Fierce Dolan's Blog: Writing Utopia, One Word at a Time, page 15
November 22, 2012
Black Friday Hop–Carrie Anne
It’s that time of year again, already! Can you believe it? I know I can’t. And I can’t stand shopping, so what better way to spend my Black Friday/Small Business Saturday, or Cyber Monday, than blog hopping! Whee!
In honor of all of the holidays, and I do mean, ALL of them: Saturnalia, Diwali, Winter Solstice, Yule, Kwanza, The Pagan New Year, Christmas, and Hanukkah (that’s it, right?), I invite you to check out my novella, Gigolo Seduction. One lucky commenter (18 or older) will win an ebook copy, if you tell me what holiday you celebrate, and your favorite, ORIGINAL way to celebrate it!
Available on:
November 20, 2012
Holiday Weekend Promo Sale at Decadent Publishing
Decadent Publishing (my publisher for Gigolo Seduction, and Traveler Through Darkness) is having a sale on YA and our older holiday titles, for this weekend only. Come celebrate Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, whee! All of the following titles are 35% off at Smashwords when you use the codes listed. Coupons end Tuesday.
So here you go! There’s something in here for everyone!
YA list titles
Sugar Rush.The code is: KR44Q
Fallenwood.The code is: MP39T
Pretty Souls.The code is: PW88V
Crushed Sugar.The code is: NG78K
Driven.The code is: AJ48Y
Initiation.The code is: FM62W
Senior Year Bites.The code is: PG67F
Of Light and Darkness.The code is: UM27C
Slack Tide.The code is: ET86P
The Demon Side.The code is: HF97K
The Keeper.The code is: BF94Q
Subversive.The code is: JW87N
Bloodlines.The code is: AV85V
Detention of the Living Dead.The code is: HG47K
Summer Break Blues.The code is: RB32M
Coming Home.The code is: BJ58G
Contagion.The code is: MC36J
Steaming.The code is: GJ28V
Holiday back list titles
Snowy Encounters.The code is: JG95C
A Christmas Promise.The code is: MM24W
A Christmas Evening Vigil.The code is: VJ34Z
Secret Santa.The code is: LX27U
Mid-Winter Magic.The code is: FV49L
Unwrapping Scrooge.The code is: MB33N
Evie’s Gift.The code is: UM48G
Holiday Headlines.The code is: FS68D
Smitten.The code is: VN99F
The Ghost of Vampire Present.The code is: FS29G
Melting Frost.The code is: JY39Y
The Christmas Fantasy.The code is: KE49M
Ms. Claus’s List.The code is: UB95R
This Endris Night.The code is: AD27F
All She Wants for Christmas is Her Dom.The code is: SF45E
Avalon for Christmas.The code is: AX47T
Under the Tree.The code is: BY44L
Her First White Christmas.The code is: FH87N
The Sweetest Gift.The code is: XX39P
He Came Upon a Midnight Clear.The code is: HY34R
Peppermint Passion.The code is: JJ88L
Santa, Cutie.The code is: WF84Q
Last Christmas.The code is: PD24Q
Taking Down Mistletoe.The code is: HN43G
November 18, 2012
It’s that time again – royalties
It’s royalty season, leaving me curious to see where my books sell, thus, where they don’t. Statements of royalties are broken down (most of the time) so that authors can see through what outlets their work sells, leaving a bit of room to interpret what that info means.
It’s been a little over two years since I stretched my writing career into the smutty back alleys of erotica, and in that time I’ve noticed a few patterns. Maybe these reflect general trends, maybe they’re only indicative of my work. Still:
Gay erotica sells best on ARe.
Het but graphically kinky erotica sells best on general retail outlets.
None of it sells well directly from the publisher (consequently, where I have the highest royalty percentage).
It all sells best outside the US.
It all sells best on Amazon.
I think it’s good to note trends, but I also wonder what these patterns reflect in readers. Specifically, what do they say about the direction of the erotica publishing industry:
Sites targeted to sell erotica are more likely to carry niche genres than retail outlets are publishers.
