Why Tuesday is my favorite day of the week

Today is Tuesday, which to me is my favorite day of the weekend, although I love weekends too, because it's payday. Since starting my part time copywriting job last June, which I go to three days a week, I've welcomed the change of going from chasing down checks that may or may not arrive on time to doing that but also getting paid every single week for the work I've done the week prior. I'd bet money (ha!) that having a steady paycheck has contributed greatly to my mental health, because I know that as long as I show up to work, I'll have that check, and can better plan when I will pay rent and bills.

From what I can tell so far this year, my book royalties will be the biggest source of my gross income, with my copywriting job the second, but the big difference is my royalties arrive four times a year and are utterly unpredictable. They've ranged from the very low thousands to over $17,000 and I have no way of predicting quarter to quarter what they will be, so I can't rely on them. That being said, I should receive my royalty statement for Q1 2017 next week and I already have a list of what I will pay for with it, including some to my retirement fund, some to debt, some to key purchases and some investing back into my biggest literary moneymaker, the Best Women's Erotica of the Year series.

This year, as I've become fanatical about bookkeeping and started truly analyzing the cost of each dollar I earn, I've realized how wasteful I was of both my time and money in my younger days. Projects like interviews for Gothamist, some of which I am still inordinately proud of, didn't pay. Others, like In The Flesh Reading Series, sometimes broke even and sometimes didn't. A wiser person would have parlayed that reading series into a book deal and/or a sponsorship. I didn't, which contributed to its demise when I felt like I was taking advantage of myself. I sometimes wonder, what could I have done with all that creative organizing energy that would have been sustainable in the long term? I don't think of it in a regretful way but more in a how can I apply this to my work life now? way.

This month I've been busy with promoting my latest Cleis Press anthology, On Fire: Erotic Romance Stories, finalizing the table of contents for the self-published rerelease of Sex and Candy and some freelance writing, and starting next week/month, I will be planning the first of many online courses I plan to teach, organized around my consulting and teaching site, EroticaWriting101. All of those projects and whatever happens after them are part of my strategy to stay relevant in the job market. I'll also be making a copywriting portfolio page and learning more about SEO and Amazon keywords. It's a lot to juggle, but I feel good about taking a proactive stance. I'm writing an essay about how I'm paying off a large amount of debt and while I'm not proud of having the debt I'm excited that I can see the light at the end of that damning tunnel and eager to get started on projects that have the potential to yield income for many years to come. Still, as long as they will have me, I'm grateful for my job, which is teaching me a whole new world and style of writing and outlook on the world, and giving me that Tuesday morning payday to look forward to. I am ready to make new mistakes (because I'm sure I will), but at least I won't be sitting around waiting for things like I did in my twenties and thirties, when I never asked for a better job title or advocated for a raise or anything else that would advance my earning potential. Now I realize that I have the power to at least try new endeavors, measure their success and go from there.

Please don't buy my titles that don't give me royalties

I posted about this a while ago on Twitter, but wanted to let you know that if you want me to get royalties, do buy my titles from Cleis Press, Seal Press and Pretty Things Press, but if you buy my Alyson Books titles (First-Timers, Secret Slaves, Ultimate Undies and Sexiest Soles), I won't get royalties, at least, as of when they decided to not pay them in 2009 and then give me the giant runaround about it.

If they ever step up and decide to pay me the money they owe me (over $900), I'll let you know and even take down this post (or adjust it), but I'm obviously not holding my breath. It's a shame because Alyson gave me my start and were once wonderful to work with, and I guess it doesn't matter now that they're not putting out new hard copy books, as far as I know, but still, I'd like to get the money that is owed me. (For the record, I got a flat fee, of $1,000, to co-edit Up All Night, my first anthology. I DO NOT recommend going this route, but I was young, and I lived and learned - I'd sooner take no advance and get a cut of royalties, but everyone has to make those decisions for themselves.)

