this to work, after all! Take as much time on them as each book needs, but always keep the end goal in mind. It might mean only publishing a book a year, but over ten years that's ten books. (I never promised that this was a get-rich-quick scheme, did I?) The advantage to having more titles available is that if people like one, chances are they'll buy more. I've had emails from people already saying that they've read all of my books and they want to know when the next is out. (End of this month, my pretties!) The first and last question that a reader always asks is what's next? That can seem like a very cruel question when you've just poured your guts into a book and feel like you've been physically and emotionally drained, but never knock enthusiasm for your writing, however much you might feel like crying.

Consider ways of increasing your output without compromising the end product. I've been a busy bee writing my Lost Realm series since the beginning of this year, and have just published the second of three novels that are going to make the trilogy. The third is coming together in my head but there's no way it will be out any time before Feb 2012. After hitting publish on Fire & Ice back in early October, I simply couldn't face writing another novel again immediately. Novels are hard work, and take a long, long time. I reckon (conservatively) I've put at least 500 hours into Fire & Ice. It literally took over my life.

To keep my hand in, I've written five short stories. They will be published in one collection at the end of this month. A short story can have a pretty quick turnaround. I can finish the first draft (say 10,000 words) in five hours or so. I can do that in an evening after work, or at the weekend. It only takes my betas an hour or two to read, and then it's back to me, usually the next day. I can then revise it. Most of them are now sitting around the 12k mark. I've got one left to finish, it probably needs another 4k adding to it, and then it needs to do the rounds with the betas and have a final revision. Then it's done. The whole collection comes in just shy of 50,000 words (so the length of a novel) but has taken me six weeks (up to this point). There is no way I could produce a full novel of the same standard in that time.

So you don't have to write novel after novel after novel. Consider short stories. Consider poetry (I know it's not a massive seller, but if you can do it, why not?) A series can be useful in keeping your momentum up because you've already got your characters and your scene, you just need a new plot. However, sometimes writing a sequel can be the hardest thing of all, because your readers already know what they expect from the characters. Mess with that too much and they'll never forgive you.

Whatever you decide to do, just keep writing. Having other works available will benefit you in a number of unexpected ways. Not only does it make that goal of 48 books a day more achievable just by virtue of stacking the odds more highly in your favour, there are also the incalculable benefit of people liking one of your book and buying your others. Amazon will help you out by including your other books in "what customers bought after viewing this item" section (if others have bought them, of course!) Once someone's bought Blood & Ash, Amazon now actively prompts them towards Fire & Ice.

Once you've got more than one book out, then promoting each title singly is a waste of your valuable time and effort. Instead, you need to promote yourself as the superstar author that you are. Let people find you, and then they can take their pick which of your books they read first. To do this you are going to have to get over yourself and start blowing your own trumpet a bit. If you've taken my advice from Self-Publishing Tips & Trick #4 then you're already got yourself started on a number of social networking platforms. Now is the time to ramp that up a gear. You see this blog? It's all about me. My books, my ideas, my advice. This entire series is a SEO wet dream. (And there you were thinking that I was just a sweet, selfless indie wanting to help others!) If you've not got a blog, get one. I'm sure you're just as interesting as I am, so find something to write about. Tip - Don't write about writing! It's boring as hell. No reader cares. (Yes, I know, I know. I'm writing a series about self-publishing. Discount that for a minute. All my other posts are about my pet subject - queer theory. And announcing when I've got new books out, or offers on. That's the kind of stuff you want to blog about).

Give your blog a theme. I studied queer theory at uni, and my books are all in the gay & lesbian genre. I know what I'm talking about in this field, and it's relevant to my writing, so the more I blog about it the more potential readers I attract. Everyone is an authority on something, so have a think about what you are passionate or knowledgeable about. The point is to get people to read your writing and want to learn more about you. See how I end every post with a sentence about what I write and a link to my Amazon author page? That's my sign-off. It's unobtrusive, but if someone has read to the bottom of my post they'll keep reading that last line, and you never know, they might just click on the link.

Just because that's not enough me, me, me for one day, consider joining a blog tour. Check out the one I hosted: the KDP Blogtour 2011. People are always keen to conduct author interviews, just join a couple of author forums and jump in. The advantage to the blogger is that every author who has been interviewed will want to promote the interview, and therefore the blog. The advantage to authors is that it's free publicity. I've done three recently, on Kindle Author, Isabella Tyler's blog, and Cyndia Rios-Myers' blog. Google my name and all three come up on the first page. It really was incredibly simple to do: each blogger emailed me a list of questions, and I did my best to answer them in as entertaining a fashion as possible. Each post ended with a brief bio of me and links to all of my books.

Sales are a tried and tested marketing ploy, and you'd do well to get involved. Goodreads has a great platform for offering freebies and giveaways, and hosting competitions. Some blogs will promote your book(s) if you provide a number of free copies for their readers. Smashwords will let you create coupons to discount your books, or to even give them away. Publish limited-time offers on your social networks. Giving the offer a deadline will create a sense of urgency and encourage people to take you up on it. Here it helps if you have a hard copy of your book to give out, but offers still work if it's ebooks that you're distributing. Consider dropping your price on Amazon for a limited period and broadcast the news everywhere. Don't be swayed into giving out free copies of your books to bloggers left, right and centre in return for reviews or publicity. Always check how likely you are to get a return for your investment, and remember that the bigger bloggers are innundated with people all offering the same things that you are.

Add value to your books. If you've written a series, consider making an omnibus edition ~ it will sell, I promise. Make Special Edition versions of your books. For $1 extra include some additional information at the end: deleted or extended scenes, a Q&A with the author, excerpts from new / upcoming publications, a list of discussion points for a reading group, maybe a short story or a spin-off from the book, or even an alternative ending. I know people who have done this and the Special Edition version has actually sold better than the original. The key is to include quality material that people will want to read and that does give your readers something a little bit special, and best of all it's probably stuff that you've got lying around anyway.

