Lavinia Collins's Blog, page 17

!!! Freebie News !!!

THE WARRIOR QUEEN, #1 Arthurian Bestseller is completely free for your kindle for just the next few days! Grab it while you can!

Recommended by readers for fans of the Outlander series and lovers of romance, history and legend.

Find it here!

BREAKING NEWS FROM THE SUN: NO, NO, IT TURNS OUT WOMEN REALLY AREN’T PEOPLE AFTER ALL

So I guess it seems like I am posting like crazy these days, it’s just a lot has been happening. Just a few days ago, I woke to the dulcet tones of Radio 4 telling me that Page 3 was going to be no more. The Sun had seen the error of its ways, and it was going to remove that creepy old institution from its pages. Hooray! My day was brighter. I love waking up to good news; this was pretty much as good as the day I woke up to hear that Obama had won the presidential election the second time. The world was good, people were not all bastards, etc. etc.

Well HO HO HO Rupert Murdoch, you had me fooled. Look at your cheeky front page there! You certainly made all those silly feminazis feel silly, didn’t you? Well done , you great big bastard.

“Why do you hate page three?” I hear you cry. “Don’t you like the beautiful naked female form?”

Just to be clear, here is my book cover:

I do not at all have a problem with female nudity. Everyone should be naked whenever they want! Enjoy your nude bodies, citizens of the world. No, I am in no way trying to suggest that people shouldn’t be naked.

But let’s think about this. The Sun is a national newspaper, and it’s got naked, airbrushed women in their early twenties, with flat stomachs and large (sometimes augmented) breasts on its 3rd page. Who is that paper aimed at? Heterosexual men. By having that on its 3rd page, The Sun is saying, newspapers are for boys. Newspapers are not for you, silly lady. And yes yes I know lesbians and bisexual ladies like naked women too,��but I know for my own part I have never looked at one of those ladies and been like MMMMM. It’s a very heteronormative, mainstream media picture of sexuality.

It’s a young, straight, conformist sexuality. And actually, with all the airbrushing and waxing going on, I think it’s symptomatic of the way our society views the female body. Cleaned up, de-haired, perfumed and airbrushed. Not to real. Not too animal. Not too sexual. Hear me out here ��� it’s a kind of barbieish plasticised sexuality we are being sold here. Waxing away hair and airbrushing away faults makes people look��less naked. Like those recent pictures of Kim Kardashian completely naked����� it took me a full minute to realise she WAS naked, because the pictures were so media-friendly, so smooth and perfect.

So anyway, besides that, beside the restrictive, discriminatory and downright boring picture it presents of female sexuality to be enjoyed with your breakfast coffee everyday, it also perpetuates a society in which women are sexual objects and the female body is something to be bought and sold between men. There’s a huge difference between a nude on an erotic book cover (and this is also an issue where gender inequality is rife) marketed to adults, and naked women casually strewn throughout the mainstream media to be consumed and objectified.

Page 3 makes the world seem like a hostile world to many women, myself included. It shuts us out, devalues us, makes us feel cheap and objectified. In the modern world there is no place for this crap, and The Sun has shown itself to be��old-fashioned and shamefully outdated. I’m disgusted, and I know plenty of other people who feel the way I do. There is no place for this in our modern world, and frankly, The Sun can fuck off.

Internet Aggression: Women Who Speak Up, and Why They Shouldn’t*

I had another post scheduled for this week. Something lighter, more fun. But last week I posted something about Scott Aaronson, and the recent controversial comment he left on his own blog, which landed him in some hot water the world over. On reflect, my post is a little confrontational, a little more raw and angry than I might have been if I had had to face the man himself in person. And we’re all a little guilty of that over the internet. And then something happened. Scott Aaronson himself came along and commented on my post about him. It wasn’t particularly flattering to him; I would even go so far as to say it wasn’t particularly nice. But he left a long comment (some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn’t) and gave me the benefit of the doubt. By that I mean, he assumed I was a compassionate human who hadn’t taken issue with his words for no reason. He assumed that I was a human, as capable of sympathy and understanding as he was. Did it change my opinion of what he said completely? No. But did it change my understanding of who he was? Yes. I would say, completely. Anyone who is willing to engage in discussion with their critics, and anyone who prefers open conversation to intimidation or silence is (at least to some extent) my kind of person. I’m still not convinced that women experience the ‘female privilege’ of not having to initiate romantic encounters; I think the patriarchal pressure on men to be sexually dominant is a different side of the same coin that pressures women into being passive. It doesn’t��benefit women that the media expects us to go second, to wait for the cue. And many of us don’t. Including me. I think the expectation is a sucky thing that disadvantages everyone, and a product of the patriarchy, feminist conspiracy theory though that is, but in the main, I think (I hope) that Scott (I hope he doesn’t mind me calling him that, but he called himself that in our correspondence) and I came to understand each other,��even if we did not come to fully agree. I would call that a victory for humans, and the internet, which is a notoriously tricky method of communication.