This is what I last heard on September 24, 2010; they have my address - the same one where I received royalty checks for many years prior to their poor decision-making on this issue. I have no idea if those books sold anything last year, but if so, I am owed even more money. It's easy to write it off...if you can afford to. I can't. I still want my money and will continue to notify them until I get paid, but in the meantime, please support publishers that pay their authors what they are owed.

Dear Rachel,

For the majority of this year we have been reconfiguring Alyson books.

In connection with such, we have essentially put all Alyson related business on hold until we determine how we are moving forward with that division of our company. We have made great strides over the past few weeks with the reconfiguration and expect that within 30 days we will have a definitive plan for Alyson books. Once a new plan is in place we will begin to issue outstanding royalty payments.

I’m sorry that your royalty payments have gotten caught up in the restructuring process, but please know that it is the Company’s full intent to get your back royalties paid to you as soon as our finance department allows us to issue royalty payments for Alyson.

Regards,


Brian Goldman
Vice President, Operations

Here Media

The reality of royalty statements

I don't think most people get how royalty statements work; I certainly didn't. I will say now that, in regards to Cleis Press, 4 times a year I get a check, and a wake up call. A very stark reminder of what works, what doesn't. It's like a roadmap: keep editing this, never edit that again. It's exciting, but can also be demoralizing to see books I poured as much energy, time, attention, heart and soul into as others sell just a few copies in three months. Was the book a mistake? Should it never have been created? Did I do a bad job of marketing it? Was it the cover?

And with the ones that did well, the best sellers of the bunch, what went right about those? It's so hard to know. As I move into 2011 and try to become a better businesswoman, one of my goals is to make all of my publicity and marketing efforts sync up. Like, there's zero reason to run around, take off days from my day job, and do events if nobody's gonna show up (cue Brookline, MA and that Book Passage writing workshop where one person attended). Literally no reason, and I cannot afford those kinds of events financially or psychologically. I just can't. Eventually I will probably phase out doing events, because they are not cost-efficient, but they are fun, bring in publicity, and allow me to meet actual real people who sell my books to other actual real people. Otherwise, it's all intermediaries.

But anyway, back to things I didn't know - I had this fantasy when I started that each royalty statement would get progressively bigger, that because I have more and more books out there, that the rate of purchase would just keep rising. I forgot that some of the people who are buying the new books already have the old ones, so even the ones that do sell well from the backlist, don't sell as well as they did out of the gate.

I also didn't realize that your losses are balanced out by your gains; the books that haven't earned out their advances make my checks smaller. The good thing in, the latest round of books seem to be doing very well; I so hope that the women's erotica books, like Fast Girls, Smooth, Passion and Orgasmic are ones that do well because I think they're all fabulous but also because out of all the books I've edited, the bestselling one is my book with Seal Press, Dirty Girls. So I want to try to recreate that success - if I could I'd be, well, not rich, but a little richer. I wish there were some magic way to know these things ahead of time, to figure out which are great ideas and which just sound like great ideas, but you really just never know.

My challenge now really is trying to edit erotica books that lots of people want to read. Obviously, something like bondage erotica or spanking erotica is a niche audience. I've tried lots of tactics - readings, book trailers, ads (I SO don't advise taking out ads for books - at least in my case, people just don't click). Part of me feels a little hopeless, or like maybe that's just how my books sell - very, very average. But part of me wants to try to find something new, some better way of working to make these books reach what in my heart I believe is a wider audience. How to do that? I'm not sure, but I'm talking to my third and most professional publicist who I hope can help me breathe new life into the business of selling books, especially with Gotta Have It, which I think is the most mainstream and welcoming of my books. I'm hoping the almost-bare butt on the cover will not be a problem for stores, and that my virtual street team of reviewers helps convince the unconvinced that these super short stories deserve a chance. This book went through a name change, and at first I was not happy at all about that, but now I'm extremely happy. We are also set to debut a book trailer, hopefully next week, that incorporates the images and voices of about 15-20 of the contributors. I love that technology has allowed me/them to do this (all were sent via email) and I am hoping this one makes it onto Amazon (ahem, where the Passion trailer is supposed to be right now!).

