Posted by Aeryn Traxx

2009 was not a banner year for me by any stretch of the imagination. There were a few high points but ten times as many lows. With 2010 only a few hours away I am looking back and find the words of a friend echoing in my ears. “You are letting yourself be overwhelmed by the big picture. Take smaller bites and you’ll do just fine.” She was right. In looking back on the disaster that was my life in 2009 I did let things overwhelm me on far too many occasions. I am embarrassed to say this applied most succinctly to my writing. Instead of focusing on one piece, a chapter at a time I got too overwhelmed with the big picture. Instead of reaching out for help I let a little speed bump keep me from finishing a story. I let a beta’s remark about a chapter of a story derail the entire story. In trying to see my writing career for the Imax screen that it is I lost my way, got overwhelmed and shut down completely. I have a novel waiting to be edited. I have a short story that needs to be pimped to e-pubs and I have over 400 works in progress that need to be finished but for the life of me I can’t seem to get a handle on things. I have two conventions I want to go to in 2010 which will require a lot of preplanning, a divorce, a 16 year old daughter going thru some trauma and an evil day job. I have a lot going on but I know others who have even more on their plates so I suppose I shouldn’t whine. I need to chop things up into smaller parcels so I don’t get overwhelmed. Everything in moderation is a phrase that certainly comes to mind. My writing is important and while I would love to devote every spare minute I have to it I would feel guilty about putting the family on hold while I did that. So my one objective for 2010 is going to be all about moderation. Taking smaller bites. There are lots of cliché’s that would apply but I’ll leave those for someone else to use. My friend was right. Looking at a small corner of the picture may be exactly what I need to do in order to stay focused both in life and my writing career.

It is now the close of my first year as a published author. I received my first contract on October 30, 2008 and my first release was February 22, 2009. With 2009 being my first year in this business, I thought it would kinda cool to see where I stood at the end of the calendar year. So here are some numbers to get you rolling.

Submissions: 17

Contracts: 17

Releases: 15

Print books: 3

Rejections: 3

Revise and Resubmits: 2

Anthologies: 3

Short Stories: 8

Novellas: 6

Novels: 2

Bestsellers: 4

Publishers: 8

The rejections were both right at the very start of my career. Two for Silver Lining and one for the first version of Runaways. The publisher who turned down Runaways didn’t even have their doors open yet and didn’t open them when they had posted that they would. That was probably a narrow escape I had there. The two for Silver Lining were followed by an acceptance. However, the small press where Silver Lining is didn’t give the antho a very attractive cover and I haven’t seen any royalties from this short story.

The R&Rs were for The Phoenix Prophecy (Where There’s Smoke.) Loose Id was interested but since it was an anthology they wanted some changes. Liquid Silver said they’d take it as a series rather than an anthology but wanted the ending to have more pop. I fixed the ending and LSB contracted it.

The two contracted submissions that aren’t out yet are The Phoenix Prophecy: Where There’s Smoke and a dark tale in the Weirdly 3 anthology, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Hellhound.

The three print books are Tales of the Darkworld Volume One (Shifting Winds and Hot Water), Fire Season, and Love Me Dead.

The three anthologies are Weirdly 3 (that isn’t out yet), Thrilled (with Silver Lining), and Love Me Dead (with Rousing Caine.)

The short stories are Silver Lining, Mating, Runaways, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Hellhound, Christmas Hookup, Christmas in Hell, Christmas Catch, and Holiday Hearts.

Novellas are The Wise Guy, Shifting Winds, Hot Water, Rousing Caine, The Pixie Prince, and Where There’s Smoke.

Novels were Fire Season and Ride the Lightning.

My publishers are Pink Petal Books, Liquid Silver Books, MLR Press, Cobblestone Press, Freya’s Bower, Wild Child Publishing, Noble Romance, and Midnight Showcase Fiction.

