Cecilia Tan's Blog, page 43

Spellbinding: Tales from the Magic University! (is here!)

Squeee! It's here! SPELLBINDING is a collection of erotic short stories all set at Veritas, the hidden magical university inside Harvard. The entire Magic University series grew out of my involvement with Harry Potter fandom and fanfic, so it seemed only natural to me when creating my own world of magic to invite others to come and play in it, too!

So welcome Frances Selkirk, Lauren P. Burka, Julie Cox, Rian Darcy, Deb Atwood, Sarah Ellis, Elisabeth Hurst, BriAnne Searles, and Carline Ball to the university!

SPELLBINDING includes four stories written by me, and eleven stories by other writers having fun! In true fanfic fashion, some of the stories follow the canon, while others explore non-canon pairings (like Kyle/Alex). All are sexy as hell. Most are slash, two are het, and one is femslash. (And one I can't decide what classification it goes under. You'll see.)

I also have a number of free copies of the ebook I can share with folks who will promise to review the book on their blogs and post the reviews to Amazon.com or Goodreads before July 1st. If you're interested, drop me an email at my "writer" address: ctan.writer (@) gmail.com

More details below the cut, including links to where you can get a free sample, or purchase from Amazon's Kindle store, B&N Nookstore, All Romance eBooks, Smashwords, or the Ravenous Romance site itself.

Download a free sample or purchase from:

Ravenous Romance
Kindle Store
Barnes & Noble NOOKStore
All Romance eBooks
Smashwords

Meanwhile, I can't help but notice that book one of the series, THE SIREN AND THE SWORD, is on special for just 99 cents at both Amazon and B&N!

So if you've been meaning to start on the series, now's the time! (Book four will be out by August at the latest! The manuscript's done and with my beta readers now! Trying to get it out before Diacon Alley!)

A bit more about SPELLBINDING. Here's the table of contents and a brief note about each story. The stories are grouped into sections as to which books in the series they are spoilery for, and where they fit in the timeline:

One: stories to be read after The Siren and the Sword

Ignorance is Bliss by Cecilia Tan –

In which Timothy Frost tells the tale of how he got together with Michael Candlin

Summer Vacation by Frances Selkirk –

How did Kyle and Alex spend the summer after Kyle's freshman year? As beach bums on the Cape.

The Taste of Cloves by D.K. Jernigan –

Oh, that cloved orange at the Scipionis House New Year's party. It started more than just conversation.

Two: stories to be read after The Tower and the Tears

Diary of a Lost Scholar by Frances Selkirk –

Tackling the problem of bibliomancy… and sex magic.

Chimera by Rian Darcy –

What happens when Timothy Frost decides what he needs is Dean Bell?

Aunt Wendy's Ring by Lauren P. Burka –

A story of Kyle's quiet roommate Glendon finally getting some action.

Iphis's Price by Elisabeth Hurst –

There's a long history between Quilian Bell and Callendra Brandish, and rescuing Frost is only one piece of that history.

Lakeside Encounter by Cecilia Tan –

A very different beachside encounter for Kyle, on the shores of Lake Michigan.

The Stain of Memory by Cecilia Tan –

What happened after the lights went out at Sassamon, after Bell's accusation? What could have happened between Bell and Brandish…

Three: stories to be read after The Incubus and the Angel

Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves by Sarah Ellis –

When Lindy first started having trouble, she sought the help of the women at the Collegium Sophia, the all-women's magical college at Smith.

Home for the Summer by Deb Atwood —

Ash learns the age-old lesson that you can't go home again.

Empathy by Julie Cox –

Kyle, Alex, and a fae-struck waif… and the zombie apocalypse.

Heaven Can Wait by BriAnne Searles –

Someone's got a crush on Alex. Someone's got a crush on someone who's got a crush on Alex…

How Frost Got His Name by Cecilia Tan –

A backstory on Frost and how he came to Veritas.

What I'd Do for a Friend by Carline Ball –

Just how far would Alex go for Kyle? All the way?

Rainy But Not Blue

Well, that was different. From yesterday anyway. The result, however, was the same: a win.

Today instead of the game taking place on a hot, muggy night, it was a chilly, rainy day. We got to our seats in the upper deck, behind home plate, to discover a driving wind into our faces, meaning that even though we are under the roof, there was no shelter from the non-stop horizontal drizzle. We resorted to plastic ponchos immediately.

Bartolo Colon was on the mound for the Yankees, while Mitch Talbot took the hill for the Indians. Through the first three innings, there wasn't much to write home about. Each team had one hit and not much else. I could mention that Gardner was caught stealing twice, once on a pitch out, once at third base. But that's reaching. There was also a Posada baserunning blunder–picked off second. I'll get back to that.

Colon was vintage, giving up only 2 hits and no runs through 6 innings. Meanwhile the Yankees were up to their old tricks, as A-Rod homered in the 4th on a low line drive. That was the way to get a ball out, since the wind was blowing in so intensely that popups were crazy, every fielder running in and in to get them. And then Granderson homered, too, in the 6th. I tweeted at the time, thinking about the recent kerfuffle last night with Carmona and Teixeira: "Granderson goes boom! 2-0 Yanks. Is Talbot thinking 'don't plunk Teixeira, don't plunk Teixeira?'"

As it turned out, that was probably not what he was thinking. Teixeira then took him deep except the wind held it back and it was caught on the warning track. A homer on any other night. Talbot then drilled A-Rod in the leg on the next pitch and Dan Iassogna, the home plate ump, didn't even flinch. He tossed Talbot immediately. Talbot whined that he had slipped on the wet mound. Replays showed that if he slipped, it wasn't visible to the naked eye…

It took a very long time for Rafael Perez to come take the mound. Was he in the can, or something?