So those are some of my off-the-cuff, just-woke-up thoughts. You can find very successful writers' royalty statements, including a New York Times bestseller, online. I can't share my details except to say that apparently, the mile high club is not as popular to read about as I'd thought, but Please, Sir has done extremely well. That brings up another piece of advice (obviously take any book advice I give with a huge mouthful of salt, because who am I? if you want real advice, find someone who makes a living off of their books - I truly don't mean that to be facetious or self-deprecating, just true) is that you should be constantly monitoring your books on Amazon. Please, Sir was out of stock for a while because it was being reprinted. That was frustrating for me because I know it's a book readers like, and of course they have the option to buy it used or from someone else. Happily, it's now back in stock for real. And if you want to watch the banned-from-YouTube kinky book trailer or find other places to buy it, click here.

So it balances out; if you ever wonder, "Why does Rachel edit 6-8 anthologies per year?" Well, the answer is partly cause I'm a crazy workaholic, partly cause I feel guilty for wasting three years of my life in law school, and partly because it's such a crapshoot that I need to do everything I can to make sure I come out ahead. At least, that's how I see it. If 1-2 of those books don't do well, but it's balanced out buy 5-7 that do, then I'm a happy girl on royalty statement day. If it were the other way around, I would be very disappointed. As it is, I am constantly assessing how to work smarter, better, how to make the anthologies appealing to a wide range of people, how to capture as much diversity given the limited submissions I sometimes have to work with. My "market research" is in large part doing my giveaways, finding out how people have found out about my books, who they are, what they like.

Honestly, I'm just happy to now have the cash to pay for things like my student loan, my upcoming hotels, all those copies of Gotta Have It I ordered, and a bunch of other things. It's a relief, but it's also a sign that I need to kick things up a notch if I want to make those checks get bigger instead of staying the same. I think this is my year to take myself out of so many of the boxes, literal and figurative, I've placed myself in, to not accept the same old, same old, in my personal and professional life, and to really push myself. So far in 2011 I haven't pushed myself in the ways I aspire to, but there's a lot more year left!

Over 10,000 copies of Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women sold!

Remember when I said that my erotica doesn't sell? Well, a lot of it doesn't sell that well, at least, not in proportion to the time it takes me to edit the books/money+effort spent promoting them.

But I just got yet another royalty check for Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women and was thrilled to see that since it went on sale in April 2008, it's sold over 10,000 copies, making it far and away my bestselling book (that I get royalties on - Up All Night may have sold more but obviously only Alyson cares since I don't get royalties - worst. rookie. mistake. ever.). I'm so thrilled so wanted to share some information about it here.

What do women really want? To be sensually seduced or pressed up against the wall for a quickie? To be tantalized by a peep show or the chance to join the mile high club?

Acclaimed erotica writer and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel knows: They want it all. They want to be worshiped, ordered around, sent blindly into ecstasy, and made hot in front of a mirror. They want strangers bearing ice cubes on a hot day and to be the party favor passed around among guests. They want sex at the office and in the great outdoors and on trains and airplanes. They want sex with the whole United States of America (or, at least, part of it). They want to be wooed, seduced, flirted with, taken. They want to handpick their lovers and make them do their bidding. They want men, women, and sometimes both at the same time.

In Dirty Girls, the country’s best erotic writers explore their sexual psyches. With contributions from Carol Queen, Alison Tyler, Sofia Quintero, Shanna Germain, Lillian Ann Slugocki, Tsaurah Litzky, and many others, this collection will set your heart racing as you savor these intimate, shocking, and passionate female fantasies.

Blurbs:

“Finally⎯a book about what girls REALLY think about. Well, maybe not


every one, but the dirty ones…and those are the ones who really

count.” — Joanna Angel, CEO, BurningAngel Entertainment

“Dirty Girls is the post-feminist generation’s answer to Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, a collection of erotically charged short stories that reveal that, in the 21st century, good girls are dead and dirty girls are the new black.” — Susannah Breslin, author of You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?

