Mina V. Esguerra's Blog, page 8

Currently #11

1. I WROTE A BOOK! First Time for Everything, my work-in-progress, is officially a finished draft. I had been writing a different book for a while, and shelved the idea for this as something for book 2…and then this story dropped itself into my head as an almost complete thing, to the point that I was thinking about it daily and telling myself to write those ideas down so I don’t lose them…so I had to start it. I’ve been writing this bit by bit on my #KiligCafe writing sprint livestream every week and I love that I got to actually finish writing this. I have not been able to write something past 30K words in two years. But the words came back.

First Time for Everything is about Sabrina, 41, who upon getting laid off early into the pandemic, has poured all of her savings into reviving an old dream of putting up her own little cafe. Like the beloved but short-lived coffee shop her parents had a long time ago. The romance here is with Victor, also 41, who used to deliver sandwiches and cakes to the family coffee shop when they were in college, and is running his family’s food business today. Read a preview on Wattpad. This will go into revisions soon, then editing, then will be published. I am enjoying my tita/tito romance era, as in.

2. This week is the anniversary of an election that we lost, but I’ve since decided on the work I will continue to do and who I want to do that with.

3. If you happen to want to buy my books but also don’t want to buy from That Place (Am/zon), may I suggest Ko-Fi? PayPal is its main method of payment, it’s creator friendly, and you get epub files that you own + access to future new editions. Visit: ko-fi.com/minavesguerra/shop. You can also buy direct from me, or search “Mina V. Esguerra” using your preferred retail site.

4. Our RomanceClass Pawfect For You charity anthology is available and accepting your donations until June 29! We’ve sent our beneficiary organization Pawssion Project P14,000+ so far! Get it on Gumroad: kilig.pub/pawfect4u (PayPal and cards) and Snack: kilig.pub/pawfectsnack (Gcash/Maya/Grabpay + PayPal and cards)

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Hello, Hannah [an Interim Goddess of Love-adjacent chat fic]

You can ask the Goddess of Love for guidance in your time of need, through a sincere song only your heart can sing…or you can DM her @ Hello Hannah. Read it on TypeKita.

Friends, I’ve started something new, short, and…sweet? Hello, Hannah is a chat fic series “adjacent” to Interim Goddess of Love. It’s sort of a sequel? Hannah is a college junior now and people are sliding into her DMs with their love problems.

To read about Hannah and her adventures (before social media), check out the Interim Goddess of Love trilogy.

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Currently #10

1. RomanceClass AprilFeelsDay2023 will be at Magdamag Market Cafe, 3 PM to 6 PM, on April 29 Saturday. Free admission! Our theme is “afternoon tea” and we’ll have book launches, new projects and partner announcements, and LIVE READINGS omg with our friends Gio Gahol, Rachel Coates, Marynor Madamesila (her first time so let’s cheer her on!), and maybe some surprises.

We will be serving tea and coffee and pastries. Please bring a favorite reusable tea cup/mug/tumbler (if this is a thing for you!). And because someone asked, yes pwedeng magdala ng plus one wink wink.

If you’re unable to attend we will have a Twitch livestream covering the program and live readings! Just go to kilig.pub/twitch to watch live for free on any browser. If you want to join the chat, you’ll need a Twitch account. To watch it on demand after the event, you’ll need to be a Tier 1 subscriber to our channel. See you, Team Bahay!

2. Romance + pets + anthology for charity! In 2021 our Tropetastic Kindness bundle raised funds for Project Propel, Gantala Press, and RockED Philippines. In 2022, NomCom raised funds for non-profit org For Our Farmers. This year, we have an all-new anthology called Pawfect For You, with stories by Danice Mae P. Sison, Ines Bautista-Yao, Tara Frejas, Celestine Trinidad, Angel C. Aquino, and Jay E. Tria. All proceeds will be donated to Pawssion Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation, and rehoming of dogs and cats in distress. Pre-order/donate now at kilig.pub/pawfect4u! Available until June 29, 2023 only.

3. I watched Beef on Netflix. I have so many feelings about it. It hasn’t left my head. A stressful watch. Stress Drilon. Stressie Tomas.