The Yankees got another run when Swisher led off with a hit. Jorge followed with another, a single into the corner that Choo kicked around, so he went to second and Swisher all the way home to score. (No RBI.) But Jorge was picked off a few pitches later. It looked like maybe Gardner missed a bunt and Jorge was starting too early toward third. Whoops.

But the drama came with 6 1/3 innings pitched, Colon pulled a hamstring while covering first base. That'd be the last out he made, as he limped to the bag and then was escorted away. David Robertson came in, gave up a hit but got the next out.

But then Robertson returned for the 8th. He gave up a single. Then another one as the heathens in the crowd were doing the f***ing wave. Don't you idiots realize the tying run is now at the plate? They probably didn't. I do wonder if they realize that the wave is also what probably caused the balk. Now men on second and third, no one out. The balk did seem to kill the wave, and I hope it stays dead.

Robertson, now without distractions, struck out the next three men in a row. Nice shooting. Mariano got up, but didn't have to come in, yet. He stood on the bullpen mound watching.

Then the Yankees came to bat again, and Teixeira hit another home run to make it 4-0, and Mariano went and sat down. Boone Logan came in for a 1-2-3 ninth inning and then we could finally get out of the driving drizzle.

Tomorrow we break out the brooms. Freddy Garcia takes the hill. Should be interesting at the very least.

Summertime Laugh(t)er

Last night, as corwin and I lay in bed trying to get to sleep after a long drive to NYC through thunderstorms and another horrendous loss to the Red Sox, I said, "Something is going to shake this team up. Girardi has to come up with something or someone's dad has to die tragically, or someone get in a wreck or something." I talked about that game in 2009 in Atlanta when Girardi got tossed and Cervelli his his one home run, and how they went on a tear and never looked back.

The Yankees have been the Red Sox's punching bag so far this year, but hey, this often happens, where the Sox dominate in the early going and the Yankees dominate in the last going. (I'd rather dominate during the pennant race, thanks.) So perhaps they sprang up enlivened today merely by seeing Boston's taillights as they pulled away last night. Or maybe it was that after a 3.5 hour rain delay last night, the fact that today was sunny and warm and summer-like lifted their spirits. (It sure lifted mine.) The pennants looked extra bright today, and the Coco Rico the old Dominicans sell on the street corner on 161st Street tasted extra sweet before the game today.

Or maybe it was that Fausto Carmona just seemed like he didn't have it and like he was an ass on the mound. Here's what I'm talking about.

In the first inning, youngster Ivan Nova had a nice 1-2-3 (capped by a strikeout of Grady Sizemore), and would go have a very nice quality start, 2 runs in 7 innings, never really in trouble. (His second strong start since allllmost losing his spot on the rotation.) But in the bottom of the first, Carmona started the game with a walk to Jeter, on four pitches. At the time it felt like a "screw you" move — much like Beckett plunking him yesterday. But while we're on the subject of plunking, John and Susan quoted a stat yesterday that in their careers, Jeter and A-Rod have been hit by Red Sox pitchers 20 times. Whereas David Ortiz has NEVER been hit by a Yankee pitcher. Of course there's the fact that they're both righties while Ortiz is a lefty, and maybe guys in the righthanded batters box get hit more than lefties but I dunno. Maybe it's just more of the Sox pitchers have been idiots. When Sabathia finally DID plunk Ortiz last night, a lot of people really felt vindication.

At any rate, the Yankees were still pissed off today, and came to the park ready to bash. Carmona struck our Granderson, but then walked Teixeira, and then walked A-Rod. Bases loaded and Robbie Cano at the plate? Cano fouled off many pitches and finally laced a line drive to score Jeter. Next came Swisher, who hit a deep sac fly to score Tex, and then up came Jorge Posada to a huge cheer — after all, tonight was Jorge Posada Figurine Night.

Base hit. Another run in! Three runs in the first inning, and Carmona had thrown 39 pitches. Off to a great start.

Next inning, another 1-2-3 for Nova. Meanwhile, Carmona got two out and then faced Granderson again. The scoreboard department put up some stats the effect of which was "Granderson owns Carmona." And he did. Solo shot, and Yankees up 4-0. But that wasn't the most exciting thing that happened in the inning. Up next was Texeira, who hit the deck when the very next pitch came straight for him and drilled him in the back. He was pissed off and yelling at Carmona who was dumb enough to not only drill him intentionally but to then gesture at him, too. Benches and bullpens emptied, and in the center of it all was a shouting match between Joe Girardi and Manny Acta, apparently. All we could see was a big scrum. But no punches were thrown.

Maybe that was just the tonic the Yankees needed, or maybe they were already well on their way, since after all it was already 4-0 at that point.

Next inning, Nova did give up a double, but there were already two outs, and no sweat. The Yankees, meanwhile, kept the pressure on Carmona. Cano opened with a single. Swish hit a line drive that was caught, but Posada got another hit, and then Gardner hit a long RBI double into right center. He would have gotten a triple, actually, except that Posada was ahead of him clogging up the basepaths. 5-0 Yankees.

In the fourth Nova again had 2 out before allowing a man on, a walk, but escaped again with nothing more. The Yankees meanwhile tacked on another run with an A-Rod solo shot in to deep left-center, into the bleachers above the driveway behind the Stanley sign. Not as far as that one we saw hit the ambulance in the old Stadium, I think, but impressively far. 6-0 Yankees.

Cleveland finally got a run in the fith, when Matt Laporta reached on an infield single, moved to second on a Cord Phelps base hit, and then after Orland Cabrera struck out, Jack Hanrahan walked to load the bases.

Then corwin brought me a sausage sandwich and I didn't write down who got the hit that scored LaPorta, but it must have been Michael Brantley, since Asdrubal Cabrera ended the inning. One run was getting out of it cheaply enough.