Now, the term bestseller is where you all may find yourselves scratching your heads. What ranks as a bestseller on some publisher’s lists (for their house only) would not cut it up against the numbers of a bigger house or a third party distributor like All Romance eBooks. I’m not going to get into a big discussion on that. I think it’s a topic for another day, but I need you all to understand the framework for the numbers I’m about to give you.

Basically, I have four bestsellers: Fire Season, Mating, Shifting Winds, and Christmas Catch. All of these have earned their silver star at ARe. The reason I’m using ARe as my yardstick for what’s a bestseller is simple. ARe sells books from ALL publishers, not just my publisher. So those books have sold really well at ARe despite the fierce competition. Christmas Hookup, which isn’t counted here because it’s free, has been listed as the best selling book of the western/cowboy category at ARe for a year. (When you sort the category by best selling Hookup rises to the top. It’s been that way since January 2009.) My estimate (I’ll have actual numbers on this probably next week) is that it’s been downloaded over 2,500 times between ARe, PPB, and some damned pirate site that showed actual download numbers until I had em remove the book. I can tell you that Fire Season alone has sold over 500 copies. Shifting Winds, in a single day of freebie downloading at ARe, was downloaded almost 2,000 times.

At PPB, to make it onto the bestseller chart, you have to have sold about 50 copies there on the publisher’s site.  So the #1 book on their bestseller list is probably closer to the 150 copy mark. (These are guesstimates. I don’t have hardcore numbers but Mary says it sounds about right without us crunching the actual numbers.) So far, all of my PPB releases have reached this benchmark. This sounds pretty good to me for a small pub only in its second year (but growing.) I know I’ve sold more at PPB with any one single title up against my one title at Cobblestone.

Now, looking at the numbers from a royalties perspective I can tell you that Fire Season (which released in July) would have made me PAN eligible. It’s my understanding that to be PAN eligible an author has to have made at least $1000 from a single title in a calendar year. (There’s a whole other criteria thing re non-vanity publishers and RWA eligible blah blah, but I’m just talking money here not politics.) A thousand bucks from one book in six months is a lotta clams. And I can see what I’m making in royalties but those payouts don’t give me a true sense of where I am with sales. I just go spend the moolah. LOL I can tell you that my royalties jumped significantly when my publishers put my books on ARe, My Bookstore and More, Fictionwise, Amazon, and others. Which is one reason I used the ARe yardstick here to define bestseller.

I could give you more numbers. Promo related stuff like:  I did three radio interviews, was a featured author on TRS once, did thirteen interviews, and fifteen guest blog posts.  I could tell you how many contests I’ve had, how many bookmarks and magnets I sent out. But promo is something I’ll get into another day. Suffice to say that I gave away books (both Ebooks and autographed print books), magnets, bookmarks, bookcards, and sent out author holiday cards.  This coming year I’ll have stuff going to some cons too. Lori Foster’s may see a very unusual Lex basket. The Escapade Slash con will have Love Me Dead bookmarks. EPICcon will have Ride the Lightning magnets. Promo stuff builds goodwill and people really remember you for those darn magnets!

So at the end of the year, I’ve surpassed my only goal of a dozen releases by three. But a dozen releases, even with so many of them being novellas or shorts, is a shitload of work. You have to be committed and driven. You have to have a promo plan and manage it while managing to write and keep to deadlines. You have to learn from your edits and editors. You have to read and pay attention to industry blogs to see what pubs not to sub to. You have to have a PLAN for your CAREER. Because at the end of this year, that is the one thing I’ve taken away from this experience in spades… I have a new career. And fuck me if it ain’t getting hotter with each release.

I may not have arrived yet… but I think just about everyone knows I’m coming.

What do Annie Proulx, Neil Plakcy, John Varley and Arthur Golden have in common?

They all write about places and people diametrically opposed to what they are.

