Asexual Fiction from Smashwords Month

Honestly, when I did this review thing for Asexual Awareness Week, I thought it would end there. However, it made me pay more attention to asexual fiction (because now there is a lot more asexual fiction to pay attention to than, say, when this blog was first launched), and I continue to be curious about asexual fiction, so I keep on reading it, and since I’m continuing the read it, I figure I ought to keep on writing and posting reviews.

In addition to the reviews I wrote for Asexual Awareness Week, there was Harmony Ink Press Month and Dreamspinner Month, as well as a review of The Painted Crown.

Eventually, my curiosity will probably get sated, and I’ll stop writing so many reviews. I don’t intend to turn this into an asexual-fiction-review blog in the long run. However, my curiosity isn’t done with asexual fiction yet, so another month of asexual fiction reviews is coming up.

The theme for this month is Smashwords. Specifically, asexual fiction stories which are self-published (or published by extremely tiny publishers, which to me just seems like a more meticulous attempt at self-publishing) on the Smashwords platform. No, I am not going to read and review all of the asexual fiction titles published via Smashwords, but I do think it is a decent sample. In any case, I already bought the books, so if someone has other Smashwords asexual fiction titles to suggest, it’s going to have to wait for another month.

Those five titles are:

Fourth World by Lyssa Chiavari
Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story by Janine A. Southard
Chameleon Moon by Roanna Sylver
Sere from the Green by Lauren Jankowski
Interface by Lucy Mihajlich

I actually read Fourth World in 2016, so that review went up right after this post.

Both Lyssa Chiavari and Lauren Jankowski are members of Pack of Aces. Both Cracked! A Magic iPhone Story and Interface were originally published via Kickstarter Campaigns. Also, all of these stories are by women which … was not intentional on my part. And this will make this the first month in which I did not review any asexual fiction by non-women.

Until now, all of the asexual fiction titles I’ve reviewed were published by LGBTQ+ publishers (and, with the exception of Harmony Ink Press, those publishers are specifically romance publishers) who have certain requirements for the contents of the stories. Self-publishers do not have any such constraints. On the other hand, formal publishers (even small LGBTQ+ publishers) also establish a floor for writing quality, which is absent from self-published fiction, but I am hoping that none of these stories are as terrible as some of the self-published fiction I’ve read. Thus, I expect that these stories will be more diverse – in multiple ways – that the asexual fiction I’ve been reviewing so far (though apparently less diverse in the gender of the writers).

Anyway, let’s see where this goes.