The Yankees, in their half of the 5th, had a little excitement when Posada got his third hit of the night and then was promptly out trying to stretch it to a double. Nonetheless, he was already batting .295 over the previous 50 at bats to this game, and now was three for three. Not bad, Mr. Figurine. Brett Gardner followed with an infield single that he beat out, and then stole second, and a few pitches later, stole third. But he was stranded there by Jeter. By then Carmona was out of the game but it hardly seemed to matter.

In the sixth, cue "Black Magic Woman" because Carlos Santana hit a solo shot off Nova. And it was spooky, because it was one of those you would call a "rainmaker" that went so high you thought it was a pop-up, and then it just carried all the way into the bullpen. Not 30 seconds after the homer was hit, it started to rain.

But the Yankees got the run right back, as Granderson doubled, Tex walked, and then they put on the double steal (or perhaps hit and run) with Cano at the plate. Cano swung and missed, but the catcher threw to third trying to get Granderson, and threw into left field instead. Granderson scampered home. 7-2 Yankees. Jorge struck out in the rain, and then it stopped, about 20 minutes of heavy drizzle and light rain, not too bad.

Nova had a strong seventh also, with two more strikeouts, finishing with exactly 100 pitches. The Yankees then went on the attack again, with Cervelli finally joining the party with a hit (up until then the only guy without either a hit, RBI, or run scored), and then Jeter following with a ringing double that brought the crowd to their feet. Interesting to see the crowd come so alive for Jeter's hit when it was only #2991, with no hope of him getting to the milestone tonight. (I was amused to see the posters hanging everywhere offering free cake at the Yankee Tavern on the night he finally does it.)

Thing is, for all the whining and crying about how he's too old and can't hit anymore, have a look at the Yankees' team averages. ALL of them are down. A-Rod and Cano are both hitting in the .260-.270 range also, and you don't hear anyone griping about how they are too old or being paid too much, do you? NONE of them are as hot as they are going to be, and it only seems likely that the whole team is going to get hot. Jeter included. They poured it on again in that seventh inning. With Jeter and Cervelli both on, Granderson walked to load the bases, on four pitches. Tex came up and doubled, clearing all three runners! A-Rod followed that with a double of his own, scoring Tex. Then Cano walked on four pitches. The Indians changed pitchers and that restored a semblance of order, but not until 10 Yankees had come to the plate.

There was a little more rain on the parade though. With the Yankees now up 11-2, we figured we'd see Kevin Whelan make his major league debut. Fresh from Scranton today, he was wearing #45 and carrying the hopes of the Yankees universe. If you've been loving under a rock then you don't know that coming into this season the one big strength the Yankees thought they would have was their bullpen. They signed Rafael Soriano and Pedro Feliciano, who together with Joba Chamberlain and Mariano Rivera should have made an unbelievably strong relief corps.

Well, Soriano and Feliciano are both on the disabled list, and today we learned that Joba is going to have Tommy John surgery this coming Thursday. Yeah. So the entire Scranton bullpen has pretty much been called up…

Anyway, Whelan took the mound in the 8th. He got a quick out. Then he walked a guy. Then another out. Then another walk… You could see he was overthrowing and overexcited. Then he walked the bases loaded. Girardi went out and gave him a pep talk.

It didn't work. He walked in a run, and they took pity on him and took him out. Whelan had only walked six men all season in Scranton and here he'd just walked four i one inning. That's as many as Mariano Rivera has walked all year, as well. Whelan got a very nice ovation from the crowd anyway, and we could be magnanimous since we were still winning 11-3 at that point. Amauri Sanit struck out Orlando Cabrera looking to end the ordeal. Cabrera got himself thrown out, having a tantrum after the called third strike. This cheered the crowd a lot, too.

Then came a troublesome ninth. Sanit struck out Jack Hanrahan, who was otherwise the one bright spot for the Indians. He had doubled and walked twice, hadn't yet made an out, and had robbed Jeter on a sparkling play at third base. But this time he struck out. Sanit, though, fell prey to the "it's a big lead! just throw strikes!" problem of throwing strikes that were too good. After giving up four straight base hits, all singles, Sanit was cooked. Girardi got him and brought in Lance Pendleton.

When Pendleton walked his man on five pitches, Girardi said screw it. He went straight to Mariano. Who, by the way, gave up another two runs with a bloop hit, but then got the next to batters to pop up easily to end the game. Final score 11-7, but you really never felt like the Indians were in this one.

Hopefully this laugher was just the medicine the Yankees needed. I'm here at the Stadium for two more days so I hope the momentum continues! Bartolon Colon goes tomorrow!

The Prince's Boy: do you want a sequel?

So, now that The Prince's Boy is really and truly done with, all chapters and the epilogue are posted… of course I'm starting to think about a sequel.

I have bunches of ideas that have been nipping at my heels…

In the epilogue of course I set up one direction the sequel could go, with Kenet and Jorin (and who knows who else…) making the trip to Pellon to meet the Frangi delegation. I would love to set some chapters in Frangit itself, too, the land of mystery.

But tell me, dear readers, what would you love to see? What questions did I raise in TPB that you want answered? Who do you want to see more of? What stones did I leave unturned?

Comment in any of my journals or drop me an email at ctan.writer (at) gmail (dot) com.

The other Prince's Boy wrapup posts…

Leave a review, get a special copy of Sergetten's Tale via email
Read the author's notes

The Prince's Boy author's notes!

Thank you for reading The Prince's Boy. The whole fun of doing an online serial is sharing it with readers every week. I hope I inspired at least as much squeeing as groaning. These author's notes are actually a series of confessions. "Now it can be told…"

It's not a mystery that my two biggest influences for this serial were Alexandre Dumas and Anne Rice "writing as A.N. Roquelaure," in particular Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask and Rice's The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. However, the first confession is that I never finished reading either of those two books.

I was actually bored by Sleeping Beauty, because I found it repetitive and I didn't find Beauty to be a compelling character. Maybe she eventually develops one, but she seems like a dishrag. A sensual dishrag, to be sure, but I found the chapters tiresome to try to get through.

