Why I’m an ally for women’s reproductive freedom

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Protestors in Alabama

Retrieved from Democracy Now website: https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/20/headlines/protesters_in_alabama_missouri_defend_reproductive_rights_from_recent_abortion_bans

I’ve been thinking about LGBTQ+ issues as the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia passed on May 17th and thinking about women’s reproductive rights while states like Alabama have been enacting bizarre and grotesque laws demeaning and diminishing female personhood. Every now and then, I post some political commentary here. It doesn’t have a lot to do with what I write, but it’s a big part of who I am. If you’re curious, here’s some stuff I wrote about the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, #TransgenderRightAreHumanRights, and the Writers Resist movement.

Today, I’m struck by the essential alliance between queer rights advocacy and women’s rights advocacy and wanting to defend women’s reproductive freedom in particular as a gay male ally.

I actually got involved in women’s rights issues before I had the courage to come out and talk about queer rights. My mother’s quiet democratic values inspired me from a young age. She decried racism and anti-Semitism and was a terrific female role model. From back when I was in elementary school, she talked to me about women’s equality by sharing the story of her mother, who died before I was born. My maternal grandmother was the valedictorian of her high school class and was pushed toward nursing school rather than college even though she had the potential to be a doctor. Nursing is of course a challenging and honorable service profession, but the point was sexist social attitudes place limitations on women’s lives. And, not incidentally, this was a lesson to me that’s it’s never too young to talk to kids about sexism, racism, and other systems of oppression. Some of the most impactful stories are from our childhood, and in my case, it helped me become an ally.

My mother wanted to have opportunities her mother could not have. She went to a four-year college and had a brief career as a biologist at a cancer research center before her life took a more traditional turn. She left her job when my older brother was born, and she was a stay-at-home mom up until I was a little further along in elementary school. Then she went back to school for computer science, one of a handful of women in the graduate program while also one of the oldest students in her class. She completed her degree and went on to manage information technology policy, literacy and training at New York State’s largest public university. I grew up a firm believer in women’s equality and appreciating the tremendous courage and determination it takes to succeed in male-dominated professions.

I think instinctively I understood the connection between women’s rights generally and their reproductive rights specifically. The latter was an issue I knew my mom supported, but we didn’t talk about it much. For me, it just felt obvious that a part of a person’s humanity and freedom was their ability to make decisions about their body. Actually, it felt terrifying that someone could take that away from you, and the way religious organizations tried to shame women about their sexuality angered me.

Buffalo, New York where I grew up was one of Operation Rescue’s target cities in the early 90s. Led by Reverend Randall Terry, they travelled around the country to picket abortion clinics with their famous fetus jar displays. I’ve participated in a lot of protests in my life, and to this day, one of my favorites was counter-protesting Randall Terry in Buffalo along with my four housemates at the time (all of whom were straight men). Most of them had never done anything political related to women’s reproductive freedom, but we all felt at our core the protestors were wrong, and there was an urgency to supporting women’s reproductive choice.

There was something at stake for me personally though I probably would not have known how to voice it at the time. The anti-reproductive freedom position is based on so-called traditional or family values with the goal of erasing social progress and re-establishing (or establishing for the first time in some cases) laws and norms based on Christian fundamentalist doctrine. I was reminded just today on a news program that many states still have laws criminalizing adultery. Of course, anti-sodomy laws still exist in many places. These “blue laws” are the legacy of the 19th century Protestant reform movement, which successfully inserted their morals and traditions into legal codes across the country.

As a young man listening to the talking points of the anti-choice side of the abortion debate, I realized I also had a target on my back. Their family values envisioned good Christian men marrying good Christian women, castigating sex outside of marriage, and often most vehemently, declaring homosexuality a perversion that is to blame for everything from single parent households to hurricanes and earthquakes. Even before I accepted I was gay, I recognized that worldview was pretty much diametrically opposed to how I lived my life, or planned to live my life. As a young adult, freedom generally was important to me, but also as someone who was drawn to secular humanism much more than any religion, I saw the rhetoric and positions of the Christian Right as defamatory and unfair.

So bringing this back to May 2019, I’m reminded – almost daily reminded since November 2016 – how fragile achievements in the women’s rights movement and the LGBT rights movement are. In addition to the assault on women’s reproductive rights, folks are working on the presidential level, congressional level, and state and local level to push Religious Freedom laws to weaken LGBT civil liberties and legally enshrine Christian fundamentalists’ right to hate us. Such laws would also limit women’s reproductive freedom. We’ve already seen cases of pharmacists who refuse to dispense birth control pills to women. And the Trump administration successfully established a ban on transgender people serving in the military.