In summary:

The more books you write, the more books you will sell
Time spent marketing yourself will pay greater dividends than time spent marketing individual books
Use social networks and personal blogs to engage with potential readers
Never waste an opportunity to leave a link to your books / author page!
Get interviewed - it's not just for A-Listers anymore
Run limited time offers and giveaways
Add value to your books to justify a higher price

Finally, never underestimate the personal touch. Your blog and your social network profiles are your opportunity to engage directly with your target audience. If people feel like they know you, they'll be more inclined to check out your books. If they think you are an interesting person, they'll want to know if your writing is interesting, too.

Getting someone to buy one of your books is the start of your journey, not the finish. There's still all of that lovely blank space at the end of your book that you'd be a fool not to use. I'm sure you've already got an author bio there already. Have you got your social network links there? A link to your blog? A list of your other titles? If not, why not? If someone has taken the time to read to the end of your book, they'll keep reading whatever else you put there. It's a great place to put a money-off coupon for your next book. It's also a great place to put a couple of sample chapters from your next book.

Encourage readers to communicate with you and engage with them. There is nothing like an email from a fan to cheer up a dull Monday morning. Even if it's just an extra follower on twitter, it's someone who will be paying attention to what you say - and to what you publish in the future. Reward loyalty with acknowledgements and vouchers. Someone tweeted me the other day to say that they'd read Fenton and loved it. I tweeted back thanking them and they've marked my tweet as a favourite. I think I've made a friend for life. Someone else contacted me when Fenton went free asking why they couldn't see it for free in the UK. I explained it was only free in the US but offered them a free copy anyway. They promptly purchased both Fenton and Fire & Ice. You can't buy that kind of loyalty or advertising.

For more on how to get the most out of social networking, stay tuned for #6: Social Networking 101

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #4: Advanced Marketing

2011-11-13T20:01:00.000Z

Your baby is live, tagged and featured in lists. You've sold a couple of copies to people that you don't even know. Your joy and excitement know no bounds. Now to ramp it up a gear: how do people get hundreds and hundreds of sales a week? How do people make a living doing this?

Well that is of course the $1,000,000 question. Let's face it, if I could write a blog post that gave you all the information you needed to guarantee a bestseller I wouldn't be sitting here writing a blog - I'd be writing my next bestseller. What I can give you is the best advice that I've seen, condensed into a nice little package. It's up to you how you use it, and remember not everything will work for everyone. You have to take these tips and tricks and find out what your magic formula is, because there is no universal guarantee of success.

The first hurdle that we all need to overcome as new authors is getting our name out there. The more webpages there are that link back to your books, the more people will know that you exist and will consider buying your book. Do a quick google search of your name (in "inverted commas") and "author". How many hits do you get? Here's mine (today):

That's approximately 10,100 results for me as an author. When I made that search 5 days ago it produced 9,900 pages. That's a 200 page increase ~ 40 extra pages a day. Not bad. But just to burst my own bubble, I'm going to put that in perspective:

Yes, that's over fifty million results for Stephen King. Bastard. To put that in perspective again, I've done a third search, using the author name of someone that I've interacted with on a number of occasions on an author's forum, who is always complaining about their poor sales. To save their blushes, they shall remain nameless:

Their book was published at the same time as Blood & Ash, yet they're not even in 4 figures on google. They're not even half-way to four figures. Now it doesn't take a genius to work out that visibility = sales. No, I do not mean spam yourself all over the web. There is such a thing as negative publicity, and it will harm you in the long-term, no matter what people say.

So how do you get all of those page results on google? Believe it or not, I have not created 10,000+ webpages all about me and my books. I create pages in key places, and I wait for the rest of the web to do my job for me. I have all of the usual sites: this blog, twitter, facebook, goodreads. I link from one to the other constantly (like I just did there). These are called backlinks, and google rates them pretty highly. The more pages that you can link back and forth to each other, the better. There are deep and complex reasons for this which I am sure an IT nerd can explain, but do you really need to know how the internet works? Just know how to play it. Any idiot can make a blog that links to every major site on the web, but if none of them link back to it then search engines will see it for what it is - spammy.

Make sure your book is available on as many platforms as you can. I know I generally focus on Amazon in this blog, but my books are also available from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iTunes, Diesel, Sony and Smashwords. Each of those sites has a vested interest in selling my book, because it makes them money, too. Their entire existence depends on the almighty consumer buck, and they spend hundreds of thousands each year on promotion. You type pretty much any salable commodity into google and chances are one of the first results will be a sponsored link from Amazon saying that they've got it and to buy it now. When your work is available on these platforms and someone types your name / title(s) into a search engine, chances are their marketing machine will kick into action and prompt the searcher to buy your book.

More than that, however, all of these sites have fingers in a number of other pies, too. Amazon owns Shelfari, for example, which means that if your book is on Amazon, it will eventually end up on Shelfari even if you don't put it there yourself. After I listed on Smashwords my books and author info appeared on dozens of different sites such as CheapLit.com, free-gay-ebooks.com and glbt-ebooks.com, all of which are "powered by Smashwords" sites. I didn't have to do anything other than distribute my books through these channels to get all that free webspace.

There are also reader sites out there that are well worth engaging with. I'm a member of Goodreads, which is probably the biggest, but there are others. The beauty of these sites is that anyone who has read your book can add it, review it and promote it for you. A 4-5* review on Goodreads can be seen by hundreds of people. Again, these wonderful people make lists of books, very similar to Amazon. Get on there, and get adding your book to any that are relevant. Join groups dedicated to your genre and interact with the people there: these people are your target audience, so be nice to them! A word of warning: the literati do hang around these forums, these are the people who are trying to make a name for themselves as reviewers. Chances are at some point you will fall foul of them, and they can be brutal. The first and last rule when dealing with negative reviews is do not engage. Remember this at all times, and work on toughening up your skin.

Now if you've taken my advice and you've distributed your book everywhere that you possibly can (if you're in the UK then Smashwords will distribute to B&N, Sony, iTunes etc etc for you for a very reasonable cut), and got yourself started on a reader forum or two, you should already be looking at search results in the low thousands. So what next?