Then someone clued me in and told me the Beauty books were originally written as a serial. Aha! It suddenly made sense why the chapters felt so repetitive and why the plot doesn't move forward very much in each. (It didn't explain, however, why Beauty was such a shallow character. But whatever.) I tucked this little seed of knowledge into the back of my head about 16 years ago.

As for Dumas, my introduction to The Three Musketeers was no doubt a movie adaptation in the 1970s. I never had a chance to read any of his books straight through while in school, though I read bits and pieces of a dog-eared copy that was kept in one of my English classrooms. I wonder now if I never felt the need to read the whole thing precisely because of the serial nature? Dumas has a way of luxuriating over the dialogue and the language (well, I was reading in translation but one hopes it was true to the original) and simply not hurrying. Because Dumas was writing in the serial form, he played to the hilt with foreshadowing, mystery, leaving his readers hanging, twists of fate, etc. And yet he never hurried. You read a chapter for the enjoyment of the chapter and surrender to his slow pace. (Steven Brust captures Dumas's leisurely ethos of storytelling in his Khaavren books.)

When the idea came to start posting a serial on circlet.com, these thoughts about serials coalesced in my mind with one other strand of creative influence, which is my hobby of writing slash fanfic–explicit, homoerotic fan stories pairing-up male characters from fantasy books/movies/TV. In the world of fan fiction, it's not unusual to find writers working on "WIPs" (works in progress), where they post chapter by chapter what they write. The danger in reading a WIP is that the writer may lose interest in writing it, or write themselves into a corner, or quit the fandom, leaving the readership stranded wondering what was going to happen.

Well, I thought, I'm a professional. I won't abandon my readers. I know what I'm doing.

Here's the next confession: I didn't actually know what I was doing.

What I knew was that I wanted to write a piece of original fiction that explored the territory of dubious consent, male-on-male eroticism, and the concepts of erotic magic that I had played with in my fanfic. And I knew I wanted to write it as a serial where every chapter would have a sex scene. I started making notes. I wrote out a cast of characters and played with linguistics and drew a map. I played with language some more and wrote out a list of words and names without knowing what they referred to.

And then I just let Kenet start talking. I wrote the first five chapters over the course of a week or so, just establishing and playing with his voice. I knew our story would involve an evil wizard, a cold and distant king, a prickly tutor, a virgin prince, and his whipping boy. And that was it. I started posting with only that much to go on.

I had a sort of sketch of a plot. But I knew I was not writing a novel with a traditional three-act structure. I was writing a serial, which was more like a string of pearls, one after the other after the other… and I just knew I would have to keep stringing them until it came time to close the circle. I had some ideas of what might happen. I knew there were certain conflicts that would have to be resolved and brought to a close. And I knew at some point the boys would have to be separated, and then later reunited. But I let the sex guide me. I let the eroticism determine what would happen in the plot. This was the whole reason for making sexual magic the basis of the plot, and sexual coming of age the basis for the character arcs.

It pretty much wrote itself. There were times when I wrote four or five chapters in the course of one weekend. I know many plot elements look like they were planned in advance and woven in so well. But another confession: there were many weeks when I was so busy with other work that I did not even start writing that week's chapter until midnight the morning it was supposed to post. I would often finish it around 3am and set it up to post six or seven hours later.

And yet I never had writer's block. I never was stuck wondering what was going to happen in the next chapter. Any time I had a spare hour, anywhere in my travels, on planes or trains, in New York, Wyoming, South Carolina, Georgia, no matter where I was or what I was doing, if I had a spare hour, I could bang out a thousand word chapter. I always knew what was going to happen next.

If I had to say why it was so easy to write, especially compared to other works of mine, I'd say it was because I trusted my subconscious. I knew there was a lot in there at the start, and instead of trying to force it out into a synopsis or write out a plot plan, I just let it happen. A string of pearls. It feels like a gift from above, or from my muse, because it isn't always that easy.

Next confession: There are mistakes in it. One of the problems with writing something over a long period of time is that I forgot certain details. When I started writing, the name of the country was Maldevar and the capital city was Trest. At some point I swapped the names, though, and then decided I liked it that way better. So I had to go back and retrofit the correction.

Some other mistakes. At one point I got east and west mixed up. Yes, even though I drew a map. I have left/right dyslexia, which extended to the words east and west being synonymous for me. The result is that anyone trying to draw a map based on what the characters say, may end up confused. I've tried to go in and fix all the geography, but I may have still got it wrong.

Also, I forgot some of the linguistic conventions I meant to use, and so the spelling of the words in the old tongue kept changing. I think I spelled ladra'an at least six different ways while I was writing. I *think* I've gone back and fixed them all…

These are all things that a decent copyeditor working on a finished novel would have fixed. But posting it week by week, even my own beta-readers didn't always catch them. There are probably other glitches that need fixing, too.

Final confession: I do feel a little guilty over the fact that there are no female characters at all. But I decided it was better to have an all-male cast for thematic purposes than to throw in "token" female characters just for inclusiveness's sake, only to have them brushed aside or minimized anyway. I am bisexual myself and a big advocate for equal rights, but artistically speaking this story needed to be all cocks, no hens.

In the end, it came out twice the length I thought it would. I was planning for about 50 chapters initially. But telling the story from two narrators' point of view means essentially that the plot doubled in size. My subconscious knew what it was doing–but I didn't! Looking back on it now I see that makes perfect sense. We'll see if I remember this lesson when I go to write the sequel.

Yes, I'm planning to write a sequel, though I think it will be a while before I begin it. I have some other projects that need tending just now, but I'm starting to gather ideas. If you have questions you want answered in a future book, there's a discussion going on over here.

Thanks again for reading. Print editions and ebooks are on sale but my plan is to keep the free chapters online! Please tell your friends about The Prince's Boy and share Jorin and Kenet with as many people as possible! Thank you for being along for the ride!

