E-publishing 'poster girl' and suspense / erotica / psychological drama writer M.J.Rose has been dodging labels like these since the release of her first novel Lip Service in 1998. The book was adored by a sozzle of publishing editors, who promptly turned it down. Concerned that the book, an erotic thriller concerning a rebellious heroine who becomes embroiled in phone-sex, was 'a little too sexy and a little too intelligent', no-one could find the right box to put it in.

Buoyed by these rave rejections and her own ad agency background, M.J. turned to the Internet and published Lip Service herself as a downloadable e-book. Timing is everything, and by 1999 dot-com hoopla was reaching fever pitch. MJ's efforts had created a buzz online and off, and Lip Service was picked up by Pocket Books to be published in the more traditional papery form, like you might buy in a shop. She was on her way.

These days, M.J. has left electronic novel publishing behind, and believes she's finally shaken free the e-ntrepreneur image. She still writes books that are hard to classify, but both her publisher and her readers are getting used to that idea. With four further novels under her belt, M.J. also now lends her experience to other writers via an online marketing class based on her own non fiction work Buzz Your Book.

To find out about her experiences, and learn a few tips about marketing, we got under the covers with M.J.Rose. In a metaphorical sense. Don't write in.

Great Writing: Had you much experience of internet marketing for books before you published Lip Service? Were you confident that it would work for you?

M.J. Rose: None. And no, I was anything but confident. It was 1998. Not many people really understood internet marketing. You know what. It's 2005 and I still don't think many people understand it. I was just experimenting and I was lucky that it worked.

GW: In hindsight, self-publishing was a smart move. But at the time were you worried that this could be seen as vanity publishing by a rejected author?

MJR: It was seen as vanity publishing. My agent begged me not to do it. The repercussions from it have lasted all this time. I think this is the first year where I have felt it's finally behind me. But boy, did I suffer slings and arrows. You would have thought I ate a baby for breakfast. I used to counter everyone with a reference to independent filmmakers and how respected they were and ask why writers didn't get the same respect. No one ever gave me a good answer, though.

But I never would have done it if I hadn't gotten such positive feedback from editors. It was what made me do it. All the feedback was the same. They loved two of my books. They wanted to buy them. One editor even made an offer the marketing dept. forced her to rescind. The issue was they couldn't figure out what I was writing and so didn't know how to sell it. Too literary to be commercial, too commercial to be literary, a little bit of suspense, but not a suspense book, and erotic too, but not classifiable as an erotic novel. And this happened with two books in a row. It was sheer frustration that I wanted to prove - via marketing - that you could market my fiction and that readers would respond to it.

GW: Was this purely a 'needs-must' exercise, or were there inherent benefits in ebook distribution that you wouldn't get from traditional publishing?

MJR: I wish I had been so systematic and thoughtful about it. I did it first via an ebook because I thought readers would find it so novel  - forgive the pun - it would work and I could save the money of having to print it. That didn't work. 9 out of 10 people who wanted to read the book, wanted a printed book. So then I had them printed.

GW: Do you think electronic publishing for novels will eventually supplant print?

MJR: Not for fiction. No, not in my lifetime. I think there will be better electronic ways to read books in the future. But if something is not broken there is no need to fix it and books are not broken. So when the technology gets better, more people will read on line but people will still buy paper books as long as people print them. Textbooks might go all electronic though. (And they should.)

GW: More and more authors are starting their own personal websites to communicate with the outside world. Is it important even for published authors to take charge of their own publicity?

MJR: I don't think we have a choice. No one else is taking charge of our publicity. I teach a class  - Buzz Your Book - where the goal is to help authors come up with plans and ideas so they can be marketing partners with their publishers. Not drive their publicists crazy but do the things for their own books, that no publisher can afford to do for every single title. There are close to 500 novels published each and every single week. We need to connect to our readers ourselves. For many of us, it's our only hope. Websites, blogs, radio interviews, articles in newspapers and magazines, working in Starbucks with stamps of our books pasted on our cheeks - whatever it takes, I'm all for it.

The sad part is that we aren't wired to do it. It's not why we become writers. If we wanted to go into promotion, we'd all be in advertising.

GW: Your work tends to blend genres, but 'erotic' is never far from the strapline. If you had to wear a label, would be as an erotica author?

MJR: No, if I had to wear a label I think it would be psychological.

You can't draw a character, deeply and fully, without dealing with his/her whole psychology. And that includes his/her sexuality. But that said, I'm easy - if you want to call me erotic, I won't argue.

GW: Having now become more 'conventionally' established, is there more pressure to conform to marketable categories, or has the hard-to-pin-down nature of your work become your hallmark?

MJR: I'm lucky in that my publisher is okay with my non conventionality. In fact in 2006 I'll  have two psychological suspense novels published and one truly erotic novel published. I sort of like that I can't be pinned down and that people are starting to get that about me. I always thought it was so sad that as artists we are prized for our creativity and then asked to curtail it and fit into a category. That gets too boring.

GW: Is perhaps this cross-genre effect a symptom of the increasingly permissive nature of the modern novel? Could it be that genre classifications are somewhat outdated, and in fact some previously genre-bound themes such as erotica, crime, horror, fantasy, etc., are making their way into more mainstream work?

MJR: Yes, I think that's true too. But marketers really love those labels, baby. They make it so easy to quickly communicate something to the potential buyer. Even if this ultimately makes for too much sameness, in the short run it is easier for them.

GW: One could look at the cover of your latest book The Halo Effect and expect a quasi-religious Da Vinci-esque thriller, which would be somewhat erroneous.

MJR: It's shorthand. They have to give it a look - so of the dozen or so open to them - the thriller cover works better. Lets think about it. They can't give it a chick lit cover - it's way too dark and suspenseful, or a cozy cover - it's not a traditional mystery. They, can't give it a literary cover - Flesh Tones and Sheet Music both suffered terribly for their "too literary" type covers. You looked at those books on the shelf and they didn't look one bit like psychological suspense.

GW:. The commissioning editor of Virgin's Black Lace imprint has recently branded submissions from UK authors 'appalling'. Why do you think Americans are better at writing about sex?

MJR: I am not aware that they are. I think writing about sex is really very difficult. No matter what continent you live on. I'm not sure why it's so much more difficult to write about a sensual experience than a murder, but for some reason it seems to be.

GW. What advice would you offer to a novelist whose rejection slip pile is getting as thick as their manuscript?

MJR: Understand - even though this is almost impossible to do before you are published -  being published isn't the prize. Writing is. Getting lost in the story is. Sitting down and disappearing into your character's head is. Spending an hour on a sentence and then knowing it says exactly what you wanted it to say, is.

If you put all your focus on getting published instead of loving the writing you'll wind up wasting precious time you'll never get back.

Screw the people who make the decisions. It's the writing that saves me every time, nothing else.

M.J. Rose's five novels, Lip Service, In Fidelity, Flesh Tones, Sheet Music, and The Halo Effect are available in real paper form from bookshops. Well, obviously. I mean, you wouldn't go to the the chemists for them, would you? You can find out more about M.J. by visiting her website and catch up on her thoughts on other work via her blogs Buzz, Balls & Hype and Backstory. Finally, if you have a finished manuscript on the shelf and don't know what to do next, you could do worse than enrolling in M.J.'s online course, Buzz Your Book where she'll even talk to you on the phone.