Meet Author and Publisher Cecilia Tan

My first for-pay story was back in 1995 and the woman who bought my story was named Cecilia Tan. Over the years I've gotten to know her better, even shared a hotel room with her at a convention, and we've continued the relationship of publisher and writer. She, herself, is an accomplished author, one of my favorites. Today I want to introduce you all to her.

Welcome to the Butt-Kicking Women Write About it, Cecilia. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me so I can let the world know more about you.

Cecilia, you've been in publishing and in writing for quite some time now. How did you get into this career?

I always knew I was going to be a writer from a very young age. I was four when I taught myself to write using the alphabet because I wanted to write by own books, not just have my mother read me the ones I already had. I could literally write before I could read. I got a job in book publishing right out of college, thinking that would be the best day job for a writer to have, and voila, here we are more than 20 years later. 

I met you in the 1990s as the publisher of Circlet Press. While I don't want to spend a lot of time on that part of your life, would you share something about Circlet so our readers could check it out?

Sure! I had been working at a regular book publisher for a couple of years when I started writing erotic science fiction. When I realized there was no one out there publishing erotic science fiction I thought, well, I know how publishing works...I'll start a house to do it. So I founded the company and published "Telepaths Don't Need Safewords" in 1992. Since then Circlet has published well over a hundred books, most of them erotic science fiction and fantasy of some stripe. We do anywhere from ten to twenty-five books a year now. 

Do you think there will come a time when you give up the role of publisher to just focus on your own books?

I almost did that in 2007, after 7 years in a row of the company losing money. Then the Kindle store suddenly appeared and I thought, well, I'll teach myself to convert our old books to Kindle format and see what happens. Suddenly, wham, Circlet was busy and making money again. Nowadays I have a staff of a dozen editors and two freelance publicity people so I think Circlet will continue for a while yet. The good thing about having other people working on the company is that I can spend more time on my own writing and I don't have to shut down the company to do it. If someone offered me enough money to sell the company, I probably would, but right now I'm content to have both my writing career and keep the company going. 

Let's focus on your own books. Of all of your books, which one has has the greatest success, however you wish to define that?

The book that has made the biggest splash by far is SLOW SURRENDER. Not only was this the book that had the biggest mainstream commercial reach (it was sold in Target as well as regular bookstores), it also won a couple of the major awards in romance (RT Reviewers Choice, Magnolia Award), got good reviews, and has overall been my best-selling book to date. It was published in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey when fans were both clamoring for more BDSM romance while on the other hand those critical of Fifty Shades were clamoring for something more representative of consensual kink. SLOW SURRENDER managed to satisfy both. 

Have you heard of this new Syfy series called The Magicians? When I first heard about it and saw promos it made me think of your series Magic University. Do you think your series could make a good TV series?

Magic University would make a great TV series except they would never get away with showing all the sex necessary to the plot. When your main character has to masturbate to do his homework assignments and has to have ritual sex to pass his classes and move the plot forward, I just don't see how they could do that on television. 

I think it might work on some cable channels but let's all keep our fingers crossed for that.

Cecilia, you've had success with an online serialized work called Daron's Guitar Chronicles that have turned into books but also continues online as a web series. How did you get the idea to do this particular series?

Daron walked into my head fully formed as a character when I was a teenager. I was about sixteen, I think. He came to me as an adult character in his forties, actually, with a long backstory that I started delving into right away by writing stories about him from the points of view of other characters. Then in my MFA program in 1992 I started writing the current Daron's Guitar Chronicles. When I hit 300,000 words I forced myself to stop, and my agent tried to sell that version (four times the size of a regular novel...) but got no takers other than a few literary houses that would have paid $2,000 if I could cut it down to 80,000 words. 

I tried but could not realistically condense it down that much. I gave up and stuck it in a drawer until 2009, when I realized, hey, I could just publish this as if it were this character's blog. DGC really is a serial, not a novel, where the chapters are very short and not a lot happens in any given one: it's all about the gradual buildup over time of experience and maturity that allows our character to overcome his internalized homophobia, childhood trauma, and become a fully functioning human being. It's still going, two new chapters a week, six years later. 

Did your work on Daron's Guitar Chronicles lead you to your Rock Star series?

Partly? The hero in Slow Surrender is a rock star, too. Having worked in rock radio and the music industry during high school and college, I have a lot of background in the music business. After Slow Surrender was so popular, my editor at Hachette said she wanted more rock stars, but this time wanted a series with a new hero in each book. I told her, "I can write rock stars all day long." And she said, "Bring it." So I did. 

Your latest book, Taking the Lead, is part of a the Rock Star series, the first book in the series. Would you tell us a bit about this book?

This book kicks off a new series that will have a couple of common threads. One of them is that the heroes are all members of the same rock band, The Rough. Taking the Lead's hero is the lead singer, Axel, while Wild Licks (August 2016) will star Mal, the guitarist, and Hard Rhythm (January 2017) will star the drummer, Chino. 

Are Ricki Hamilton (Taking the Lead) and Gwen Hamilton (Wild Licks) related to each other? Is this series the stories of a family?

They are sisters, and the heiresses to a Hollywood mogul's fortune. One of the other threads in the rock star series is that a provision of the will is that they have to keep the secret BDSM club that their grandfather started in the 1950s going. There's a dungeon in their mansion and they each have differing feelings about the family's secret kinky legacy. 

You have two more books coming out in the Rock Stars series. What are your writing plans after that?

I've already turned in the first book of The Vanished Chronicles, a new erotic urban fantasy/paranormal series from Tor Books that I'll have coming out in 2017. It's a bit like your classic "there's an underground world of vampires who walk among us" story, except there are no vampires. Instead there are practitioners of an ancient ritual magic that modern BDSM and blood play can trigger. And with any luck, who knows, maybe both the rock star series and this series might carry beyond three books!

I'll cross my fingers for both series to become more than trilogies. Thank you, Cecilia, for talking with me today.