cliterature

If you read magazine or blog you have probably heard the cries of horror.  Our books are getting check lit covers!  Think of the children!  Pull out the pitchforks and burning torches!  How shall we every survive?

Um, is it even true?

For a start chick lit as a genre is defined largely by cartoons or highly saturated photos of very skinny, very white girls in fun settings.  And there are fated worse that being associated with it.  But exactly which covers are being panned and by whom?  Why is the threat considered so dire that if you Google: chick lit covers, the top results are not discussion of this type of cover but warnings of their invasion of other genres.

Radar magazine (a publication that was once so promising, but turned out to be rubbish) had a dig at trend without either explaining it or showing it.  They just mocked up some satirical examples.  So apparently the fact this happens is a foregone conclusion.  But here is another thought: perhaps publishers have realized that modern readers (often women, but certainly including men) like a simpler, cleaner cover design with a more vigorous font.  A big picture with some blocks of cover is simply more attention grabbing.

I mean let us look at the examples being derided.  The Pursuit of Happiness as disdained by the Guardian books blog, and this article was ‘me too-ed’ ad nauseum across the internet.  The very first comment on Amazon is: “I bought this book on the strength of its cover (I liked the shade of blue!!!), and it was one of my better impulse buys! It’s a totally compelling story” and another wrote: “Attracted at first by the beautiful cover.” One commenter didn’t like the cover but that is still 2:1.  The story is strongly focused on the relationships and romances of women and I think the cover fits.  It may lack the feel of the 40s era, but then with the use of phrases like ‘mid life crisis’ and ‘nanosecond’, so does the book.

The (now defunct)
New Zealand blog Page Turner illustrated the same point with the Tears of the Desert cover.  It is chick lit-ty simply for picturing a woman (it is a woman’s memoir) and using a large, somewhat cursive font? Meanwhile everyone seems to look back with nostalgia to the penguin books (the cover you have when you don’t have a cover)–perhaps missing the point in the process.  I think that a lot of what is being denigrated as ‘chick lit’ cover design is in fact a return to design simplicity, large font title, a simple picture and a limited-but-vivid color pallet.

Now, as it happens, I do think the cartoony, cheerful covers have been slapped on some books that actually have a much darker tone or belong to a much different genre.  But the blog-meme of ‘attack of the chick lit covers’  seems to be based on examples that are just covers with a clean, feminine aesthetic, whilst simultaneously implying that being mistaken for chick lit is worse than catching an STD.  In most cases they haven’t pointed to a romance being misbranded (as often happens), but expressed the horror of the literary and non-fiction ‘elite’ being tainted with a lowly genre—overlooking the fact they are simply being marketed in a way that is inclusive of the female gender.

WebMD (amongst others) is reporting that dressing in red really does make you look sexier to men.  “Although male students found a woman’s image on a red background more attractive than a white background, the female students did not.” This is taken to suggest women should wear a red dress to be seen as sexy.  However the data relates to background, not garb, it is not specified what the women in the experimental photographs were wearing (if anything).

SheKnows reports: ‘Unexpectedly however, men were more likely than women to give priority to a romantic relationship when asked to choose between a relationship and their career, education and traveling.”  They apparently didn’t considered whether a sample of male undergraduate psychology students filling out  survey is representative of your average male, actually being asked to make those trade-offs.

NY Times writes that female IT workers are injured more than males.  Breaking news from the year before last, they say: “In 2006, the overall number of injuries at IT-related employers stood at 840, with 480 injuries, or 57% of the total, suffered by women.” Although quite why this can be considered meaningful I don’t know.  They fail to report how many of the workers generating these reports were female–and whether it is significantly less than 57%.  Although no data suggests that there is any difference in footwear-related injuries, an interviewee blames women’s shoes.  (i.e. fill a void in information with some gendered speculation–women are hurt more because they wear silly shoes.)  (I know my IT staff is always seen in stilettos [/sarcasm]).

