New at Forbes: Why this book dedication is going viral

The humorous dedication in Ben Philippe's debut novel, The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, is going viral. Why? Find out in my latest article at Forbes online.

Me on how to get a book deal by using Instagram at Forbes.com

I hope you'll check out my latest article at Forbes.com on "How to get a book deal from your Instagram account". I interviewed Stupid Fit Couple, Emma Lee of Hidden Heartbreak (and author of the book of the same name), publishers Andrews McMeel and Knock Knock and two literary agents to give you the scoop on what it takes to go Instagram to book.

It's the first of several articles exploring book deals and social media (including podcasts), so follow me at Forbes.com so you don't miss anything. I'm aiming to cover multiple service articles like this so if there are things you want to know about book publishing, let me know and I'll try to explore them. Email me at rachelkb at gmail dot com with "Forbes" in the subject line. I obviously can't cover everything but am always open to topic suggestions (though individual titles are less useful unless they're part of a trend or current events/publishing news).

15 erotica authors share their fiction inspiration

Over on the Best Women's Erotica of the Year Tumblr, I've had the pleasure of interviewing 15 (so far) of the contributors to BWE of the Year, Volume 2, about their erotica history, writing process, inspiration for their stories, favorite lines and future plans. I wanted to share those interviews and some fabulous quotes with you as I listen to the rain while waiting to take Amtrak to Baltimore for the next stop on the book tour. And more interviews are scheduled through March so keep reading our Tumblr and following us @BWEoftheyear on Twitter.

I'll conclude by giving you easy ways to read or listen to the book, and I encourage you to also ask for it at your local library (yes, it may be nerve-wracking to ask for a sexy book, but they're librarians, they've heard all sorts of requests and if they are at all good at their job, they won't judge you, but will be happy to help their users) or bookstore.

I'm starting with the authors you'll hear at our book events and including the cities where you can hear them (Abigail Ekue can't make our Baltimore reading due to weather, but you can catch her in New York and Jersey City).

Jordan Monroe, "Performance" (Baltimore)



Abigail Ekue, "Cigarro Tarde" (New York, Jersey City)



Stella Watts Kelley, "Teacher Appreciation" (New York, Jersey City)



Vierra Lai, "A Hint of Lime" (New York, Jersey City)



Annabeth Leong, "On Some Maps, But Not on Others" (New York, Jersey City)



Melina Greenport, "The House on Orchard"



Jocelyn Bringas, "Taste"



Kristy Harding, "Another Way to Start a Fire"



Kate Sebastian, "On the Calendar"



Corrine A. Silver, "Her Best"



Dorianne, "Like Lights in the Northern Sky"



Garnell Wallace, "Beautiful Broken Things"



Winter Blair, "At the End of the World"



Kay Jaybee, "Brick Dust"



Josie Jordan, "Volcano Nights"



And of course, please read or listen to Best Women's Erotica of the Year, Volume 2 for these authors' stories in all their full glory:

Amazon (print)

Kindle (ebook)

Bn.com (print)

Nook (ebook)

Powells

Books-a-Million

IndieBound (find your local independent bookstore)

Audible audiobook

Google Play

iBooks

Amazon UK (print)

Amazon UK (Kindle)

Amazon Canada (print)

Amazon Canada (Kindle)

I have no idea how many words I wrote in 2015

I will be posting next week some of my favorite things I've written this year, and listing the publications I broke into in 2015, and other reflections on my year in writing. But one thing I won't be doing is sharing a grandiose, glamorous, impressive sounding number of words I wrote in the prior 365 days, because I don't have one. I have no clue how many words I write per day, or per month, or per year, because that's not how I calculate my output.