The other Prince's Boy wrapup posts…

Leave a review, get a special copy of Sergetten's Tale via email
Put in your thoughts on a sequel

Get a preview copy of The Prince's Boy: Sergetten's Tale (non-holiday re-post…)

(Reposting this as the holiday weekend was not a good time for it… duh.)

So, volume 2 of the ebook/paperback (and also the complete hardcover) include a special bonus story called Sergetten's Tale. I know some readers aren't flush with cash and can't pay for it right now, but really want to read the story. So here's a way you can, and help out The Prince's Boy at the same time.

Do any of the following things and then email me about them with a link:

1)Post a nice review at Amazon.com

2) Post a nice review at Goodreads

3) Post a fic rec in your own blog or fanfic journal, linking people to chapter one.

Email me at ctan.circletpress@gmail.com with a link to your post or letting me know where to find it, and I'll email you back a copy of Sergetten's Tale in thanks.

In fact, I'll email it right away! You'll get to read it first, before anyone else! :-)

(I'll re-post this during the week so that folks who went away from the Internet for the Memorial Day weekend can have a chance, too…)

The Prince's Boy special story! Want to read Sergetten's Tale?

So, volume 2 of the ebook/paperback (and also the complete hardcover) include a special bonus story called Sergetten's Tale. I know some readers aren't flush with cash and can't pay for it right now, but really want to read the story. So here's a way you can, and help out The Prince's Boy at the same time.

Do any of the following things and then email me about them with a link:

1)Post a nice review at Amazon.com

2) Post a nice review at Goodreads

3) Post a fic rec in your own blog or fanfic journal, linking people to chapter one.

Email me at ctan.circletpress@gmail.com with a link to your post or letting me know where to find it, and I'll email you back a copy of Sergetten's Tale in thanks.

In fact, I'll email it right away! You'll get to read it first, before anyone else! :-)

(I'll re-post this during the week so that folks who went away from the Internet for the Memorial Day weekend can have a chance, too…)

Bi Writers Reading in NYC this Friday (including me)

By the time this post appears I should be on my way to New York City for BookExpo America (aka BEA). If you'll be there and want to say hi, text me! Looks like I'll be at the show Tuesday and Wednesday if all works out with badges and such? (If you know anyone who has an extra, I could use it…) Thursday will be the Lambda Literary Awards. I was a judge this year and I can tell you queer representation at publishers large and small is alive and well.

Then on Friday the 27th I will be reading at the annual Bi Lines event: Bi Lines IV: A Celebration of Bisexual Writing in Reading, Music & Culture. An impressive number of the finalists in the bisexual fiction category will be reading that night!

I'm looking forward to seeing Nora Olson and Ann Herendeen again, both of whom I met at Saints & Sinners and who are on the slate, too.

Details below!

Come to the biggest bi culture event of the year in NYC: amazing authors, live music and a bi art exhibit!

Friday May 27 at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

208 W. 13 St., 7-8 Ave, NYC, 10011

6:30-9:30 pm: Book signings 6:30, Program 7-9:30

Free (donations appreciated)

Bi Lines is a reading and multi-arts event to honor the winners, finalists and nominees of the Bisexual Fiction and Nonfiction Lammy Awards, hosted by the Bi Writers Association.

Authors:
Cecilia Tan/Black Feathers
Daniel Allen Cox/Krakow Melt
Ann Herendeen/Pride/Prejudice
Michael Gregg Michaud/ Sal Mineo
Malena Watrous/If You Follow Me
Georgeann Packard/Fall Asleep Forgetting
Ann Tweedy/Beleaguered Oasis
Nora Olsen/The End: Five Queer Kids Save The World

Musicians: Robin Renee, Rorie Kelly, and Ben Silver.

Comedy & song: Donna Redd.

Plus bi art exhibit representing over a dozen bi artists.

Colorful online event info on the BWA "Bidar" blog



http://biwriters.livejournal.com/90741.html .

BWA website www.biwriters.org

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ebook Piracy

Is Ebook Piracy Good or Bad for Authors?

I get asked this question a lot. It tells me something that I used to get asked (breathlessly) "OMG, what are you going to do about piracy!?!?!" and nowadays the conversation is a little less fraught with hysteria. This is a good thing, for several reasons. One is that hysteria rarely solves problems. Two is that it may mean that people are taking a more rational approach to the realities of the digital world.

The realities of the digital world include:

1. It's easy to share files.

2. It's easy to find like-minded people out there, coalescing in communities.

3. It's easier than ever for people to spread word of mouth.

All three of these things make life easier for pirates and illegal file-sharing activity. But all three of those also make life easier for authors and creators. I've written before about how discoverablity, or lack thereof, is the biggest problem most authors or books have. (tl; dr — pirate sites are havens for dedicated book addicts and so what better place to get your name or title in front of a rabid audience?)

Since my last article on the subject, I've been collecting links and anecdotes, trying to build a better picture of just how free, word-of-mouth-driven filesharing helps books sell. That's some people's definition of piracy, but I also include intentional free giveaways of books, as well as inadvertent "releases into the wild."

The latest big splash in the news is one of those inadvertent ones, the viral spread of the PDF "galleys" of "Go the F**k to Sleep," the children's book parody for adults by Adam Mansbach. This article in PC Magazine tells the story: How the Success of 'Go the F— to Sleep' Discredits Copy Protection. In short, the PDF review copy has been forwarded all over the Internet (completely illegally) because people are so jazzed about the book that they cannot wait for the actual book to come out before telling all their friends. The result? The book is #1 on Amazon.com and has over 100,000 copies pre-ordered. As the article states, "To conclude that piracy is good from this story would be dangerously oversimplifying things. But if the publisher had sealed advance electronic copies of the book with deadlocked digital rights management (DRM), it would never have had a chance to go viral." For more on Go the F**k To Sleep, check out this roundup of links from Digital Book World. A review copy is supposed to help generate buzz. That's exactly what this did. Yes, you've read the whole book now, but that has only increased the hunger for the physical product.