Various sites including the Daily Mailhaving been running with the story that men are their most romantic at the age of 53.  (Overly specific results are always suspect).  How can they tell?  Well in the absence of a love-o-meter it seems to come down to:  “This is the time they tend to splash out on chocolates, flowers and perfume.”  This based on self report by men, answering questions as part of a survey that is not well  described (who was surveyed, why, and by whom?)

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail, by way of UPI, reports that the gloss wears off a marriage within three years (or, speaking of overly specific data: two years, six months and 25 days). They state that: “Research company onepoll.com [paid by?] said its survey [you didn’t see the actual data?] of 5,000 married couples suggests 83 percent of couples stop spending their anniversary together after three years of marriage…. whilst they still love their other half they’re a little too comfortable in each other’s company.” 

 The long and short of it is this.  Don’t take any of these reports too seriously.  Most are based on weak science and others gibly summarise the research in a way that makes its real meaning hard to judge.  When reading research reports look at what was really measured, who was studied and how the slippery concept of romance and sexuality is being defined–and that is before you even get to who is paying the bills and how egregiously the results are being over-generalised.

If you want reliable science, try a peer-reviewed journal.  One that will report the hypothesis the researcher came in with.  Because often the journalist also comes in with their own hypothesis/angle and any meaningful information tends to get lost in the mash up between the two.  However if any of these studies sound at all interesting I will do may best to track down where the information original came from and what it really means–just drop me a comment.

The following is just my personal  opinion based on seven years of writing and publishing erotic romance ebooks.  Your mileage may vary :)

 1) Why do you want to know about your readers?
You want them to buy your book, right? It is hard, and in most cases impossible, to make a person want your book.  Books are diverse, consumers are diverse–you have to play the overlap.  That is, you do not grab the nearest person and try to force their book into their hands; you try to find the people who would love to buy your book if only they knew about it.  In old style marketing terms this is called the ’soft sell’.  Using it is more often a matter of finesse than great effort and expense.  And bear in mind that your publisher will have done an enormous amount of ground work because in a general sense your readers and their readers will be the same readers.  You just need to piggy back on their efforts with  message fine-tuned for your specific material.  Finally, this is something of a cliche, but nevertheless true: the best way to spend your time is writing the next book.  Promote in your extra time.

 2) What do you want to know about your readers?

You should not approach you readers like you are writing a police blotter, nailing down their age, gender, race, nationality and so forth.   Thinking demographically leads into a number of fallacies such as the consequential fallacy.  Two examples of this incorrect reversal of thinking are 1) Harlequin’s: because most of our customers are woman, what we provide is what all women want and 2) Ellora’s Cave’s initial disinterest in gay romance because their customers were women, they were women, so whatever they were not interested in, their customers would not be interested in (not so!).  Try not to assume that even if 99% of your readers are female, or American (or whatever) that they all are–this may lead you to use language that excludes the minority group or implies their interest in your work is abnormal.  What you want to know about your readers is what they like about your writing.  The easiest way to discover this is to observe them (have your pen name on a Google Alert and lurk) and to ask them.  Your readers will be buying your book because it does something for them.  It might be the erotica, the prose styling, the complex plotting, the world building, it may be as specific as a certain fetish.  You can then look for those readers in places devoted to that interest such as your publisher’s yahoogroup, fetish forums, genre chats, specialist review sites etc.  And don’t forget, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.  If a reader has bought your books once or twice before they may do so again.  So try to reprise popular themes with a new twist, develop series and build up a backlist, preferably at a limited number of publishers with decent distribution abilities–and provide a book listing in your website.

3) What do readers want to know about you?

