Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog

Contrary to popular opinion, writers aren’t writers because they have nothing better to do and are merely killing time until they end up at the cemetery. The majority of us who toil with the pen (and keyboard) need to earn off our labours, just like everyone else on the planet. If you ask a bricklayer if he/she would work for free rather than be paid, what do you think the answer would be? How about accountants, librarians, school teachers, electricians, farmers, architects, graphic designers, nurses, shopkeepers, janitors, clerical workers, street cleaners, and so on and so on?

Unless they’re offering their services for charity, I suspect the answer would be a resounding NO. We all have to make a living. We all have bills to pay. And we all have to survive.

So why is it that some individuals out there seem to be under the impression that the product of our labours should be given away for free and without any form of compensation? If you wonder what I’m on about, I’m talking about pirates – and by pirates I don’t mean Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. I mean pirates who steal copyrighted content and upload it to websites so others can read it FOR FREE. We all know this has been going on with music, but how many of you are aware that authors are likewise having our work stolen and, consequently, the food taken out of our mouths?

Despite the existence of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, many authors such as myself have had the displeasure of discovering that our work has been pirated in the form of our copyrighted material being illegally copied and made available for free for download on the internet. It’s all well and good that hugely successful (and wealthy) authors such as Neil Gaiman think it’s just fine and dandy to have our work ripped off and not be paid for it, but hey, Neil can afford to be ripped off. The majority of us cannot. “You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there,” he says. Get real, Neil. Don’t compare your international sales levels to that of the overwhelming majority of writers whose wallets really feel the pain when their work is pirated.

Contrary to what many people might believe, this form of theft isn’t always a matter of scanning print books. These pirates have managed to bypass the digital security measures put in place by electronic publishers such as Amazon Kindle and do their copying that way. (Clearly a lot more work needs to be done on the part of Amazon and others to prevent this from happening.) I’m assuming that these pirates were interested enough in these books to buy them in the first place. So what’s the motivation behind copying them and uploading them to be read for free? Isn’t that what public libraries are for?

Frankly, I just don’t understand what these book thieves are getting out of it. Have they nothing better to do? Do they not have a job or a family or a dog that needs to be taken for a walk? What’s the point of this exercise? Are they serving a greater good? Not if the greater good is a crime, they’re not. Is what they’re doing any different to that of a shoplifter stealing a book from a bookshop? If a shoplifter is caught, he/she would be prosecuted for theft.

Theft is theft.

Unfortunately, it isn’t only copyrighted works that are being pirated. A growing number of authors (many self-published) have been discovering that content they’ve written and posted on websites for free have been stolen and offered for sale on Amazon Kindle as electronic books. Talk about ballsy! But yes, there are opportunists out there stealing work that’s already being offered for free, putting a different author’s name on it, and then selling it for money. It’s bad enough to be cheated out of money, but to be cheated out of getting credit for your own work as well? Talk about adding insult to injury!

Some of the file sharing sites that have uploads of copyrighted material work in conjunction with an organisation called the DMCA (apparently nothing to do with the governmental statute), therefore pirated material can be reported (and hopefully removed) by them. However, for those sites that don’t have a relationship with this group, you’re sort of shit out of luck, especially if you can’t find anyone at the site to report the stolen content to (which is often the case, especially if they’re outside the USA). Having said that, if the site collects a subscription fee from its users, you can report them to the financial services they employ, be it PayPal, MasterCard, etc, which may or may not result in the financial relationship being terminated (and therefore causing inconvenience to the site offering the pirated material). The point is, writers need to be vigilant and chase after these bastards themselves – and be prepared to make it a part of their regular work routine. Further to this, book publishers need to become pro-active about this issue, because they too, are losing money. The responsibility should not be borne entirely by the author.

For those of you out there who have no sympathy for writers and can’t understand why we’re bitching when our work is at least being read, let me pose the question again: Would YOU work for free?

For more on this subject and some tips on what to do, check out this link.

Mitzi Szereto's "In Sleeping Beauty's Bed: Erotic Fairy Tales"

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 Sonoma County 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?

Mitzi Szereto: Dying For It: Tales of Sex and Death

What do you do when your book is mislabelled? No, I’m not talking about some spotty teenaged kid at Wal-Mart putting the wrong price sticker on it. I’m talking about something a lot more annoying and something which can potentially affect your book sales - sometimes to the negative.

When readers head over to a bookshop or to an online bookseller to find a book to purchase, they might go to a specific category, be it crime, romance, science-fiction, chick-lit, self-help, whatever. They then have certain expectations of what these books will be about. But what happens when a book isn’t quite what it says on the tin? Well, readers may get more than they bargained for and have their reading experience elevated to a higher level. At least this is what we as writers hope will happen! But what about those readers who miss out entirely on a book because of the way in which it’s labelled?

Labelling isn’t necessarily done as a sinister plot to mislead a book buyer into purchasing something he or she doesn’t want to buy (though if a recent article about publishers suddenly labelling everything chick-lit is anything to go by…), but rather a matter of expediency. If it says sci-fi on the cover, booksellers know to stock it on the sci-fi shelves, and readers know to find it there. Simple, right? In the majority of cases, this works just fine for most categories of fiction and non-fiction. But what about those times when it does not work just fine?

I’ll draw upon my own experiences in this area to demonstrate my point. Although much of my work has been in the area of erotic fiction, or “erotica” as it is more commonly referred to, the label has on occasion been misapplied. Case in point: my anthology Dying For It: Tales of Sex and Death. This is a multi-genre collection of short stories ranging from crime, romance and horror, to literary fiction and erotic fiction. Before it went to press, I spoke on the phone to my publisher in New York discussing this very issue: how to label the book. We both agreed that classifying the work as “erotica” was not really accurate, therefore it was agreed that the anthology would not be labelled as such. But when the book came out, there it was on the back cover: ”erotica.” Clearly the opinions of the creator and editor of the book (me) and the gentleman who’d so enthusiastically agreed to publish it were overridden by someone with no concept of what the anthology was about (they probably just saw the word “sex” in the title) and had probably not even read one story contained within it.

The problem is, there are many readers out there who are not interested in reading erotica – or what they either rightly or wrongly perceive to be ”erotica.” However, they might not be averse to reading material that contains sexual themes or content, providing this is placed within a wider context. These readers probably don’t bat a proverbial eyelash at the sexually explicit and often even purple prose to be found in a John Updike or Philip Roth novel, but will they buy a book that proclaims itself to be erotica? Unlikely. Which means, you’ve lost a reader, and you’ve lost a sale.

Don’t get me wrong – labelling a book in a specific genre can have its advantages, providing said book is labelled properly. But this requires a bit more than a one-size-fits-all mentality by publishers. It requires some thoughtful analysis of what a book is actually about and who might be interested in reading it. It should be the goal of a publisher to attract the widest possible audience to a book, which will result in higher sales figures – and a label can either help or hinder this process. Placing a book such as my Dying For It into a specific classification can undermine what the author (or editor) is trying to accomplish. Likewise, it can keep readers away from books they might have considered, were it not for the label. A book is not a garment with a tag sewn into the collar listing its size and washing instructions. By treating it as such, we not only shortchange writers, but readers as well.