Best-selling authors Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman have spoken out often on the value of giving away their work via the Internet to spur print book sales. Just Google them and you'll find plenty on the subject. Here's a video of Neil Gaiman embedded in a Fast Company article which says "…after observing that the most pirate-heavy countries, such as Russia, actually had the best sales, [Gaiman] decided to experiment with putting his book for free online. 'Sales of my book, through independent book stores, because that's all that we were measuring it through, went up, the following month, 300%.'http://www.fastcompany.com/1737151/self-destructing-ebooks-a-twisted-proposal-to-libraries

How about author Paul Coehlo, whose book The Alchemist was selling a mere 1,000 copies a year in Russian. Then in 2001, it sold 10,000. Why? And sales continued to grow, to 100,000. And now over 1,000,000. How? People were pirating the book, and that spurred exponential growth in the sales. That spurred Coehlo to start his own free download site, The Pirate Coelho. Here's a news item about it: http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books-080124/ He also convinced HarperCollins to release free promotional versions of his books, as detailed in this interview: http://torrentfreak.com/best-selling-author-turns-piracy-into-profit-080512/

In the ultimate way of profiting from piracy, O'Reilly sells for $99.99 the results of their study of book piracy on their sales. (The Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales) Talk about tl;dr! The gist of it, though, is in this interview with Brian O'Leary of O'Reilly, in which he says, "Data that we collected for the titles O'Reilly put out showed a net lift in sales for books that had been pirated. So, it actually spurred, not hurt, sales." He also says "I'm pretty adamant on DRM: It has no impact whatsoever on piracy. Any good pirate can strip DRM in a matter of seconds to minutes. A pirate can scan a print copy easily as well. DRM is really only useful for keeping people who otherwise might have shared a copy of a book from doing so."

O'Leary makes the point that what drives piracy the most is people's desire to read material in the format they want and the difficulty they have getting what they want. If the publishing industry meets that desire, then we can build ourselves strong commerce, instead of getting caught flat-footed like the music industry, who wasted billions of dollars trying to "fight" piracy, only to find that the only effective way to reduce the amount of piracy going on was to give the people what they want: cheap and easy (DRM-free) music. Now that MP3 download stores are well-established (even Wal-Mart has one!), money is flowing in and piracy is down. Here's an op ed piece in Wired saying the heyday of music piracy is over: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/st_essay_nofreebird/ (I'd like to see more actual numbers, but the record companies really don't want us, or their artists, to know how much they're really making.)

And here's a call to arms for the comic book industry to respond similarly, by making legal, digital versions of many titles available. http://www.tuaw.com/2011/05/08/publishers-choice-will-the-ipad-be-the-hero-or-villain-of-the/ (You'd think comics would be a no-brainer with the huge popularity of independent webcomics already well established, and so many of the graphic novels coming out having been culled from the webcomics ranks!)

Here's the thing. You could still argue that all these examples of authors "pirating" their own books leading to higher sales are all about physical books. (See more links below re: Tor Books, Tobias Buckell, John Scalzi, Paul Carr, and others.) But what if you're a digital-only publisher? I see the fear. Your product is 100% digital. If someone pirates it, they have the entire product. What incentive do they have to pay for it? Piracy of digital files might help print sales, but they'll hurt digital sales, right? RIGHT??

Not so fast. Let's look at the software industry for a possible answer.

Folks in the software business have been fighting piracy a lot longer than book publishers have. In particular, let's look at games, which are more like books in that they're an entertainment choice. Game developers have every incentive to get you to pay for what they do. Developing a new major-release game is a huge financial investment in salaries, marketing costs, etc. Way more than a book.

And yet the prevailing winds seem to be blowing in the direction of getting rid of DRM and relying on the players of the game who legitimately pay for it. According to this blog post "Game Developers Speaking Out Against DRM", some games like Prince of Persia are now released without any DRM at all. A game called World of Goo is knowingly pirated by 90% of the players out there, but the developers feel those 90% would never have paid for it anyway. Putting strict DRM on would have just cut down even more that 10% who did pay!

Here's a link to a blog post by veteran game developer Jeff Vogel. (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/05/final-answer-for-what-to-do-to-prevent.html) He opens the post by saying "This article is my decisive statement on how developers should deal with pirates. It includes humorous anecdotes about how dumb I have been in the past. And, believe me, I've been pretty dumb."

For 15 years on his games, they had a complicated registration system that was supposed to reduce piracy, but all it did was reduce legitimate buyers. As he writes, "We stuck by this system for fifteen years. Might as well have just made a big pile of money and set it on fire." Don't make it hard for people to enjoy your product and don't make it hard for them to be legitimate users. Life should not be easier for pirates than for paying customers. If you make life harder for your paying customers than for pirates, you'll make less money. Simple.

Googling around now, I find many more articles about games getting rid of their DRM, including the wildly popular Dragon Age. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/bioware-dragon-age-securom-drm,7722.html.

So, if the game publishers are dropping DRM to reduce the incentive to pirate and increase the ease of buying, and the result is rising popularity of games because people get to try them out first… that seems like a loud and clear cue that digital book publishers should follow. Kindle ebooks are now outselling printed books at Amazon. People want digital books. Give the people what they want and make it easy to get them in their hands.

While I have your attention, I ought to point out that authors who see 100,000 downloads of their book as equivalent to 100,000 lost sales are deluding themselves. Please trust me when I say that 100,000 downloads is not the equivalent of 100,000 copies shoplifted. It's actually the equivalent of 100,000 people thumbing through the book while standing in the bookstore or library, deciding whether to invest the time in reading it.