In most cases, nothing.  Really.  There are a lot of very active online sites where readers and authors can mix but the great majority of readers will buy your book and that is it.  Attitudes are mixed when it comes to how much authors should share online.  My attitude is that I am online not as an author, but as me.  Your may take a different approach (e.g. building your author brand assertively online, or surfing under a different name entirely).  In my case, writing is not my primary income so I can afford not to care.  I would suggest that it pays to have a fairly relaxed attitude to the internet no matter who you are.  Readers will tend to stereotype authors just as we stereotype them.  Erotica writers are easy (or frigid).  Romance writers are stupid and unimaginative.  People will say stuff online, swathed in relative anonymity, and some of it might not be pleasant–but most of it will blow over very quickly if you extenuate the positive and gloss over the rest.  In the end if you don’t stereotype your readers, do appreciate them, and try not to act like an ass (too often) — most of them will do the same.  And not only will you sell books, you will sell them to people who will enjoy them, and a good time will be had by all. :)

My recent post about the gender gap in reading provoked plenty of comments that people should follow their own interests, regardless of gender.  this is, of course, true.  Although I still think that if there is a big gender difference in an activity, consideration should be given to whether there is an unfair gender barrier. 

If reading is becoming seen as a ’sissy’ activity this would be a backwards step for any modern society.  If it is seen as shading towards feminine but not in a way that would embarrass a male reader, then that is not a problem.  A predominance of interest by one gender should never act as a barrier to another.

 For me, reading does not feel ‘gendered’–but an activity equally admirable in either sex.  When I look through my collection of antique and vintage photographs, a photo of a reader always strikes me as being particularly attractive.

I mean this lady looks beautiful, engaged by the world within the book and hardly noticing her surroundings.

And this older gentleman certainly strikes a scholarly note, even in an informal outdoor setting, partly by virtue of the volume in his hands. …And finally what about these guys (below)?  They look plenty masculine to me, reading together at the table with what looks like a bottle of beer between them.

So the bottom line for me is this: Reading, a Good Look for Anyone, Any Place, Any Time.

 (p.s., to the guys, it totally impresses the chicks ;)

Communities that center around erotica, have really interesting boundaries.  For example, erotic romance has large embraced (so to speak) gay, group and bondage.  However something quite ordinary, like bisexuality, is not much represented—and fetish and role-play remains very rare.  Even in non-romance erotica, where kink is pretty much acceptable in any form that is consenting and not harmful.  I think straight (so to speak)erotica writers and readers are more comfortable with coming across interests they don’t personally share–without feeling the need to condment them as morally disgusting.

But even fetishes move with the time.  A few years back appreciating a women smoking was about as mainstream as liking to see long legs in silk stockings.  As a modern fetish it is not all that common, and not very well known.  A lot of people are surprised to find that their own guilty pleasure is in fact shared with quite a few men.  The focus seems to be the deep inhalation and especially exhalation of smoke, its manipulation and sometime a specific interest in exactly what the woman smokes (e.g. cigars).  (I will not link to any of this adult material from this public website–but if you are an adult, Google is your friend).

Although, it does seem to be men we are talking about here, at least as consumers of smoking fetish material.  Which is odd because, as I in a previous post, in general women run very much towards liking dominant men—and the smoking fetish is closely linked to a submissive streak.  The smoking woman is seen as confident and commanding.  But smoking fetish material showing men is rare and, as far as I can see, almost entirely directed towards gay men.  In fact, in one smoking fetish forum it was asked whether a woman having smoking fetish was even possible. 

This is the point where I should make it clear that I don’t smoke and never have, and I don’t even like to be in the same room as a smoker.  But I have watched with interest as objections to smoking fetish became stronger with time, just as physical punishment fetishes (e.g. spanking) seem to have gained wider acceptance.  This is entirely logical given that a body will recovered quickly and completely from a slap, but the consequences of smoking as more severe and cumulative.  However is the moral condemnation of smoking actually impeding our ability to understand why women do it? (And therefore, if we choose to, from stopping them?)