“A spanking good collection of smart erotica assembled by always exciting ringleader Rachel Kramer Bussel, Dirty Girls begs the question ‘What are those dirty girls thinking?’ and answers with insight not just to how women want it, but why.”

– Lisa Beth Kovetz, author of The Tuesday Erotica Club

“This is an outstanding collection of hot women’s stories. That’s hot stories by women and stories by hot women. The table of contents reads like a who’s who in the best erotica writers around, an All Star team who deliver the raunch and punch the reader deserves. Rawr.”


– Cecilia Tan, author of Black Feathers and White Flames: Erotic Dreams

Table of Contents

Introduction – Dirty and Sweet Wrapped Up in One

1. Fucking Around by Marie Lyn Bernard

2. Live Tonight by Saskia Walker


3. Just Another Girl on the Train by Catherine Lundoff

4. Beautiful Creature by Kristina Wright

5. In the Name Of… by Isabelle Gray

6. Cheesy Boots by L. Elise Bland

7. Truck Stop Cinderella by Lillian Ann Slugocki

8. The Dream of Life by Tenille Brown

9. The Mile High Club by Kate Dominic

10. Like a Good Girl by Alison Tyler

11. The Garden of Sinn by Darklady


12. Bag and Baggage by Teresa Noelle Roberts

13. Icy Hot by Rachel Kramer Bussel

14. Dreams by Marilyn Jaye Lewis

15. Shocking Expose! Secrets Revealed! by Carol Queen

16. To Dance at the Fair by Donna George Storey

17. The First Deadly Sin by Gwen Masters

18. El Mar de Encanto by Sofia Quintero

19. Flight by Suki Bishop

20. Lily by Tsaurah Litzky

21. Opera Gloves by Maddy Stuart

22. Party Favor by Andrea Dale

23. Carn Euny by Madelynne Ellis

24. A Prayer to Be Made Cocksure by Melissa Gira

25. All About Hearts by Sage Vivant

26. The Next Thing by Gina de Vries

27. Until It’s Gone by Shanna Germain

Introduction: Dirty and Sweet Wrapped Up in One

“I can be dirty and sweet at the same time” reads my self-proclaimed motto on my MySpace page. When I wrote that, I meant that not so deep inside me lurks the soul of a highly perverted, kinky, dirty girl who can get aroused often by a single word whispered in my ear or a solid smack across my ass. Once someone gets me into that zone, I’ll do anything, no matter how depraved, to be with them. I’ll find myself fantasizing about all the wicked things we can do together throughout the day and night, waking from wild dreams with the wish that they were beside me. I’ll see their name in my inbox and get instantly wet. I’ll tell them in public exactly what I want them to do to me, and vice versa. Yes, that’s what I mean by “dirty.”

Yet I don’t think my sexual interests make me any less of a well-rounded, kind-hearted intelligent person. I’m “sweet” in the sense that I care about my friends and family, like sending cards and random gifts, strive to be a good person (also, I run a blog about cupcakes). I’m as likely to kiss a lover’s forehead tenderly and offer to tuck them into bed as I am to throw them down on the floor and strip them naked. For me, the sweet and tender and down-and-dirty go hand in hand; I’m most turned on, and most slutty, when I’m partnered with someone who brings out my sweet side. Once, I visited a boyfriend who was sick with a fever, and did the one thing I could think of to make him feel better: sank down on his bed and took his cock in my mouth. Playing the slutty nurse, horny yet doting, is another aspect to my dirty/sweet motto.

I’d originally meant the phrase as a throwaway line, but more and more I’m realizing that everyone (or almost everyone) has a dirty and a sweet side. All too often we denigrate the dirty girls⎯the ones who dare to publicly show their naughty sides⎯as incorrigible sluts, rather than realizing just how much exciting it is to tap into our lustiest selves. Once you crack the surface of those who are seemingly prim and proper (the demure suburban housewife, the suited-up banker, the quiet secretary, the curious bookworm, the shy computer nerd), you’ll very likely find that the simplicity of the word “dirty” doesn’t go anywhere near far enough to describe the kinks that lurk within them.