Publishers’ web efforts are perhaps best spent on promotion rather than distribution.
US readers purchase erotica in print more than as ebooks.
Most online distributors for erotica emphasis romance over harder edged erotica.
Amazon isn’t as picky about its product contents as authors fear it is.
It’s interesting to see erotica develop as an industry, and to see how epublishing unfolds as a powerful entity in a power-drunk arena. Over the last three years we’ve seen some of the big publishers drop their erotica lines, though I’m putting my money on the creation of new ones.
Readers, where do you buy erotica? What factors do you take into consideration before you buy from a site? Authors, what trends do you notice in your sales? How do those patterns affect your promotion?
November 8, 2012
Autumn Blog Hop – Harvest Holy Days
Yay! It’s time for another blog hop with Carrie Ann! She does the best hops!
This time the theme is autumn… Honestly, it’s my favorite time of year. While other people have Seasonal Affective Disorder in the winter months, I swear I have it in the summer. All that scalding, bright sunlight about does me in. And I can feel those first dips in the humidity, the slight change in my hair and skin, well before everyone else around me. Maybe it’s because I’m so ready for it?
Admittedly, I don’t celebrate the majority of the holidays of the season. We celebrate Samhain, The Dead Time, Yule, Solstice–the Nature-based holy days. There are a few rituals around them, but mostly it’s all the time of giving thanks. The end of the year has come, and it’s time to assess everything, from household goals and needs to personal writing challenges, successes. At the end of the long (hot) growing season, we harvest. That means we celebrate with a decadent meal, time with our loved ones. We consider what we need to save back to hold us through the winter (literally, metaphorically). We cull out what seeds we need to plant for next year’s goals (Nobel, Pulitzer, etc). We elect what we can give to needy others (volunteer efforts, donations). And we ride out the cold until Solstice tells us it was not all for naught: We get to do it all over again, for another year.
What’s your favorite thing about autumn?
Friend me on Facebook (if you haven’t already) and post your Facebook link in a comment here, to be entered to win a copy of Gigolo Seduction, my BDSM erotic novella. Must be 18 or older to win.
Visit the other authors on this hop.
November 7, 2012
Hard Romance…
I confess, I’m not much on romance. Except that I am, just in a very different way than most people expect.
Let me back up. All sources report now that erotica is the genre to publish in, and the industry still largely views erotica as a sub-genre of romance. Many publishers who focus on erotica require a romantic element, if not primary plot. In other words, the erotica may be there, but the romance must be. But what does that mean, exactly? What if romance is different things to different people? Can erotica with nipple clamps and an intimidating peg be as romantic as flowers, a rugged alpha, and HEA? The climb in sales of erotica could suggest so, but what do you think?
For me, romance is anything that captivates my mind in such a way that I open to intimacy. Intimacy is the result of an acquiesced ego, body and mind spread for cerebral stimulation, carnal completion. What it takes to get all of us there isn’t the same, across the board, so why would we expect it to be in our literature? If romance involves a flail, potty mouth, and a cathartic mindfuck… well. Whatever it takes.
On Traveler Through Darkness…
A lifetime of want collides with fate the night of Tarik’s bachelor party, fulfilling his deepest secret desire—only it’s not with the strippers his Arab friends hired to cater to his every whim. Uncomfortable with the debauched festivities, Tarik ducks out of the soirée, stumbling into Wo, a kind Navajo artist, who forces him to say what he really wants, then gives it to him, all night.
From Traveler Through Darkness…
“I am so sorry–” Tarik began.
“It’s okay. It was an accident.” The words were rushed as he pulled the soaked sweatshirt from his skin and fanned the dripping tablet. Black smudges coated the fingertips and heel of his left hand.
“I’ve ruined your work,” Tarik lamented, motioning toward the pad.
“Oh, no. It’s just a sketch. I was fascinated with the moonlight on the harbor.” He flashed a charcoal rendering of the midnight water. A long, shimmering black strand fell forward of the band securing his hair, lighting just at the edge of his upturned mouth. “No masterpiece here.”