You see, the incidence of smoking amongst the young seems to be on the rebound, especially amongst girls.  People tend to blame all the aspects of society that make the poor little girl-child a slave to their power.  That is, advertising making smoking sexy and because smoking (like any chronic toxin) helps them lose weight.  I think that it might be interested to look for some other explanations that are based on what girls want—not what they are victim to.  That is that men like to watch sexy,  dominant women smoking—and a significant minority of girls want to be sexy, dominant women (even while almost all want to seen as beautiful, submissive damsels).

How can they want to be both?  Well, women are complicated, adolescent girl-women are even more so as they “try on” different identities.  Boys routinely “try on” being tough, by speeding in cars, committing petty crimes, getting drunk, getting in fights and hanging out in gangs trying to out-macho each other.  Increasingly some girls do this too, but for the most part being female, and being a classic (masculine-style) delinquent, do not do together—especially when it comes to violence and crime.  Women (either innately, or due to conditioning, or both) typically don’t do public disorder.

So girls are left with a fairly short list of ways to rebel that are more-or-less legal and don’t necessarily harm anyone but themselves.  And so long as that remains true there will still be young girls who get off on smoking and not-so-young men who get off on watching them because they have the equally problematic and socially unacceptable issue of lusting after strong, socially-transgressive women, a.k.a. “bad girls”.  (And smoking fetish material is often a fascinating form of pornography in that much of it is un-macho-like in being “safe:–neither explicit, nor relating to activities capable of transmitting disease.)  

Perhap it is not the big bad tobacco companies who make smoking transgressive, the social condemnation does—and if this is the case the more smoking is condemned the more a significant minority of young women will want to do it to experiment with a “bad girl” identity.  The thing is, smoking will be transgressive so long as it continues to lop about 15 years off your life span.  That fact, in combination with human psychology, is going to be a public health problem for some time to come.  However, overly shrill objections to things like product placement, smoking fetish material and so forth are going to make that worse, not better.  So if the ultimate goal is to do as little harm as possible, the answer may be to live, and let smoke (between consenting adults and in the privacy of their own home).  If it becomes less of a dangerous deal, it might also become less of a turn-on in both a erotic and the general sense of the word.

One of my interests, hobbies, source of income is writing erotic romance ebooks (hence the title: money for lovin’) I do this in addition to a full time job and my current goal is to bring in about $500 a month–which I am currently doing although the income is admittedly rather variable.

By a process of extrapolation I suspect that if I wrote full time I could probably earn a living, but frankly I prefer a regular salary with benefits. Also, unlike many people, I actually like my job.  But I also really enjoy writing my spicy romances on the basis of what you could probably call a ‘hobby with benefits’.  I can only hope my readers are enjoying them too.  :)

But, just in case anyone is interested, I thought I would post my recent earnings from this and a few other online sources of income. As you can see the ebooks are by far my best source of online income right now. Stock photography brings in a few dollars but it is not something I am actively pursuing right now. Advertising isn’t generating very much income either. This blog is shown as the brown line and has already overtaken photos and advertising even though it is only part way through its second month of existence.

 If anyone has an tips on how to make more money from advertsing and blogging, please do let me know!  But based on this it sure looks like my best bet would be to log off and get back to writing my next book….

I realise (after much badgering) that most woman like the alpha-male, if not in real life than certainly in romance fiction. This probably accounts for the fact that 99% of heterosexual romance (completely made up statistic, but you get the point) has a power imbalance in favor of the male.  Some commentators assert that beta heroes are on the rise, but I have yet to see a great deal of evidence for this.

Mainstream romance beta’s still come in limited flavors: the nerd, the high fantasy (e.g. Taming the Forest King–Claudia Edwards), the gorgeous geek (e.g. Gone with the Nerd–Vicki Thompson) or the rich boy (e.g. A Lick and a Promise–Jo Leigh). And some of these stories still end with the heroine all overwrought that she has been too bossy. And if, like me, you shop in the AA shelves (that’s African American fiction), well, just be prepared to spend more time liking for beta male romance than actually reading it.

