Howdy, everyone!
It’s time for the September edition of the Smart Bitches Business Update. Once a month, I nerd out for your reading pleasure about the inner workings of the Hot Pink Palace of Bitchery.
I’ve heard from a few folks, including some people at RWA, that this feature is one of your favorites. Thank you! I was really nervous about starting it, and I’m always nervous when I write it each month, but knowing that some of you look forward to it and learn from this discussion is a big help (and motivation, too). So, thank you for that!
This month: New Swag! Over the summer I’ve been focusing on developing new, better, and more fun swag for the Bitchery, and I wanted to show you some of our new products.
First: we have a brand sparkly new Shopping page! Right now, we’ve got four main categories: apparel, beverage, stickers, and home goods because, well, priorities, right? Thanks to Tristan at Wax Creative for setting up the nifty page and the layout.
(I also have to say, adding products on the back end is really fun, too. I wasn’t lying about the nerdery. I really love learning how to update and organize information.)
Second, we have new designs for our Swag!
And before I start showing you the particulars, there’s a coupon valid at Zazzle right now for 25% everything on the site! The coupon code ZWEEKENDSALE is valid until Monday, 4 September at 11;59pm PST, and is good for 25% every single thing (including the items I’m about to show you).
Zazzle is terrific about having coupons and sharing them, so if I see a great coupon code, we’ll make sure to tell you about it in the Books on Sale posts, or in a special heads up alert. Because coupons are the best, right?
The links to Zazzle are affiliate-coded, so the purchases you make support the site, unless, as above, the profits are designated for a specific organization.
I’m having WAY TOO MUCH FUN over here with the new designs.
First, you probably saw the Slayer of Words collection, which celebrates Beverly Jenkins’ Lifetime Achievement Award from RWA and benefits Doctors Without Borders. We have mousepads, water bottles, notebooks and t-shirts, all proclaiming that Slayer of Words is obviously the best kind of slayage to which we aspire.
I have a few more designs, too. I’m calling this The Romance > Patriarchy Collection, and it comes in all sizes, and in varying levels of profanity!
Disrupt the Patriarchy. Read Romance. is available in scoop neck or v-neck styles in sizes up to Adult 2XL or 3XL respectively, in red or black.
It’s also available as a mug!
And the more assertive version: Fuck the Patriarchy. Read Romance. Unless you’re like me and work with dogs who don’t read (not that you know of, anyway), this probably isn’t safe for work. These two are available in red, in a v-neck or scoop neck option, in sizes up to Adult 2XL or 3XL, respectively.
And for your beverage needs, Disrupt the Patriarchy. Read Romance. is available as a water bottle, tumbler, and flask:
And if you’re feeling somewhat more assertive, Fuck the Patriarchy. Read Romance. is also available as a flask:
We also have an assortment of items with all three versions of The Ladies, because they’re lovely.
I’m working on new items all the time. And of course I take requests!
Is there a product or item you want, or an image you’d like to deck yourself out with? Email me, or leave a comment.
As I mentioned last month, I’m working on the 2018 Advertising Rate schedule currently.
I’ll be dropping prices in 2018 for advertisement packages. If you like those words in that order (I do!) please consider joining the Smart Bitch Insider newsletter, so you can be the first to hear about the 2018 rate schedule.
I will never share your info, nor will I email you overly-frequently. This list is only for updates on advertising on the site, and opportunities for promotion.
If you’re thinking about this year, as there are a few more months in 2017, please feel free to email me about what you have coming up that you’d like to advertise or promote, and what your budget is. I can do custom proposals, and I have references from many happy advertisers.
As always, we end with goofy stats!
Our top 10 countries in the past month in terms of visitor numbers are the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Germany, Philippines, New Zealand, Sweden, and South Africa.
And in a shift I am finding so fascinating, mobile visits surpassed desktop visits by a pretty hefty margin! In the past month, our device stats looked like this:
- Mobile: 44.75%
- Desktop: 38.45%
- Tablet: 16.80%
In the past, desktop had a narrow advantage over mobile, but mobile has been the most common device for a few months now.
This is, incidentally, why I package desktop and mobile ads into bundles, because I don’t want anyone to miss the opportunity to reach a large portion of the SBTB community.
If you’ve got questions, suggestions, queries, ideas for swag, or want to ask about pretty much anything, email me!
And, as always, thank you, thank you, thank you, for being part of Smart Bitches. We wouldn’t be here without you. Thank you.
Your mobile trend reflects what a LOT of websites are seeing. Our university websites, for example, are primarily accessed on mobile devices right now, and the gap between mobile and laptop/pc has been widening over the past 3-4 years. (Our uni also counts tablets as mobiles, though.) It’s remarkable to see such a huge shift, just since I’ve been partnering with our IT people.
I shouldn’t be, but am somehow surprised that you can tell between mobile and tablet device access. Granted, I know nothing about this kind of stuff.
@SQ Google Analytics (which I’m guessing Sarah uses since it is pretty much the standard in my experience) tracks it for you! You can just go to a page and it will tell you the types of devices.