Why? Because for me, I tend to be focused on the finished product. I have umpteen half-finished stories and essays and articles that may or may not someday make it into a publishable form, but when I think about what I've written, it's generally about what I've then shared with other people. I love the moment when I hit the end, when I turn in a piece, or know it's edging closer to publication. I'm honored that this year, while most of my writing was read online, I got to hold newspapers and magazines in my hands and admire my words and byline on their ink-stained or glossy pages. Now, I'm not at all saying only published words are what "counts." Certainly, if you're writing a novel or novella or longer form work, especially, that's an unrealistic measurement. But in my case, even then, I am someone who can't afford to count her chickens before they're published, because then I get ahead of myself and forget to actually dig in and finish.



Yet while I measure my words by how they appear in their final, immutable form (although as a writer, I am always willing to tinker with them in my head post-publication, or imagine what if, or learn what I wish I'd done), I do think there can be something valuable to tracking how much you write. I was reminded of this while listening to Chris Fox on the podcast Write With Impact, which is one of the podcasts I recommended to writers. Fox is the author of the book 5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter, which also has a corresponding iPhone app. I've read the book and downloaded the app and plan to use them starting next week to get me over some of my early morning hurdles of eek, I have so many things to write, where do I start?

There are lots of authors who do indeed track their output with a number. You can find various posts boasting of feats like "How I Wrote 400K Words in a Year" as Jamie Todd Rubin wrote at The Daily Beast. Maybe my resistance is self-defeating, because the truth is, I often overthink and over-research and then cannot cram all my thoughts and ideas and findings into a limited word count for an article. Or with fiction, I psych myself out because if I don't know the ending or full story when I start, I don't bother.

But for me, especially as I look back on what I did write in 2015 at this moment in the early morning hours of December 24th, I still want to pause and savor the feeling I had when the words got published, not the amount of them. I want to truly feel what it was like to create them, whether at a leisurely or a far more hectic pace. I want to remember what it felt like to be holed up in a hotel room in South Portland, Maine and write three articles in a day. I want to remember the pride I felt contacting interviewees and saying I was writing an article for The New York Times, plus the rush of editing said article from a hotel and in the car and then from my desk, then seeing people with far more advanced tech skills than I'll ever have make videos of opening the newspaper and zooming in on my piece. I want to remember watching porn from a hotel room in Krabi, Thailand, for research. I want to remember the way it felt to turn life's biggest frustrations and annoyances into words that helped soothe me, even for a few moments. I want to remember rereading my erotica story "Flying Solo," one of my rare second person stories, which I'd written the year before, and deciding, "Hey, this is pretty good," and putting it in my new book (which, I admit, doesn't count exactly as writing, but more like, selecting).

I want to remember the good and bad times, the agonizing, stressful moments writing caused me, the ones that woke me up early and occasionally made me cry, and the euphoric moments where I felt so damn happy and proud and eager and excited. Writing puts me through the gamut of emotions; it is an ever-present voice in my head, whispering in my ear, reminding me that this is my role in life, not just my job. Writing makes itself known to me even when I want to ignore it. While I am actively looking for ways to channel my 2016 writing output into both fruitful possibilities and ones that push me to try new things, which includes doing some of the writing sprints Fox suggests (sort of like sprints when you're working out, but with writing, but read his ebook or get his app for the full scoop), I don't think I will ever be converted to measuring writing in terms of numbers entirely, though I admit, I'm curious, not to much on a year's scale, but to see how many words I can create in a day, and how many I will keep after I'm done futzing with them. I want to see if I can jumpstart myself out of the fear that keeps trying to steer me toward the comfortable status quo and away from the big dreams. I want to go beyond my comfort zone, as I did this year, but also continue to remind myself what I want out of writing, why I do it, what it means to me on the most personal level.

Why being flexible is one of the most important things a writer can do

I fully believe flexibility is one of the most important traits a writer of fiction or nonfiction can have. Yes, you love your words, and yes, you have your goals and ambitions for them, but unless you run your own magazine or website or publishing house, there will be times you have to compromise or, as is often the case for me, not so much compromise but let an editor guide you into making your piece better and/or more in line with what the publication wants.

