Who learns most from a good book is the author. – José Bergamín
Y’all have been pushing me for a book for a while now, and I’ve been talking about it for even longer, but at last the day is nigh! As I think I’ve mentioned in print somewhere, I plan to do two books, one of fiction and one of nonfiction. And given that I’m new to the whole self-publishing thing, I decided to do the fiction volume first because that way the “front end” would be easy, allowing me to concentrate on the “back end”; in other words, since most of the stories were already written I wouldn’t have to generate much new content and could devote my attention to all the details of actually preparing the product. Now that I’ve learned how to do all that (and set up the infrastructure to manage the business end), that aspect will be relatively easy next time and I’ll be able to concentrate on writing the composite essays necessary for the nonfiction volume.
There was also a bit of strategy involved in releasing the books in this order. There are two main reasons for writing books rather than just blogging: first, to make money; and second, to expose a wider audience to my ideas. And I believe both of those can be maximized by doing a volume of fiction first. Stories are more accessible than essays; one might say they have a lower entry threshold, and many people who would never pick up a book of essays by an author they’ve never heard of will happily buy a book of stories by the same person just because the description seems interesting or they like the cover art. If they enjoy those stories, at least some of them are likely to buy a future essay book with the same name on it, and even if they don’t ever give my nonfiction as much as a glance they’ll have been exposed to the central theme of most of my writing, both fiction and nonfiction: whores are not a special “type” of person, but rather just people like anyone else.
Since most of the content of this volume is already available for free on this site, I wanted to give the readers who choose to buy one something special. So not only did I write a new, longer-than-usual story for the collection which will not appear online, but I also wanted to have some top-notch cover art (I also figure an attractive cover will get more attention). Accordingly, I asked friend and regular reader Chester Brown (creator of Paying For It, Louis Riel and many others) if he’d do me the honor, and as you can see the result is magnificent (and you may recognize the model). As for the format and design of the book itself, I hope you’ll find it adequate; if not, one of the advantages of self-publishing for the reader is that he knows exactly who to blame! The official release date is Wednesday, but it still may take a few days for it to pop up in Amazon searches. You’ll be able to buy it four different ways: First, as an e-book; second, as a paper book; third, in an autographed copy mailed directly to you from my own stock (this will cost just a little extra because of the handling and all); and fourth, from me at a book signing, of which I plan to have as many as possible this year (and will inform you of as they come up). With any luck the book will sell well enough to attract the attention of a conventional publisher, but even if it doesn’t I plan to keep releasing new ones at least once per year or so in the future. Wish me luck!
UPDATE: You can now buy the book on Amazon for $15.95 US; it’s also available on Kindle for $8 US, but the autograph option (for which I’ll probably charge $30 US, with free shipping) may still be a few weeks yet. It’s also available for £9.95 in the UK and €11.95 in France, Germany and Italy. Readers in other countries will need to order it from the Amazon branch which gives them the best price and service, or directly from CreateSpace (international shipping applies), or from me once that option becomes available in March.
Congratulations Maggie – I’ll be getting hold of a copy as soon as I can! Can’t wait to read it
Woot! Congrats Maggie!
Hey Lady Miss M,
I am so proud of you! Go Maggie!
I want to buy an autographed authors stock book. Tout suite!
Next link you send out hyperlink to the ways you can purchase and/or ISBN# so we can look for it on Amazon and hopefully will cause it to rise in rank?
I’m still rebuilding my home from Sandy, so I can’t promise to go to a NY area book signing. That said, if you have that on your radar, please let me know any whisper dates so I can arrange to be there.
Where do I send money to buy your book? I have paypal, but only keep a few bucks in to that account. Good Luck! Jylly Jakes
I’m ordering a copy as soon as it shows up at Amazon!
Good work, hopefully it will be a success.
Given the way you feel about planes, I guess it’s too much to hope to see you at a book signing in Europe. Oh well, I’ll have to get your book another way.