4. Also did that map of where I’ve lived/stayed/visited in my country. Via https://my-philippines-travel-level.com

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UPOU panel: Writing and Publishing Women’s Narratives [Discussion notes]

I was so excited to have been invited to this! I’m a UPOU alumna (master of development communication), and took all the education electives that I could get, including a subject called Online Teaching and Learning. I designed #RomanceClass many years later using what I learned there as the foundation. It feels great to be back, in a Zoom kind of way. I hope the students see what they have access to and how it absolutely can be the beginning of helpful things. (RomanceClass readers may recognize Gantala Press as one of the beneficiaries of our Tropetastic Kindness bundle in 2021! Your donations helped a small press focusing on marginalized women’s narratives.)

These were the guide questions from the discussion and my thoughts about each. It’ll be partly what I remember from the session and a very edited version of what I may have said, with a dash of things I wish I had said.

What are your current projects and what are the themes of your work? Why did you choose those? 
As an author I still write romance but for the past few years now I’ve been focusing on writing Filipino main characters who are in their 40s. It’s been so fulfilling to do this and the reader feedback I get has been worth it. (If you don’t know this, most romances published have characters in their teens and 20s.) It’s nice to be able to convey to a person through my characters that it’s a great age, and romance that starts at 40 is its own kind of exciting.

What are the concerns/challenges in writing and publishing as, for, and by women? How do you ensure that other voices of women are heard?
It’s actually a joy to write and publish as a woman and for women. Most people I work with in self-publishing are women, from editors to artists, designers, photographers, printer…it just happens. We’re everywhere in publishing. The concern would probably be in finding publisher support for your story if it doesn’t fit what they think can sell. Which is why I also help people self-publish…the tools are available to distribute our work to the readers who need it. Yes publishing makes it difficult for us but I hope we use the tools available rather than stay discouraged for too long.

How should we work within traditional/independent/small presses? How important is building a community of readers and writers?
“Traditional publishers” employ people and I always try to remember that the publisher, the decision-makers, are people and not a nameless faceless entity who is never accountable for anything. If there’s a lack of support, a lack of interest, that is a person’s lack of interest and failure to provide support. The entire thing can change if people who care about the books know what to do when they become part of the industry. I’m optimistic that the people who have ideas, and care, and can open doors, will find each other — but we do have to let each other know that we exist. Panels like this are a chance to do that. I’ve been doing for this a while and am more aware of what my role is and where I can help. One of those ways is to not feel that I have to write or publish everything. I can find/support the ones who do.

We also have to be the kind of readers and authors who support fellow readers and authors. If #RomanceClass can serve as a model at all, it’s because we asked authors who want to benefit from the community’s resources to participate and read each other. Change in our reader habits = better environment for us as authors. Reading each other = more equipped to identify what’s missing, what needs lifting up and creating space for. We are now read in 37 countries, meaning there are people in those countries interested in a book by a Filipino author. The doors are open and they could and will read more than one. We should be present in the spaces where the doors have been opened. And let’s open more doors.

Why should women continue to create/write and publish stories? Can you share tips on developing and writing our stories? 
We have to first get rid of the feeling we have that our story isn’t groundbreaking or earth-shattering, that it’s too small so that means we shouldn’t write it. From experience a theme or moment that I’ve written that feels very personal to me always resonates with a reader, and that’s the point, right? Whatever it is, we’re reaching out to that reader and saying we understand. Yes even if it’s a small feeling. And speaking as a romance author, it’s always worth it to write romance especially if you have strong opinions about how people are treated in relationships, how our society has normalized many things that we should get rid of. To be able to show a Filipino reader (often at a very impressionable age) that these are the joys and consequences of our choices, and it’s great to have choices.

Thank you, Roda Tajon, for asking me to be part of this. Roda has been supporting RomanceClass, and my books, and many more Filipino authors, for years.

If the panel earlier and these notes made anyone curious about RomanceClass, the textbook is on Gumroad (cheaper in the Philippines because of purchasing power parity pricing), and Snack.ph (accepts Gcash/Maya/Grabpay).

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State of the Publishing Situation 2020-2022

Sometimes I’m in the mood to look at spreadsheets, and then make charts. I was curious about how my books did during a specific window of time, and chose data for 2020, 2021, and 2022. I focused on mainly what I got from Amazon and Smashwords/Draft2Digital, although I’m also on Google Play, Gumroad, Findaway Voices, Snack, and I also sell direct through this page on my site.

What it looks like:

From 2020 to 2022, readers in 37 countries purchased/downloaded/acquired my books. (!) I have 2 titles set to perma-free on many non-Amazon channels and I noticed how it helped give me a presence in countries I wouldn’t have expected. I should explain what I mean by an “unexpected country”: Just that I know no one who lives there, so the purchase or download would have come from someone who isn’t a friend or family member. I’m Pinoy so I still think a friend or family member is the first purchase in any foreign city even though data will tell me that’s not the case (also because I don’t ask friends and family to purchase my books just “to support” anymore).

