First line, last chance--veinglory I have the 20 entries I was looking for, for the first line contest. As many submissions were not 100% clear on whether they were published or unpublished I will combine the two categories and award an overall winner and runner-up, both receiving a $20 book token. You can choose which online bookstore but please do me a favor and pick someone other than Amazon :). I will leave the contest open just one more day, 24 hours starting now, for those last minute entries. Send your first line, novel name and pen name to ERECmail at gmail.com. The first lines will be open to voting soon!
  ¶ posted at 5:02 PM by Emily Veinglory 0 Comments

  Guest blog from Jade James When Emily Veinglory asked that I be guest on her blog, I frankly jumped at the chance. You see, I’ve been where the Ocean’s Mist Press authors are at now.

Let me begin by saying, I was approached by Noemi to write a story for her new company. I was a new author, still learning the ropes and truthfully I jumped at the chance to showcase my writings. What a horrible mistake I made. At the time of OMP’s shadiness, my husband was out of work. So every dollar, I could get from writing would be used to pay bills. It all began with Noemi making up her own ISBN numbers and listing them on her OMP website. She claimed she was cheated by the company she bought the ISBN numbers. I emailed that company directly, and they said it was impossible. (I also have that email to prove it.) In the year, I was published with OMP, I saw two payments. Then payments stopped. Unfortunately, at that time I wasn’t the only author not being paid. I have emails from authors stating this, but none of them would go public. But that wasn’t going to stop me.

I emailed Noemi numerous times, and some of my emails would go ignored. And when she felt she had time to answer them, she would email rants, change the contract payment terms on her own without notifying OMP authors.

To read more on it, visit my blog archives at jadestruthordare.blogspot.com

Public Communication, Based On Evidence
As I wrote on another blog, I took my fight public, because I couldn’t afford a lawyer. But one of the reasons why I chose this route, is because I already had numerous amounts of written evidence from Noemi that payment was going to be made. It never arrived. So I made it a point to visit yahoo groups/discussions/blogs and let everyone know about Noemi’s lying, cheating ways. I would post updates on my blog and even on the author group. I remember one author (who shall remained unnamed) told me that this shouldn’t be posted on the author group. I didn’t care. I didn’t give up until Noemi was forced to listen to me. (FYI: that same author emailed me asking for advice on how to handle OMP, and pulled her books a couple of months later for nonpayment).

Around June of 2006, I was mailed a money order, with no return address. Brilliant Noemi had even chosen not to fill it out. My books were taken down from her website two days later.

There were rumors also flowing abut with Silk’s Vault. But at least with Silk’s Vault Publishing, the same week I requested my books to be taken down and payment, the owner (Sarah) obliged immediately. I know other authors weren’t so lucky.

If a publisher is trying to shaft you, don’t keep it quiet! If you have the evidence, show it to the world. I did. No one can call you a liar, if the written proof is in their faces. My advice to authors who choose the public route, make sure you keep all emails and communication between publisher and yourself. And if you do choose this way, know that you would be helping a writer choose an honest company for themselves.

What has OMP taught me about choosing publishers? It is my number one rule to not submit to newbie companies. Yes, newbie companies will say that’s unfair. Well, they haven’t been in my shoes.

I now choose companies that have been in the public eye for a while, and that have proven that they are well established author friendly epublishers.

Ask the publisher questions. You have the right. Sit down and think of everything you want to ask them and submit those to them, to see what answers they come up with. It’s also important to talk to other authors within publisher’s company and see if there happy with how the publisher is treating them. View their marketing plan, google their name. Do what you can to find out anything you need to know, to make you a satisfied publisher.

And I’ll end it here. Thanks to Emily for posting this.

Jade James  ¶ posted at 3:33 PM by Emily Veinglory 6 Comments

  Fact, Fiction and Propaganda--veinglory I will warn you, the page I am linking to today has a little nudity and a lot of racist, anti-Semitic, violent and other objectionable content. This page shows real propaganda leaflets used during various wars. I think they also show that sex and love are naturally intertwined even here. A perspective being lost once again as the blogverse cycles around to deciding the real problem with the RT cons was (you guessed it) the evils of erotic romance destroying the genre.