This is wrong. This is a critical time for folks who care about women’s lives and dignity to come together. Because it’s not just about one issue. It’s a systematic attack on the values and norms that allow a pluralistic, democratic society to thrive. We’ve been at this juncture before. Many of us just never thought we’d be back there again. I stand up as an ally to women’s reproductive freedom for my mom, for women everywhere, and to acknowledge this is an issue that men—gay and straight—care about as well.

Queering up Your Bookshelf

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Happy Spring Folks!

Just a quick note this month, a media alert if you will, while I’m focusing my time placing a couple of finished projects.

Author Alex Harrow had me over at their blog for their Queering up Your Bookshelf feature. We talked about queer representation in literature, my writing process, and what’s up next for me. You can read the article here.

Alex also hosts a monthly Twitter chat on queer speculative fiction fyi. It’s generally the third Thursday of the month at 7:00 pm EST, and you can find it with the tag #queerspec.

That’s all I got for now. Hope everyone is doing well now that spring has sprung. 🙂

 

 

Some thoughts on small press publishing

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From time to time, people stop by my blog with comments and questions about my journey to get my books published and the business side of being an author. I’m hardly a huge success story, but I’ve been doing this writing thing for a little while. So I thought I’d do something different and share a bit about my experience being a small press author. Full credit to Victoria Sheridan, a fellow NineStar Press author, who wrote this piece on the subject for the NaNoWriMo blog and got me thinking about the idea.

I actually have titles with four small presses so I guess that gives me some cred on the subject. First off, I should explain there’s three main pathways to getting your book published: big press, small press, and self-publishing. I’ve also had some experience with self-publishing through some short fiction I published on Smashwords and a romance/erotica novel I published on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) under a pen name.

The big press route is the most coveted pathway for authors. I don’t think I’ve ever met an author who didn’t start out with that goal in mind. As publishing corporations have shrunk and merged due to declining sales over the past decade or so, five publishing houses are left as “The Big Five.” They make up an estimated 80 percent of market and offer the largest distribution networks, promotion/marketing resources, advances for authors (i.e. you get paid something up front before your book makes sales), “social capital” to generate buzz and opportunities, and the much sought-after stamp of prestige.

I tried the big press route with most of my titles figuring it made sense to aim high first and give my books the best chance of discoverability. With rare exception, an author needs a literary agent to get their book considered by one of the big houses, thus the first slow and agonizing step in the process is to query agents who can sell the kind of book you’ve written.

If an agent accepts you as a client, you’ve increased your chances of getting published by a big press, though results can greatly vary. I had an agent for Irresistible who had nearly four decades of experience repping gay literature for example, and she couldn’t get any editors she works with interested in it. She candidly shared with me the number of big house editors interested in gay fiction has dwindled such that she can count them on one hand. Fiction generally is the softer side of big house income, resulting in greater reliance on authors to do some of the marketing themselves, even presenting a business plan and an established following in some cases. Thus, landing a book at a big press has become ever more elusive for many of us.

Self-publishing is the accessible alternative and has become quite popular via platforms like Amazon’s KDP program. The advantages are control over production, marketing, pricing, and of course getting a much bigger share of sales. KDP for example pays authors 70% of list price. Big presses pay as little as 8-10% on hardcover and paperback sales, 20-25% on e-books.

On the other hand, self-publishing requires a considerable outlay of money in order to start making sales, from editing and design services to marketing costs. Moreover, the most successful self-published authors churn out a ton of books in order to establish a following so the sense of being free to DIY however you want has some limits. According to writer sites like Reedsy, it’s become pretty much obligatory to focus on writing serials if you have expectations of generating income as a self-published author.

I dabbled in self-publishing as somewhat of an experiment. I had a couple pieces of short fiction I thought might be useful as freebies to entice readers to check out my longer work. Then, I had a more [ahem] mature novel I thought I’d try on KDP out of curiosity and really for the fun of it.

I did practically nothing to market the short fiction pieces on Smashwords. One story which is permafree has gotten about 600 downloads since it was published almost five years ago. The other story, published just last year, got 40 downloads when it was free for a two-week trial period and has since gotten about 40 downloads while priced at 99 cents. So, nothing too impressive there.

And there’s no way to track if those downloads led to purchases of my other books. Smashwords allows you to mention other titles inside a book published on their platform, but they prohibit direct links to competitor retailers like Amazon. My guess is any buy-through activity has been very light.

