julesjones

Doing some tidying up, both physical and virtual, and came across the email conversation with my editor discussing the recently submitted draft of Lord and Master 2, and my plans for the third Lord and Master book. *Detailed* plans, and whether what I had in mind would fit in with Loose Id. But with a comment that if a job resulted from one of the interviews that week, it would take a while to write.

That conversation was five years ago this week.

It wasn't just the new job that resulted from one of those interviews, although that basically chewed up six months of all of my time and energy. A lot of it was one medical issue after another over the last four years, starting with the vicious viral infection that started a couple of weeks before Redemption 2009 and wouldn't go away.

At least now I'm back to being able to write reasonably consistently for stretches of several weeks at time, and did actually manage to complete the first draft of a short novel over the last 7 months, in spite of a couple of interruptions. That doesn't mean L&M3 is going to get worked on any time soon -- it's a complex story that needs to be very carefully managed and will take some time to write even if I'm fully fit and can give it my undivided attention. Realistically, I'm better off doing another one-off short novel I'd outlined last year, and getting Nice Tie up to submission standard. Any serious work on it is at least a year off, I suspect. Bit I do still intend to write it some day.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/567938.html

May royalty statement has just arrived from Loose Id. Items of interest:

-- First Footer's first quarter at ARe, 50 copies, first complete month at Amazon US 51 copies, nil to 3 everywhere else, including Loose Id's own website. It's a solo re-issue of something that was previously available for years in an anthology, so this pattern may not hold for a brand new title. (I'd expect higher numbers all round, for one thing.)

-- Buildup 2: Pulling Strings has finally reached 1000 copies sold since it was first released. *Exactly* 1000, copies, as it happens.

-- Almost all sales come from third party distributors these days. Whether that pattern would hold with a brand new release, I've no idea. The big ones are Amazon US, then ARe and B&N, but the cut varies from title to title and month to month. The other Amazons sell a steady trickle. It would appear that Sony readers are not into m/m erotic romance, or at least not *my* m/m erotic romance. And RIP Fictionwise.

***

All of which prompted me to check the statistics on the short story I have up as a free download at Smashwords, Naked. That went up at the end of October last year, and has accumulated 454 downloads as of this morning, i.e. in seven months. It's running at around 1 download a day these days.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/566288.html

On Thursday Predatrix sent me some comments on the rough draft of Nice Tie, which I will be trying to work on over the bank holiday weekend. Not that I've got to it as of late Saturday afternoon... The gist of it is that a) the story works overall, b) the first four fifths is mostly pretty good, the last fifth has a bad case of plot being obtrusive.

I'm not surprised by (b). When we discussed it, the section she pinpointed was precisely the section I'd been wrestling to get down over the last two months. A couple of other comments about spots earlier where the characters were doing things for the sake of plot also mark points where I was hit by an inspiration particle that changed what I was doing with the plot. So one of the things I need to do is go back and make that all blend together a bit more smoothly. (Amongst other things, I need to do a bit of in-cluing much earlier on about Alex having seen a colleague's problems with an abusive/controlling partner, plus make it clearer that the reason for the lack of "why did you not mention this boyfriend before" is the lack of privacy to have that conversation.)

The other thing that I think is going on is that for much of the last section it's almost all dialogue and very little description/business, which makes the pace feel forced and is adding to that feeling of things happening for the sake of Plot. Predatrix agreed when I suggested that -- she hadn't consciously noticed it, because she's even less visual a writer than I am, but on having the possibility pointed out to her she thought it was a likely component of her reaction.

But (a) is good. Given the way this story changed and grew as I was writing it, I did wonder if it made sense outside my own head, and if there was enough story to support the word count it had grown to. (b) I can fix, as long as I have (a).

It's gong to take me a while yet to get this ready for submission, which is a shame because I'd hoped to have it ready to send off to my editor by now. But at least I've got something novel-shaped to work on, which is a distinct improvement over the last few years.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/565986.html

Nice Tie now has a finished first draft. A very, very rough first draft, but it is, nevertheless. done. All 40 kwords of it.

I'd been hoping to get it down in draft by the end of March at the latest, but was rudely interrupted by a bad bout of Real Life. Also, I was visited by Plot in the course of writing it, and while I knew what was going to happen, I was failing to find the exact words to describe it. Even the words I had found earlier had escaped me, scattered on the four winds, during a previous hiatus after the initial burst of writing during PicoWrimo.

