Anyone who’s interested in trying to win a free copy of my book, The Invisible Orientation, can do so in this Goodreads giveaway!
Update: Giveaway over, winners were Eileen, Stacy, Susan, Lilian, and Mato.
Also, see the latest news in my recent newsletter and check out the new options available to get autographed bookplates.
And for electronic copies, you can get my autograph for free using Authorgraph:
I received my box of books from my publisher and I’m thrilled to finally see the finished product! If you want to see me opening the box and talking a little about the book (and how you can get it), check it out:
Nicole Brinkley of YA Interrobang was kind enough to interview me for the column Dragons Raging: a feature that is for interviews of people from marginalized backgrounds.
We could definitely do with more asexual characters. Canon asexual characters in mainstream media are almost nonexistent, and characters interpreted or rumored to be asexual are often played as uninterested in sex/relationships for a specific reason (they’re an alien, they’re a villain, they’re ill, they’ve given up).
I would love to see both “issue books” about asexual people AND books in which characters are incidentally asexual. We need both of those things.
I was featured a couple places today. In The Varsity, Jasleen Arneja wrote about the WorldPride-affiliated asexuality conference and quoted me, using my book table photo as the featured photo. You can read the article in “Toronto hosts second-ever International Asexuality Conference” on their website.
And this was just a quick mention, but The Daily Dish decided to excerpt my The Toast article and that’s pretty cool:
“She’s Just Not That Into Anyone.”
I had the pleasure of attending the International Asexuality Conference in Toronto, Ontario, at the end of June 2014. As a WorldPride-affiliated event, we got some pretty amazing coverage and attention, with something like 300 registered attendees!
I was on the Asexual Leadership Q&A panel with Sara Beth Brooks and David Jay. Video here!
And later I was on a Visibility and Content Creation panel. You can see video of it here.
But what’s also great is it was the first appearance I made with my book!
I asked attendees to enter their names to win advance reading copies. Around fifty people entered and I got to talk to quite a lot of amazing people who were really excited about the book coming out. And there were a few who treated me like a celebrity or excitedly told me how much they like my videos online. How nice!
And after attending sessions and sitting on panels all day, I rounded out the night by appearing on Canadian national television.
Click to watch the video!
So yeah, that was a good experience. Hanging out with new and old friends was also fun–I was staying with asexual friends in a hotel, some of whom I’d known on the Internet before and some of whom I was getting to know for the first time. I didn’t stay for the parade–just the conference–but I’m glad I got to go.
Hooray for visibility and connections!
I got a pretty super review for my book The Invisible Orientation, provided by sociologist and researcher Mark Carrigan.
Please read it here on his website.
This is a long overdue book, offering the general purpose introduction to the subject which has heretofore been lacking. It is an essential addition to any academic reading list that encompasses asexuality and should be required reading for any therapists with an interest in sexuality. It provides a sense of what it is like to be asexual that can sometimes be missing from academic work and engages with the literature while nonetheless refusing to be constrained by it. It is also immensely readable, providing an authoritative overview that sign posts the reader who is keen to explore further. I can’t recommend The Invisible Orientation highly enough and hope it has a wide readership.
Now for a video on one of the most universal subjects for authors: REJECTION.
In this video I discuss my personal rejection experiences, share my first rejection letter and laugh over my most condescending one, and give you an idea of how and in what capacity I’ve been rejected over the years–from the perspective of a person who did eventually get to “yes.”
My book The Invisible Orientation has been featured in TIME online with a six-hundred-word excerpt. They titled the article “How to Tell if You Are Asexual” and showed a bit of my intro and a bit of my section addressing asexual people on how to decide if it’s the label for them.
As of this writing, the feature contains a couple of inaccuracies.
[1] The article’s introduction claims that “[Decker] explains that asexual people can become sexual later in life, and that doesn’t mean they were not asexual before. Similarly, sexual people can become asexual,” and this is misleading. I discuss both sexual fluidity and label experimentation in my book, but it is part of a more nuanced discussion; I do not say “asexual people sometimes ‘become sexual’ later” or vice versa, and I think including it in this introduction contributes to the damaging perception that asexuality is just a phase. For most people, sexual orientation is a lifelong piece of identity, and the invalidation asexual people experience at the hands of the “you’ll grow out of it” myth makes this at best inaccurate. [2] As for “Decker has written for the Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and Salon”–That’s incorrect. I have been interviewed in all of those publications but have never written for them.Looks like my book has been assigned a cover!
This may not be the final design, actually, but for now it’s representing the book on Amazon and Goodreads and other book-selling sites, and if it changes I’ll give you that news too! For right now it’s what my distributor will see at a conference, I’m told, so we’ll see if they have input and if they do it might get a different design.
I’ve been notified by my publisher that a pre-sales meeting with my book’s distributor led to a decision to change my title. This is pretty common in the publishing world, and not at all a bad thing in my opinion.
I think this title does a much better job hooking audiences and encouraging them to buy the book than did my original title, So You Think You’re Asexual: An Introduction to the Invisible Orientation. It’s a much more inclusive title and won’t make interested non-asexual people think they’re not the audience for the book.
Hooray!