The propaganda says not only 'you want sex, stop fighting and go home' (erotic) but also 'what if your romantic relationship is being destroyed by loneliness and the seduction of less virtuous men' (romance). Sex and love go together in real life, the go together in writing of all kinds. And ultimately this kind of propaganda proved ineffective because even in these extremities people know the difference between fiction and real life.

Sex and Psychological Operations by Herbert A. Friedman is well worth a look. Excerpt of one pamphlet below:

"She dreams of last night. In her thoughts she is enjoying the wonderful hours again which she has just spent with her new friend. Don't grudge her these nights. She is young and beautiful. The human body and its desires are powerful. At first she tried very hard to remain faithful but she lost this battle against herself as thousands of wives and girls back home did before her. It all started with an evening out, with going to the movies and to some bar, but soon it became real love. Only by the picture at her side she is occasionally reminded of her husband who is - for months now - somewhere in Western Europe, fighting a stubborn enemy, freezing and suffering in a muddy foxhole. But as time passes she thinks of him more and more seldom. Now she does not even turn his picture to the wall when another man is staying with her and holding her in her arms."  ¶ posted at 3:30 PM by Emily Veinglory 3 Comments

 

[click to enlarge]  ¶ posted at 2:59 PM by Emily Veinglory 6 Comments

  Ocean's Mist Press: very alarming--veinglory I had assumed Ocean's Mist was down for the count and the return of their website was some kind of error as the content such as 'news' announcements dated, for the most part, from 2006. However it has been brought to my attention that not only is the site still up they are listing a new, May 2008, release. The coming soon page has material with this same author "Essence" mixed with authors (some of whom probably should not be there at all).

In case it needs restating: avoid them, do not buy from them, warn others.

Edited to add:

Karen draws my attention to Author Crusader who says the new author 'Essence' is Noemi, the owner of OMP who sold books but didn't pay authors--she continues, apparently, to write for Loose Id and Siren. She adds: "Why would you know that this person has deceived people, stolen from people and have her around?" Is there an obligation to avoid publishing a writer who has been less than honest in her publishing endeavours? I genuinely don't know. I think publishing her maybe isn't a good look fir them whether it is technically okay or not, but they know the name being signed to theor contract so I guess it's their call.

Labels: OCEANS MIST

  ¶ posted at 10:08 AM by Emily Veinglory 12 Comments

  The real ebook money is in sci fi, um, okay--veinglory
David Rothman at teleread posts a blog entry entitled: Love tech? Enjoy SF? Hate romances? Then you’re part of a pattern—and e-publishers should pay attention. "...tellingly, in our recent TeleRead blog survey, 76 percent of the participants listed “sci fi/speculative fiction” among the genres they’d browse in a bookstore if they had an hour to kill. Thirty-three percent went for “classics/public domain.” Just 11 percent mentioned romance/erotic—the very favorites of Jane’s DearAuthor audience."

I honestly am not quite sure of the point being made. Telereaders say they like sci fi and say they buy ebooks. I can only assume they are a relatively small and unrepresentative sample of the total ebook buying market. Because there are authors out there supplying sci fi to fantasy/sci fi epublishers. Despite what the readers of this survey report I am told their sales figures make the relatively modest erotic romance sales-per-title figures look positively lavish by comparison. I wonder if I should start accepting selected data on other genres as a basis for comparison?

Romance epublishers (or at least the top 20-30 of them) are doing well focusing on that genre. And the sales figures seem to encourage them to gravitate to romance, and to more erotic types of romance. These publishers, being in this business for money, have gravitated to romance and erotic romance for a reason (as witness Samhain becoming a romance press and New Concepts going from disdaining erotic romance to pushing it quite strongly). The pattern in this case is, in my opinion, in Telereads sample not the sales figures that keep most authors fed and most publishers viable. But I would be happy to take sales figures from authors with non-romance sci fi books at presses such as Double Dragon to test this proposition.