Piercing umber eyes met Tarik’s, and the gentle smile relaxed his shoulders. “You were in the ballroom earlier.”
“Mmm. The bachelor party.”
Tarik pursed his lips, nodding once. “I’m staying in the hotel. Allow me to get for you a clean shirt.”
“It’s fine. I don’t have far to go.”
“In this cold, with no jacket, you will freeze. Please. I insist—”
“What’s your name?” the younger man asked.
“I am Tarik.” He bowed.
“I’m Wo.” He nodded. “Thank you for your kind offer, Tarik.”
~*~*~*~
Enjoy Traveler Through Darkness along with the http://www.fiercedolan.com/TTD-readersguideReaders Guide
~*~*~*~
Bio
MezzoFiction author, Fierce is imagination shapeshifted as a scribe taunting blank pages and carpal tunnel, neither of which are much use for deadlines. Close allies are impeccable timing and a trusty masseuse. Being a switch I/ENFP doesn’t hurt. For kicks Fierce has other personas across several genres, tends to fill in “Other” on surveys without explaining, and chooses the finality of the Japanese Tamagotchi.
In summary: Fierce writes all kind of dirty things that you shouldn’t read, ever …
November 4, 2012
The Creepy Season with Me and Cate Masters
Cate: It’s the final day of the Halloween celebration! Fierce is here to close it off with a howl. [image error] . Fierce, please tell us a little bit about yourself.
Fierce: Thanks for having me, Cate! It’s great to be with you, today! Did you know that fall is my favorite time of year?! I love it! I’m so glad it’s cool and dark after all of that hot, bright sunlight!
Cate: I love fall too! What do you love most about Halloween?
Fierce: To be honest, I don’t celebrate Halloween. I’m pagan—animist to be specific–and we celebrate Samhain and The Dead Time. My favorite part is skulking along the cool, foggy streets while the kids trick-or-treat. Also, honoring those who have died this year over a cozy meal and crackling fire, soaking in that lively, crisp fall energy! I come back to life, as odd as that sounds, when Nature’s color soften, and the sky goes grey. What can I say—I love the creepy!
Cate: [image error] Do you have a favorite memory of a Halloween past?
Fierce: All of them? Samhain is my favorite holy day. I have been a deathwalker since childhood, experiencing souls’ death moments, then when I was older, helping them to move on. While interesting, that’s not something I can really converse about around the water cooler. But for that slip of time that our culture honors the veil once a year, I get to feel like the way I have always experienced life is normal.
Cate: Wow, that’s intense. Which makes this next question seem silly, lol. Have you ever had an unusual experience you couldn’t explain?
Fierce: Many, and I’ve written about them extensively in my other writing. As I said, I had them in childhood and they scared the crap out of me. I knew by the time I was 6-7 that I was seeing and experiencing things other people weren’t, and I knew not to talk about it. Knowing that my experiences scared other people only reinforced that I shouldn’t talk about them, which made the whole thing harder to deal with. Eventually I realized the spirits weren’t intending to scare me, but that they needed help. What we perceive as a spirit being aggressive or angry is the entity communicating the story of how it died, or some understanding it needs to impart before it can move on. Once I realized that, everything changed. It became [mostly] peaceful, and I started to work with them in earnest. A normal day for me includes hearing voices and seeing visitors.
Cate: What frightens you the most?
Fierce: Insanity. Seriously, people, who aren’t and possibly can’t be in control of their wills frighten me. Mixed with things like hatred, misogyny, homophobia and that’s a scary little problem on all of our hands.
Cate: So true. Ever gone on a ghost tour? Or ghost hunting on your own?
Fierce: I used to, because it somehow helped me to feel legit in my own experiences. I don’t, now. I can interact with the dead anytime, anywhere. Wax On, Wax Off. I don’t seek it out now, unless there is a healing need behind it. And of course, sometimes souls in need find me, even if I’m Wax Off. That’s always interesting.
Cate: Any favorite Halloween recipes you’d care to share?