The novel at KDP, also barely marketed, has sold 20 copies over a one-year period, leaving me pretty deep in the red as I paid $500 for editing and book design.

I said this post was going to be about my experience with small press publishing, but I thought that lead-in was helpful to put things in context. Small presses, sometimes called independent presses, are often described as that world in-between the big houses and self-publishing since they offer some of the advantages and some of the limitations of both of those routes.

Most small presses will take unagented submissions, and they’re quite specific about what they’re looking for. For instance, I was encouraged by the number of independent publishers who are enthusiastic about LGBTQIA+ fiction, and I found homes for several of my titles at Bold Strokes Books and NineStar Press, which publish LGBTQIA+ fiction exclusively.

Now I should say, when I refer to myself as a small press author (primarily), I mean a small press. There are scores of independent publishers outside of the Big Five, and they vary in size. The bigger ones might have a staff of twenty and publish over 100 titles annually. The smaller ones might have one or two people running the business and a pool of editors, production staff and marketing folks they hire for projects, altogether publishing a dozen or less titles each year. That describes all four of my publishers.

As such, their response time to submissions was generally gradual. I waited six months to receive offers on two of my titles. The quickest turnaround was for Werecat – two weeks, and that project also has the distinction of having a 100% success rate. I really liked the publisher’s mission statement and backlist and sent them an exclusive submission.

Bold Strokes paid a $500 advance for each of the first two books I published with them (The Seventh Pleiade and Banished Sons of Poseidon) and offered $200 on the third since I had not earned back my advances on the other books. My other three publishers do not provide advances, but their contract terms were largely more favorable. The best is a 50/50 split on both print and e-book sales with no right of first refusal on future titles.

An advantage over self-publishing is a small press provides professional editing, proofing, cover design, copyrighting, and placement/distribution at no cost to the author. While my experience has varied somewhat with my four publishers, I’ve largely been ushered through that process with personalized attention and a collaborative approach, which may be less common when working with a big house due to the volumes of titles their business plan demands. There’s nothing quite like working with an editor who is genuinely enthusiastic about your book, and I’m grateful to have had that experience with several of my titles (special shout-out to my fabulous NineStar editor Elizabetta!).

Now regarding placement and distribution, only one of the four presses I’ve worked with has a distribution plan for trade paperbacks that is even slightly comparable to the big houses, i.e. actively working to get their titles into brick-and-mortar booksellers, trade shows, and libraries. And even so, I saw those efforts trickle off with my three titles. As one metric, the first title got picked up by 36 libraries across the country and around the world according to World Cat. The second title got into 11. The third got into 2. And I saw a similar trend with Barnes and Noble, which briefly had a handful of stores carry the first two titles and never picked up book #3.

One of my small presses is e-book only, and another is e-book mainly because they use a print-on-demand service to publish paperbacks. That’s a significant limitation as paperback readers will never find the titles off-line, and even the bookstores and libraries I approached to inquire about carrying the title had a difficult time finding the book via wholesale distributors like Ingram.

Regarding promotion and marketing, there’s no question small presses have a lot of limitations, though there can be an upside that I’ll get to. That ‘biggest’ small press Bold Strokes offered the most in that department such as paying for exhibit booths at book fairs, entering titles in awards programs, and providing authors with ten free copies of the title to give away as samples to get it into bookstores and libraries and send to early reviewers.

One of my publishers places titles on NetGalley, and another uses the early reviewer giveaway program at LibraryThing. They all use social media and mailing lists, but being small companies, their reach is pretty modest. Their contracts include clauses about marketing being a “partnership,” and while the terms of that are non-binding and don’t require authors to spend money in that area, it’s been my experience across the board that small press authors must become the primary ambassadors of their titles.

I’d estimate I spent 100 hours or more on each of my titles via social media work, querying book bloggers, sending out to my own mailing list, running giveaways, creating related content for my website, and various forms of networking. I do readings at local bookstores and book fairs and conferences. I’ve also spent between $100-500 for each book on ads at Facebook and book promotion sites and printing promotional materials.

The impact can feel bleak. My best-selling title has sold 500 copies since its release in 2013. Two of my titles have only sold marginally better than that self-published novel I put up at KDP with close to zero marketing effort. Yep, I’m talking double digits.

The biggest success has been my e-novelette The Rearing, Book One in the Werecat series, which is approaching 15,000 downloads. That’s largely due to the e-book going permafree in 2017 and brings me to an upside to working with a small press.