Map above made with mapcustomizer.com.

All my books are “wide” ie not exclusive to Amazon, and this is what that decision looks like, 2020 to 2022, for all downloads paid and free:

What that contribution from Smashwords/Draft2Digital looks like when broken down by channel:

Not surprised by Scribd’s recent performance, although it’s small compared to say Amazon. Still, it’s the most reasonably priced subscription service for Philippine residents (less than $3 monthly vs $9.99 for Kindle Unlimited) and it’s mainly why I went wide when I did. Also for all the advice that Kindle Unlimited is better, it really is different when you’re a Filipino author and your books are about Filipino characters, set in the Philippines. But for some lucky moments, usually the KU audience doesn’t go for books like mine, and the decision to go wide was for accessibility to the readers who are supposed to feel seen and represented by what I write. If they’re not on KU (or they’re reading something else there) then my books don’t have to be there.

So what do I think of the situation? My best year out of the three years I looked into was 2021, when I released two new titles. 2022, when I released no new work at all, performed the worst in comparison. It wasn’t terrible by the way for a year of relying entirely on backlist, and it tells me that if I want to boost my 2023 I should…release a new book. I will!

I’ve also gone back to expanding my presence in print in the Philippines, distributing print editions via Komiket and exploring two small retail spaces in Quezon City and San Juan City. It requires more work to move print books and I’m making the time and also choosing partners who can do some of the work with me. But goodness, Philippine publishing…all the work and sales of print is just a fraction of what we can all make in a day, a week, a month if we all just helped each other and did not fear digital.

Maybe they think it’s competition? Working with print makes people think of books in terms of print runs, and the space they take up on a shelf, in a store limited by square meters. Authors are made to feel bad about things they don’t have to feel bad about: like say how quickly a print run sells out, or about the space an unsold book takes up on a bookstore shelf or warehouse. Maybe they think for every print book on a shelf then there’s less space for other books by authors who write the same genre, or in the same language, or for the same audience.

It’s so wrong, and I hope authors realize that this (outdated) publishing view holds you back the most. The publisher is held back too, because they could be making so much more, but maybe another successful author makes up for it and they can proceed as usual because “the bottom line” is still good.

Pinoy authors! Here’s a tip! In a more international and open retail space, when I do well, you (if our books are at all similar in any way) do well too. And even if you don’t know me (or like me even lol) you can benefit from the readership that I create. Ideally you put your work out there so it finds its readers, which may be an entirely different group of people from the ones who read me, but then the ones who may be into my work find me through you.

This is what a creative community does. Try not to get stuck in a publishing situation where you do not participate in a community, where you are just a product to be sold, and you are made accountable for shortcomings that result from an inefficient system they insist on using and not improving.

OK! I should go work on my 2023 release now.

My How I Publish lecture slides and script (updated for 2022) can be purchased on Gumroad.

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Currently #9

1. I’m currently watching K-Love on Viu (available to watch on any browser!). It’s a series written by Tara Sering and Tweet Sering, and if you grew up on Summit chick lit like me (before I wrote Summit chick lit) this should be on your radar too.

2. I watched John Wick Chapter 4. It’s great.

3. My books + RomanceClass books can now be purchased at Magdamag Market Cafe, Sgt. Esguerra Ave Quezon City…

…and Collective Base Theater Mall Greenhills, San Juan City. Look for CAB 109!

4. If any editors of contemporary YA (featuring teen characters whose parents are Asian immigrants) wander over here, I have a request: The right thing to do is to remember that the MC’s parents were adults in their respective countries in Asia in the 2000s. Do the math! These countries very likely were in a vastly different political/social/economic/tech situation in the 60s/70s/80s, when the author’s parents immigrated.

It’s not right to have the teen Main Character act and think like their parents left a country that was technologically behind and had no culture separate from American pop culture. I’m embarrassed to have to remind you that in the 2000s Asian countries had the internet, cellphones, texting way before it became mainstream in the US, formative music and movies and animated series and tv shows. Entire cultures, as countries do! It’s insulting when a book makes it seem like the MC’s parents only found progress and technology and culture when they moved to the US. There are very specific situations where this is true, and when you edit a contemporary YA make sure the situation fits.

If the aim is to make readers feel seen and included, acknowledge and introduce the greater world; don’t reinforce the lazy and uninformed stereotypes that actively feeds the distance, distrust, and hate.