You’ll be able to buy a regular copy from Amazon, and a signed copy from here. 🙂
Or I’ll have to take a plane myself 🙂
Good luck! I can’t wait to read it.
Hmm… I think you’re dead on about how much more likely people are to pick up something titled “short stories” rather than “essays”. In fact, you might want to entirely avoid using the term “essays” for your second book’s marketing (including in the title).
Consider what memories most people associate with each term:
“Short stories”, fond-if-time-blurred memories of a parent reading bedtime stories to us in our much less complicated childhoods.
“Essays”, high school memories we’ve tried to repress of being forced to write book reports on a book we wouldn’t have chosen to read for pleasure, which were then judged harshly by an authority figure we probably didn’t respect, during an age when we were most emotionally vunerable to criticism.
Yeah… “Essays” is a negative word assiciation for most people, I suspect, even if it is the most accurate term for your second book’s content and format, I suggest pulling out a thesaurus and finding a term that doesn’t evoke memories of people’s least favourite aspects of school.
I’m sure your book will do well.
Whoa! It’s ABOUT TIME! Congratulations!
I LOVE the cover art – but what’s with the snakes? I envisoned chickens – not snakes!
Well, now that I think of it – there was one picture you posted of you holding a snake, I think – there were a couple of other things in the picture that distracted me! 😛
Again – Congratulations and, as we say in the submarine fleet … hope you make a METRIC BUTT-TON OF MONEY off it!!
The snakes are symbolic. Think snake charming, Medusa, Freud. And yes, they’re also a private joke for readers who remember that picture; that’s one of the reasons I picked that one from a number of good sketches Chester sent me. 🙂
Congratulations!
Reblogged this on Sable Aradia, Priestess & Witch.
Congratulations, Maggie!
Congratulations, a lot of work achieving this!
I hope to get an autographed copy when it’s available!
Good luck, Maggie. Your writing is both informative & captivating. Put your eyes on the back cover & the publishing world is yours.
Very exciting. Although I do write essays, myself, I can certainly understand why presenting your writing as “short stories” would be more effective. And salable.
Such wonderful art work, too!!! So happy for you!
Best,
Elisabeth
Wow! Congratulations, Maggie. That’s one down and more to come. Very happy for proud you. Keep it coming!
would be nice if you made the book available as a non-DRM-encumbered PDF with a bitcoin QR code on the cover and provided a recommended price denoted in US$
I have no idea what most of that means. It will be available electronically on Kindle, but I don’t know about that other stuff.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover”, this is one of those exceptions.
Wonderful news, and congratulations!
I could have worded it better. I like the cover art.
Congratulations, Maggie. I hope it’s a great success and I look forward to buying a copy at a signing.
[…] Maggie McNeill, who blogs at The Honest Courtesan, is publishing a collection of her sexy short fiction. If you’re a regular reader (as you should be) you may have read most of the stories, but Maggie promises an extra previously-unpublished story, and the cover art is fan-freaking-tastic. […]
Wow! I love your blog and your activism in helping the mainstream world understand sex work with less hearsay judgement and more objective facts. Thank you!
This was my first blog post of yours that I’ve read (incidentally, published on my birthday this year—how magical!), and I look forward reading more post from you. And I went ahead and bought your book on Amazon, as well as “Paying For It” by your friend.
I’m really excited to dive deeper into understanding this subject and being a conduit of the necessary shift in perspective that our modern world so desperately needs and aches for.
Love and Blessings to you!
Thank you so much, Ileana; this comment made my day! Welcome to the blog, and I hope you enjoy the books!