Fierce: Hmm. Well, I not a prescriptivist with cooking—I don’t measure ingredients, but I love butternut squash soup! Roast one with some garlic and onion. Purée it with a bit of broth, salt and pepper, a drizzle of honey and some cream. Yum! It’s the best by a warm fire on a cool night =)
Cate: Yum! Tell us about your latest release, and where readers can find it online.
Fierce: Frankly, it’s a bit dark, even for me. Journal of a Lycanthrophile is the diary of Jesse Hollman, a young man who has a fetish for justice and a kink for werewolves. Together, his passions spiral him into a world of pain, shadow desires, and an even more sinister, secretive sort of shapeshifter—the kind that changes without shifting. Definitely the darkest, grittiest erotica I’ve written, somewhere along the spectrum of paranormal horror. This ain’t your grandma’s werewolf story. It will be out soon!
Cate: lol Love that cover too. Care to share a blurb or excerpt?
Fierce:
We sat there, sizing each other up. Smaller in stature, overall, than the other werewolf had been, his fangs were every bit as huge. No doubt he killed those goats on the last moon.
“I’m a safe person,” I said. I swear he cocked his head and looked at me, then sprang up, kind of bounced back on his haunches. Pointing his nose straight up at the moon he let out this piercing, shrill howl. He did it several times, and this is just crazy as fuck because, yes, my ears rang like a motherfucker, but my chest hurt. My heart ached and I wanted to bawl or fucking howl too, he seemed so sad.
After a few seconds he stopped howling and his eyes bore into me. He stood on all-fours and backed down my body. When he got to my feet he sniffed and dove. I thought he was going for my leg, and I reared back to kick the shit out of him. I doubt hurting him would have gained me anything, reflex just kicked in. He grabbed my jeans cuff in his teeth and licked my ankle, down to my shoe. I stared down the length of my body watching. After a minute he looked up. His dark mane blew on the breeze, a billowing fur halo, then he ran for the trees.
Cate: What inspired you to write about the theme?
Fierce: Frankly, I’m sick of the fluffy treatment of the paranormal genre, specifically of shapeshifters. Yet, it wasn’t enough for me to de-humanize shifters. I wanted to demonize humans, sort of a counter-balancing measure along the spectrum of nothing is inherently good, nothing is inherently bad. This is the first book in the series.
Follow Fierce on Facebook and/or Twitter, to learn more about Journal of a Lycanthrophile.
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fiercedolan
@FierceDolan http://www.twitter.com/fiercedolan
Google+ https://plus.google.com/118302380096094683854/posts
Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5236551.Fierce_Dolan
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007CJS3QK
Fierce Dolan http://www.fiercedolan.com
Blog: http://www.fiercedolan.com/blog
October 14, 2012
Interviewed at Unwritten!
I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Mysti Parker at Unwritten!
Please welcome yet another lucky interview winner from the 20,000TH Hit Giveaway events, erotic author Fierce Dolan to Unwritten! Let’s just get right to it, shall we?
Fierce, please tell us a little more about yourself. Where are you from, and what do you do when you’re not writing spicy stories?
Thanks for having me, Mysti! I’m right-coaster, though I consider myself a world citizen. I like to travel far and wide, and can never get enough of seeing new places. When I’m not writing erotica, I’m writing all kinds of other things. I’ve been a career writer for 22 years, in technical documentation, articles for journals, magazines, also nonfiction, poetry and gentler fiction—all under various names. I really never stop writing, even when I stop.
On your website, you describe yourself as a mezzofiction writer. For the more clueless ones among us *ahem*, what is mezzofiction, and how did you get into it?
I came up with that term about sixteen years ago to describe my quirky style of writing quasi-believable stories. MezzoFiction is my way of describing method acting, not for the stage but for the page. The term doesn’t describe the validity of the stories, but how I write them. I work with trance states, and “mezzo” means middle, or medial. I go into trance when I write, sometimes not even remembering what I wrote until I look back. So, mezzofiction is about not just me thinking up things and writing them down, but sensually going into those spaces and feeling them, being them. Probably a little weird, but all in context… Giving it a name helped me to grow into it as a technique, and I use it for writing nonfiction as much as fiction.