It's going to need some heavy revision, not least because the chunk I've been wrestling with over the last two months is happily demonstrating that I do not see my stories inside my head as films, but hear them as radio plays. There is much dialogue, and little description, and I need to improve the ratio somewhat before it goes anywhere near Ye Editor. It has for now gone off to Predatrix for some alpha-reading, to see if it makes sense anywhere outside my own head.

I should probably leave it alone for a bit and come back to it with fresh eyes in a week or two. Time to think about what to work on next, particularly with summer PicoWrimo coming up. There's Taxman, which has been worked on fitfully for some six years now, and can perfectly well wait a bit longer. There's the story idea that I was using to experiment with using Dragon to write a first draft, which I think might work well as an offering for Loose Id's tenth anniversary next year. And there are a couple of... things... which my muse handed me recently, apparently after a hard night binging with the girls on cream cakes and hard core porn DVDs.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/565482.html

I forgot to mention that I have a new toy, namely an account on Authorgraph. This site provides an interface for readers to request electronic autographs from authors, whether to add to their ebooks, or to print out and keep with a print book. And yes, it really is a personalised autograph if you so choose. The author can type a message and then sign their name using a tablet, and the resulting file shows the actual signature process.

It's funded by affiliate links to Amazon, so you can only request signatures for books available on Amazon. However, you don't need to have a Kindle to request or display the autographs.

I've put most of my titles currently available on Amazon into the system, and you can find my account here http://www.authorgraph.com/authors/bookfetishist should you wish to have a play.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/565015.html

Finished the rough draft of the confession short. It's 6 kwords, which is only a minor overrun on a target of 5 kwords, at least by my standards. I can see about 200 words marked up on the way through for potential trimming, but I'm going to have do some more serious trimming if I want to send it to the market I wrote it for. On the other hand, I could quite easily expand it by another couple of thousand words without bloating it, and push it slightly more to the romantic end of erotica. That's still outside the remit of my usual markets, but I could self-publish it.

I shall let it sit for a day or two, and then look at it again with a view to editing/rewriting into two different length versions.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/563964.html

...it would appear that I have temporarily burnt out on writing sex scenes.

Or at least I'm having trouble getting any further with the one I should be writing at the moment. Okay, it's porn, and I mean porn as in True Confessions, not literotica, but there's actually a smidgen of plot in there and I feel enough interest in the characters and setting to keep my Inner Editor happy. But apparently I have run out of ways to describe the actual insert tab A in slot B bit. Even though I *want* to write this story, about these guys and what they're doing.

This is what happens if I lay off the 300 words a day for a month. :-( Had too many other things to juggle, and I was struggling with the scene anyway, and now that I have time/energy to work on it, I can't get back into it. Can't even skip this and go on to a new bit, because it's a 5 kword short (and one of the reasons for doing it is to get in some practice at writing to a specific length).

I suppose I'll have to do the other trick, which is stare at the screen each night for as long as it takes to wring out at least 50 words. That does eventually kick-start most things.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/562768.html

This morning's post included the cheque for my short story in the Mammoth anthology. Yes, an actual cheque. This may not be of great interest to those of you who spell it "check" but here in the UK, the banks were making a determined effort to make the cheque an extinct species, on the grounds that nobody used them anyway and all the cheques that people weren't using cost too much money to process.

It's quite true that cheque usage has dropped drastically, but that's not the same thing as either a) they are no longer used, or b) that there are no situations where cheques are more convenient. I suspect that were I trying to handle the logistics of an anthology with over 100 stories, I would much rather deal with a list of names and addresses than a list of names, address and bank transfer details.

The anthology in question is officially released in the UK tomorrow. So far I have only read a handful of the other stories in my trib copy, but the ones I've read, I've liked. They didn't all do it for me as porn, for Not My Kink reasons, but they were still good *stories*.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/562493.html

Review: moo.com business cards

I do very little by way of printed promo material, and most of it I print at home as and when required. But I could do with having some business cards to hand out my contact details at cons, and the business cards might as well double as promo material. However, I need so few that I can't justify doing a batch for each book.