Social networking, that twenty-first century monster, is your next port of call. Every author that I know has a facebook fanpage, myself included. The problem with facebook is that it's very difficult to find something unless you're actually looking for it. That means it's not a great place to launch your career as an author. What it is good for is providing a rallying point for people who have already found your books and like them. Get one by all means, and remember to update regularly (you'd be amazed how many people make these things and then forget about them!) but don't rely on facebook alone.

Get on twitter. Twitter is a much better forum for finding people, thanks to its hashtag technology. If someone tweets #amreading then they are well worth a look. Follow people who tweet with relevant hashtags, and give them a couple of days to follow you back. You'd be amazed how many people do this just as a common courtesy. Suddenly you'll find yourself with hundreds or even thousands of followers, for minimum effort on your part. Followers do not equal sales, of course. Where I find that twitter is useful is getting traffic to my blog, and of course, my book links are all over the place on here!

The first and last rule of social networking - on goodreads / facebook / twitter or whatever forum you choose to engage - is be interesting and get involved. No-one wants to read a million tweets saying "buy my book!" anymore than they want to read that in the middle of a discussion on a forum. I am constantly coming up with tweets that I hope will make people nod, or smile, or laugh. If your tweet amuses someone, chances are they are going to retweet it (share it with their own followers). The retweet stays in your name, so you might only have 50 followers, but if someone retweets something to 5000 followers, they've all seen what you've got to say. Whenever I get something funny retweeted I get new followers. If you fancy seeing a master of this technique at work check out The Tweet of God. Forget the religious thing for a minute, this account advertises a book and it's hilarious. 49,000 follows agree with me.

Once you're all set up on the social networking platforms that you have decided to engage with, you should really think about finding out how effective your efforts are. There is no point sending out a million tweets if no-one is listening. Thanks to the Big Brother nature of the internet, help is at hand. Get yourself over to bit.ly and get an account (you can sign up with a social networking account for free). Make bit.ly links for your books, blog, facebook page, author page, etc etc and use those links exclusively whenever you're networking. Never again use www.amazon.com/buymybook. Bit.ly will collect data whenever your links are used, and will provide you with tons of information, like this:

What that shows me is that 70% of clicks to my book pages on Amazon come from my blog, and that 50% of those clicks come from the US. That tells me that I need to get people to my blog, and that I'm better off linking to the US Amazon pages of my books, rather than the UK, Germany or France. The key to anything on the web is minimising the journey that someone has to make to get to where they need to be to buy your book. If I send someone from the US to my UK author profile, they've got to make another three clicks to get onto the "buy now" bit, and somewhere along the line you can guarantee I'll lose them. Work out exactly who your target audience is, and then lead them by the nose to where they can buy your book.

Bloggers will be familiar with built-in analytics which show them details of who has visited their website. Blogger.com provides some great data showing an overview of hits, most popular posts, country and site of origin. But you can go one better than that by signing up with Google Analytics (again, free). This will provide you with a little html code which you just have to copy and paste somewhere near the top of your website (always make it the top, otherwise if people don't scroll down far enough it won't capture them). Now this little programme comes back with a terrifying amount of information. It will give you the number of visits, the bounce rate (the percentage of people who go off your site as soon as they land), their time on site, the number of pages they visit each time they land, if they're a recurring visitor or not, where in the world they are (pinpointed to city), and where they came from, even down to what they typed into a search engine to find your site. The beta version will provide in-page analytics showing you what percentage of people clicked on what link on what page. If you tell it what your goals are, it will tell you how to channel people towards them.

Now I am not getting into a debate about the moral rights and wrongs of software like Google Analytics, because I must admit it does make me a little uneasy sometimes. About the only things it doesn't tell me are the first names of my visitors and what they were wearing. As a taster, here's the map overlay of my visitors this week, by city:

See, America likes me! If I hover over each little dot it will tell me the city and the number of visitors, and just in case I'm too thick to understand that it also writes them out below, too. (FYI the big dot over the UK is my own visits ~ I ♥ my blog!) I can use this kind of data to further tailor my marketing: clearly, the east coast loves me far more than the west, for example. I can then work out the time difference between the UK and e.g. NYC and up my marketing campaigns at times when the east coast will be wide awake and receptive to my advances. Or, alternatively, I can decide to concentrate on the west coast, because they clearly need help understanding my genius. What I choose to do with this information is up to me, but the fact is that I have it and can do something with it.

All of this little lot might seem very time-consuming. Wake up call: it is! As I said before, writing your book will soon look like the easiest thing that you ever did. Marketing, now there's the bastard. You have to set these things up, you have to maintain them, and you have to collect and analyse data from them in order to get the best results that you can. It can seem overwhelming, and it can seem like all you do is market your books, rather than write. This is what self-publishing is all about. You are no longer just a writer, so get out of your garret and get online! Sensible people don't let marketing get in the way of their writing. Set aside time each week, even if it's only an hour or two, and confine your marketing to those times. Never, ever put off writing to market, because the best marketing that you can ever do is to write another book.

For more information on how being prolific will help you sell more books, and hints and tips on interviews, giveaways and sales, stay tuned for #5: Selling Yourself

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #3: Marketing, The Basics

2011-11-11T11:50:00.000Z

So you've written your book, polished it until it shines, got a killer cover, a great synopsis and you're pricing strategy is all worked out. What next?

Once you've come down from the giddy high of seeing *your* book for sale on Amazon (and everywhere else on the web) you need to start thinking about how other people are going to find it. There are over 850,000 books in the Kindle store alone, so the chances of people stumbling onto your masterpiece all by themselves are remote. Certainly they won't stumble in great enough numbers for you to be able to tell the boss where he can stick his day job.

First things first, tags. These can be found on your product page on Amazon, about half-way down. The tag section looks like this:

Those are my tags for Blood & Ash. You can add up to 15, so get going. Start typing them into the box, and make sure they're relevant. As you type Amazon will second-guess what you're writing, and also show you how popular your tags are. Don't forget to check this out: is 'vampire' more popular than 'vampires'? Remember that the more popular a tag the more likely that people will be using it as a search term, but also the further down the list your book is going to appear. You want a combination of general tags and more specific ones.