Small presses can be innovative and flexible when it comes to promotion. That deal I brokered to set The Rearing permafree at retailers gave the series a second life after a period of declining sales, and the publisher’s willingness to collaborate on a pricing strategy is something that’s less likely to happen when working with a big house.

Another one of my publishers sponsored a live Facebook chat that was a fun way to launch the title, and another has a Facebook group with lively discussion and resource-sharing on everything from how to get the most out of tabling at a book fair to tips for getting books into libraries and connecting with vlogs and podcasters. I’ve found there’s not a lot a small press will do for you marketing-wise, but at their best, they’re a great source of information on how to DIY so there’s definitely value added there. I’ve learned a ton about media opportunities and how to make the best use out of Facebook and Goodreads. Most importantly, I’ve developed relationships with a lot of fellow authors, which is a huge source of mutual support and has often led to opportunities I would have never discovered by myself.

So I’d say the biggest benefit of being a small press author is being part of a community. Writing can be a lonely journey, and it helps to know you’re not traveling on your own. I cross-promote with other authors, commiserate when things aren’t going well (we all need that validation), and on the other side, we celebrate each other’s successes. For me, small presses are the realistic way to get my books published since I don’t have the expertise to design my own books, market them effectively, nor the funds to pay for professional editing and a publicist.

On retold stories and folklore

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Illustration from The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Illustration from The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, retrieved from Wikipedia commons

I’m in between BIG, EXCITING publication news, so I thought I’d blog a little something on the subject of retold stories and folklore, which has sort of become my métier.

Alright, I actually do have some exciting but super early news to share that relates to the subject. Late this year, most likely late fall, NineStar Press will be publishing a collection of my short stories, which are based on world mythology and folklore. The contract is signed, and I am busily getting each one of them ready for editing and production.

Yeah, I’m really happy about that, and if you’re curious, you can get an exclusive preview of some of the stories at my Patreon page. I’ll be talking up that project a lot more as we get closer to the release date. 🙂

For those of you who are new to my world, well first off: Hi! Thanks for stopping by. I’m Andrew J. Peters. I principally describe myself as a fantasy author, and then, a little more specifically as a gay fantasy author. Then, even more specifically, I tend to write heroic fantasy, which means action-adventure, typically taking place in an olden world type of setting, and based on classical legend, which usually follows the structure of The Hero’s Journey.

For example, my first two novels were a two-part series about two boys who led survivors to safety during the destruction of ancient Atlantis (The Seventh Pleiade and Banished Sons of Poseidon). In a similar vein, Poseidon and Cleito explores the trials of Atlantis’s founders. And I wrote The City of Seven Gods (the first book in The Lost Histories series), which has two men struggling for survival in a treacherous world inspired by Classical, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures.

They’re all hero stories. Well, the latter is a hero story on a smaller scale, though still taking place in an epic, old world setting.

I’ve also written a contemporary, paranormal series Werecat, and most recently, I published Irresistible, a contemporary gay-rom com of all things. That might be starting to sound eclectic, a nicer way to say all over the map. I make the case there’s a common thread in the stories that inspire me. You can call it loose for sure, but even the modern tales I’ve written came from fantasy ideas.

Werecat of course is a variation on werewolf lore, and more than that founded on a mythology drawn from pre-Columbian Amerindian sources. Irresistible is a retelling of an ancient Greek novel (Callirhoe), whose premise is a young woman is so gods-blessed with beauty, her true love can’t keep hold of her because everyone betrays him to steal her for himself (I queered the story up and made the two leads guys).

I haven’t always written retold stories. I credit one of my very favorite authors Gregory Maguire for turning me on to the fun of taking classic lore from a new point of view. Some of my work is far derived from a specific myth, but myths, fairytales and folkore are mainly where I find my ideas. My upcoming collection has stories drawn from classical mythology, The Arabian Nights, Hungarian folklore, the Brothers Grimm, a classic opera, Amazonian jaguar mysticism, and African and Japanese sources. I really wanted to celebrate stories from around the globe.

People ask me sometimes what’s my favorite fairytale or legend. That’s hard for me to answer because I love so much of it, and I’m discovering new stories all the time! I love the drama and imagination of Greek mythology, epic poems and plays. I love the humor and magic of The Arabian Nights, and I’m a fan of Shakespeare and gothic horror from the 19th century.

More recently, I discovered Japanese folklore, which is fascinating because it comes from such a different perspective both in tone — a lot of irony and absurdity — and in its ideas about magic.