Enter moo.com and their Printfinity system. You can put a different image on the reverse of every card in the batch, if you so desire. Which means that I can order a box of 50, and get a mix of all of my book covers. And they do a completely free sample box of 10, not even a charge for postage. The price is in the form of their own logo on the image side of the card, but it's small and discreet. So I thought I might as well have a play with the system and see what the quality is like.

( Read more... )
Overall -- I'm a very satisfied customer. The quality was excellent, and while there was a problem with one order, it was fixed quickly and politely. The only niggle I've got is that there doesn't seem to be a way of storing your images on their system other than as part of a design project. You have to re-upload each time you start a new project. But since they don't charge a fee for uploading images (unlike many card printers), and you can save and edit projects, this is not much of an issue. They also do postcards, greeting cards and stickers, although I haven't seen physical samples of those yet. On my experience so far, I'd be happy to recommend them to other authors looking for small print run options on promo materials. The one problem they have from a promo material perspective is that the laminate makes it difficult to write on them, so you'll need to take along something like a marker pen or photo pen to sign them or add details by hand.

And since they have a "refer a friend" bribery and corruption scheme... If you go through the link below, you'll get 10% off your first order (and I will get a discount off my next order:-> ).

http://www.moo.com/share/qqjdqc

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/561064.html

First Footer

They say that how you spend New Year's Day will set the pattern for the rest of your year. Matthew Ryder was hoping not to be single by the end of the New Year's Eve party, but the blind date promised by his matchmaking friend never showed up. Still, there's always hope in the form of the old custom of First Footing. To bring good luck to the household, the first person across the threshold after midnight should be a tall dark man holding a lump of coal and a bottle of whisky, and in some places they still like to provide this service for neighbours.

A tall dark stranger does indeed knock on the door at midnight, and he's the man of Matthew's dreams. Intelligent, good sense of humour. Handsome too, if you go for fur, tail, and a very seductive purr. For the First Footer is a First Contact team member, with a bit of a problem. There's making a discreet landing in an uninhabited area, and then there's landing your spacecraft in a peat bog.

It's going to be an interesting year for Matthew...

Excerpt 1 from First Footer
Excerpt 2 from First Footer
Erotic excerpt from First Footer

ISBN: 978-1-62300-274-9
Publisher: Loose Id
Author: Jules Jones
Cover Artist: April Martinez
Price: $4.99

Also available from All Romance eBooks.

(First published in the Loose Id anthology A Kiss at Midnight, now out of print.)

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/557998.html

Copy-n-paste from my post to the OrgASM comm:

My plan was to start on Monday, but in fact I got in some wordage yesterday. 329 words, to be precise, which takes Nice Tie to 27375. And it was like pulling teeth, even though I had the next couple of thousand words in my head when I had to down tools before my extended Christmas break. This is why I need to write every day.

And some information about my experiment with a free short story at Smashwords. Copy-n-paste from my posts at Picowrimo for background and early numbers:

11/11/12: In addition, I have written up the results of the first two weeks of my having posted a free short story at Smashwords, if anyone's interested in seeing some data about number of downloads and how many third party distributors it's got to. Note that it's an erotica story and while there's no excerpt the post does include the keywords I used for the file. http://julesjones.livejournal.com/547953.html

25/11/12: Update on the short story at Smashwords - I forgot to check it last Sunday, but it ticked over to 200 downloads sometime between Saturday night and Monday morning, so let's call it 200 on Sunday last. Right now it's showing 227 downloads. The number of libraries it's in has varied -- it's currently at 18, but has been as high as 19 and then back down to 15, so presumably some people have added it and then discarded it.

30/11/12: An update on the Smashwords figures - as of this evening total downloads of 234

And as of 13/01/12, it has 312 downloads and is in 23 libraries. It never did get any more ratings/reviews beyond the three in the first couple of days.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/557118.html

I will not be sad to see the back of 2012, for a number of reasons, including an exciting new repetitive strain injury. That little incident made it impossible to write new fiction wordage for some months. However, my various other medical issues were for once not such as to make it impossible to write, and I have been a lot more active as a writer than I had been for some years. In summary:

The existing fragments of the unfinished Syndicate story self-published on my website.

Short story A sparrow flies through accepted for The Mammoth Book of Erotic Quickies (forthcoming April 2012).