Once you've added your tags they will be linked to your book and bring it up in any search that contains those key words. Each tag will have a little (1) after it, showing that one person has tagged the book with that phrase. Here's where you need friends. Don't get involved in tagging threads, Amazon dislikes them and if you've suddenly got 50 people agreeing with all your tags it just waves a big red flag over your book. There is a fine line you need to tread because every vote for a tag bumps your book further up the relevance list for a search of those key words, but too many and it looked like you're another desperate indie. You can see on my tags that I've got 14 people tagging Blood & Ash with 'fairies', eight tagging it 'gay' and the rest have 13 votes.

The eagle-eyed among you will also notice that some of the boxes are ticked, and some aren't. Those are my tags on my book (fairies, fantasy, gay). The full list of my tags is below, the majority of which are not among the most popular. You will also notice that Blood & Ash has a total of 23 tags. This is where you play a very, very sneaky game. Once you've got someone else to vote on a tag and the lovely number changes to (2) you can untag it yourself, and the tag will remain attached to the book. This means that you can add another. And another. And so on. You can technically continue this ad infinitum, but I wouldn't encourage that. Tags are first and foremost meant to be relevant. There is no point in tagging your book as a space opera if it's a historical novel. The trick is to attract readers who are interested in your book. Don't just tag for the sake of tagging. Again, stand on the shoulders of giants. Find the bestselling books in your category and see what their tags are. Some people tag their books with the titles of other books, or other author names (e.g. a horror writer might tag their book Stephen King). It's a common technique, but not one that I like to use. It's a personal decision, and you can always disagree with me.

Reminder: as with all things Amazon, .com, .co.uk, .de and .fr all count separately, and you will need to repeat your tagging game on each and every site.

So now your tags are sorted. What next? Amazon has a great system that allows you to saturate your reader with information. Is it overkill? Not at all. If they've clicked on your product page and read the synopsis you've got their attention, but maybe they're still not sure. Some people need a little extra push. Most people won't read any further than the synopsis, but you're a fool if you throw away a chance to add a bit extra where you can that might get you some additional purchases. This is where Shelfari comes in. It's an Amazon company, so if you've got an Amazon account you're already a member. Here you can add all manner of additional information about your book, and some of it will display automatically on your Amazon book page. Here's Blood & Ash's as it appears on Amazon:

This shows anyone who's interested that this book is the first in a series, of which three are available. Great if they land on Fire & Ice (book 3) first! It also tells the reader that there are 6 main characters, and shows a description of the first three. The character descriptions allow me to expand on the synopsis and expand on each character's motivation, and also hint more at what happens in the book. (BTW for the purpose of this blog I have cut off the end of each line to make the picture fit, it doesn't just stop like that on Amazon!) You can add more stuff on Shelfari, including quotes, awards, the first sentence, contents, glossary, themes, etc etc. It's up to you how far you go, but Amazon will filter out what it considers the most pertinent information and only displays that.

Your author page is also important. It gives readers a chance to see who has written the book, learn a little bit about you, and it also gives you a landing page where all of your books are listed. To set up yours go to http://authorcentral.amazon.com/ (don't forget to make separate ones for US, UK, DE and FR!). On your product page it will show your author picture and have a link to your author page:

On your page you can add a description about yourself and your work, a full list of all of your books will appear below it, and on the right is a really handy tool that will link into your twitter account and any RSS feeds from blogs, facebook etc. which automatically update. This means that readers can find you on social networking forums, and if you've got a blog or a fan page somewhere they can also jump straight to that, too. The hardest thing you have to do as an author is get readers interested in you, not just your books. So someone likes your first novel ~ great. Now get them following you and they'll probably buy your second and third, too. I've hooked up my twitter account, the RSS from this blog, and also the RSS from my facebook fanpage. Every time I tweet, or blog, or comment on my facebook page it goes automatically to my author page. Just remember to keep it interesting! It gives your readers (fans!) an at-a-glance update as to what you're up to, which is especially useful if you're gearing up to a new release.

Finally, look at what else Amazon provides for its reader community. As an author, steer clear of the reader forums. I cannot stress that enough! In my experience the forums are pretty hostile, no doubt because they're all bored to the back teeth of indies popping up in threads and shilling their own books. I do participate as a reader, and I must admit I've gritted my teeth when in the middle of an interesting debate someone has posted "buy my book!" without attempting to engage. If you think that's marketing, you're already lost. Instead, consider the lists. At the very bottom of your product page Amazon will display lists relevant to your book's genre:

See that 'create a guide' link at the bottom? Go for it! Make sure your books feature prominently within it. Obviously include other books that are relevant (remember in authorship there is no competition ~ no-one is making a reader pick one book and never buy another ever again. Other sales in your genre help you, not hinder you!) The better your list, the more people will take notice of your recommendations, including your own books. Make several lists. Make dozens. Each list provides a link to your book page, and each link is worth its weight in gold when it comes to SEO (which we will get onto in due course). If people get down to this part of a product page either they've already bought that book, loved it and are looking for something similar, or they're not convinced and they're not going to buy it. Either way, your presence in a list at the bottom of a relevant page is going to help you.

So now you've got tags, a Shelfari account, an author page, and your book appears in a number of lists. The tags and lists are going to be what get people to your book, then when they're there Shelfari will bump up your sales numbers, and the author page keeps your readers coming back to find out more about you and your writing. All the basics are in place for you to succeed. Lesson #4: Advanced Marketing, coming soon...

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #2: Pricing

2011-11-09T15:09:00.001Z

This is the oldest debate in history. You're a new author and you've not got a publisher, so how do you value your work? Remembering that this is your baby, your opus, your first-born, it doesn't seem unreasonable to you that you charge a gazillion dollars for it. When you add up the time that you've spent getting it to a point where you hit 'publish' that seems like a pretty fair return. On the other hand, you're nobody. Aside from some long-suffering friends and family, no-one even knows that you exist. What gives you the nerve to think that your work is worth a stranger parting with their cold, hard-earned cash for?