As for the real ebook money... per title it's probably in non-fiction: self-help, money management etc. But that's another story.  ¶ posted at 2:35 PM by Emily Veinglory 6 Comments

  Sexy Resin--veinglory
Pin up style erotica is often a wonderful example of how something can be sexy without being tawdry. Model examples include resin statues that are bought in kits just like a model plane or car, and assembled and painted by the buyer. Azimuth provides a range of very muscular girls in various poses including the bride pictured.

There are also jointed resin dolls and the question of how sexy is too sexy is found even here. Resin figures of all styles can be found from stormtroopers in bikinis, and ultra curvy gals to elfin pretty boys.

It says a lot about the mixed nature of statuary that sexy manacled fairy and a virgin mary can appear on the same page. Of course in the past erotic statues were made of porcelain, stone and precious metals and there are also modern examples including Andy Rae's intimate bronzes [adult link].

The only statuary I have is a tiny rather primitively cast bronze Pan. I like some of the yaoi style dolls and would be happy to have them by not when they cost more than an iPhone.  ¶ posted at 9:48 PM by Emily Veinglory 3 Comments

  Yawn--veinglory
Amazon has a huge spot in the middle of their main page about how they are unable to keep their Kindle device in stock. They have however refused to state how many they ever had in stock, or even a ballpark figure of how many they have sold. There is a link to a 5 page letter about humans 'coevolving' with their tools. Call me cynical but this looks, to me, more like desperation than success.

Other recent Amazon talk:
Dear Author--Publishers Get Wise, Undercut Amazon prices
Technology Owl--Amazon Sues New York Over Net Sales Tax
James Chamberlin--...a letter from Jeff Bezos blathering on about their electronic book reader...  ¶ posted at 5:20 PM by Emily Veinglory 0 Comments

  It's starting to look a lot like smoke....--veinglory So, recently I said the way Ellora's Cave and Samhain are conducting their disputes in private and without public rancor showed their class. Ellora's Cave is starting to spread the dispute to their email list, where it inevitably escapes to the public domain. Meanwhile there are reports of the online store not functioning properly. There is, if not smoke, certainly some friction.

See also C'um Hither, more Ann Jacobs,  ¶ posted at 3:02 PM by Emily Veinglory 1 Comments

  p.s.--veinglory
I have updated the new SALES page. I have received a few questions about the Wiggly Graph. The basic idea is that I am tracking the average sales across time. The line for a press starts when I have data for at least 5 books by at least 3 different authors. It continues based on all of the data I have for books currently available for sale and reported on within the last 365 days (a 365-day running average). The reason I am doing this is to track whether sales in general and for specific presses are increasing or decreasing over time. I hope that isn't too confusing. So far other than a gradual tendency for overall sales to drift upwards I am not picking up much. But my resolution is pretty low for most presses (send lawyers, guns and data). I have incomplete data sets for Aspen Mountain, Dark Castle Lords, New Concepts and Whiskey Creek. For any others not on the graph I have no data at all. (venglory at gmail.com)  ¶ posted at 6:26 PM by Emily Veinglory 0 Comments

  Cover Snark Xtreme--veinglory In this new world of Poser zombies and stock photo model clones cover snark can get a little too easy to be considered sporting. So I would like to suggest a new category of Cover Snark Xtreme (cue the theme music). In CSX snark must be based on the potential for the cover art to contravene the new British extreme pornography law. That is:

An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following—
(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,
(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in
serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,
(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,
(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or
appears to be real.

For example. One Foot in the Grave has a nice cover. But once I got past it having the same title as a BBC comedy about post-retirement ennui and frustration, the ex-biker babe in me comes out. One can be a biker and dress like a babe sequentially, but doing so simultaneously is seriously ill-advised. Combine legs clad only in stockings with stiletto heels and a large motorcycle and this lady is engaging in an act that is likely to result in her ass and associated orifices making like mozzarella with the asphalt.

Is her defense that she is just sitting on the bike (ergo the risky act is not actually happening in this picture), unlike Peter Driben's vintage pin up gravel-rash-waiting-to-happen? But I am sure some of you out there can come up with more extreme cover examples, please let me see them!



Edited to add: How about this from Mrs G. Implied (d)?  ¶ posted at 3:41 PM by Emily Veinglory 0 Comments