[…] if you’d like to see thirty-six more like it in a more traditional format, my collection Ladies of the Night is now available at Amazon UK for under […]
I finished your book the other day and left up a long review at Amazon. Since the last story “Nephil” is exclusive to your book and has not been posted up on your blog, I thought this would be the best place to comment on it. It’s a very good story and it’s the only one besides the opening “Pandora” that does not directly or indirectly involve sex workers. The protagonist is a biology teacher and a single mother who is starting to get some uncomfortable questions from her teenage son about his biological father. This isn’t one of Maggie’s stories with a surprise ending. I suspect only Professor Higginbotham of “X Factor” will not correctly guess the nature of both Jim and his son. The narrator is no fool, and specifically becomes a biologist (earning a doctorate) because she already suspects the answer, too. So the reader will have a pretty good idea of where this story is going, but that doesn’t make the ending less heartbreaking or devastating. I mentioned that at the beginning that this story had nothing to do with sex work, and I just realized that this might not be true at all, because if in Maggie’s words “the laws of biology were not designed with human happiness in mind”, that truth has EVERYTHING to do with the importance of sex work.
Eddie, I took the liberty of editing two sentences out of the middle of your reply because I felt they gave a tad too much away. 🙂
Thank you. Please accept my apologies. Just because I could see where the story was going doesn’t mean there aren’t any spoilers.
I also saw the ending coming in that story, but so many others were a surprise the first time I read them; like “Concubine” and “Mercy” and especially “The Specialist”.
Some of the less surprising endings were really well done – like in “Ghost in the machine”. It’s quite predictable what would happen, but it is still a deliciously executed finale.
I would argue that “Ghost In The Machine” does have a surprise ending in the punch line itself, although most readers probably (and rightly) suspected that something would go wrong, especially with the hints given in the story.
Also, I don’t think that not all the stories have to have sex worker protagonists—I can see versions of “Friend” where Judith was not a whore and “Visions of Sugarplums” where Miss Kane is simply a traveling secretary and the core of the story would still be the same. But considering what Maggie said about her muse, if writing the main character as a whore makes it easier for her to write the stories, that more than justifies it.
I think you’re definitely right about “Friend” but only somewhat right about “Visions of Sugarplums”; after all, the setup for Miss Kane getting stuck with babysitting Nahgi is cross-cultural confusion over the concept of a “paid companion”. I’m sure I could have worked it out differently, but it wouldn’t have been as funny.
I gave my mother a loose summery of “Visions of Sugarplumbs,” and she laughed at the alien’s logic: of course a paid companion is the perfect person to hire to watch your child. Whereas here in the US and in many other Earthly nations, we want to call the cops, a shrink, and an exorcist if we find out that a paid companion has so much as glanced at a child.
Also, I don’t know if this is because of the reviews or because people have started buying the book, but the price of the paper book on U.S. Amazon has dropped to $13.65. The U.S. Kindle price is now $7.94. I was unaware of this (*doh!*) but people who purchase the paper book as I did can get the Kindle book for only $1.99 USD.
The Amazon price fluctuates from day to day; it was down to twelve-something for one day but went back up. I have no idea how that works. But the Kindle deal was something I consciously opted into so readers could get the extra format to lend out if they want.
Hi Maggie,
I am going to snap up an autographed copy, and hope it goes really well for you. I enjoy your blog immensely and I’m sure the book(s) will be wonderful!
Best,
Anne O Nomis
Archaeologist / historian
Author of ‘The History & Arts of the Dominatrix’
http://www.historyofthedominatrix.com
Congratulations! I’ve said that already, but it was on a post which had nothing to do with the book itself; I’d just noticed it was for sale. But I wanted to say it again on this post, which is about the book. I hope that people give the book a go, because I think that they will really like it if they do.
I attended Project: A-KON this past weekend, as I do every year. Had a great time, in spite of some weirdness which might’ve ruined it all, but didn’t. For some reason (I don’t remember what brought it up) I had the occasion to mention you to one of the merchants at the con. She had me spell out your blog title (I couldn’t remember the whole URL) and I did tell her it was on WordPress. She said she’d be interested in reading it.
I wonder if you might enjoy talking with Lee Martindale, who edited a book of short stories with a similar theme. I mentioned you to her last year, and she practically lit up over it. I think you two might get along well.
[…] Maggie McNeill, the popular sex worker rights blogger, retired librarian and retired call girl behind “The Honest Courtesan” just published her first short stories collection, Ladies of the Night. […]