This admittedly-unsolicited tip courtesy of the always unexpected kick to the gut when reading contemporary YA.

5. I’ve been posting my draft of my upcoming book First Time For Everything on Wattpad and 19 parts are up now! We’re nearing HEA, my friends. If you’ve been reading and you think they’ve just been coasting along, all landi and snack foods and not a lot of conflict, that’s it, that’s how we are writing in this economy and circle of hell. Enjoy!~

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#RomanceClass10thAnniv

Because this story has been shared to our friends/fellow authors at #RomanceClass10thAnniv, I guess I can blog about it too.

In 2018 I decided to produce an audio edition of Iris After the Incident. Audio editions are not standard with releases here in the Philippines, and I wanted to try it, so I had to pay for it myself. You have to pay for a narrator in “finished hours,” and also studio time and post-production. It was expensive but did not take too long to make. According to Audible, it was released on August 8, 2018. I have not yet earned back what producing this has cost me.

However.

Three months later (I checked my inbox talaga), I got an email from a Filipino-American talent manager based in LA, who was looking for books by Filipino authors to develop, and had found Iris while searching Audible. That started a series of meetings, in LA, then Manila, and then a whole lot of Zoom, and then a formal partnership for Anna Liza Recto-Ruth and Michael Kaleda of Bold MP to represent my books and RomanceClass Books for film/tv/media.

Another part of this story: I was asked by Honey de Peralta at an event in 2019 why don’t I just transition RomanceClass into a publisher and that was the first time I said out loud that I didn’t want to, because publishers (every single one I know and worked with, and all the publishers people talk about having worked with) will eventually favor the titles and authors that sell. When we sell books at our events I do get to see the numbers, but at the next event everyone still gets to sell their books, can be part of the program, is still part of the community.

So what I tried to do next instead, once the partnership with Bold MP was signed off on by RomanceClass authors, was to champion our books in all these meetings and presentations. It’s challenging work but I prefer it because each meeting and situation is different, because people are looking for different things. Good thing RomanceClass has a catalogue of over 100 stories, and I care about each of them enough to champion them when the opportunity comes. I have talking points. I have Canva decks. I have comps. Someone can tell me what mood they want and I will pull out at least three books they can consider.

This month (February 2023) I’ve spent more time in meetings than the past year but it’s worth it to spend time with someone and really see how they feel about things. Are they going to be the people for this thing, and that thing? When I’m about to get overwhelmed I remind myself that we publish our own books and set up our own publishing resources system. That requires the right people, and this requires the right people too.

Text of my speech at #RomanceClass10thAnniv, February 24, at Magdamag Market Cafe:

Hello and good evening, everyone. My name is Mina V. Esguerra, I’m a romance author, and I founded RomanceClass.

I do a speech like this every single event so please bear with me as many of you have heard this before. There will be a couple of new things, don’t worry. 

RomanceClass is a community of Filipino authors of romance in English, the readers of the books, and all the people who help us make the books. We started as a free online class in 2013. By now, in 2023, we have done the class 10 times, and helped over 100 authors write and publish their books. When I say that our community includes people who help us make the books, what I mean is that for each complete and published book that you see, that needed an author, two or three beta readers, an editor, a cover designer, a layout artist, a photographer, a cover model or two or three, a stylist, a makeup artist, a printer, an audio narrator, an audio editor. Supporting one book supports many creatives and artists, in many related industries. 

If you’ve been following our book releases over the past decade you may notice how we change things and challenge ourselves to come up with better books. Ten years ago, when we started, we just wanted more contemporary romance books to read, and people stepped up to be the authors who would write those books. Because we write in English and it became easier to publish to the world on Amazon and online, more and more people in this country and the world began to discover our books. 

Today we have readers in at least 23 countries, because love of the romance genre is global. It is an exciting and humbling honor to be contributing our voices to a genre that is about love, acceptance, and all the challenges we face just to find the love we deserve. 

If you’re curious, a RomanceClass book follows several editorial guidelines. The most important ones are:

the happy ending (yes they end up together and that’s not a spoiler, because the journey is the point)agency and consent (our characters must have the freedom to choose and must consent to all aspects of the romance)celebrate being Filipino 

As we’ve seen in the past ten years, these guidelines result in over a hundred wonderful stories by Filipino authors, with empowered Filipino characters, supported by a talented Filipino creative community, enjoyed by a global romance readership.

I think the next step for us is to see these stories come to life, right? On screens all over the world.