There was an author (Anne B. Ragde) recently who spoke out against piracy in just that manner, though, calculating to the dollar what her "lost sales" were worth. During the interview, her son let slip to the reporter that his mother, despite her anti-piracy stance, had almost 2000 illegally downloaded songs on her MP3 player. Her defense was that she didn't really listen to them anyway (that player was in a summer cottage somewhere); she pays for the music she "really" listens to. Well, guess what folks. Of those 100,000 who downloaded your book, most of them aren't reading it anyway. 90,000 probably never open the file. Of the 10,000 who do, you just got the equivalent of them opening a copy of the book on the shelf at a bookstore to see if they like it. Most traditional authors would have KILLED to have such great placement in the bookstores as to attract 10,000 browsers to pick up the book and look in it. Out of those 10K, say 3 out of 4 decide the book is not their cup of tea. So now we're down to 2500 who are genuinely interested. In the brick and mortar world, retail rule of thumb says 500 of them would have a good chance of buying it. Another 500 probably go to the library and borrow it. The other 3/5ths never close the deal and put the book back on the shelf and forget about it.

So your book needs to be downloaded 100,000 times before you gain a measly 500 buyers. The percentages go up when the downloads are legal, free copies marketed to your target audience, as with the Tor Books free giveaways (see below). O'Leary in the interview linked above also mentions Baen Books, another science fiction publisher, who has been spreading around free digital copies of their books for over ten years (including by handing out CD-Roms at sci-fi conventions — I have one from 2002). He mentions that they have among the lowest incidence of piracy in the book biz. This is not a coincidence.

So, you may not be convinced, but I am. Giving stuff away helps. Having it for easy sale also helps. In fact, despite all our "new media" chatter about publicity in the digital age, about blog tours and Twitter contests and Facebook pages, these two things seem to be the only two things that actually make a measurable impact on sales. Give stuff away to increase your customer base, and then have it for easy sale to sift money out of those who are eager to pay. That's it.

P.S. More links, for those of you still hungry:

Speaking of free, legal ebooks, have you seen eBookNewser's list of top ten sites for legal downloads of free books? http://www.mediabistro.com/ebooknewser/ten-websites-to-download-free-ebooks_b10776

More on authors and publishers giving away books:

Tor Books (science fiction publisher) saw jumps in sales for Tobias Buckell and John Scalzi, among others, as a result of their free giveaway. Many articles about it, but here's Bloggasm: http://bloggasm.com/did-tors-free-ebooks-affect-sales

Paul Carr's article on TechCrunch Free as in "my publisher will disown me after I pirate my book on TechCrunch" from December 2009.

When author Chris McKitterick discovered his novel was already on pirate sites, he entered a "race" with the pirates not to stop them but to give more copies of his book away. He talks about the experience at the Lawrence (KS) Journal site. Also, his blog post on the subject: http://mckitterick.livejournal.com/653743.html

P.P.S. The photo above of the pirate's book is not pirated. I purchased the right to use the image from iStockPhoto.com. The image is by a photographer named Feng Yu. Sites like iStockPhoto and Dreamstime have embraced this principle of make it cheap and easy and money will flow. Nothing stops bloggers from just lifting copyrighted images from around the web to sprinkle on their sites like pepper. But why steal when so many easily searchable images are so good and so cheap? I paid about $3. That's less than a soy green tea latte, and totally worth it.

Publicizing Your Book (panel at Saints & Sinners)

This is a blog post to supplement the panel I'm on at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans this weekend, "SUDDEN EXPOSURE: The Write to Market." The moderator, Michele Karlsberg, asked me to speak specifically about the social media and networking. So I'm posting it now so that people equipped with mobiles at the panel can look this up immediately without waiting to get home. Ah, the power of the Internet! If you're reading this from SASFEST, please comment here or drop me a line at my Twitter feed: @ceciliatan.

I divide the things a fiction writer can do online to connect with people into three types:

1) things that are purely customer-facing,

2) things that connect one to ones peers,

3) and things that are a combination.

You need all three, and they work together.



FIrst, some lists. These are not exhaustive lists, and more things are popping up all the time.



Customer-facing Outlets:

YouTube (i.e. videos of yourself reading aloud, book trailers, etc)

Fiction-content Blog (i.e. a serialized novel)

Facebook Fan Page

BookTour.com

Amazon.com Blog & Author Page

Goodreads/Library Thing/Shelfari

Community/Peers-facing outlets:

LinkedIn

writers communities online (Livejournal, Absolutewrite, etc)

publishing business communities online (Digital Book World)

Ning groups for writers (SheWrites, Gay Writers Circle, BookBlogs)

Both:

Twitter

Facebook personal page

Regular 'real life' blog

Tumblr

Customer-Facing Outlets:

Customer-facing outlets are pretty easy to understand. They mimic most closely the old forms of media and brick and mortar world of promotion. They are MOSTLY a one way street, where you put up content and the "masses" look at it. The feedback from those looking at it might be minimal — your YouTube video might get lots of comments, or it might not. It also might get lots of negative comments, but hey, nothing stops people from throwing rotten tomatoes at you in a bookstore. Oh, except public decorum, but don't expect that from the faceless trolls who have nothing better to do than leave homophobic "bait" in comments. (Tip: IGNORE TROLLS. No really. IGNORE. Don't put them down. Don't debate them. DO NOT ENGAGE.)

As an author you have the most control over your customer-facing outlets, but you also face the problem of how do you get the word out that you even bothered to MAKE a YouTube video? Well, hopefully you are leveraging some of the other social networking tools that are more of a two-way street.

