Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog

Teddy Tedaloo reads "In Sleeping Beauty's Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales"

No, I’m not talking about what you think (or hope) I’m talking about. Nor am I talking about Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan. As you may already know, I’ve blogged about Dave before – he was one of my very first Facebook friends! (Alas, our relationship has since gone pear-shaped, and we’re no longer speaking.)

No, I’m talking about Teddy Tedaloo, who’s one of my most devoted fans. Well, he’d better be, since I pay the rent. Though I really wish he’d stop singing that damned Pet Shop Boys song all the time; it’s beginning to get up my nose. I love you, you pay my rent, indeed! Mind you, when it comes to fans, he has plenty himself, if his Facebook group is anything to go by… and my long-distance phone bill. When my shipment of author copies for In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales arrived the other morning courtesy of my publisher Cleis Press in San Francisco, who do you think couldn’t wait to tear open the box?

You guessed it.

I didn’t even get a chance to make a cup of tea before Ted was already in the kitchen rustling about in the knife drawer to find something to slice open the box with. The next thing I know he’s happily ensconced on the fluffy white coverlet on our sofa with his little black nose buried in the book. How he managed to fetch his reading glasses from the upstairs bedroom without my seeing him is anyone’s guess. I suppose that’s one of the advantages of being diminutive in stature.

“Now Mitzi, are you using your blog to plug your new book release?” I hear you asking. Why, of course I am! After all, it’s my blog and I can do what I want with it. Having said that, don’t I provide you with hours and  hours of free entertainment? After all I’ve done for you – sacrificed for you, is it so much to expect a little consideration and support? (Insert Jewish mother guilt-inspiring voice here.) Haven’t I given you the best years of my life? (Insert nagging-wife voice here.) If my book is good enough for my bear, then it’s good enough for you! And take my word for it when I say that Ted’s not easily impressed. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more difficult critic to get past.

So if you want to make me happy (and you do want to make me happy, don’t you?), then click on one of the very handy Amazon carousels located right here on my website (you can select from three different countries – oy, how easy can it be?) and pre-order your copy of In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed now!

Do it because you love me.

And if you don’t, so lie.

(BTW, if you happen to be a book reviewer, drop me a note and I’ll put in a review copy request for you. But you gotta promise to be nice!)

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You know that expression “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings”? Well, I don’t even give her a chance to open her mouth! I apply this methodology to my professional life and to my personal life. Alas, the latter hasn’t proved as successful as the former, but we aren’t here to talk about that, are we?

Indeed, I’m not the kind of woman who takes “no” for an answer. When I started out in this literary gig, I knew the odds were hugely stacked against me. Hell, they still are. You think it’s easy to sell a book? – especially when you refuse to churn out the same shite everyone else does? I’m definitely my own drummer, and when I think what I’m doing is right, there’s no convincing me otherwise.

Case in point: my book of solo short stories Erotic Fairy Tales: A Romp Through the Classics. How I laugh when I hear some precious writer grumbling that their precious novel went to seven publishers before it finally found a home. Seven? What is seven? Try fifty, baby, then you can start grumbling! Yes, my little masterpiece went to about fifty publishers worldwide. I even had a literary agent working on it for a year (and believe me, I’ve lost track of the number of agents I’d submitted the thing to before I went with this one). Not that he did sweet FA, other than collect money off me for every conceivable cost, save for loo roll. (Wait, I think he did bill me for a jumbo pack of Charmin!) Half the publishers the manuscript was submitted to were ones I suggested to Mr. Literary Agent, the other half he came up with – and they were totally off the wall, including some tiny press in Georgia that only publishes poetry. WTF?

Fine, I’m used to always having to do everything my own damned self, since no one ever does anything right – and that’s if you can count on anyone to do it in the first place. But come on. I even had to track down an editor because my manuscript was returned unread, along with a letter stating that said editor no longer worked at said publishing house. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this a clue to find out who took his place in order to then resubmit the material  – and indeed, to submit to the original editor at the new publishing house as well? Apparently that took a bit of common sense and initiative, neither of which my so-called literary agent possessed. No wonder every time I phoned the guy he always sounded as if he’d been asleep… which he probably had been. Ah, well, I suppose it beat the New York agent who had a dog barking incessantly in the background while she tried to convince me over the phone to shell out 500 bucks to her to read my manuscript. Had I done so, I’m sure it would have ended up as one of those “my dog ate my homework” deals.