You will find militants on both side of the fence, those that always charge low, and those that never do it. There are valid arguments on both sides. Those that say you should always price low point out that:

No-one has ever heard of you, and if you price yourself out of the market, no-one ever will.
You're asking a reader to take a punt on an unknown. They're more likely to take that punt if the financial risk is minimal.
New authors should be trying to build readership volume, not profit. The best way to do that is to price low.
With so many free and cheap books on sites like Amazon - from established authors and big publishing houses - an overpriced indie just can't compete.
People always like a bargain - a low price makes your book more visible.

Those on the other side, who say never price low, argue that:

Pricing a full-length novel at $0.99 devalues it and leads to reader expectation that it's not going to be very good.
You have to sell 6 books at $0.99 to match one sale at $2.99.
With the flood of cheap books saturating the market, discerning readers are filtering them out and won't even see your book.
You have spent many hundreds of hours on your book, don't sell yourself short. Even at $2.99 your hourly rate is probably going to be less than minimum wage.

Both sides have a point, but personally I don't think there's any hard and fast rule that will work for everyone. There are so many other variables to consider, including:

Length. $2.99 might be reasonable for an 80,000 word novel, but is it still reasonable for a 5,000 word short?
Genre. In some genres it's basically the law that your book should be priced at $0.99. In others, it's the law that it should be $5.99.
Series. It is always financially viable to have the first book in a series work as a loss leader to encourage follow-on purchases of more expensive sequels.

Then there's other, more subjective and personal quandaries. Reviews - those rare and beautiful things - are always hard to come by, and when we get them we want them to be good. Now increased readership ups the odds of getting more reviews, which is an incentive to price low, however people are suckers for a bargain: if your book is too low - or, especially, free - then many, many people will buy it for that reason alone. They probably won't bother looking properly at the blurb or the sample. This ups the odds of negative reviews from people who were never going to like your book to begin with. If they're parting with $3 or more, chances are they're going to be pretty sure that they like it before they commit to the purchase.

Is your head spinning yet? Personally, I ignore most of the theory that I've just reiterated. You should consider it all, because it all matters. Yes, if you price a novel at $0.99 some people will sneer, but more people will buy it. Yes, the price can determine your audience and thus indirectly affect your reviews. All of this is true. But the biggest factor? What is happening in your genre.

I'm going to use examples from Amazon.com from the thrillers and romance categories, as they're the biggest and best-selling overall. There are over 50,000 books in the romance category. The average price of the books on the first page (most popular / top 12) is $4.50. For thrillers the average price is $2. Out of 39,000 books, 9 of the top 12 are priced at $0.99. That's a pretty big hint that if you're writing thrillers, price 'em low. If you make it into the top 12 in that category, you're selling enough books that you can afford the drop in royalty.

Each genre is different, so look at your own. Check out the bestsellers and see (a) how long they are, and (b) how much they are. You want to be working to similar figures, because familiarity breeds sales. Also helpful here is Amazon's "what other people bought" section. That will give you up to 50 other books that readers are likely to purchase if they purchase your book, and this is the best tool for price-comparison that you'll ever find. Are those books the same price as yours? Are they higher or lower? If so, it might be worth changing your price. I know it seems alien to increase your price to get more sales, but in some genres (especially the niche ones) it really does work.

Genre differences also negate the oft-repeated wisdom that length determines price. If you're writing romance, generally readers expect shorter books. It's not unreasonable to charge $2.99 for a 60,000 word novel. If you're writing sci-fi readers typically expect longer books, often 100,000+ words. As a (very loose) rule I personally wouldn't charge more than $0.99 for a short story, but there are so many variables that there's no set rule for novels.

In summary, consider the following points before deciding on a price, and reconsider them for every separate work that you publish:

How long is my work?
What genre is it in? What is the standard for that genre?
Do I want more readers or more sales?
Is this the first book in a series (or the second, third, etc)?
How many other books have I got available? How well are they selling?
What do I think is an acceptable return for my time and effort?

The last one is the most important of all. It's your time, and your baby. What you decide to sell it for is up to you. As a parting note, I'll leave you with my own pricing strategy. I have 4 books available: two short stories (under 15,000 words), a novella (34,000 words) and a novel (62,000 words). Three are part of the same series (a short, the novella and the novel). One short is a stand-alone.

The stand-alone short is priced at $0.99. It is my slowest seller, but manages to keep its head above water. Genre: gay contemporary.
The short from the series is free (as I'm sure you're aware from past blog posts!) It's a loss-leader for the series. Thousands upon thousands of people have downloaded it. Reviews are split: for every 4-5* I get a 1-2*. It doesn't help that it deals with a difficult subject (asexuality) and it doesn't end happily ever after: both of these facts seem to attract negative feedback, but hell it's my story and I like it. Genre: gay fantasy.
The novella is the official first book in the series, and is priced at $0.99. I dropped the price down from $2.99 a couple of days before the novel was published. It's selling well: the minute I dropped the price sales took off and have remained steady since. I know I've already got a loss-leader but this is another incentive for people to get into the series. I'm making more profit at the lower price than I did at $2.99 anyway because I'm selling more than 6x the number of copies. That being said, I never had any complaints at $2.99, and I got my only Amazon review when it was at that price (5*!) Genre: gay fantasy.
The novel is priced at $2.99 and will stay there. It's also selling well, no doubt because I've increased my chances of follow-on purchases by pricing the short and the novella low. Currently the purchase-on rate (overall) stands at 60%. Not bad when I published the first book in June and this one is only 4 weeks old (yesterday!!) Genre: gay fantasy.
The third novel in the series will be around 75,000 words, and will be priced at $3.99. Genre: gay fantasy.
I've got another stand-alone book due out at the end of this month, a collection of 4 or 5 (can't decide!) short stories. That will be priced at $0.99. It's another loss-leader in a way because it's a slightly different genre than the series, and I seem to be making a name for myself in fantasy alone at the moment. Genre: gay contemporary.

