Since RT, I have read a (small) sampling of what Ravenous is publishing. It’s not for me. I write hot. I write hot love stories. I hope I write hot, well crafted love stories. What I don’t write is smut. Never have, never will and God help the editor who dares refer to my work as porn. Such an assertion advances feminism how?

Thanks for the information. It certainly confirms my gut reluctance to submit my work there.

Anne Manning
http://www.annemanning.com
http://www.writeranne.blogspot.com

I’ve been writing romance for a long time and this whole erotica/romantica thing has been bothering me. Jane’s take on the situation is right on and, though I am not a prude and believe a writer should write what she wants and the reader should be able to get and read what she wants, do we have to cede the field of romance to what is…I’ll say it!…smut?

Thanks, Jane, for saying what needed to be said.

Anne Manning

And while I lack the mental fortitude to soldier through to the end of all of these RR books, I have gotten the distinct impression from Jane’s discussions that a lot of them make it difficult to even identify who might be considered the romantic leads, much less pick out a satisfactory ending for them.

I come to this late and I should probably just leave it alone but I just couldn’t resist because the above reminded me so much of something I read and saved several months ago from an article on Teach Me Tonight (emphasis added for comparison):

If we stay with the basic meanings, both pornography and erotica may be well-written or badly-written; both may deal with kinds of sexual activity that an individual reader finds either exhilarating or repellent or any point between: the big difference is that pornography is episodic and lacks the true story arc and distinctive characters that we expect to find in a fully evolved novel. It is aimed only at arousing physical sexual response in the reader. A simple test of pornography is that the average reader can easily lose track of exactly who is doing what to whom. Erotica, though focusing on sexual activity, should follow the conventional structure of novels in having a proper story and believable characters.

Tossing words around doesn’t fool anyone for very long if there isn’t a product there worth the money people are paying for it – I don’t care how cheap it is – particularly if you’re trying to sell it to people who do use those words all the time.

Now, if your market is people who don’t know anything about the genre(s) at all . . . ?

What I’m seeing is a distinct disconnect between “product” and audience. Who the heck are these people really trying to sell to?

Are they? Really?

I submitted and had accepted one story, it came out in their Sweaty Sex Anthology. I will not submit any further stories to Ravenous Romance.

I am so happy I was published with Liquid Silver Books, Loose-Id, and Lyrical Press before becoming entangled with Ravenous Romance. Their business practices could be termed sloppy at best. In their hurry to publish daily, be seen, be heard, they forget there are actually authors doing the work. Items like timely contracts (I actually received a contract the day after publication and have yet to receive back signed copies months later), advances (I was promised $10. and I suppose it is a moot gripe that I was never paid because of the low dollar amount), or correspondence replies (even though I have written the editor and Lori Perkins about my concerns on several occasions, they have not been addressed.)

I would encourage any author who is taking their career serious to avoid Ravenous Romance completely. I wish I had.

Can someone tell me exactly what’s feminist about their smut? Because the excerpts I read weren’t particularly empowering for women.

I don’t even think that they understand what feminist is at all. In fact I am shocked to find that Jamaica Layne is a woman, I was convinced she was a 14 year old school boy :-)

Lets just say that I wont be buying anything that they put out – ever.

Simply because it’s a woman writing dirty, raunchy, poorly-written smut doesn’t make it feminist. It makes it dirty, raunchy, poorly-written smut.

I also received *no* editing or discussion about editing of my short story in an anthology for RR. Oh, and my contract wasn’t even finalized before the anthology was published! Luckily, this particular short story was something I’d written for personal amusement so I’m not heartbroken over losing it for, most likely, the $10 advance that was, like, two weeks late. Live and learn and all that.

Maybe they’re feminist in the same way they’re romance. *shrugs*

It’s disappointing that there’s not an editing process. After I subbed, I found three or four typos. Not a huge deal for a submission, but it’s definitely something you’d want to catch before the thing is published!

…so I don’t know what the editing process will be like.

I received ZERO edits to my short story… or any correspondence about them, for that matter. The standard contract, however, I was able to negotiate without any hassle. It’s not set in stone. And my “advance” was paid promptly. No complaints there. I don’t expect to see another dime, though. Since the story was a quickie piece of stroke I wrote for a magazine that never got off the ground, I don’t feel I’m out anything.

The biggest deterrent to further submissions from me will be RR’s reputation for sloppy editing and purple prose. (#RRTheatre is embarrassing by association.) Phaze has first dibs on my longer work, but my short-short stuff needs pub-love, too. I’m hopeful RR will overcome its reputation, because there’s a lot of energy behind the house.

I’m glad that I just experimented with a short story (under 10k even) and not something longer. I think I would be very, very disappointed if I subbed something that took me months to write and received that contract in response. It is really quite insane. I’m surprised anybody signs it as it stands.

So I got three books from Ravenous just to try them out. I couldn’t make it more than halfway through any of them. But that’s the good thing about ebooks because you can have loads of them on your reader and if one sucks, you go to the next one.

Anyway I haven’t gone back to Ravenous Romance again. Why bother.

Luckily, my book got some great reviews and a couple of awards, and hopefully it’s being judged purely on its own merits and not lumped in with everything else at Ravenous.

Honey, I’d really love to play poker with you just once.

I personally use a very simple litmus test when it comes to new publishers. Regardless of the exact genre designation, I read the blurbs and excerpts and a sometimes a book or two, then play the “name another” game. (Why only “sometimes” on reading a book or two? Because if the blurbs and excerpts are shoddily written, then I don’t feel all cozy about spending my hard-earned money on the rest of the book.)

But, back to the “name another” game. I try to name any other houses who I think would publish said book. I look at the author’s storytelling ability, word choices, sentence structure, and yes, number of typos. And in reality, I don’t put any of those faults on the author. I put them where they belong, on the publisher.

I know that sounds weird, but it is truly the publisher’s fault if they buy such slip-shod stories. The ones that were meant to be shoved under the bed with the dust-bunnies while the author hones his/her craft.

So, if in the end, I can only name other publishers who I feel will basically publish ANYTHING at all if a dime was to be made, then I pass and write the newbie pub off until they class up. Which sometimes never happens.

I’ve had more than my share of issues with editing and other publication-process disasters, and the stress and time it’s taken to deal with have set my writing time (and motivation) back considerably. I’m not even going to go into the issues of payments or contracts, because those are another issue and I’d rather focus on what’s being published since that affects how readers perceive a publisher.

I feel that I have to promo my work twice as hard to overcome these issues, and that the publisher is making it harder for me to sell books rather than easier. I am a fairly new author but I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Luckily, my book got some great reviews and a couple of awards, and hopefully it’s being judged purely on its own merits and not lumped in with everything else at Ravenous.

This whole thing just makes me want to cry. It might not be so bad if RR took a step back and learned from the comments being made rather than just brushing them off as “sour grapes” or a targeted attack on the company or its management. Every company experiences growing pains when first starting out. But I can’t see how they hope to succeed if they can’t learn from their potential market about how to improve.