Heads up, you say the code is valid until the 4th of September, which is in the past, which would make me sad, because F*** THE PATRIARCHY.
“And before I start showing you the particulars, there’s a coupon valid at Zazzle right now for 25% everything on the site! The coupon code ZWEEKENDSALE is valid until Monday, 4 September at 11;59pm PST, and is good for 25% every single thing (including the items I’m about to show you).”
I received this Sept 10. The 4th is a few days ago
Oh, geez, I totally messed up. I had rescheduled this post and hadn’t updated the code. I’m so sorry about that! I will post coupon alerts for the Zazzle collection as soon as I get them. I’m very sorry again.
Question: How does reading romance disrupt the patriarchy?
And thank you for fixing the like button. Now, I can like comments to my heart’s content without any problems.
Hazel asks an excellent question. “Disrupt and/or fuck the patriarchy” are admirable slogans to be sure. But until Romance lit divests itself of a distressing over-fascination with billionaires, aristocracy and military men as romantic heroes reading Rom literature will likely disrupt little. No doubt the countless women and kids being droned and bombed in the name of so-called humanitarian intervention can tell you exactly how the the military (which now—thanks to feminism—-allows women to kill too!) is freeing them from patriarchy. Likewise, women and kids laboring in billionaires’ sweatshops worldwide and historically the slaves whose forced, unpaid labor allowed the aristocracy to consolidate vast wealth. There are exceptions of course. However, publishers likely will not look kindly on Rom lit narratives that deviate from accepted casting, for after all, along with most publishers and media, they are part of the patriarchial edifice.
I disagree – obviously, since I designed it. Yes, romance tropes operate in a very patriarchal structure and can often adhere to varying degrees to established sexist and misogynist colonialist archetypes. I believe there are a lot of readers who struggle with their admiration or enjoyment of a literary form when it does so – I know I do.
But to answer the question, how does reading romance disrupt patriarchy? Because a narrative that places women at the center, and anchors itself on her fulfillment, especially her emotional and sexual fulfillment, is disruptive to a system wherein men hold the power and women are excluded from it. Can romance do more to disrupt the kyriarchy? YES. It’s not doing enough, and it needs to do more, and soon. That said, I see centering narrative on the triumph and satisfaction of women, even within patriarchal structure, as inherently disruptive.
@ SB Sarah: I’m not convinced.
Last night I saw the first episode of the new adaptation of Handmaid’s Tale. I had real difficulty watching it, because, like the best of science fiction, it speaks to who we are now. Some of who we are is deeply horrifying. One of the characters that chilled me the most was the woman enforcer and indoctrinator. ( I haven’t read the book in ages and watched with one eye closed, so don’t recall the names, but I understand it’s a hit in the US, so I bet you know who I mean.) That character finds great emotional fulfilment in furthering the aims of the patriarchy. She reminded me of the stories coming out of Raqqa and other parts of Daesh territory over the last few years, about the triumphant and emotionally satisfied women who enforced the brutality of that patriarchal militant religious regime.
We who are excluded from power tend to grasp at whatever little crumbs of power we can, don’t we?
I’m also reminded of the Disney princess stories, which have central themes of triumph and female fulfilment. I don’t see the threat to the patriarchy.
I understand that we fight where we are, with the weapons we have, and sometimes just by surviving. But no, I don’t see the disruption.
@Hazel: I don’t think that I’m going to convince you, so please don’t take my reply as combative. For me, the choice for women that’s inherent in romance – I choose this partner, I choose this method of fulfillment, I choose my own path – is the disruption. Instead of being valued merely as commodities for reproductive ability, women in the romances I enjoy most define their own value. And while there are certainly enforcers as you’ve described them limiting others, there are also many women publishing on their own, reaching the readers who are asking specifically for stories about their own experiences. That is also disruption – both culture and economical.
The way I see it, women own their own agencies in romance novels, for the most part. Even when the heroes are really over the top alpha, women own their own agencies.
Will romance lit bring down patriarchy? Not by itself, certainly.But it can be one of the nails in that coffin.
Or so it seems to me.
@Sarah: I’d love to be convinced. If I thought that romance as a genre was subversive, my friend, I’d spend considerably more money on romance novels. The thing about subversion, of course, is that it’s difficult to prove its efficacy.
I have no doubt that there are feminist romance novels. (I’d love to see a list, if you’d set that up! Or maybe you could make it a subject of a podcast?) And I know from SBTB that there are authors who make it their business to redress imbalances in romantic fiction. You’ve told me about writers who aim for diversity, and those who try to educate us about forgotten or suppressed history and about mental health and disability, and about kink, for that matter. Great. But these are not the majority of romance writers, are they? I’m grateful that websites like this one raise their profile, but as a newcomer to the genre, they do not seem to me to be representative. In the main, what I read in the samples I download from Amazon, and what I see on the covers online or in bookshops isn’t going to disturb the patriarchy in the slightest.
(@Jam: I share your antipathy toward those contemporary billionaire stories. We know where those billions come from.)
Ah well. Here’s to disrupting the patriarchy, any way we can.