This week, I got my first byline in The Washington Post with my essay "Old magazines, stuffed animals, and sex toys: How hoarding shaped my relationship" in their Post Everything section, which was Post Everything's most read story on Tuesday and Wednesday. Here's the thing: my original draft looked nothing like what got published. Neither did my second. The title and focus were on completely different aspects of hoarding, and while my editor was interested in the topic, those earlier versions didn't quite work for what they were going for.

So I went back to the drawing board. I offered a few possibilities for what angle might work and when we decided on relationships I went for it. My first working title was "How My Hoarding Is Threatening My Relationship" followed by "Do I Love My Stuff More Than My Boyfriend?" Then that got finessed into what you see above. If I hadn't been flexible about that, or had thrown a fit over the title that ultimately went with the piece, which I saw for the first time when it went live Tuesday morning, I would have been persona non grata there. But as a writer, I want my work to be read by as many people as possible, not because I'll get paid more, but because that's the whole reason I'm putting such personal information out there in the first place. If this version, with this title, along with the photo of my hoarding that was requested, will make the essay a better fit for their audience, I'm all for it.



Guess what? It worked. My essay was the most read piece on Post Everything on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Yes, that matters to my editor and, on a personal level, to me. It means I did my job well (I'm not saying if a piece performs poorly traffic wise, or, as I certainly know well, a book doesn't sell, that the author/editor didn't do their job well though, because there are so many factors going into it), it means the combination of words and photo and placement and social media and whatever else makes someone want to read about the life of a hoarder succeeded. And this may not be true for everyone, but when I have one writing win, it makes me excited to work on the next one (sadly, the opposite happens too, and my poor boyfriend has to live with my hoarding and my moping when I get writing rejections).

For the record, I pitched a different piece about hoarding to another publication I'd love to break into, and it got rejected, but kindly so. Since there seemed to be interest in the topic, and it's one I know not tons of people are writing about from a first-person perspective, I tried Post Everything. I was flexible about who I wrote for, what I wrote, what images went with it and how the piece was positioned, because I see this one small essay as part of my larger career as a writer. I especially love when I get to write about topics that are not sex, because I do so much of that already. I love writing about sex, and have been honored recently by some of the topics I've gotten to cover and the things people have shared with me, especially ones that I feel can make a difference, such as the sex toy store crime article, but I also rebel hard against being stereotyped as a single-issue writer. That is not my goal and it's freeing and exciting to be recognized in another arena, even if "sex toys" are in the title. So thank you for reading this piece, and I hope this inspires you to dust off a rejected piece and get it out the door.

Not coincidentally, this week I finally sent out rejection emails for my spring Cleis Press anthology Come Again: Sex Toy Erotica. I procrastinated on it because I despise it, and am always considering quitting erotica anthology editing because it is not fun and kind of makes me feel like an awful person when I have to do it, even though the numbers will tell you that 100+ submissions of at least 1,500 words each cannot fit into a 65,000 word book. Because this book took me a longer time than usual to finalize, I found that many authors had already sold their rejected pieces to other publications. This made me feel so much better about the difficult task I was faced with, and reinforced my intuition that a rejection is just one publication's reaction (which, as an editor, I can tell you happens for so many reasons beyond an author's control), and that another may be ready to snap up your story/essay/article/etc. Here's the cover of Come Again, which I'm 99% sure will be on sale at CatalystCon at the end of March and in stores close to then too - stay tuned for readings and events, and click on the cover or title above for my introduction and the table of contents!

Have drinks and chat with me and Melissa Petro on February 13th

Writers Bloq has been kind enough to invite me to co-host this February 13th event along with Melissa Petro. Click through to their Facebook page to participate and get an invite. This will probably be my last New York City event before I move in May. I'll have a few books with me to sell, and am happy to sign any if you've got them. Looking forward to it! And if you're coming to the dinner, I will very likely have hot off the press copies of Serving Him: Sexy Stories of Submission with me and I'll be extra happy if you tell me you liked it on Amazon.