OOP short story And if I offered thee a bargain published by Musa Publishing.

First draft of co-authored novelette Circle of Glass finished.

Short story Naked re-released as a self-published ebook through SmashWords.

Some 15,000 words added to Taxman, the urban fantasy m/m romance novel, taking it to 40 kwords.

25,000 words on a new contemporary romance novel, Nice Tie.

( the long version )

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/554954.html

Cecilia Tan of Circlet Press has set up a comm to do a NaNo-style month specifically for erotica writers, running from Jan 1 to Feb 14. Like the PicoWriMo comm, it's set your own goal, and both fanfic and profic welcome. Also, there are prizes. :-)

More details at the Circlet Press blog and the comms on DreamWidth and LiveJournal

http://blog.ceciliatan.com/?p=1153
http://orgasm-circlet.livejournal.com
http://orgasm-circlet.dreamwidth.org/

The comms are members-only, so you'll need to join the comm to sign up. I've just sent my join request, as I think it will be useful for keeping up the momentum I'd made in PicoWriMo, at just the point when I can get back to writing after a necessary break over the holiday season.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/554268.html

So I've been doing Picowrimo this year, as I can't physically manage Nanowrimo. My goal was at least 150 words and ideally 300 words every day -- the point was to write *something* each day for an entire month, after a very long spell of medical problems which made a daily writing target impossible. And I'd just had a fresh plot bunny from an old post by

agentxpndble, who will probably need to take a cold shower after reading the following excerpt from Nice Tie, the Picowrimo WIP:

Eye Candy flipped his collar up and settled the tie back into place, and then proceeded to re-tie it neatly. Two-handed, keeping it under perfect control. Fingers dancing smoothly through the motions needed for a neat half-Windsor knot, in and out and around.

And Alex had a perfect view of it. So damn perfect that he regretted not having picked up a Metro this morning, because a newspaper in his lap right now would cover a multitude of sins. There was something very, very hot about watching an attractive man put together an attractive tie. Stripping a tie off a man was pretty damned nice, but watching him put it on...

The show was finished. Almost. Eye Candy leaned his head back against the window of the bus, stretching his neck out. The sort of posture a man might use when inviting someone to kiss his way down that elegant line of neck.

Progress of the total word count: 1-318, 2-1040, 3-2628, 4-5068, 5-5676, 6-6382, 7-6739, 8-7006, 9-7321, 10-8052, 11-8571

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/548234.html

Just a quick update on the short story, Naked, I uploaded to Smashwords 2 weeks ago, on 28 October 2012. So far it's been downloaded 169 times, and been added to 16 personal libraries. It's been reviewed 3 times, all in the first couple of days. For future reference, it's been free all of that time (and I don't intend to charge for it in the future, it's advertising), and the keywords I uploaded it with are: erotica, gay, bdsm, mm, ds, shaving, shaving erotica, bdsm shaving

It was approved for the Premium catalogue (i.e. third party distribution) on 31 October, and hadn't shown up anywhere else as far as I could see when I checked last Sunday (4 November). Today I can find it at

Barnes & Noble, where the cover is missing
Apple iTunes
Deisel (where I needed to use the advanced search to track it down).

I can't yet find it at Sony or Kobo.

It won't show up at Amazon, because Amazon isn't taking most of the Smashwords output. And I can't put it up myself, because it's free, and Amazon requires a minimum price of 99c or local equivalent.

Hope this is useful for any of you wondering about using Smashwords to distribute stuff. I'd planned to do "One Size Fits All" this weekend as a 99c short by way of comparison, but I've a) been sidetracked by Picowrimo, b) had a nasty outbreak of the RSI today. That amount of mousing would be a Really Bad Idea. Maybe next weekend, depending on how I feel.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/547953.html

The word count is moving on Taxman after a break since the beginning of August working on edits and post-release stuff for Bargain. As usual after a longish break, I'd slightly lost the thread of where I was going with the chapter - not that I'd lost the plot of the book, just what I was doing with the next 1000 words or so. I seem to have got back into a groove again after 4 days of writing, although possibly not the groove I was in before I set it aside. :-) It stood at 30592 words when I opened the file on Monday night, and was 31063 at the end of the evening, for 471 new words. Tuesday I skipped, owing to a long day and temptation in the form of a brand new Midsomer Murders. Wednesday was 31373 total and 310 new. Thursday was 31626 and 253. Tonight was 32042 and 416.