But now (at last ��� sorry!) we come to the crux of why I am writing this. Somewhere along the lines of the discussion, some internet vigilantes decided that what I was doing was wrong. What was I doing? Expressing my opinion. OK, in a kind of controversial way, but this is my blog and I can say what I want here (ha). Well, these fine upstanding gentlemen didn’t like it, and Tuesday morning (I think it was) I woke to find a barrage of comments from some rather creative individuals who had changed their screen names through gravatar (or something) to unpleasant commends regarding yours truly here, and left comments that were essentially aggressive hate mail. I know how this goes, you know. I’ve heard this tune before. Woman speaks her mind online, gets harassed into silence. These weren’t strongly worded responses. These were specifically intended to intimidate me. Well sucks to be them, I guess, because I’m not going to be.

I’ve called this post (rather ironically) “Internet Aggression: Women Who Speak Up, and Why They Shouldn’t”. *Obviously we should speak up. Speak up and keep speaking. And yes, sometimes I’m going to be wrong. I’m often wrong. I was kind of wrong about Scott, and do you know what convinced me to rethink? A respectful comment. A proper conversation. The offer of conversation, of human interaction, rather than just a barrage of aggression that demands silence. Is this how we interact with what we don’t like on the internet now? By bullying people into silence? Because that’s bullshit. Anything that shuts down a conversation is bad. And anyone who needs to try to intimidate people to make their point clearly doesn’t have a point.

I love the web. I love wordpress and twitter. I love the people I’ve met online. We don’t have to shout each other down here. And what’s more, we don’t have to shout each other down. To be honest, I’m surprised that this is the first lot of hate male (oops freudian slip) that I have received on this obviously feminist-leaning blog. I have been heartened by the internet until now; its ability to accommodate all perspectives, to offer a platform to all. But how many women have been shouted down online? Lena Dunham has quit twitter��because of abuse and the woman who wanted Jane Austen on the bank notes got rape threats online. If you don’t like what someone has to say, and that person happens to be a woman, why not try talking to them as though they are an actual human? As though they are intelligent and compassionate and capable of nuancing their thoughts?

It worked for Scott. Who knows, maybe it can work for you.

Scott Aaronson On the Suffering of the ‘Male Nerd’��

The internet has been on fire recently with discussions about vulnerable men, ‘nerd’ men who don’t feel privileged.

Scott Aaronson recently posted in a comment on his blog about how he doesn���t feel that he has experienced ���male privilege��� because he was a ���male nerd��� and women rejected him sexually. This comment is now prefaced by a lot of bold writing saying that all his friends agree that he is a such a nice person, and he would never have meant any of of the negative things he said about women, and he would never have meant to dismiss sexual harassment, because obviously he is such a nice person.��

Nice people can be blinded by their own prejudices, led astray by their own suffering, and blind to the problems others face. I have no doubt in my mind that Scott Aaronson suffered from being a ���male nerd���. I have every sympathy for him. What I cannot and will not agree with, and what I cannot and will not stand for, is him suggesting that this absolves him of male privilege, and therefore women who think they are sexually harassed by ���male nerds��� just don���t understand their suffering.

I am sympathetic to Aaronson���s narrative, but I also find it deeply problematic. What underlies it, what runs through it, is a seam of casual misogyny. Not once in Aaronson���s narrative does he ever acknowledge that women could be like him. That women are complex, that women suffer too, that women can be ���cool��� or ���uncool���, that women could have their desires rejected. Reading feminist books, as Aaronson constantly emphasises that he does, is not some kind of magical get-out-of-jail-free card protecting you from accusations of misogyny. The only way not to seem like a misogynist is to talk about women as though they are humans as complex and as capable of thought and emotion as men.

Hardly any of his discussion takes into account that women can be nerds. Women can be beautiful, unavailable, feminist, judgmental, blaming, rejecting, but they can never be clever. They can never be nerds, too. Women don’t understand the experience of nerds because we are bodies, not minds. That is the unpleasant, underlying implication.

There were plenty of girls, back in those teenage years, who were smart but not pretty. Who were shy and socially awkward. Who would have given anything to be the object of someone’s desire. They were overlooked, too. You just didn’t see it. Because you were looking at the “attractive” girls, and it never crossed your mind that a woman could be an equal, not just in intelligence, but also in experience.

