(no subject)

[julesjones]

700 words on Tuesday, 1200 yesterday, and 2500 today in spite of the 35C heat here, which takes it past 41,000 words. I'm very pleased with yesterday's chapter, as it actually uses the shapeshifters' abilities to advance... well, not the plot as such, but the relationship between the three guys.

alg has posted an interesting and useful essay about getting GLBTQ fiction published at a mainstream house. Well worth a read if you're interested in either slash or m/m profic.

No change in Jim Baen's condition this morning, which is both bad and good. He's still in coma, but he's still here, and as Marilee has pointed out, she came back from her stroke after six weeks in a coma.

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

That essay is interesting to any profic writer who's working either cross-genre or in one that's not commercial enough. Thanks.

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

Which is more important: labeling your book as gay! gay! gay!, or getting as many people as possible to pick it up and enjoy it?

Now I have an image in my head of Daffyd Thomas from Little Britain waving a manuscript and shouting, "The only gay book in the shop!"

[brooksmoses]

Heh. You just wanted to share your moment of having a fan go "squeee!" at you!

It was indeed an interesting essay, and I quite enjoyed it despite not being directly interested either in slash or m/m profic. Thanks for the link!

[julesjones]

Well, I'd meant to post a link even before I got squeed at. :-) It's not the firts time I've been squeed at, but it's still a sufficiently novel experience that I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Anna's been doing some great essays on the realities of the publishing industry, and I thought that one was well worth pointing people at. As Hafren has pointed out, it's going to be of interest to anyone working in areas that aren't terribly commercial, and I think I should repost the link with a note to that effect.

I'm very pleased with the sales figures of several hundred copies each of most of my ebooks, but I'm well aware that those are small press sales figures, and don't necessarily suggest that there's a market that would support a New York print publisher's minimum sales required to not take a bath on a title. I think there probably *is* such a market, but it's a fairly big gamble for a publisher to take.

[brooksmoses]

It was quite pleasant to see the squee secondhand, even; I imagine getting it firsthand must be even more fun.

And, yes, quite a big gamble for the publisher to take -- and, also, quite a big gamble that they'll be able to find the market even if it exists. There's some material at suzimoses's publisher that she's sure would have a sufficient market if they publicized it right (specifically, collections of the autobiographical prefatory chapters from the scientific journals they publish), but they already tried publishing it once and did it with completely ineffective marketing, and so it was a complete and thorough flop.