I should try to keep this up while it's flowing. But I'm also very much tempted to dig out an old short story that never found a home, and do some re-writing on that. It's only 3300 words so would need to be beefed up a bit to meet the minimum 5k for the epub markets that take short stories, but it might be fun doing that.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/540260.html

What with the squeeing about the sale to the Mammoth Book of Erotic Quickies, and the "buy my book" bouncing over Bargain, I forgot to report the *other* bit of Mammoth anthology news, which is that Alex and I were told that the Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica (2007) is out in ebook format. We don't normally do f/f, but some years ago I saw a call for submissions for an anthology of funny lesbian erotica called "My dog ate my dildo", and we were so taken with the call that we wanted to write something for it. Alas, the original market was one of those cancelled when the publisher was hit by freak weather events, and we ended up submitting it to Mammoth. "Love is blind" duly appeared in what is indeed a mammoth anthology of lesbian erotica. The treeware edition is still available five years on (and at cheap second-hand prices, too), but now you can get it on carefully hand-crafted electrons as well. Kindle links below, but I'm assuming it can also be found at the usual other fine book emporia online. Note that you're looking for the one edited by Brabara Cardy -- there was an earlier anthology of the same name by a different editor.

The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica at Amazon UK - ISBN: 9781849016810

The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica at Amazon US

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/539367.html

Normal author behaviour on receiving the latest rejection from a literary agent: weep on their friends' shoulders and maybe curse the agent once or twice in a locked blog post or on an author's forum in a manner that it makes it clear they're just letting off steam, before sending the next query letter out.

Authors behaving badly: send abusive emails to the agent, post multiple self-pitying rants in public about !@#$%^ !@#$% who can't recognise genius when they see it, and stalk agent and agent's friends online for a while, maybe start posting 1 star reviews of books by agent's clients.

Authors behaving criminally: send threatening emails to agent, and then track down agent in meatspace and physically assault them.

No, I'm not kidding. Someone allegedly did this to literary agent and book blogger Bookalicious. Good round up at mybookgoggles. There are some more horrifying tales from publishing insiders in the Absolute Write thread discussing this incident.

And this, children, is why we can't have nice things like personalised rejections.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/539083.html

My short story "And if I offered thee a bargain" was released today by Musa Publishing. It's available direct from their website, and from the usual third party retailers. Direct links that I've collected so far:

Musa Publishing
All Romance eBooks
Amazon UK
Amazon US

And if I offered thee a bargain cover art - gay romance novel

One night of your life for seven years of love. Would you pay the price?

Jack never dreamed that a reluctant trip back to his home town would thrust him into the world of the sidhe. He finds that the legends are true, but the sidhe have changed. They have a new bargain to offer the mortals who bring them fresh stories and share new technologies.

But is the price of this new bargain worth it?

Excerpt

ISBN: 978-1-61937-427-0
Length: 5,500 words
Price: $0.99

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/538183.html

Had an email to say that my short story A Sparrow Flies Through has been accepted for Maxim Jakubowski's Mammoth Book of Erotic Quickies. :-)

Had an email a couple of weeks ago, which I only saw last night courtesy of an email whoopsie... Fortunately I managed to get the electronic file to him just in time, so it's still in the anthology.

Seriously chuffed about this, because I have enormous respect for Maxim Jakubowski, and have long had an ambition to get onto the ToC for one of his anthologies.

Crossposts: http://julesjones.livejournal.com/537698.html

Where did the time go?

Notes from the royalties spreadsheet

alpha reader notes on Nice Tie

finally finished the first draft of Nice Tie

authorgraph

and first draft done

This is slightly awkward...

The cheque has arrived

Review: moo.com business cards

Re-release: First Footer

First Footer

Check-in 01/12 and Smashwords

2012 writing year

NaNo-style community for erotica writers

Picowrimo progress report

Smashwords update

wordage

"Love is blind" now in ebook

authors behaving criminally

Out now: And if I offered thee a bargain

Sale: The Mammoth Book of Erotic Quickies

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June 2013

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