Circlet Press: Welcome to Circlet 2.0

Circlet Press, Inc.
39 Hurlbut Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Editorial Offices: (617) 864-0492
Bookstore Orders: (800) 729-6423
general email box: circletintern AT gmail DOT com

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Employment Information:
• • internships
• • jobs
• • writers guidelines
• • art guidelines

Visit our Cafe Press Shop: http://www.cafepress.com/circletpress

Bug reporting: Need to report a bug in the web site, formatting error in an ebook, or error in a printed book? Please comment to the bug report post.

Posting Policies: We welcome comments on our blog posts, but we will remove any comments which promote racist, sexist, hateful, or sex-negative views. We are a sex-positive organization and we believe strongly that freedom of erotic expression is an important key to human happiness, and that promotion of the erotic imagination is healthy.

Statement on DRM:We don’t consider DRM to be effective or reader-friendly. We publish our digital books without DRM (digital rights management) software. This means if you have bought a downloadable file direct from us, you don’t need a special password to access the file or to copy it from one device to another. Some third-party retailers may add their own DRM ‘wrapper’ to downloads, but on all sites where the publisher is allowed to control it, we have disabled it.

Company Profile & History

Circlet Press is an independent publisher dedicated to “celebrating the erotic imagination.” In specific, we are known for existing in the niche we call “erotic science fiction.” (Which means, of course, that we do fantasy, too, but lack a decent catch-all term for our genre.) If you’re just discovering us, we’ve been around since March 1992, when our first book, “Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords” by Cecilia Tan, was published, debuting at the Lunacon science fiction convention. “Mate” by Lauren P. Burka came shortly thereafter, in April.

What has followed since then is a long string of books, mostly anthologies but also some stand-alone books, featuring the work of such noted authors as Francesca Lia Block (Weetzie Bat, Dangerous Angels), Lawrence Schimel (Two Boys In Love), Catherine Asaro (The Last Hawk), Nancy Kilpatrick (writing as Amarantha Knight), Delia Sherman (The Porcelain Dove, Fall of the Kings), Carol Queen (The Leatherdaddy and the Femme), as well as giving many, many writers their start in either erotica, sf/f, or both. Among the writers who are fairly well known now who sold either their first or one of their very early works to us: Mary Anne Mohanraj, Gary Bowen, M. Christian, Thomas S. Roche, Raven Kaldera, and others.

At the time of this update (May 2010), Circlet has 27 books in print, with nearly an equal number no longer in print. This intrepid small press has survived the bankruptcies of its distributor twice, has weathered the “boom” and crash of the gay book business, and continues to rely on the whims of the two hegemonic behemoths in the book biz (Borders and Barnes & Noble) to survive. (Don’t we all.)

Circlet titles have been nominated for many awards, including the Independent Press Awards, Ben Franklin/PMA Awards, the Lambda Literary Award, Spectrum Award for gay/lesbian science fiction, Firecracker Alternative Book Award, and others. In May 2010 our anthology “Like A Thorn” received the NLA: International award for best anthology.

The latest venture within Circlet is the blogsite you are reading this “about” page on. “Circlet 2.0″–as we affectionately call it–will continue to further our mission… oh wait, we still never quite described our mission.

“Celebrating the erotic imagination” is rather nebulous, but everything we’ve done has fit into what is for us a mission to open up and mark out new territory in both erotica and sf/fantasy. In 1991, when we began, the majority of the erotica (and porn writing) being published in English was formulaic and boring, and very, very, “real world.” Anne Rice hadn’t yet brought her vampires out of the closet, and people’s idea of “erotic science fiction” was alien abductions with anal probes. (UH, fun, but there could be so much more…!) The science fiction and fantasy genres, meanwhile, were mired in the idea that their target audience still consisted of 13-year-old boys, who don’t like “mushy” stuff, and whose parents would freak out if the content were too “adult.”

