A pirate ghost, forty-nine cents, and two orphaned stories
In 2007 you could buy a short story from Amazon for forty-nine cents. The program was called Amazon Shorts, and pretty much nobody remembers it. It was Amazon’s experiment in digital fiction, and it ran for a few years before quietly going away. The Kindle turned up later that same year, and after that nobody needed a separate program for selling short fiction. Either that is there were better ways for Amazon to make easier money.
One of the stories in that catalogue was mine. It is in the book I have coming out next month, and getting there took it through four publishers and two names.
Brigand Flames started life in the fall of 2005 as Brigand Love, a Halloween short for Venus Press. Venus was one of the many small digital-only presses inventing e-publishing while the big New York houses were looking the other way. A pirate ghost, a woman tired of competing with a dead fiancée, an old journal bought at a charity auction. I loved that little story.
Venus Press, as is the fate of many new small businesses, didn’t last long, and my tale became an orphan. Yes, that is official publishing terminology. Publishing is a quirky business, part clinging to the past and part dreaming big about the future.
In 2007, after being toned down as requested, Brigand Love joined Amazon Shorts. Then the Kindle arrived, Amazon worked out how much money there was in selling other publishers’ books, and my story was orphaned a second time. I put the steam back in and sent it to Total-E-Bound, a British publisher that is still going today as Totally Bound. That was 2010. In 2014 it moved again, to Ellora’s Cave, and came out under a new title as part of their Exotika line.
Four publishers. Two titles. One pirate.
Fate Unbound began at Venus Press too, in 2006, in a line called Sons of Zeus. It went to Total-E-Bound next, first inside an anthology called Nectar of the Gods in 2008 and then on its own in 2009. Ellora’s Cave gave it a home in 2011, in their Twilight line, which was the heart of the EC paranormal catalogue.
If you were reading romance in the 2000s you probably remember Ellora’s Cave. Founded in 2000, EC built something the big New York publishers insisted could not exist: a thriving market for smutty romance. No women will want to read that trash. The first EC titles sold digitally, via floppy disks sent via snail mail, years before most people had heard of an e-reader.
They called it Romantica, and the paranormals were its wild heart. Vampires, shifters, ghosts, gods. That era wasn’t a trend so much as a permission slip. Anything was possible, as long as the emotion was true and the heat was hot.
When EC stopped its presses in 2016, rights went back to the authors. Putting these two out again as a pair is my way of keeping a little of that time alive.
I have left these stories the way they were. They are of their moment, bold and quick and unapologetic, right down to the handful of spelling and punctuation errors that neither I nor the very good Ellora’s Cave editors ever spotted. Those little quirks are our imperfect human fingerprints. I wouldn’t dream of wiping them away.
To the readers who found me back then, welcome back. To anyone meeting these two for the first time, this is what it felt like when digital romance was young and anything seemed possible.
Flames of Fate collects both stories. Out Tuesday, October 27.
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