Undaunted by the blatant hopelessness of my situation, I resumed control of my product and re-embarked upon the quest to find a publisher. I submitted far and wide, to publishers in every corner of the globe. Had there been publishers on Mars, I would have submitted to them too. In fact, I was running out of publishers. Oh, the despair! Finally I put together my last batch of mailings and headed to the post office (which by this time was thriving thanks to my generous patronage). This was it. If it didn’t happen, it wasn’t going to happen – there was no one left.

The next morning my phone rang. It was a publisher, and she wished to speak to me about my fairy tales manuscript. I was asked to come to their San Francisco office for a meeting. Since I lived in Petaluma at the time, this was fairly easy. Besides which, I always welcomed any chance to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge – I still do, in fact!

And that’s the tale of how Erotic Fairy Tales: A Romp Through the Classics finally saw the light of day. The book has sold so nicely and has been reprinted so many times that Cleis Press decided to publish a second edition – the now renamed In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales. I invited author Tobsha Learner to write a special forward, along with some words of praise on the back cover provided courtesy of author Nancy Madore. The book will be out in autumn 2009 and is already available (HINT HINT!!) for pre-order at the lovely Amazon.com.

So you tell me who was wrong: all those publishers who passed on my book, or me?

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Some of you may have heard about the recent fracas concerning online retailer Amazon.com. What happened is this: a whole slew of books had their sales rankings removed – books which apparently fell into a certain category, the likes of which have puzzled pretty much everyone. Amazon initially seemed to be targeting titles deemed to contain “adult content”, especially anything in the “erotica” genre. This then ended up being extended to gay and lesbian literature and even feminist works. Now we’re not talking only about those books with covers that would make your average raincoat and black-socks-wearing perv blush with embarrassment, but some very high-profile books as well, including non-fiction historical studies and works containing no sexually explicit content whatsoever.

Considering that many of my books classified as “erotica” are far less explicit than the average Jilly Cooper or Jackie Collins novel (see my blog post about mislabelling), this sounded like hypocrisy in action. So too, was the fact that titles containing nude photographs of women (and not the most highbrow either), along with memoirs penned by porn stars were still respectably ranked on Amazon. So I went and had a look and found that a number of my titles had been de-ranked. What makes this especially amusing (or not, depending on how you look at it) is the fact that Stephen Fry’s autobiography was also de-ranked, along with classic works of literature such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and a biography of Oscar Wilde. Rather than be upset by it as my fellow writers were, I felt flattered to be in such lofty company as Mssrs. Lawrence, Wilde and Fry.

Since I live in a cave (metaphorically), I had no idea this cull was even going on until I began to see mention of it in Facebook and Twitter updates. A petition had been started and was being passed along the grapevine (helped by me once I knew of the situation). Finally Amazon sat up and took notice, though they blamed everything on a “glitch”. (Sounds just like Facebook’s favourite excuse!) Now I’m not going to say the good folks at Amazon were telling porkers – glitches in systems are common enough, and something intended to perform one function can often end up taking over and creating havoc, much like the Hal 2000 computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So why did this happen? Well, in some frothing-at-the-mouth Bible-Belting attempt to protect the delicate book-buying public from material that might be deemed to be of an “adult” nature, Amazon took it upon themselves to enact this de-ranking policy, which didn’t remove books from the site, but removed their sales rankings, thereby driving them, shall we say, underground. It also removed these books from search results. Perhaps I’m not the only one who lives in a cave, because surely any member of the public (regardless of age) can locate the most extreme, sick and disgusting forms of pornography online at the click of a mouse. So who exactly was being protected by this policy? Your guess is as good as mine as well as all the others who objected to this arbitrary silliness on the part of Amazon.

