Jules Jones

This was posted to the Loose Id admin mailing list today, with permission to forward. Since it was the internal call, it's short on detail, but Treva added that they're looking for novella length and up (i.e. 20 kwords and up). Given my ongoing health problems, I'm not expecting to get something written for this, but I think it would interest some of you lot. General LI submission guidelines are at http://www.loose-id.com/submissions.aspx


Coming out refers to the expression “coming out of the closet” meaning to tell others about your sexual orientation.

http://www.lasionline.org/the-issues/coming-out.html

Loose Id wants Coming Out stories --  Thoughtful, authentic erotic romances featuring men and
women who come out.  The coming out theme must be integral to the story. All stories must follow Loose Id submission guidelines. Final deadline for full submissions will be June 15, 2012 but the earlier, the better. Those accepted may be included for release in conjunction with Coming Out Day.

Note: Coming Out Day is observed in many countries, usually on October 11.
In the UK it is celebrated on October 12.

Coming Out Day celebrations:

http://www.hrc.org/ncod/

It's not often I swear in public on the intarwebs, but Dorchester's behaviour deserves it. Don't buy books from Dorchester/Leisure, because you can be certain that most of the authors won't see a penny in royalties, and you can't be certain that Dorchester actually has any right to sell the books. Yes, that's right, Dorchester have apparently decided that the way to ease their financial woes is to sell pirated books.

This has been running for nigh on a year now. Dorchester was selling ebooks where the rights had reverted to the authors, and then claiming that oops, they'd tried to take the books down, it was those mean evil distribution companies like Amazon that kept putting them back up. That story really doesn't wash any more. Here's the latest installment of writer Brian Keene's battle to stop Dorchester's piracy of his books.

Do not submit work to this publisher. They used to be respectable, but alas that's in the past.

I'm doing very little blog-hopping these days, so I didn't see the latest piece of erotic romance industry news until a couple of days after the faecal matter impacted the air circulatory device. New epublisher Quartet Press has closed, before it even opened.

This is significant news, because this wasn't your typical "it would be fun and easy and profitable to be an epublisher" epub start-up. Quartet Press was set up by people who had some relevant experience, and who had the nous to headhunt a highly respected chief editor from an established epublisher. I wasn't paying much attention to it, because I haven't been paying much attention to the market at all for the last year other than what my own publisher is up to, but I did sit up and pay attention when I heard about them recruiting Angela James.

My own uninformed reaction to their progress was that they appeared to have the background that indicated a fairly low likelihood of the management going batshit insane (an unhappily common occurrence in this publishing sector), that it appeared to be a serious business venture by people who understood what they were getting into, and thus I thought they had a better chance than most start-ups of making it through the first year, that nevertheless I didn't understand why all the love for them from some of the blogs before they'd even opened, particularly as their background was skewed print rather than ebook, and that I really didn't like what I eventually heard about their royalty payment structure and their rationale for it.

I wouldn't have submitted a novel to them, even if I'd had something available at the time. Established publishers crash and burn, yes, and established publishers screw over their authors, sometimes in very bad ways. But the odds of something bad happening are a lot worse at a start-up, and I would not risk a novel at a start-up if I had a chance of selling it somewhere else. Yes, I sold several manuscripts to Loose Id before they opened for business, but I understood the risk I was taking, and back at the start of 2004 publishers willing to look at m/m romance were nearly as rare as hen's teeth.

What I might have been willing to risk at Quartet was a short story, or even a novella that wasn't suitable for Loose Id. And one of the reasons I might have been prepared to gamble at least that much of my material is what I referred to above -- that the people involved appeared to be treating it as a serious business venture. I thought that there was a high risk that the publisher wouldn't make it -- but that there was a fairly low risk that the management would simply disappear, or hold books hostage, or publicly post the real names of any authors who dared to criticise them during the final tailspin, or any of the other idiocies authors and readers in this genre can tell you about.

And indeed, it appears that they have closed the operation down cleanly, accepting responsibility for their actions, and reverting rights to authors immediately so that they can get on with trying to sell the manuscripts to another publishers. It's not a good situation for an author to be in, but it's a *much* better situation than simply being left in limbo, or being stalked and smeared and even physically threatened. It's early days yet, but for now this is looking a lot less messy for the authors than some past failed publishers.

This is why it's important to think hard about submitting to a start-up. It's not just the high probability of the publisher closing down within the year -- it's how well they'll handle it if it happens. Even if you're willing to take the risk with a new publisher, you need to be choosy as to which ones.

15th May

Bought and paid for
fiction about sex for money
5-15k, or collections within that range
all orientations
split of 40% of net
reprints considered
email subs
http://www.erotica-readers.com/ERA/G/Bought_And_Paid_For.htm

Plane sex: Mile high erotica
2-4k
all orientations
$50 plus 2 copies
reprints considered
email subs
http://www.erotica-readers.com/ERA/G/Plane_Sex.htm


May 20

Best Gay Romance
to 6k
reprints considered
email subs
http://www.erotica-readers.com/ERA/G/Best_Gay_Romance_09.htm

Samhain has re-opened the slushpile. Note new guidelines. More info at Angela's blog:

http://nicemommy-evileditor.com/blog/?p=1235

Anna Genoese, formerly of Tor, has just announced on her blog that she is opening a non-profit small press (by which she means that the authors will be paid royalties, and they will be applying for grants from relevant bodies).

Blog post with more details

Por Vida Press website

Guidelines in pdf format

The latest issue of Speculations has just arrived in my email, and among the market listings is one that might be of interest to several people on my flist:

NEW G/L/B antho UNSPEAKABLE HORROR: From the Shadows of the Closet seeks
H (1k-7.5k words) that reflects its theme; pays 5 cents/word for FNASR.
Subs MUST follow GLs at http://unspeakablehorror.com/submissions/. Query
deadline, 10/07. Deadline, 6/08.

(If you want the full market listings, you''l just have to get your own subscription. :-)