I talk romance and erotica on the Bookrageous podcast

Click here to hear me talk about being a book lover, favorite books and the romance and erotica genres with In The Flesh alum Sarah Wendell of the wonderful blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books, along with hosts Rebecca Schinsky of The Book Lady and Jenn Northington of JennIRL (also events manager at WORD). I recorded my part at Greenpoint, Brooklyn extremely excellent indie bookstore WORD, where I'll be in the audience being a fangirl getting my Sarah MacLean and Kieran Kramer books signed April 27th.

LA Times' book blog Jacket Copy (and me) on why women CAN write about sex

Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times' book blog Jacket Copy quoted me extensively about the whole "women can't write about sex" story that The Erotic Review editor Kate Copstick has stirred up.

Here's a snippet of what I emailed to Kellogg:

I think the number one critical element is honesty, meaning using your most natural voice to write about sex. Trying to make it sound more 'porn-like' by deliberately using words that you wouldn’t normally use almost always reads in a stilted, clichéd way. Honesty, too, about sexual desire; I think part of why so many writers, male and female, use pseudonyms (approximately half of the authors in my erotica anthologies) is because it allows them more freedom to go to the often dark, disturbing, odd, etc. places their sexual imagination takes them.

Make sure to click through for the HOT kissing photo (by someone called masochismtango on Flickr, an awesome Flickr name if I've ever heard one!).

I'm in The New York Times

Okay, well, it's my book, Best Sex Writing 2009, and it's in the New York Times book blog Paper Cuts, but still, VERY exciting! They excerpt Daphne Merkin's piece "Penises I Have Known" - please check it out.

Speaking of this, stay tuned - in the next few days I'm going to post 10 Author Promotional Tips based on things I've learned/done/observed.



Read the introduction here

Anatomy of a six-figure book deal

Fascinating look at the making of Lenore Skenazy's six-figure book deal for Free Range Kids: Giving Our Kids the Freedom We Enjoyed Without Going Nuts With Worry (click through for her site/blog) based on this New York Sun article on letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone, up now at Alan Rinzler's The Book Deal. This is all in keeping with a book I'm going to post about soon, David Seaman's Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz - as in, getting people angry is good.

At this point it was a Wednesday afternoon in our San Francisco offices, and the end of day in NYC. My heart beat accelerated, a small vein in my temple began to pulse, and the situation escalated immediately to code red, taking control of my life. I stopped doing anything else, made some urgent calls to my immediate team, and emailed the proposal to my boss the publisher, his boss the President, and our team marketing manager, sales director, publicity guy, and many others, including big sales honchos and national account reps at our parent company John Wiley & Son’s corporate offices in Hoboken.

To justify paying a competitive six-figure advance, I’d need to persuade literally dozens of people throughout the company that we could sell enough copies to earn out in the first year enough royalties to equal or surpass whatever other companies were going to bid.