The women writing here don’t apologize for being dirty. They know who and what they want and they go after the objects of their affection in all kinds of different ways. Reading this collection⎯whether from start to finish or skipping around to your favorite authors or the most eye-catching titles⎯will give you a glimpse into what makes women wet, what makes us feel and act dirty, what makes us slick our lips and spread our legs. Maybe, just maybe, their stories attempt to answer Freud’s infamously infuriating query: “What do women want?” To judge by the twenty-seven tales you hold in your hand, they want to be worshiped, they want to be ordered around, they want to be sent spinning into ecstasy and then come crashing back down. They want strangers bearing ice cubes on a hot day, and to be a party favor passed around among guests. They want hot vacation sex, visits to peep shows, and a man who’ll lick stinky cheese off their boots. They want power, and they want to give up power. They want sex at the office and in the great outdoors and on trains and airplanes. They want sex with the whole United States of America (or, at least, part of it). They want to be wooed, seduced, flirted with, taken. They want men, women, and sometimes both at the same time.

Of course, there’s more to what women want out of sex than any one book could possibly capture. What I’ve done with this anthology is highlight some of the best erotic writing I’ve found from authors who show you exactly what makes their hearts beat and their clits stand at attention. What they’re up to is, as Marie Lyn Bernard so aptly puts it, “Fucking Around” (which I briefly considered as a very fitting alternative title to this book). When I first heard Bernard read this story tag-team style at my reading series “In The Flesh,” I was blown away. She captures so much of the drama of sex⎯the high highs, the low lows, the awkwardness and the intensity⎯in a playful yet totally hot way. And when she writes about the Big Apple, it’ll make you want to hop the first plane or train to get here: “New York fucks me. New York fucks me so hard that I cry. My pussy opens like the long throat of a flame-swallower. Her fingers make love to the inside of my bellybutton. I am sweating so much that our bodies glide against each other like fish underwater.” You’ll find yourself drawing a map of your own sexual conquests, marking your territory right along with Bernard.

But for every feisty babe here, there’s another just in the process of discovering what turns her on. “Dirty” can be a state of mind just as much as it can be a description of one’s bedroom antics. Carol Queen’s peepshow virgin protagonist Abby doesn’t quite know what she’s getting into with her new friends Daniel and Lila, but she desperately wants to find out. “Lila’s lips covered hers right away, soft and wet, licking and nibbling in one of the most arousing kisses Abby had ever experienced,” writes Queen. “Dirty” doesn’t always mean depraved, either; these stories aren’t all wham-bam-thank-you-sir (or ma’am) quickies. Many of them evoke the intensity of emotion sex can bring with it, the ways having a lover know you literally inside and out can throw your life completely off balance, as if they can read your soul like a map, using fingers, toys, tongues, and cocks to navigate you until they own your internal compass. The thrill of giving yourself over to someone, of giving up control for that deliciously delirious sensation of pure erotic adrenaline, surfaces throughout this collection.

The women you’ll find here are complex; they’re by turns playful and bashful, horny and haughty. They want to share much more with you than just the details of their latest screw. They want you to know what makes them tick, who haunts their dreams, why they can’t quite forget the man who fucked them senseless, even when they’re with someone new. They like to watch and be watched, to take risks, to live out their long-held fantasies. Some are in loving, committed relationships, ones that allow them room to get their freak on with the person who knows just how to push their every button. Others, like my “Icy Hot” protagonist, don’t even want to know their bedmate’s name: “I forgot about the fact that I didn’t really know him at all. Sometimes, in a city of millions of strangers, you just have to take a chance and let your body make the decisions for you, as I’ve learned over the years. And my body was saying yes, please, more, harder.”