 However there has been a slight increase in beta-male romance (from basically none to just very little) and an increase in alphas with vulnerabilities.  For example the trope of the ‘wounded hero’ has become more popular–alphas rendered vulnerable by amnesia, magical curse or something less subtle like a gunshot wound.  And, in fact, wonder of wonders,  there might be some more books in the middle ground (like Joey Hill who writes beta men for readers who like alpha men).

My only hope is that somehow, the beta-hero and the flawed alpha will meet somewhere in the middle.  Some weird fantasy world where men and women have relationships that where who’s on top is just a matter of sexual positioning, not some kind of sociological statement (patriarchal or feminist).  Until then, I’ll keep hunting for the elussive beta and spend the rest of the time reading gay romance (where one can normally stop gender politics getting the way of a good love story).

I decided to sign up for some blog networks.  The first to get back to me was BlogRush.  And the verdict is:

“Reason Your Blog Wasn’t Approved: Inappropriate Content Or Advertising: Obscene or Disgusting … Please do not take this decision personally. We have decided to only approve the highest quality blogs for our network.”

That’s a pretty diplomatic rejection format [/sarcasm]. You disgust us, don’t take it personally (you are just low quality).

 My rewrite, for what it’s worth, would be: “Reason Your Blog Wasn’t Approved: Inappropriate Content Or Advertising: adult themes and topic… Please do not take this decision personally. We have decided to limit the scope of our network to general audience material.”  This rewrite says the same thing, only without the condemnatory tone (e.g. removing labelling of discussion of sexuality as innately obscene/disgusting and therefore low quality).

Another entry for WJPA files (Writers who hate Journalists who love Publish America). And this one is particularly egregious right from the title.

“Cape author bracing for release of her first novel; Publish America to place in stores“ — Websites, maybe. Stores, nope.

“Started in 2005, Adams said that she worked “ferociously” on it for a couple of month … After a conversation with a friend, she eventually finished the entire novel in one day.” I may sound picky here but you ‘entire’ means… entire. If some of the novel was already written she can’t write the entire book in one day. Which is just as well; even ‘On the Road’ took three weeks.

“The fate of her publishing career might not be so dour, as the new author has several new manuscripts she is working on, all in various stages of completion.”Also an issue of ‘little bit’ pregnancy.

Giving your book to Publish America is many things, but a first step in your publishing career is not one of them.

I have previously mentioned that I am not a fan of the coyly named Cambridge Women’s Pornography Cooperative. Their stated goal is to: “recover the term “pornography” from the gold-chained, hairy-chested, leisure-suit-wearing, mouth-breathing knuckleheads, and reclaim it for the rest of us.” By removing the sex. Because ‘us’ wouldn’t want anything to do with anything that depicted actual sex, oh no. [WTF? Do we need a counter-movement to keep the sex in pornography? Really? And how did they find out about my chest hair!].

I am bemused by the Cooperative’s even more coyly named book: Porn for Women. It is an overpriced book with a few pictures of SNAGs saying things like “I love a clean house”. To my eyes it always looked much more like something guys would find hilarious. After all it plays into every so-called stereotype there is about women as shallow neat freaks obsessed with shoes, cake and mini-vans–while assuming we all lust after hairless boy-band drop outs. But whatever, some people like the book and it’s a free market economy. I can hardly defend Paris Hilton’s ego-a-thon and have a problem with this pap.

I am still just a little boggled, however, by their more recent effort: Porn for New Mothers in which “the group continues its heartfelt mission to redefine pornography”. In the current day and age the idea of putting the word porn, no matter how ironically it is used, above of a picture of a baby…? That is kind of boggling enough. But combine that with the tag line “Who’s Your Daddy? … Porn for New Moms will have you saying “Oh Baby!” in no time” and I am backing. out. of. the. room.