Scott Aaronson’s experience is not a peculiarly male experience, and it has precious little to do with male privilege. It is not only men who feel ashamed of their desires, or of voicing them lest the object of them becomes disgusted. It is not only men who are afraid of being shamed for fancying someone who is ���out of their league���. Women experience that, too.

Then we come to this phrase here: “no woman deserves blame if she prefers the Neanderthals”. There’s blame inherent in that; go ahead, make the wrong choice, if you want to. For a blog post that is supposed to be dismissing the idea that he is entitled, Aaronson comes off hella entitled. This is almost in Thor Lund territory here. For Aaronson, men are people, and women are prizes. He thinks he’s a nerd guy, but as well as that, he’s the quintessential ‘nice guy’. There are just as many women frustrated that the conventionally attractive women get all the romantic attention as there are men who are frustrated that all the conventionally attractive men get all the attention. This isn���t about male privilege or gender bias. Aaronson still enjoyed male privilege while he was disheartened and disadvantaged by the fact that he did not fit the conventional model of masculinity. Women who don���t fit the conventional model of femininity also suffer as he did, but do not benefit from male privilege. Blaming the women for rejecting you sexually just shows up how you see women as sex objects, rather than as people as complex and autonomous as yourself.

What would I say to Aaronson? OK, people were mean to you because you were nerdy. That was bad. That isn���t nice. But that has nothing to do with your sex. Sure, there���s something in the bias against people who are uncool/bad at sports/nerdy, but that���s something completely unrelated to male privilege. A black man still experiences male privilege, even while he does not enjoy white privilege.

We women, we���re people just like you. We don���t all like the same things. We don���t all fancy the same kind of men, or the ���Neandertals��� as Aaronson so tellingly calls them. Don���t do us the disservice of imagining us as homogenous sex-bots programmed to want one thing. Accept that while other areas of your life may suck, you do still enjoy male privilege. Accept that we want the same things as you; to be loved, to be understood, to belong. It���s only then ��� and not by blaming each other ��� that things can get better.

Publishing for the E-book Market Part II: Social Media

This post is reblogged from the Chapterhouse Publishing website. 

Hello, it’s me again. Last week, I promised a post about being an e-book author in the Brave New World of the interwebs, so here it is.

Let me also begin by saying I’m no expert. A few years ago I would have described myself as a technophobe, and while this is no longer true, certainly I am not great computer expert. But the internet itself is a magical genie that can often answer any of your troubles with a quick google, and the more I have learned to trust the internet, the better things have become!

When I began my venture into the e-book world just last year (my first book came out in February 2014), I knew that I would have to build up more of an online presence. (That is to say, an online presence at all). The literary world has changed, and there’s a lot more emphasis now on the author as a person, on interaction with readers, and on online community. At first, the thought of this terrified me, but now I love it.

If you’re an e-book indie author, you’re going to need to build up an online presence. And it’s not as difficult as you might think!

1. Start a blog!

Notice that I do not say ‘author page’. My blog certainly has the words ‘author page’ written on there somewhere, but there’s more of a focus on events within the writing community, politics and my own personal interest than on selling the books. That’s Amazon’s job. I mean, make sure to link to your book, but my point is that your blog is to connect with your readers, to share your milestones and to share your opinions so that they can get to know you, not to plug your book. And the more you write, the more you’ll realise that you’re engaging with a community of like-minded readers and writers. My top posts this year were on two contemporary political issues that intersected with issues within the indie author community;  Gender bias and nudity on book covers and  the idea that “smart” women shouldn’t be reading or enjoying romance novels. Both of these garnered lots of support and comments from the community of romance writers I had met through my blog, and really helped in feeling part of a community of writers all supporting one another.

2. Get tweeting!

Twitter is a wonderful tool for getting yourself out there these days, and there is a huge community of indie authors out there just waiting to connect and to support one another. Over this first year I’m glad to say I have made quite a few twitter friends from among the community, and come to know about some wonderful books and some inspirational people. Look out for the hashtags; #MondayBlogs lets you share on Mondays, #WWWblogs is women writer wednesdays, and #ArchiveDay is saturday, and for sharing old post. The #IARTG (Indie Author Retweet Group) are also usually an active and very helpful resource. Get online, get following and get connecting, because there’s a great big world of fellow writers and avid readers. And yes, I have had a few DMs from people who have loved the books, and yes, they did spectacularly make my day.

3. Facebook

Everyone needs a Facebook page these days, and my only advice with a Facebook author page is to keep it short and sweet. News, reviews and new blog posts can go up, long rambles about anything better kept to the blog!