Now I know a lot of people diss Amazon and this hasn’t exactly helped the situation. They’ve become the company people love to hate (much like Starbucks). Surprisingly, a lot of authors have joined the hate bandwagon too, which I find surprising, especially since the odds are hugely stacked against authors’ books being sold at all, to say nothing of actually being stocked! If this makes me politically incorrect, so be it, but frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. I LOVE Amazon – and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Amazon is not the love that dare not speak its name. They have all my books listed for sale and if they are out of stock, they’ll reorder them. They also allow buyers to pre-order titles that haven’t even been published yet. (I suggest you hurry over to Amazon and do so for the upcoming re-release of my bestselling story collection In Sleeping Beauty’s Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales!) Now how many brick-and-mortar booksellers can even be bothered to do this when they can’t even be bothered to re-order a book that’s already been published?

Most of the big chains are in bed with major publishing houses (I won’t mention names, but two biggies here in the UK are definitely enjoying a gay old romp in the sheets with some heavy players in the publishing world). Why do you think the same stale books by the same stale authors are in every bookshop? God forbid if you want to be a Looky Lou and peruse the shelves to see what else might be worth a read – you’re pretty much stuck with Delia Smith’s cookery books, David Beckham’s words of wisdom, Katie and Peter’s lives as happily married chavs, and Paris Hilton’s riveting life story (or has it been published yet?). Of course you can’t exactly peruse the bookshelves at Amazon as you might a regular bookshop, but when a regular bookshop offers you a very limited variety of the vast variety of books and authors out there, you’re getting a raw deal anyway.

So stop your whingeing. Amazon behaved stupidly (how many of you can say that you never have), and they did something about it (how many of you can say that you have), so let’s all be friends again. As writers we can’t afford to thumb our noses at vendors who sell our product. And as readers/consumers we deserve the greatest variety of books offered at the very best price. Amazon has revolutionised the way books are sold. Fine, so they screwed up, but they listened to the public and they responded by rectifying the problem. I bet you can’t say the same for your local or national government or your utility company or your bank. And I bet you can’t say the same for your lover/partner/spouse either!

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Within the past week I’ve had two people say to me – “but I like REAL books!” They were, of course, unhappily referring to the increasing popularity of electronic readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, and therefore the increasing popularity of books you can download and read on said reader. Unfortunately, I own no shares in Amazon.com (I wish I’d gone with my gut instinct on this years ago rather than listening to the dotcom doomsdayers, one of which was the investment guy who advised me to buy mutual funds whose managers are now all in jail), but that’s beside the point. Granted, in a way I agree – there is nothing like holding a book in your hands; it’s tangible, tactile, it looks nifty on a bookshelf, and hell, it can even make a damned good door-stopper, to say nothing of performing other important household functions. Why, just the other day while Facebooking I found myself being harassed by a wasp. Needless to say, he meet his fate quickly (and no doubt painlessly) at the hands of a novel I’d grown bored of reading.

So why am I jabbering on about Amazon Kindle? Well, for very good reason! My bestselling and now out-of-print erotic novel The Captivity of Celia (written as M. S. Valentine) has just been published as a Kindle book. Indeed, thanks to Amazon Kindle it has been brought back to life, and several of my other Valentine titles will be following suit via this platform. Is that such a bad thing? Not if it puts a few bob in my pocket! And I’m suddenly hearing from other authors who are feeling quite encouraged about this new opportunity to gain readers and thus earn a bit to put toward the rent.

Speaking from the rather prejudiced perspective of a writer, the really great thing about the Kindle is that the author can publish directly with Amazon, thereby cutting out those annoying little middlemen such as literary agents and book editors and publishers who, as many of us in this business have already learned, know as much about publishing good books as your senile old Aunt Gertrude in Hoboken, New Jersey. Hang on a minute – isn’t Gertrude the name of that editor who rejected my last book?

So before we go starting up a Kindle fatwah, we need to gain some perspective. People who like print books will always buy print books. The marketplace cannot ignore such a large percentage of readers. However, those who prefer the transportability, the varied features, and the ability to store a multitude of titles, not to mention being able to bookmark them, will add the Kindle to their reading repetoire. There’s room for all of us. Let’s just all try to get along, shall we?

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