Did you ever think Ancilla would be your most popular book? Why or why not?
To date, Ancilla is my only novel, and no, I never thought it would be popular. The only thing it has going for it in terms of popularity is sex. There's a lot of explicit sex in Ancilla, and there are a lot of people who want to read about people getting it on. It's kinky, too, and I think writers like E L James have proved that books with bondage and spanking in them sell like hotcakes.
However.
However.
The kink in Ancilla is considerably more extreme than it is in bestsellers like Fifty Shades of Rubbish - it can be assumed that plenty of spanking and tying up goes on behind the scenes, but what gets shown are canings, knife play, temporary genital piercings, heavy floggings - most of which the protagonist must endure in silence, without making so much as a whimper. There's also mysticism and ceremonial magic, philosophical and literary discussion, and musicology that I insert into the erotic prose like broccoli snuck into a cheesy, saucy lasagna. At one point the protagonist and her mentor/dom/soulmate are analyzing the letters of Heloise and Abelard and quote from the letters in the original Latin... This is not what most people look for when they pick up a book of smut.
Of course, Ancilla is so much more than just smut. It's literary erotica... and it's a bisexual bildungsroman, it's magical realism, it's dark academia, it's a romantic love story, it's an atypical vampire story in which vampirism is not paranormal at all and it's more like a disability than like some kind of dark gift that grants superpowers and immortality. Ancilla is a story about coming of age in the early nineties in a deeply conservative part of the Rust Belt of America and coming to terms with being a hopeless misfit in a society that's made for people who conform easily.
It's serious.
And then there's the ending... I'd better say nothing about the ending, because of spoilers, but the ending is not the sort of ending most readers of erotica or romance expect.
In fact, almost nothing about Ancilla conforms to tropes for any known genre. The vampires are weird, the romantic tropes are weird, and the plot and characterization are meant to take a wrecking ball to the conventions of dark romance and to the toxicity of writers like E L James, Colleen Hoover, and H D Carlton. (To say I'm not a fan of them would be to put it lightly).
The prose forces people to work at reading it, which is not what people want from their one-handed reading material. Furthermore, it's obviously artistic. (It's artistic in more ways than one, in fact - I illustrated the novel myself).
People who want erotica or erotic, dark romance want easy prose, stock tropes, and smut.
People who want literary fiction don't want a kinky sexfest. (Does anyone actually read Anais Nin these days?)
Ancilla is neither fish nor fowl, and I expected it to do terribly. As it is, I've sold maybe two hundred copies of the commercial edition, mostly in ebook form, and the Wattpad edition hit five thousand views this week after having been on the platform for roughly nine months, plus almost two thousand for the serialized/soundbite edition, making for seven thousand views total - which I've been told is not extreme popularity, but it's still above average - the average book on Wattpad gets between one and two thousand views in the space of an entire year.
I was not expecting that. I was expecting Ancilla to completely bomb.
What got you into writing in the first place?
YOU ARE READING
Ancilla's Awards and Reviews
RandomI decided it was time to make a portfolio for the awards and reviews Ancilla has received. The pages they were on were cluttering up the back section of the original book; I deleted the pages once I made this portfolio. My apologies to anyone who mi...