 

4. Hints and Tips

So, you want to promote yourself online, but you don’t want to spend hours each day in front of your computer? There are ways you can help yourself out. BufferApp is a wonderful free tool that lets you buffer 10 tweets, which the programme then tweets at intervals you set. It’s dead easy. I know it’s dead easy, because I haven’t got it wrong yet, and I am not the most natural at this kind of thing! WordPress and Facebook will also let you pre-programe messages and announcements so you can do them all in one evening with a cup of tea (/glass of wine – who am I kidding?) in one hand and in front of the telly. Dead easy.

So that’s all there is to it. My main piece of advice is, if you’re an indie author putting yourself out there over the net, just relax and be yourself! I can’t claim to be much of a perfectionist, but I still worried too much about each tweet and each blog post being perfect, and they don’t have to be. They only have to be punchy and genuine and interesting. People want to know who you are, what makes you tick, what made you write your story about your characters. Perfection can be saved for the book itself!

In less than a year, I’ve grown from a shy internet caterpillar into something close to a social networking butterfly. It makes the whole business of being an indie author so much more rewarding; connecting with others like yourself, talking to readers, and growing together as a community.

Lavinia Collins is the author of Arthurian #1 Bestseller The Warrior Queen Find her here:  Author Page

Publishing for the E-book Market

This post is reblogged from the Chapterhouse Publishing website. 

Getting published these days is hard, and it’s even harder if you’re not a celebrity with a scandalous life story to sell, but Kindle publishing and the rise of the e-book have revitalised the publishing market in the last few years. Three hundred million e-books worldwide were bought in the last year, in comparison with 82 million hardbacks, and 60 million paperbacks. E-books represent a very powerful emerging market, and if you’re an author, you probably want to jump on board.

So first things first.

How do I get my book published as an e-book?

There are three avenues here.

The first I’m not going to discuss at length here. This is to be traditionally published, and then your publisher may have your book converted to an e-book.

The second (the route I took) is to pursue publishing contracts with an e-book-only publisher. (I am published with Not So Noble Books.) There are several advantages to this route:

a) You get the benefit of an expert in the market directing your book where it will be best sold.

b) They provide you with a professional cover design.

c) They also have access to e-book promotion sites so they can get the word out there.

d) You don’t have to go through an agent, so you get more royalties (hooray!)

There are some disadvantages:

a) You won’t get to see your book on a Waterstones shelf.

b) You will find yourself peering over people’s shoulders on the tube when they’re reading their Kindles, just to see if they are reading your book.

If you can get a contract with an e-book publisher, then this is certainly the best way to enter the e-book market. High royalties, professional cover design and access to all of the e-book promotion services online all make this worthwhile.

But there is still another option!

The third avenue is to self-publish your e-book. There are some advantages to this as well, the main one being:

a) You get all the money Amazon doesn’t take.

E-books are the friend of the self-published author, as there are no start-up costs, and you can publish online for free, getting your material out there instantly, and earning money. You have to (you should – it’s worth it) pay for a professional cover design and a professional proofreader to make your work look professional if you are going to publish this way. Self-published or “indie” authors aren’t amateurs, and if you’re going to go down this route, you don’t want to look like one. It stings a bit, paying for those services, but an indie author e-book published with care can look just the same as a professionally published one, if professional services for cover and proofreading are obtained.

What do I need? 

You’ve written your masterpiece – what now?

Whether you go down the e-book publisher route, or decide to self-publish, there are a few things that you need to consider before you launch down the giddy track towards publication:

a) Online presence – the market is such that you’ll need something of a Twitter presence (tweet me here!), a blog, a Facebook presence etc. to drum up followers.

b) Time investment – the job is not over once you (or your publisher) hit the publish button! But the fun is just beginning. You’ve got lots of readers dying to meet you, and loads of wonderful people in the indie author community with whom you can chat books all day long!

c) (And perhaps most importantly.) PROOFREADING. I cannot stress this enough. I have started reading many independently published e-books that I have not got past the first page of, because they have been so riddled with errors. And no, you can’t proofread your own work. Trust me. It’s like tickling yourself. You cannot do it. And even if you go through a publisher (as I did) they might still ask you to do one round of proofreading yourself. And do you know what I did? I got a professional to do it. And it was worth every penny. And I have an English degree. And no, that doesn’t mean that your grammar will always be perfect. It is so important to make your e-book look professional.

So what next? 

You’ve written your book, the grammar is perfect (and the spelling, and you’ve made sure there are no continuity errors) – now is the time to either take it to a publisher (or back to your publisher) or to get on the indie-author self-promotion road!

Look out for my post next week on how to promote yourself as an author in a world where online presence matters.