Annie Proulx, a thrice divorced woman with three sons and a daughter, wrote the multi award winning short story Brokeback Mountain, a story about two Wyoming ranch hands who work together one summer and become reluctant lovers, a love affair that goes on in secret for years, neither man able to speak of the love they have. Annie Proulx is a) not a man b) not gay c) not a ranch hand. Yet her writing won awards and went on to become an iconic film that won awards all over the world, including Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Director’s Guild awards.

Neil Plakcy is another award winning author who has written a series of books about Kimo Kanapa’aka, a mixed Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Haole homicide detective in the Honolulu Police Department. Now I’ve met Neil, he’s a wonderful, talented man, but he’s not a) a cop b) Hawaiian, Japanese or Chinese c) does nor nor has he ever lived in Hawaii (he lives in Florida) But his books are wonderful and I’ve never heard of anyone taking exception to his skill in writing about the place or the man.

John Varley is a Hugo Award winning white Texan who wrote some remarkable books set on a goddess made world called Gaea. His characters in that series ranged from a bi-sexual black female ship’s captain turned wizard called Cirocco Jones, and impossibly, bizarre creatures out of legend like centaurs and flying angels.

Arthur Golden is a middle-aged, Jewish American man who authored the critically acclaimed Memoirs of a Geisha, a story about a young, Japanese girl who was raised/trained to be a geisha girl.

How can these people, so different from the characters they portray do it? Is it wrong for them to try? Is it wrong for a white person to write about a black, a male to write from a woman’s POV? Someone who lives on the east coast to write about the west coast, or an American to write about a Chinese character living in 4th Century China? Are there lines that writers shouldn’t cross in their stories? And if there are, who draws those lines?

My books all deal with gay men living in modern America, in most cases in Los Angeles, a city I did live in once, but haven’t visited in over twenty years. My most recent book, not yet published is about a young Latino man from a gang ridden barrio in South Central Los Angeles. As I wrote it, I wondered if I was going to get flack for writing about a world I have never lived in, so in the last while I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’ve come to some conclusions. I know I’ve been criticised for writing about L.A. since I don’t live there now. And all of us who are female and write gay male fiction face the criticism that we have no business doing so. Is there any merit to what those critics say?

Personally I’m of the mind that as writers we are supposed to delve into worlds and people we don’t know, in some cases can never know. This is the nature of good fiction. Tame books, told about everyday lives, can be good literature, but for me that’s not what I want in my books. I want to explore new places, from new POVs in a way that allows me to live them vicariously. My final argument about this way of thinking is that there would be no science fiction, no fantasy and no historical books, since all those require the writer to step outside of their comfort zone and put themselves in another’s shoes. Our bookshelves would be a lot lighter and less interesting if we followed those rules.

L.A. Boneyard

I also think, that as long as we invest in the research and don’t succumb to stereotypes, that I want the freedom to write the stories that come to me. I use the Internet on a daily basis to not only find out about people and places, but I use Google Maps and their Street View to see what a neighborhood looks like. I’m lucky in that L.A is one of the first cities to have its streets mapped. I’ve also invested several hundred dollars over the years in books about police procedure, bios of active gang members, and I have built up contacts within both the LAPD and people who are considered gang experts. I can tap these, as well as some L.A. friends, who can help me keep my facts true. It must work, I’ve had more than one compliment on how I make L.A. live and so far, not one taking me to task for getting it wrong. Finally, I devour any and all books and movies I can find set in Los Angeles.

What do you do to ‘keep it real’? Do you write about places or people unlike your own? Do you think there are things we shouldn’t write about?

Write a comment and I’ll enter you in a contest to win an ebook copy of L.A. Boneyard, the latest L.A. series book.

Visit me: http://www.pabrown.ca

Twitter: http://twitter.com/pabrown

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/PatABrown

Good day one and all. Let me introduce myself. My name is Shiela Stewart and I write paranormal romance. I am also a mother of three children, 14, 17 and 21 and have been married to an absolutely wonderful man for twenty-four years. I have accomplished a great deal in the three years since I was first published, having 15 books under my belt.  Now, personally, I think that is quite an accomplishment, considering I work in pain eighty percent of the time.