Peer-Facing Outlets:

Peer-facing outlets should also be pretty easy to understand. They're like going to a cocktail party at a publishing convention or attending a writers conference. You make friends and acquaintances. In the old days you would exchange business cards and maybe when you had books come out you would ask someone in your Rolodex to provide you a laudatory jacket blurb. Then you would do the same for them if asked. Nowadays, you become connections on LinkedIn. You make connections to people who make connections to people who make connections to people, and next thing you know you can have a friend send a virtual message to that best-selling author you love introducing you and asking for a blurb… or a mention on their blog to spread the word of your book directly to that famous authors' readers. That's way better than just a jacket blurb.

Dual Outlets:

Here's where most social networking newbies get confused, I think. They get on Twitter, for example, and they can't quite figure out if they're supposed to be "talking" to their readership or if they're talking to their friends and family, or business colleagues, or what. Well, guess what, it's ALL OF THE ABOVE. This means that if your tweet feed is nothing but promo for your book, your colleagues will get tired of it, so will your family, and wait, so will your readers…

This doesn't mean you have to tweet what you had for lunch. (With any luck, I had crawfish ettouffee today… thanks for asking!) Think about it this way. If you were stuck in an elevator with some of your fans, some of your friends, and some of the people who worked for your publisher, and you were the only one talking, what would you say? Twitter is the ultimate "small talk." 140 characters, in fact. News of the day, the weather, headlines that outraged you, what your kids did at school, what YOU did at school, the book you're working on now, where to find the best Mexican food in Cleveland. Remember, you get to ASK as well as TELL people things. Did you notice your book was one of the topics in there? Yeah. That.

If you can do it on twitter, you can do it in the longer form media of Facebook (where the "status" message can be identical to your tweets, and in fact can be automatically imported by software so you don't even have to remember to send it twice!) and the even longer form of your personal blog. Whether you have your own named website, or you set up a Blogspot account, or you go with one of the other blogging services (Typepad, WordPress, etc…). The same rules apply, only now you get to hold forth in essay form, rather than fortune-cookie size.

Growing Followers:

One of your goals in being witty, interesting, provocative, informative, or whatever else your public persona makes you worth reading, is to attract NEW followers/readers. The way it works and why it's called viral marketing is that if you say something witty on Twitter, for example, and someone who follows you likes it, they can forward it instantly to all of their followers to see. Some of them may not have heard of you and might think, huh, interesting person, I should follow them, too. One click and they are following you also. It's that simple.

On Facebook there are two kinds of of pages. You can have a personal page that is actually for connecting with your real life family and friends, and a Fan Page that is for your readers and supporters. On your personal page, people will request to be your friend and if you accept, then you can see their private posts and they can see yours. But on the fan page, all a reader has to do is click that they "LIKE" you. This is less intimate than friending and gives fewer reciprocal privileges, but it does give you permission to market to that person. (One still shouldn't give them nothing but the hard sell, though. They can "unlike" you, too.)

Use Software Tools

Most of the forms of social networking and online hanging around one can do have various software ways to make it easier on you to connect it all together. For example, most blogs allow you to install a kind of widget that whenever you post, a tweet automatically goes to your Twitter followers, who then know to go look at the new post on your blog. While they're there, even if they don't buy anything, if you're running ads on your site, they count as visitors. USE THESE TOOLS. Sometimes they can be a pain to figure out. But guess what? I usually tweet to my list that I can't figure it out, and someone among my followers will tweet back with advice.

EVERYBODY ROWS

We're all in the same boat. Every fiction writer and every publishing professional is experiencing rapid change in the way they work, create, and monetize what they do. The only way to keep the boat moving is for everyone to row. Readers are in the boat, too. They have a vested interest in tools that will help them find the books that will entertain them and sustain them. Readers are already connecting with each other through sites like Goodreads, and helping each other (and incidentally authors) by leaving reviews for books on Goodreads and Amazon. Goodreads, Library THing, and Shelfari are networking sites where people can make friends based on what they're reading. They're like virtual online book clubs and viral word of mouth combined into one awesome tech package. (Well, three since there are three sites.) Authors can have a presence on all three of those sites as well as Amazon. If you don't have time to do all of them, pick one and stick with it.

Another list. This one of useful movers and shakers in the e-world to follow and read to stay up to date on the new frontier:

JA Konrath — this guy is selling millions of books on the Kindle store. Not kidding. He started a blog called Newbies Guide to Publishing where he shares his successes and failures. http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

Kristine Kathryn Rusch — a longtime sf/fantasy writer, editor, and publisher, her site features frequent blog posts on freelance writing business, changes in publishing, and her online Freelancers Survival Guide, etc. http://kriswrites.com/

John Scalzi — president of Science Fiction Writers of America and an early adopter of blogging as a writing & promo tool. http://whatever.scalzi.com/

Those were people. Here are some organizations and institutions:

Digital Book World — It's an annual publishing industry conference in NYC, but online it's a community of book biz optimists collecting real data and information about what's working and what's not in the digital publishing world.

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/

Publishers Lunch — If you're not already having PubLunch delivered free into your email box every day, you're missing one of the book industry's greatest freebies ever. Sometimes irreverent, always relevant.

http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/free/

PW Daily & other Publishers Weekly Newsletters

While we're at it, did you know you can subscribe to email news from Publishers Weekly? In addition to PW Daily, there are specialty newsletters on cookbooks, comics, religion, and childrens books. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/email-subscriptions/index.html

These are the great places you can follow the play by play action on things like the Borders bankruptcy, Amazon's latest "glitch", and the Google Book Settlement. And if you think those things don't concern you as a fiction writer, you're wrong. Fisherman have to do more than just put their hook in the water. They have to know about the weather, pollution, et cetera. Writers can't just sit at home alone and write, and then lick the envelope on their manuscript and just wait for a royalty check to come. (I could write a whole post, actually, on how that was rarely the case even in the "golden age" of publishing… writers have always had to do more than just write.)

Please comment below to add to these lists! What are your favorite new media and publishing resources? Who do you follow? Where are you participating in social networking? Does anyone use MySpace anymore? How about the MobileReads forums?