 

Lavinia Collins is the author of the Amazon Number 1 Arthurian bestseller The Warrior Queen

You can find her on Amazon here: Author Page

And follow her at her own blog here: Vivimedieval Blog

2014 in review

2014 has been my first year blogging (and my first year as a published author!) I’m just posting to thank everyone who has visited the blog, and commented, and shared. You’ve made this year an amazing one for me, so thank you very much.

Lavinia xxx 

 

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,900 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Making and Breaking New Year���s Resolutions

Every year I make new year���s resolutions. They���re always the usual sort of thing. I���m going to get fit, be healthy and stop drinking too much wine. Do I keep them? Never ever ever.

First of all, it���s the wrong time of year to make such resolutions. January as the month of virtue? No thank you. There���s all the Christmas chocolate to eat, it’s cold, and you’ve just spent half a month with your relatives and/or travelling up and down the country. This is no time of year to be doing something silly like promising yourself you’ll stop drinking, or eat healthy. We expect too much of ourselves. You cannot suddenly become a slender wonder woman if until December 31st you have been a chocolate-loving lush who doesn’t like to get off the sofa.

Now April resolutions, those I could get on board with. Summer is coming, and there are reasons to be cheerful other than food and drink in abundance. Why don’t we have those?

But anyway, owing to the usually disastrous state of my new year resolutions, I am going to try to make one I will actually keep this year. Last year, I promised myself I would do 30 minutes of Yoga every morning and become trim and toned and lovely. For the first week, I did 30 minutes of Yoga a day, then 20, and by February it was 10 minutes a day. I’ve kept up that ten minutes (I usually, though, do it with the telly on, which isn’t very zen of me, is it?) but I am still filled with a sense of my own failure. New Year’s Resolutions are designed to make you feel like a worthless lump with no self-control.

So this year, I am going to make some resolutions that I might realistically keep. I haven’t decided on them yet, but here are the options:

1. I will stop chugging the drink I’m drinking just because I want to try a different drink. That is greedy.

2. I will stop wearing my running kit when it is slightly damp because I forgot to take it out of the washing machine until I wanted to go for my next run. That is disgusting.

3. I will stop peering over the shoulder of everyone reading a kindle to see if they are reading my novel. That is creepy.

So there they are. Much more reasonable in my opinion!

Please put your own realistic New Year’s Resolutions in the comments! Let’s all not expect too much of ourselves ;)

Making and Breaking New Year’s Resolutions

Every year I make new year’s resolutions. They’re always the usual sort of thing. I’m going to get fit, be healthy and stop drinking too much wine. Do I keep them? Never ever ever.

First of all, it’s the wrong time of year to make such resolutions. January as the month of virtue? No thank you. There’s all the Christmas chocolate to eat, it’s cold, and you’ve just spent half a month with your relatives and/or travelling up and down the country. This is no time of year to be doing something silly like promising yourself you’ll stop drinking, or eat healthy. We expect too much of ourselves. You cannot suddenly become a slender wonder woman if until December 31st you have been a chocolate-loving lush who doesn’t like to get off the sofa.

Now April resolutions, those I could get on board with. Summer is coming, and there are reasons to be cheerful other than food and drink in abundance. Why don’t we have those?

But anyway, owing to the usually disastrous state of my new year resolutions, I am going to try to make one I will actually keep this year. Last year, I promised myself I would do 30 minutes of Yoga every morning and become trim and toned and lovely. For the first week, I did 30 minutes of Yoga a day, then 20, and by February it was 10 minutes a day. I’ve kept up that ten minutes (I usually, though, do it with the telly on, which isn’t very zen of me, is it?) but I am still filled with a sense of my own failure. New Year’s Resolutions are designed to make you feel like a worthless lump with no self-control.

So this year, I am going to make some resolutions that I might realistically keep. I haven’t decided on them yet, but here are the options:

1. I will stop chugging the drink I’m drinking just because I want to try a different drink. That is greedy.

2. I will stop wearing my running kit when it is slightly damp because I forgot to take it out of the washing machine until I wanted to go for my next run. That is disgusting.

3. I will stop peering over the shoulder of everyone reading a kindle to see if they are reading my novel. That is creepy.

So there they are. Much more reasonable in my opinion!

Please put your own realistic New Year’s Resolutions in the comments! Let’s all not expect too much of ourselves ;)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas and a happy Festive Season to One and All from me!

This year, it’s a particularly special Christmas, since just a few days ago, my first novel was made available via Amazon as a paperback! Very exciting indeed.

You can find it on Amazon here:

Buy the Brand-New Paperback Here!

Enjoy, and a very merry Christmas to all!