So I'm playing a long game. I've got a series so I want people to stick with it and the best way to do that is to price the early books low. However, I've also got concerns about being pigeon-holed into a very specific genre. As much as I love man-loving vampires and witches and fairies and all the rest of it, that's not all I can do. My contemporary stuff is much grittier, and is closer to my heart. Gay fantasy vs gay contemporary might seem like splitting hairs, but it's a hair I want to split, just to make the point that I'm not a one-trick pony. After the fantasy trilogy is finished I'm planning on something totally different again. Watch out, sci-fi fans!!

Lesson three: Marketing, The Basics, coming soon!

Self-Publishing Tips & Tricks #1: Preparation

2011-11-07T16:20:00.000Z

Self-publishing is not as simple as most people assume. In fact, it's a bloody baptism by fire. Everyone and his dog has an opinion on it, and how best to go about it. I thought I'd throw in my two penneth and run a miniseries of hints and tips that I've picked up over the months that I've been playing this game, starting with the basics. Lesson number one is Preparation.

So you've written your magnum opus. Your blood, sweat and tears have gone into your manuscript, and it is no exaggeration to say that it is more important to you than your firstborn. You've scouted round the options and decided that epublishing is the way forward. So now what?

Firstly, your book isn't finished. You've got a killer title, the best storyline, the most empathetic characters, and a cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers. But do you have a cover? A synopsis? You'd be surprised how often people fall at this hurdle. Honestly, writing your synopsis may well take as long again as writing the damn book.

Let's start with the cover. Firstly, make sure that it's the same shape as a regular paperback cover. You'd be surprised how many people don't do this, and what a big psychological effect it has on potential readers. When people hear "book" (even "ebook") they expect to see a certain product, presented in a certain way. Even though what you're selling is an electronic commodity that doesn't exist outside of cyberspace, it still needs to look like a book. Familiarity breeds sales. You don't have to spend a fortune or be a Photoshop wizard to make this happen: I make my covers in Microsoft Publisher using photos that I've taken myself or royalty-free images. You can buy very decent images for a very reasonable price if you do a bit of canny googling.

Never, ever rely on a template cover. How many times when you're browsing Amazon's catalogue do you skip over them, assuming them to be public domain works? I know I do. Remember, the point of a cover is to attract people to your book. A pretty cover may seem an inane reason to buy a book, but it's the first thing that any potential reader looks at. Best tip ~ look at what the bestsellers in your category look like. You'll find that there are patterns in every genre, and you'd better follow them. Remember: familiarity breeds sales!!

Once your cover is done, you need a synopsis. You basically have about 3 lines in which to hook a reader and get them interested. You know that old saying that a first impression is made in 5 seconds and can never be changed? Well this is your first impression. Your synopsis may run to a dozen lines, but if you've not hooked their interest by the third, I guarantee you most people will stop reading or stop paying attention. "When" clauses are always popular ~ "When Jack and Jill went up the hill, little did they expect how quickly they'd be coming back down...". Yes that's a nursery rhyme, but note that I've introduced the two main characters, I've set up the action ('went up the hill') and also added an element of suspense (why did they come down so quickly? how? what were they doing up the hill in the first place?) And that's only the first line.

Keywords are important. Words and phrases that people search for a lot. You know these words, we see them repeated time and time again: paranormal romance // epic fantasy // vampire // space opera // coming-of-age etc etc. If any of these terms apply to your book, use them! It will make your book more searchable, both on the platform where you're selling (e.g. Amazon) but also on search engines. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the topic of a whole other blog so I'll only touch on it briefly here, but remember that keywords are pretty much the beginning and the end of getting your book noticed. Google has some fantastic tools that will help you check the popularity of certain keywords, and I advise everyone to use them.

Now you're feeling pretty smug. Thanks to a friend with an art degree that's been going to waste all these years you've got a fantastic cover, and a synopsis that leaves your readers drooling to hear more. Think you're ready? Think again. Chances are you've written your book in MS Word, and you've spent ages formatting it just so. Well scratch that, because everything will be wrong. Go to Smashwords and download their Style Guide. There is more information in there than I can ever impart in a blog, and all of it is valuable. Best of all, it's free. Word has a pesky habit of including hidden formatting in its documents that will go haywire when you try and convert the file to a .mobi (the Kindle file) and your beautiful book will end up looking like something a three year old could have produced.

Once you've cleaned up your document, I strongly urge you to make the .mobi yourself. A reliable conversion tool can be downloaded (free!) from Mobipocket. This part always divides people, with some sticking to their Word file, some making a HTML doc, and others making a .mobi, but for me, it's the .mobi every single time. I've got a Kindle and I can upload my .mobi straight onto it, meaning that I can see exactly what any reader is going to see. Not got a Kindle? If you're serious about this, get one. Consider it an investment. They're not that expensive (think what you'd pay for a first run of a POD service!!) and not only will you get a tool that will help you see exactly what you're expecting people to pay for, but you get a great piece of technology to boot. You can always download a Kindle viewer for your computer, but honestly, they're a waste of time. I have yet to find one that actually resembles what I see on the screen of my Kindle.

So now you've got your beautiful, sleek .mobi file, a perfect cover, killer synposis, and you're ready to go. You've uploaded it to Amazon and had kittens looking at *your* book on the Amazon website. Now you can just sit back and let the sales roll in, right? Wrong! Have you even thought about SEO, marketing, pricing, advertising, and all the rest of the kit & caboodle that comes with trying to make your voice heard over the 850,000+ other voices that are all screaming for attention?? Lesson 2: Pricing. Coming soon...

The Fenton Dilemma...

2011-11-03T11:27:00.001Z

...rumbles on. People love this character. I love this character. But he was only written to fulfil a purpose, which he does at the end of Fire & Ice. Fenton's story was never meant to be a happy one, but I am getting messages daily, on facebook, twitter and goodreads, asking me when he's going to get his HEA.

I had Fenton's story planned out, its conclusion was going to come at the beginning of the third novel (WIP - being released in early 2012). This was never meant to be about Fenton at all.