I’m so happy to be able to share with you all that our community has delightfully expanded in that direction. In 2020 we started working with Bold Management and Production, to develop our stories as movies and series. In 2022 we welcomed Cornerstone Entertainment as a partner for talent, production—the many exciting things that adapting our books will require. 

As a fan of romance movies and series I can’t wait to see our books, our kilig, become part of the landscape of global film and TV. 

Thank you to everyone supporting every RomanceClass book and we’ll have more news about our projects with Bold MP and Cornerstone Entertainment soon!

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After KomiketBGC

[Reposting from Twitter, because this is important, and that site could disappear at any time]

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A post shared by Mina V. Esguerra (@minavesguerra)

Am the type who feels like talking to people takes a lot of my energy and also the type who tries not to talk too much to customers lol but if I can make the time to man a table selling our books I will. People have questions! It’s great being able to answer and recommend.

What questions did I get this time? “Are these all Filipino?” Yes all Filipino authors! Writing in (mostly) English. “What can I buy for my niece?” What age? *points to YA books, explains heat level scale “Do you have LGBT?” This one! *points to Kilig anthology

*this last one admittedly we don’t have enough! only some short stories in anthologies and collections, and then 2 standalone titles. Kulang talaga pls “If I were to start reading your books which one do I get?” Interim Goddess of Love if not a romance reader…

My Imaginary Ex if a romance reader but new to Filipinos writing romance in English, What Kind of Day if romance reader who reads higher heat lel. (Buyer bought IGoL!)

“I have some of the books na from before” *points to new stuff! 2022 releases on the table Books that were the most picked up/touched/flipped through FIRST

Titles spoken out loud to another person: “KILIG” “Kilig daw o” (“kailangan ko niyan”) “My Imaginary Ex” (by a child lol) “Love at First Run daw o”

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[Deleted scene] Pascal, Lexa, and Colin in So Forward

This month I went to Makati and walked a couple of kilometers through the area that inspired the setting of Colin’s school in So Forward. Even if I fictionalize settings in my books, they’re usually based on real neighborhoods in Metro Manila, with some tweaks for timelessness or convenience. I walked right past a bar that I had “repurposed” as a cafe in an early draft of the book, and was supposed to take a photo and tell readers that this was the cafe…and then remembered that I had cut the scene in revisions and readers wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about.

So Forward (and its companion book Kiss and Cry) are books I’ve rewritten almost completely several times. Sometimes the version contradicts the published book so I try to not remember it haha, but sometimes (like in this case) the scene just isn’t needed anymore.

Here’s the scene set in the fictional cafe, so now you know about it too. Though I enjoyed writing this I eventually had to admit that most of it served to establish the next book’s lead (Pascal in Totally Engaged) and that book was going to have to stand on its own.

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So Forward is available on many retailers, but if you don’t have this yet, consider buying it from my new online store: minavesguerra.com/snack!

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Updated: RomanceClass Intro Lecture and textbook

Time flies, but it really has been 10 years since I first offered to do #RomanceClass. We’ve done the class about 10 or so times since, and when I’m unable to do a full class (like right now), I do intro lectures instead. An intro lecture to RomanceClass is just me talking participants through every section of the textbook, giving context to the assignments, and answering questions.

I’ve updated the textbook for 2023 and it’s available here:

Gumroad [free if you already purchased or claimed a previous edition, just go back to the product page and download the new file]

Snack [accepts Gcash/Maya/GrabPay + Paypal and other cards]

One of the things that is new to this edition is my updated introduction, where I mention pretty clearly that there is a lack of institutional/systemic support for us (self-published Filipino authors of romance in English) on practically every level in 2023 despite very “trendy” calls for inclusion in the past years. I had to mention that right away in the introduction because it is a discouraging thing for an author to discover if they were expecting certain doors to be open or remain open. (This requires recognizing the difference between being included as a token and the door being opened for us and everyone else.)

There are less opportunities for us offered by publishers, retailers, media, and social media. What’s there is only there because of people making intentional moves to include non-big pub authors, and often they do this at risk of losing their standing with corporations and algorithms. I suggest supporting those platforms/accounts/people instead; let’s help each other out here.

It might be frustrating but not enough for me to stop doing what I’m doing. I’m still writing, and I hope you do that too? If you feel like it haha.

I did a video version of my intro lecture on Twitch, and it’s available on demand here (you’ll need to subscribe to the RomanceClass Twitch channel at P100 or whatever is the minimum in your territory):

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