The Hairpin

My piece on writing Carnal Punishment and Love's Bouquet is up at The Hairpin!

Check it out! Not only is it super exciting to be getting the word out about my smut, but it's quite thrilling to make the cut for The Hairpin, which is my all time fave website... Funny, feministy and quirky without being all smug about it. The comments are always fantastic, and they're like an asshole-free zone on the Interwebs... Miraculous, like unicorns and fresh corn on the cob. Love it.

Also, in two wonderful worlds colliding, the fantastic Edith Zimmerman, editor of The Hairpin is being interviewed on Q today (though sadly for her, not by that deep voiced delight, Jian Ghomeshi). She's talking about the death of Helen Gurley Brown.

Aieee! So much good in the world!

Love's Bouquet is up!

My angels! Love's Bouquet's fragrant aroma is ready to be inhaled by the world's reading public.

It's up on Amazon Kindle, my dickie birds, for the bargain price of $4.25.

Best part? You don't even have to own a Kindle to read it. Amazon will kindly download it your computer without making you a slave to their proprietary hardware! Hurray!

If you do buy it and read it, my feathery doves, and you are so moved, leaving reviews is very helpful, apparently. It tells others out there that the book is worth their hard earned (but entirely reasonable) $4.25.

Hurray!

Judging a book by its cover

I am totally not a visual person. I can't really tell if something looks good on me, if a box will fit through a door or if a photograph has a good composition. I'm so non-visual, that when my husband and I have discussed rearranging furniture he has actually gone to the point of cutting out scale models of the items we're going to move and then given me the little cutouts to move around on graph paper, like a super boring game of paper dolls. While his plan didn't help me visualize what the room would look like if the table were over THERE, I think it assisted him in handling the frustration of trying to get decisions from someone who just repeats, "I have no idea what you're talking about," when he's trying to describe something.

All that to say that when it came time to choose a cover for my soon-to-be-released novel, Love's Bouquet, I was nervous. Covers, as I am learning, are vitally important, especially in the e-book, self-publishing world. Your readers have to take a leap of faith when buying your book. Because it hasn't been vetted by a publishing house, they have no way of knowing if you're the second coming of J.K. Rowling or if you view Snookie as a literary heroine. Aside from the short blurb you write about your book, the cover is the only tool you have to convey what it's about,  its tone as well as whether or not you're actually competent. That's a lot of pressure for one simple image.

Knowing I could never actually come up with something on my own, I searched the Internet until I found someone creating e-book covers in a vein I liked.

Judy at Custom Ebook Covers was great, especially considering I didn't really know what I was doing, and our communication was just an email version of "I have no idea what you're talking about."

Here's the cover:

While that's not how I originally conceived of Wendy, or the back of James' head, I think it coveys what the book is about: A fun, flirty romance involving laughter love and tulips, oh the tulips!

A bit of whining to start...

Oh man, I've been telling myself I need to start blogging since I first heard the news that Harlequin would be publishing my erotic novella, Carnal Punishment in February 2012.

Everyone tells you, over and over, that creating a successful book is 20% writing and 80% promotion.

That's the tricky bit, though, right? Writers are often introverts (nothing wrong with that!) who are less interested in the money making end of things than in the careful choice of words and sentences, the evocation of a scene, the delineation of a character. Writing a book, articulating thoughts and ideas you might never have expressed to any one before, can be an extremely daunting  act, and the idea that you then have to SHILL those ideas is dispiriting... At least for me.

I just want people to read my stuff and get a kick out of my story. I want to connect to people, but I want to do it at a safe remove...  Dudes it's bad enough I've written an EROTIC novella (what would my mother think?!?) that features a disembodied Egyptian ghost getting a little rapey, the idea that I then have to go out and convince people to read it is downright sick-making.

But, you know what my babies? I'm committing to doing this. After all, we only get one crack at this nutty crazy world of ours and I don't want to be 90 (yes, I'll make it that far) on my deathbed, metaphorically kicking myself for not marketing the bejesus out of my super sexy, s&m'y story.

So. Dudes -- go buy it!

Harlequin has distributed it left right and centre, so if you're in the market for sexy sado-masochist stories about plucky archaeologists, brooding bosses and, yeah, a sexed up poltergeist with control issues... Here are a few places to get it:

Amazon

Google

Waterstones