The good news is that I've caved. I can't decide if Fenton is getting an epilogue or another spin-off, but his story will continue. I'm keeping the same conclusion that I planned in terms of his relationship with Ash and Azrael as that cannot change at this point, there is only one way that it can end. But every ending is a new beginning, and Fenton's story is free to start all over again. Will the loneliest vampire get his happily ever after? I'm not promising anything. Fenton has so many obstacles to overcome, so much that sets him apart from everyone that he's ever loved.

After long and careful thought about how I can reconcile all of Fenton's problems and the arc of the overall Lost Realm story, I think I've found an answer. A good one. We will follow Fenton into an entirely new life, where maybe enough has changed that he can finally find what he's been looking for. It still won't be easy, and there will be all of the angst and agony that has defined Fenton as a character thus far. But there will be something else, too: this time, there will be hope.

~^~

Update on the rest of the Lost Realm series:

Fenton is still FREE on Amazon US, and is still holding its own at number 2 in the gay & lesbian section.
Blood & Ash is regularly in the top 100 in the gay romance category: at only $0.99, what are you waiting for? Go buy your copy now!!
Fire & Ice is having an exceptional first month, and I'm thrilled at the response. Only reviews so far are on Goodreads, but they're all 5*.
Book three is already coming to life in my head. I'm using NaNo as an incentive to start getting it down on paper. The final part of the trilogy is set to be a thrilling narrative of love, war, hope and betrayal, with a number of unexpected twists along the way. I will update with progress reports both here and on the NaNo website, so be sure to stay tuned!!

Fenton is back at Number 2

2011-10-29T15:35:00.000+01:00

One day, Oscar. One day...

Still FREE on Amazon

New Interview on Kindle Author

2011-10-28T12:50:00.000+01:00

A third interview of mine has just been posted on Kindle Author. I have been a busy bee!! My undying gratitude and thanks to David Wiseheart for including me in a fantastic site, of which I have been a fan for some time. David's commitment to indies is inspiring, and his site is, in my opinion, the go-to place for finding new talent. To be in its annals is a thrill indeed.

That concludes the interviews that I have conducted recently. I figured that if I did any more I'd start wearing sunglasses indoors and talking about myself in the third person!

The Effect of Having a Free Book on Amazon

2011-10-28T10:16:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd share a chart with you. This is the sales ranking figures of Blood & Ash. Amazon.com is in orange, Amazon.co.uk is in blue. Can you spot the day that Fenton went free in America?

Before Fenton went free, it had been a pretty slow month. The low point (or high point!!) of just over 258,000 was my worst sales ranking since Blood & Ash was first published in June. My average sales rank for the month (including that abysmal start) at the moment is just shy of 70,000. My average for the last week is significantly higher. Proof positive that exposure is the be-all and end-all of marketing, and a free book is the best exposure of all.

These figures are out of an approximate total of 850,000 books in the paid Kindle store, so really I shouldn't even moan at being 250,000 - that still means I'm outselling 3/4 of the other books on Amazon, after all. Once I hit the top 25-30,000 I enter the top 100 in category, and that only pushes the numbers higher because the book becomes more visible. I have spent the last two weeks bobbing in and out of the top 100 in gay romance, usually peaking at around #35. If I could just make it onto the first page (top 20) !!

Now I just need to get the UK on board. It galls that my own countrymen seem disinclined to make me rich and famous. Of course, the fact that I have kept this little venture Top Secret to avoid "pity purchases" from friends and family who might feel obliged to buy my book probably hasn't helped. It does mean, however, that all the purchases that I do get are genuine. That doubles the excitement all on its own. It has also made me appreciate America in a whole new way - especially because all my earnings from the US are tax exempt as they count as "overseas earnings". The downside is that I have to fill in an IRS tax return next year. If anyone knows a good accountant who is prepared to work for free, now is the time to speak up...

Second Author Interview!!

2011-10-27T16:37:00.000+01:00

Last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by the wonderful and talented Isabella Tyler for her blog. We had a great time discussing the challenges faced by indies today, the best marketing techniques, and graffiti. It certainly wasn't a run-of-the-mill interview, and Isabella asked some interesting questions, which I have done my best to answer in an interesting manner!! Isabella and I have a lot in common, and I look forward to collaborating with her again in the future. The mutual appreciation society starts here!

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0

Short Story Extract

2011-10-27T14:21:00.003+01:00

Here's a sneak peek at one of the shorts I'm working on for a new collection, due for release in November 2011. Enjoy!!

~^~

Tom looked at his reflection in the mirror and winced. He’d deserved that punch, he knew that. He’d behaved like a total dick the other night, he wouldn’t have blamed Dean if he’d beaten him to a pulp. And he could have, too. Tom considered himself lucky that after the first swing Dean had simply dragged on his clothes and left. He had no idea where that foul tirade had come from. What did he care if Dean cheated on his girlfriend, or hid in the closet? He wasn’t normally like that, he’d always thought that he was an easy-going, live-and-let-live kind of guy. Apparently somewhere inside him was a vicious queen, longing to get out.

Tom studied the mottled yellows and greens carefully. At least the swelling had gone down and the garish purple had faded. It didn’t look too bad. It wasn’t too noticeable. He touched a finger to the sensitive skin, wincing again. At least he could see out of that eye now. A week ago it had been puffed up to hell. Thank god for not being in work.

Of course, they all spotted it immediately, crowding round and wanting to know what had happened. Tom told them some haphazard story about a fight outside a bar, and they all applauded him as he assured them that the other guy had come off far worse. All except one of them, anyway. Mike stood by his locker, scowling. Tom hung back after the others had filed through to the common room, knowing that his boss had something that he wanted to say.

“I didn’t figure you for the brawling type,” Mike muttered, stowing his shirt in his locker viciously.

“I’m not,” Tom answered.

“So what the hell is that then?” Mike pointed at his eye.

“Not a bar brawl,” Tom admitted.

“What then?”

“A rough trick.” Tom attempted a sheepish grin.

“What!”

“He said that I got what was coming to me.” Tom thought he might have pushed that a bit far. Judging from Mike’s horrified expression, he clearly didn’t get Tom’s twisted sense of humour. He shook his head reassuringly. “Relax, I’m kidding. It was an argument that got out of hand, that’s all.”

“At a bar?”

“No, at my place.”