I found this quote on your Facebook page:
An editor asked me what led me to write erotica. I replied, “A dirty mind, excess words, and an overactive sacral chakra.”
I think most of us would agree that writing erotica is not only challenging, but often controversial, particularly when it comes to homosexual themes. Have you experienced any opposition to your work, and if so, how have you handled it?
You know… I’ve not had an opposition to the GLBQ aspect of my writing, though there was sort of a trip up on the “T” part of that not too long ago. Someone reacted very emotionally to my statements around being gender-neutral in how I identify in my life and in my writing. I was very surprised by that, though it’s a reminder that a lot of people still think in two genders, only. And if they can make assumptions around that in my writing and how I choose to present myself, it makes me wonder what assumptions they make about gender vs biogender in their everyday attitudes. In this particular instance, my choice to be presented as gender-neutral in open correspondence was targeted as a marketing device to draw in more readers. Well, my writing speaks for itself. It draws readers, or it doesn’t. I just was stunned that someone would get angry over my choice to reflect how I view myself and how I choose to hold gender as loosely as possible in my writing.
Buy it HERE!
Let’s talk about your latest release, Traveler Through Darkness. What’s it about, and what inspired you to write it?
Thanks for asking! I’m really excited about it because it’s part of Decadent Publishing’s The Edge series—stories that are quite short, focused on tight plots and brief interludes, with intense heat levels. This story is interracial gay erotica. I like to write stories featuring Middle Eastern characters fusing into mainstream western romance tropes, particularly when it comes to breaking taboos. In Traveler that fusion is front and center in multicultural erotic collisions. Particularly, I like making Middle Eastern men romantic leads.
In Traveler Tarik is an Arab Muslim, though he’s been in the western world long enough to have established a bountiful life in the United States. Wo, a young Navajo man, is proudly out but on the fringe, himself. They have a chance meeting the night of Tarik’s bachelor party that leaves them both changed forever.
Several well-known authors have been caught paying for book reviews. What are your thoughts on this? Since I doubt this development is anything new, do you think the “revelations” may be just another publicity ploy?
I think you’re right—I don’t think it’s new. I know that big agencies and publishers pay interns, etc, to plant positive reviews for their authors. I guess it’s just part of the indie progression for authors to do that, themselves. I’m sure it’s in part a PR move, perhaps for the author at the center of it, but also for the industry to say, “See? Indie authors aren’t legitimate.” We focus on where digital technology fits into the production and distribution process of publishing, when in reality we don’t know how it fits into the afterlife of a publication, either. It’s still a very new frontier in a lot of ways.
Everyone I interview gets a random question. Here’s yours: What’s the most neglected room/area in your house?
Ha! I don’t know if it counts as a room, but the attic. I’ve not been in my current space long—just a few years. I was thinking yesterday of how when I first moved in, it was all shiny and new. Now every flat surface stays covered and it’s a constant struggle to beat it all back. The attic, though, was empty, completely empty, upon arrival. Now I have to step over things up there to keep from tripping. *sigh*
There’s also a ‘Reader’s Guide’ highlighting wee details in the story’s context on my site:
http://www.fiercedolan.com/TTD-readersguide
Originally published at Unwritten, by Mysti Parker.
September 28, 2012
A Journey of Books Blog Hop!
Anyone interested in meeting some new authors? Hop down these links and meet some of the great talent participating in the Journey of Books Blog Hop:
A Journey of Books
Oh! For the Love of Books
Coffee, books and me
Kay Dee Royal Paranormal & Erotica Romance Musings
Wicked Readings By Tawania
Booksnob
September 24, 2012
Journal of a Lycanthrophile — Coming Soon!
Darker and grittier than anything I’ve published before, and in a world uniquely its own… Book One of my new series, The Scattered Dark, will be out soon!
About Journal of a Lycanthrophile
Jesse Holloman has a fetish for justice and a kink for werewolves. Together, his passions spiral him into a world of pain, shadow desires, and an even more sinister, secretive sort of shapeshifter—the kind that changes without shifting.
Writing Utopia, One Word at a Time
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