Erotic Corner - Know when to fight or stand down

Authors Promoting Authors

Any author that writes for me or talks to me and is mentored by me learns a few things about publishing, hopefully from my rather…direct tone, rather than the school of hard knocks.  I strive as an editor to teach my authors, strive as an author to be an example of my peers (even if I look better in a dress than some of you ) Over the years of my career I’ve learned quite a few things about fighting battles and tact.  And patience.  The last lesson has been one of the hardest to learn even as I mature into a more confident Alpha.

One of the things I keep seeing in publishing, be it erotic or non is the snarky, bitchy, whiny behavior displayed by authors in a variety of circumstances.  For example, bad reviews.

I always tell my authors to stand up to the publishers and editors when the time is right.  I’ll fight my editors at Decadent over dialogue tags, POV changes and those sorts of things because I know I’m right and ultimately MY ass is on the line when it comes time to do the math on sales.  Yes, the publisher has a large vested interest but if I’m not a new author and I’ve already cultivated an audience and defined the author/reader contract, then I KNOW what they’re going to expect from me.  It’s MY job to deliver it to them without fail, without change (growth is okay, in fact, preferred) EVERY SINGLE TIME.  So yeah, Val and Kate will occasionally have to just let me roll with whatever edits, trusting that I’m not some newbie.

If I were, I’d be smart to listen to them.   They have experience I need.  Unless I can justify a plot point or a style issue, (and usually new authors can’t, they lack the experience to plot properly, and that’s okay) I should listen to my editors.

Regarding reviews and bad press – LET IT BE.  If I received a bad review from a site (and I have had a few, believe me) my best move is to LET THAT BE. Unless I can spin that into some sort of huge controversy that wastes my time but is justified by a LARGE sales spike, I’m better off telling myself that the reviewer is a moron if my fan base disagrees with him/her, and my sales reflect that.  Yes, there are a number of poorly published books out there that sell yet don’t deserve to sit on the book shelf, let alone my bathroom floor, but that’s the nature of free market economics.

In an upcoming marketing course I’m teaching to my writers before releasing to the public for a fee, I’m going to cover this concept in depth.  Even in sex writing, if you’re writing the purest, hottest smut, for publication, you’ll have to understand that some battles cannot be fought and won, even if you’re right.

When you DO choose to fight battles, make sure you use tact, decorum and diplomacy.  I’m seeing a lot of bad author behavior on social media and while I eschew it myself, it took years of learning on the streets of hard knocks (in publishing we’ve got more than one street of hard knocks…we roll deep like that!)

Annoying behavior will have dire consequences, no matter how well you sell, how awesome you write, if you do not learn when to fight and when to stand down, you will be knocked down . Getting up from that is not easy.  Just ask any author who started in this business s fourteen years ago and isn’t where they should be.

Menage Bound – A tired corporate exec seeks two dominant men.   On Amazon
Dark Sensualities and Primal Instincts – Paranormal Erotic Romance out from Sizzler Editions