Mike’s eyes narrowed. “You mean with some guy that you, you,” he paused, not saying the words.

“That I slept with? Yes. Why, is that a problem?” Tom held his breath as he waited for Mike to answer, realising with a pang that he did want it to be a problem. A big problem.

“And he hit you?” Mike asked, avoiding Tom’s question.

“Yes. But I was pretty shitty to him. I said some things that I shouldn’t have.”

“That didn’t give him the right to hit you,” Mike told him emphatically. “No-one has the right to hurt you.”

You hurt me, Tom’s heart whispered. Mentally, Tom stamped on the treacherous organ. “It doesn’t matter,” he told him, “it’s not like I’m ever going to see him again.”

“Good.” Mike nodded, satisfied.

“Really?” God, Tom hoped his voice didn’t sound as needy as he thought it did.

“You deserve better,” Mike told him gruffly, shutting his locker. “Someone who’ll take care of you.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Looks like it.” Mike let his gaze linger over Tom’s bruised face. Tom looked back at him and Mike cleared his throat uncomfortably.

“Anyway - ” he turned to press past Tom, but the younger man reached out, stopping him.

“Mike,”

“ – Don’t. just don’t, Tom, please.” Mike’s head was bowed, his eyes locked on the tips of Tom’s fingers as they lightly touched his arm.

Tom felt his whole body vibrate with uncertainty, every nerve connected to the feather-light feel of Mike’s warm skin. “He didn’t mean anything,” Tom told him quietly.

“You don’t need to explain,” Mike choked.

“Yes I do. It’s important.”

“No, it’s not.” Mike shook Tom’s hand off, severing their connection. “It’s none of my business who you sleep with, just don’t come to work looking like that again or I’ll send you home.”

Tom slumped against his locker as Mike strode out of the room. What the hell? He asked himself angrily. He’d swore that he wasn’t going to do this, that he was going to come to work and treat Mike just the same as everybody else. Yeah, right, a snide little voice in his head taunted. He promised himself the same thing every day, and every day he broke that promise. Why was he so keen on Mike, why couldn’t he just forget about him and get over it? It seemed like every time he saw his boss he fell for him a little bit more, and he hated the effect that Mike was having on him. He didn’t get like this, he wasn’t some needy, clingy queen; he was independent and in control. He had a job he loved, a nice flat and great mates. Why would he want to complicate that? He was twenty-one, why limit himself, why tie himself down now? He had the rest of his life to fall in love and settle down and be boring.

Love. He recoiled from the very idea. He knew all about love: love was following his best friend around school like a lost puppy, putting up with all manner of shit just to be near him. Love was sobbing himself to sleep night after endless night because the guy who’d taken his virginity hadn’t called him back. Love was a thousand shattered dreams and a flood of memories that made him cringe. Love could fuck off.

~^~

Enjoyed this extract? More can be found at Goodreads. The collection is due for release Nov 2011.

Eek! My First Interview

2011-10-26T16:50:00.000+01:00

I have recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by a very talented author and blogger, Cyndia Rios-Myers, who gave me the opportunity to wax lyrical about myself (my favourite subject!)

No, I'm not that vain, but it was a really exciting experience, and great exposure too. With Fire & Ice still less than three weeks old, I'll swim in all the marketing streams that I can find. The interview also gave me a chance to discuss what I hope to achieve with my writing, my method, and my views on the entire indie publishing phenomena.

It's a great blog, by a fantastic author, and it's well worth a look even if you're not interested in what I've got to say. Why not check it out now?

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0/

Fire & Ice on Indie Snippets

2011-10-25T15:49:00.001+01:00

A short extract from Fire & Ice has been published today on Indie Snippets. Check it out now!!

Fire & Ice on Amazon

Yes, I Am Ten Years Old

2011-10-25T00:25:00.003+01:00

This pic has been making me laugh all day.

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. She also possesses the mentality of a child. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0/

Going Free on Amazon ~ Update

2011-10-22T20:08:00.001+01:00

Downloads of Fenton slowed a little after the first manic weekend, and I now stand at 2400 downloads in 1 week. I'm averaging about 200 a day at the minute. Fenton is still #3 in gay fiction, but has slipped to #21 in fantasy. Oscar has somehow sneaked past me again and is back at #1. I was devastated on Wednesday to see that I was being beaten to the top spot by a book advertising itself as containing "lots of angry male/male revenge sex". I mean, how rude!!

Follow on sales are picking up. In the last week I've sold 3-4 copies of Blood & Ash a day (compared to 3-4 copies in a good week previously). All 4 of my books are in the top 50,000 across the Amazon store, Blood & Ash is consistently ranked in the top 100 in the gay romance section, and sales of Fire & Ice are running at approximately 60% of those for Blood & Ash. I am a happy, happy bunny.

I may not be making millions, but Fenton has only been free for a week. Fire & Ice has only been available for a fortnight. I stated in an earlier blog that I didn't anticipate getting the staggering download numbers seen by other authors in more mainstream genres, but I still think this is a good thing. I can safely assume that at least 50% of the people that have downloaded Fenton haven't even got round to reading it yet, but already sales have increased dramatically across the board for my other books. That I am holding my position in my genre indicates that the "right" people are seeing my story.

Slightly worrying side-effect: Fenton (the character) has fans. People have been contacting me all week asking if I'm going to expand his story. Now, Fenton's character was written for a very specific purpose. His story continues in Fire & Ice, where he fulfils that purpose. I had no plans to do much more with him after that. If you've read Fire & Ice, the reason why he's got to go will be pretty evident. It's a shame because I like Fenton. In a lot of ways he is very like me. (The review which states that my story "very accurately portrayed asexuality and all of its frustrations" had me a little bit worried though!!) Fenton's story is sad by circumstance of who he is, and what he wants. Will he ever have a HEA? Probably not. But the messages I've got this week have set me to thinking about how his story is going to end. You never know, I may surprise myself yet...

__________________________________________________________________
Kate Aaron is an author of queer and fantasy novels and short stories. Find all her books on Amazon now http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Aaron/e/B0058DL8A0/