“Dirty” doesn’t preclude poetry, the kind where the words roll off the page, roll from your tongue, so beautifully it’s like they themselves are making love to you. Writers like Marilyn Jaye Lewis, Suki Bishop, and Melissa Gira probe the twisted places women go in search of sex⎯and themselves. In “A Prayer to Be Made Cocksure,” Gira elevates the art of the blowjob to new heights: “I sucked your cock as if it was the last cock. I trusted you to let me keep breathing, to never take that final bit from me, to tell me that getting any air at all was your choice just by reaching your hand down the length of your chest to me, to cradle the back of my neck, to run your fingers across my lips, softly, as you plunged suddenly and held me at the edge.” She takes you right into that moment, where this intimate act is dissected, treasured, hoarded, and missed.

You’ll find a range of motivations here, from women looking to spice up a lackluster relationship to single girls on the prowl to kinky couples, daring dommes, and sultry sirens intent on performing on a sexual stage of their own creation. You may read their stories and ask yourself: Would you ever write your name across your lover’s cock? What about pick up a stranger at a rock concert or screw a doctor in a hospital? Get fingered at the opera? Go to a bondage club? These characters do all this and more, always making sure their wanting, lusting, panting, and perversions are met with equal fervor.

Take a hot and steamy trip with these writers as they unlock your deepest desires, or perhaps give you some new ideas to try out next time you shut your eyes and part your legs. From tender to tempting, sweet to sadistic, loving to lascivious, there’s something for every reader who wants to go to bed with images that’ll surely make you blush and just may spark some brand-new, unique fantasies of your very own.

Rachel Kramer Bussel

New York City

July 2007

Press:

Interview with me about erotica at Bookslut

Listen to me talk about erotica in a podcast at Seal Press

Read an excerpt from "Shocking Exposé! Secrets Revealed!" by Carol Queen

Lucrezia Magazine review:

However, Dirty Girls is certainly not just for girls alone. As Bussel was quick to point out at the New York launch party, which I attended, the book’s original title was Dirty Girls: Erotica by Women. Anyone with a love of erotic fiction can explore his or her dirty side with this volume. And I guarantee anyone will want to.

Get the best seats in the house at the Lusty Lady Theatre in the legendary Carol Queen’s “Shocking Expose! Secrets Revealed!” Explore a tangle of the senses and a melding of two strangers’ bodies in Rachel Kramer Bussel’s expertly crafted tale “Icy Hot.” Encounter the post-structuralist implications of ownership and autonomy within a relationship as Isabelle Gray’s “In the Name Of …” sees a couple exploring sensual pleasures outside their marriage for the first time. And delight in a darkly-tinged, BDSM tale in Alison Tyler’s provocative “Like a Good Girl.”

Fleshbot review:

At 27 stories long, “Dirty Girls” is a book for “literary size queens” (at least according to editor Rachel Kramer Bussel). Even though we usually tend to prefer our books short and sweet—who doesn’t like a good quickie?—we can’t deny that this book is well worth a read: from girls who like to take to stories of girls who like to be taken; girls who like girls, girls who like boys, and girls who like both; waitresses, dommes, college professors, college students … well, you can probably figure out that there’s something for everyone in this collection. (And don’t be discouraged by that “erotica for women” tagline: it may be made for a woman, but we promise it’s hot enough for a man as well.

Author interviews:

Interview with Tenille Brown ("The Change of Life")

Interview with Melissa Gira ("A Prayer to be Made Cocksure")

Interview with Gina de Vries

Interview with Donna George Storey

Interview with Kristina Wright

Interview with Lillian Ann Slugocki

Interview with Marie Lyn Bernard (watch her reading her story - part 1 and part 2)

Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women virtual book tour!

For sale from:

Amazon

Bn.com

Powells

Photos below by Stacie Joy at Dirty Girls NYC book party:




L to R: Lillian Ann Slugocki, Sofia Quintero, Suki Bishop, Rachel Kramer Bussel



More information at the Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women blog