Of course, polls showed quite firmly that the average sf/f paperback reader was more likely to be female (55% at that time) than male, and between the ages of 25 and 35, and many older than that. And our own experiences within the alternative sexuality communities of leather, fetish, and bisexuality, showed us that there was an almost universal interest in sf/fantasy among those populations. Where were the books for those folks? Where were the books for us?

Well, someone had to start publishing them, and we did. Consistent praise from reviewers, a growing submission pile, the addition of various high-profile authors, and the inclusion of many Circlet stories in Best American Erotica and other such places, defined our “golden age” in the 1990s, when alternative culture as a whole redefined many genre boundaries in mainstream media. The emergence of writers like Poppy Z. Brite, Circlet’s founder Cecilia Tan, and others pushing the envelope of erotic content within the sf/f genre at this time was eased by the expansion of the genre’s boundaries brought about by Circlet, and led to the eventual smash successes of works like the Black Jewels books by Anne Bishop, Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel books, and others.

Anne Rice even let her vampires out of the closet, allowing Lestat to refer to Louis as his “lover.” (Despite the fact that her vampires don’t have any sex.)

So what comes next for little Circlet Press? The website/blog continues to foster that imaginative spark that puts fantasy and erotica together. We will be hosting a podcast which will include short audio fictions, interviews with writers, and more. The site features essays by our authors and noted writers on such subjects as the intersection between erotica and sf, our need for fantasy, and why the alien abduction with anal probe story is STILL not hot for us (but is for some people).

As of Spring 2010 we have eight developmental editors acquiring manuscripts for anthologies and working with our authors to develop full-length projects. We have published over 30 ebook originals in the past 2 years, with many more on the way. Microfictions run on the site every Friday, and serialized fiction on Wednesday, with news, reviews, and essays on various Tuesdays and Thursdays, and excerpts from new books on Mondays.

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Wikipedia on Circlet Press: clicky!
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Some online press:
A Conversation from DAZE Reader online magazine between authors/editors M. Christian and Cecilia Tan.

Recommended reading from the Speculative Literature Foundation.

Reading list of feminist SF/F from FeministSF.org.

Interview with Cecilia Tan from Strange Horizons magazine.

Review of Erotic Fantastic at The Harrow.

One Of Us profile on Cecilia Tan from Boston’s Bay Windows newspaper.

Praise For Circlet Press

“Fabulous books! There’s nothing else like them.”
– Susie Bright, editor of Best American Erotica

“The writing is superb and the use of SF tropes is skilled. Many of our SF writers would do well to emulate these authors for they have renewed the future. And it is brave, bold, and sexy indeed.”
– SFRA Review

“If you happen to be turned on by fabulous, fluent, and imaginative writing, mixed with inventive and significant sexual encounters and a lively sense of humor, I highly recommend the short story anthologies from Boston-based Circlet Press.”
– Paramour Magazine

“These gentle books hold your attention, are highly spiritual, intelligently written and oh so smooth to read!”
– EIDOS

“The tropes of fantasy and science fiction can inspire erotica that stretches the imagination of both writer and reader. No one need argue that point anymore: [Circlet Press] proves it.”
–Lambda Book Report

“Circlet Press has rapidly established itself as a consistently orginal publishing house… All Circlet Press volumes maintain a high standard of writing and a welcome greater unpredictability in their narratives than writings to be found in some… formulaic erotic imprints.”
– Skin Two

“Cecilia Tan and Circlet Press need to be praised for their dedication to the cause of erotica in speculative fiction. …The imaginative breadth of speculative fiction gives its writers the chance to be among the forerunners in an exciting and very necessary movement.”
– Tangent

“It’s hard not to enjoy the pleasures of reading tasteful erotica from Circlet.”
– True Review

More places to find us:

We have a Facebook group and a Facebook page
We’re on MySpace
We have a Livejournal Community
Follow our Twitter Feed
with undoubtedly more to come…