So how to choose just one, or even two or three? I can’t and won’t I’m afraid. 🙂

I think another reason I’ve been drawn to retelling stories from classical lore is to give voice and visibility to gay experiences. Of course, one doesn’t need classic lore to do that, but when you take a familiar story and ‘queer’ the characters, swap genders, I feel it makes the story enjoyably subversive and surprising.

For example, with Irresistible, casting the tragic beauty as a man created opportunites for me to show gay desire in its many variations: triumphant, obsessive, heartbreaking, and comically absurd, while also broadening the scope of eroticism. Everyone falls in love, or lust with the lead Callisthenes: young and old, men and women, declared gays and others who are confronted with buried fantasies. The premise of the classic novel provided the opportunity to explore love and lust in greater depth.

If you’re looking for some queerly retold stories (until my anthology comes out) 🙂 I’ll point you to two of my favorites: Jeremy McAteer’s Fairytales for Gay Guys and Lawrence Schimel’s The Drag Queen of Elfland and Other Stories.       

 

My Year in Books

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For three (or so) years running, I’ve been sharing My Year in Books as organized and analyzed by Goodreads. It certainly does make it fun to look back on all the titles you’ve read and to realize it’s quite an achievement!

I actually nearly doubled my reading output in 2018. For the past two years, I finished thirteen books annually, and this year I read twenty-four (I might hit twenty-five if I find the time to finish a book on Hungarian history in the next week or so). That might be a slightly inflated improvement in that I did a lot of beta reading and awards program reading in previous years, and I usually didn’t log those titles in. But here’s my positive take-away: I got a lot more reading done on my commute back and forth to work, which can be one to two hours total each day, by spending less time with games and social media on my phone. 🙂

Another thing that probably helped was I took on writing reviews this year for the New York Journal of Books and Out in Print, in addition to occasional reviews for Queer Sci Fi. In total, I read eight titles for the purpose of reviews, which is definitely the most I’ve ever done in a year.

A lot of those were recommendable, and I’d say my favorite discovery was K.D. Edwards The Last Sun. It’s kind of an alternative history/urban fantasy that takes inspiration from Atlantean mythology, along with a ton of paranormal horror conventions–vampires, zombies, witches, etc.. It’s a début novel from Edwards, and his action-writing and suspense-building craft is vacuum tight. I’ll definitely be following where he goes with the series. You can read my full review here.

I read pretty purposefully, and this year I was eating up popular, historical, and #OwnVoices gay fantasy to consider titles for my curated Intro to Gay Fantasy list. Thirteen of the twenty-four books I read fall into that research category, and I thought three of those titles were worthy of adding to the project: Lawrence Schimel’s fairytale inspired short story collection The Drag Queen of Elfland, Ricardo Pinto’s Stone Dance of the Chameleon trilogy, which begins with The Chosen, and Philip Ridley’s In The Eyes of Mr. Fury.

All three of those titles are remarkable and appealing for different reasons. If you like heart-warming, young adult-ish magical fantasy, In the Eyes of Mr. Fury is the book you should drop everything to read RIGHT NOW. If you like dark, complex, slow-burning epic fantasy with a gay hero who breaks the mold, get cracking with Ricardo Pinto’s trilogy. Well, if I could take just one book with me to a desert island, I’ll say I’d be in good company with Stone Dance of the Chameleon.

So that leaves just three books that fall in the category of “read for pleasure,” and you see my dillemma. I don’t have much reading time to pick up new books by authors I like or try something different that might be fun. I did read Gregory Maguire’s re-imagined story of the Nutcracker Hiddensee (and LOVED IT). And I did finally get to read Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, which had been on my TBR list forever. That was a little dry, but still a mind-blowing work of literature, written with such authority and an authentic voice you can’t believe it’s not source material.

I’ll end with some fun by answering the question: what’s the strangest book I read last year? I actually have two.

First, while researching gay fantasy novels written before the 1960s, I came upon William Beckford’s Vathek. It was first published in 1792. Though I’m afraid that’s the only intriguing thing about Beckford’s bizarre, overly-written and ultimately unreadable tribute to arcane magic and horror.

Then, I chose a re-printing of a “gay pulp classic” from the 1960s – Neil J. Weston’s Naked Launch 2. – to review for Out in Print since Riverdale Avenue Books recently launched an imprint to re-release a series of pulp titles. It’s just about the most absurdly adolescent take on gay pirates I can imagine, but the story ended up winning me over. There’s a lot of heart and hopefulness in-between the copious scenes of pirate debauchery.

So that’s my year in books! This will be my last post of 2018 so let me say Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, and Thank You Very Kindly for supporting my work. 🙂