01. What are your nicknames?

I don’t have any that I know of. Laura is kind of short to start with. If I am called anything else, it’s probably not printable.

02. How does your hair look currently?

Long, past my shoulder, dark brown, almost black, straight but very full and thick. My hair is one of my best features. It frames my second best feature, my dark eyes.

03. What’s new in your life right now?

Chaos, but that’s not new.  I’m rearranging my office so I can set up a workstation for my eldest son to help me out with time-consuming tasks for the press. It may sound small but the room is large and is filled with computers, four printers, external cd burners, table space, shipping supplies, bookcases, books, promo material, booth supplies, office supplies, fax machines, scanners, and phone lines, cables and enough power cords to reach to town. I do not attempt this job lightly! It will easily take days to accomplish without disrupting work too much. Plus I’m getting ready to make our new bookstore feature live for the press. Lots of work going into that one.

04. How many colors are you wearing now?

Two. Lilac nightie and black dressing gown. Sorry, it’s 2 am. I like to be comfortable when I write.

05. Are you an introvert or extrovert?

Extrovert. I think. (continue reading…)

You may have noticed that rankings and bestseller info has been removed from all a lot of gay romance and gay fiction books in the last few days. It appears that Amazon has decided we are to be hidden from the mainstream readerships. Obviously they don’t understand that a lot of our readers ARE mainstream.

When Amazon was asked about the missing rankings they responded to one author with:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

Plainly, we are being discriminated against by Amazon, shoved into the backroom–again.

Not all authors of adult fiction are being targeted but it is widespread and rampant. So if you are looking for rankings and bestseller lists of adult or gay fiction,  it looks like you’ll need to buy directly from the publisher or hit up B&N.

Hopefully next month MLR Press will have the ability in place to buy ebooks directly from the site (with paypal and credit cards through paypal to begin with) and print books soon after that. We getting everything in place for direct sales. We value our readers and now we REALLY like Barnes and Noble.

From Twitter posts:
If you want to protest to Amazon direct, this is their email addy: connect-help@amazon.com
Other ways to get in touch with them: http://clicheideas.com/amazon.htm

Or write to their CEO:
Jeffrey Bezos. The address is 1200 12th Avenue South, Seattle, Washington 98144-2734, United States Phone: 206-266-1000 Fax: 206-622-2405

There is a petition in circulation, see link below:

The Lambda Literary Awards were announced yesterday and I’m proud to be able to say that two MLR Press titles are among the finalists! Two titles–six authors!

HARD WORKING MEN an anthology by William Maltese, Victor J. Banis, Jardonn Smith and J.P. Bowie made it to the Gay Erotica category while MEXICAN HEAT by Josh Lanyon and Laura Baumbach (me) made it to the Gay Romance listing.

Congratulations to all!

The complete list is here: (continue reading…)

Hi all,

There appears to be a contest going on at Dear Author tomorrow and MLR Press’s MEXICAN HEAT is one of the entries! SO COOL! But it also appears we need people to go vote for the book in order to win . The great part is it looks like there are a lot of prizes for voters including a Sony E-reader!

You can read the details at the link below. Voting started tomorrow. Can I ask you pretty please to go vote for MEXICAN HEAT, in the GLBT category of course, if you enjoyed it? Josh and I would be thrilled! I’m actually kind of really excited about this!

http://dabwaha.com/

Welcome to the 2nd Annual DA BWAHA, Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hellagood Authors. For newcomers, this is a tournament of books that mimics the March Madness tournament of basketball. We’ve picked a slate of 64 books in 8 different categories to compete against each other through the next few weeks.

I’m Laura Baumbach, author and owner of MLR Press, LLC. This is the first blog on the press’s newly constructed author blog. Jet Mykles and Maura Anderson, both authors here and both talented computer geeks *g* created this new venue for us and I’m very proud to make the first post.

MLR Press is a very author-centric press. We work our schedules around authors’ needs where we can, take our authors’ suggestions and creative ideas seriously, and love to give them the creative freedom to tell their masterful tales of mystery, love and romance. We even throw in a little lust and mayhem when we can. We publish M/M erotic romance and gay fiction, the very best we can find to offer to you.

Blogging has become such a rampant passtime for our technology- enthralled and capable society, it has earned a place in every author’s toolbox for generating a connection with their readers.  It’s a natural outlet for authors because if there is one thing we know how to do, it is express ourselves with the written word.

So each day we hope to bring a little of ourselves here to offer our readers. Glimpses of our lives, our likes, our work, our dreams and even some of our not-quite-ready-for-public-display snippets and story ideas. A new author will post every day, and some promo moments will surface whenever a new release hits the shelves, maybe at the same time. We hope this blog will be a place where readers and authors alike will feel comfortable, intrigued, up-lifted, entranced and possibly even startled by what we say and write.

We look forward to readers’ comments and questions, but we will be content just to have you pull up a chair, sit back, relax and get to know us and our work all a little better.   And if you have a topic you’d like us to discuss, leave a comment and we’ll consider it. We’re a pretty accommodating group. *g*