When I was twenty-five, I was diagnosed with Migraines. For those that don’t know what that is, let me give you a brief explanation.  Despite what you may have heard, Migraines are not just a headache and anyone who has ever suffered with them will tell you hearing people refer to them as “just a headache” pisses us off.

The term “migraine” refers to a syndrome of vascular spasms of the cranial blood vessels. Symptoms of a migraine attack may include heightened sensitivity to light and sound, nausea, auras (loss of vision in one eye or tunnel vision), difficulty of speech and intense pain predominating on one side of the head. It’s not pain you’re likely to forget if you’ve ever experienced it. The excruciating pain of a migraine, often accompanied by nausea or sensitivity to light and sound, can be brutally painful. As anyone who’s suffered a migraine can tell you, these headaches, when left untreated or treated ineffectively, can disrupt every aspect of a person’s life, from the ability to work to day-to-day activities and relationships. They can eventually lead to a loss of self-confidence, sense of control and self-esteem.

Though the description above does give you a good look at a migraine, it does not give you a complete idea of what it really is like to suffer from migraines so let me fill you in. Have you ever drank a cold drink so fast that it feels as if your head will explode? I’m sure you have. Now imagine while in that excruciating pain, someone is stabbing an ice pick into one of your eyes. Now, add extreme nausea and the need to stay away from the bright lights that are so painful to your eyes that you would just as soon rip them out then deal with the pain. Okay, visual enough for you. Now try dealing with that pain for a day, two, three, a week, two weeks. And while you are in that searing pain, try concentrating on writing a book.

That is my life. I suffer from a migraine at least three times a month and they always last for at least three days but have gone on for a week. If I’m lucky they only last three days, but rarely I am. But despite the pain, I have managed to write over fifty stories and published fifteen. There have been times my head has hurt so bad that I want to slam it into a wall. I’ve had thoughts of gouging my eye out to relieve the pain. And though I want nothing more than to crawl into a deep dark pit, I know I have edits to do and stories to get finished to meet my deadlines. It’s difficult to think over the pain, to focus on building a relationship where the hero and heroine just can’t get enough of each other while the pain is screaming in my head. But I manage because it’s part of my life and I have to get it done.

I rarely discuss the pain I am in almost constantly. Only once have I written it into one of my stories. But I find ways to deal with it, such as writing stories about vampires who live in a city cast in total darkness for an entire year. When I am in excruciating pain and the sun is shining brightly into my room, I often think how wonderful it would be to live in a world with no sun. I guess, in some sense, I am a vampire because I avoid the daylight. If I’m in a dark room and someone opens a curtain, I will cry out and scramble for any part of the room that is still dark. I don’t have the blood-lust, though if someone were to tell me drinking blood was my only prevention from these awful migraines, I wouldn’t hesitate.

So when I write about vampires, I don’t make them ruthless blood thirsty animals. Well, the evil ones I do but the hero and heroines are always just trying to live with their disease and find ways to cope with it. I am a child of darkness at least seventy percent of the time and so what would be more fitting than for me to write about darkness and the creatures who suffer in it.

Now, I didn’t write this to gain pity. If I wanted pity I would be more vocal about my pain. No, I wrote this to let you know why it is I write what I write. And also, to give hope to someone else who is suffering a much as I am and to know that despite the pain, there can be pleasure. You just have to find a way around it, like I have. As I write this, I am in the midst of a two day migraine and despite the meds I have taken, the pain is still killing me. Though it has taken me the better part of an hour to write just over nine-hundred and fifty words, I have managed to get this post finished. Why, you might ask? Because I am an author and just because the pain is blurring my vision and dulling my brain, I know I have a job to do and it must get done.

For a more in-depth look at my struggle with Migraines, you can go to my website at http://www.shielasbooks.ca/Migraines.htm

My website: www.shielasbooks.ca
Place to purchase my books: www.breathlesspress.com