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M.J. Rose was repeatedly spurned when she shopped her first novel, Lip Service to publishers. But demand for the book spread like kudzu when she offered it on the Net. The sexy and literate erotic suspense novel was the first book initially published on the Internet to get picked up by the Literary Guild.
Rose did not have some of the conventional concerns of women who find themselves jostling elbows with men in business.
"I'd already made it in the ruthless world of corporate advertising," says Rose. "And those marketing skills were invaluable in getting my project off the ground."
Those skills were sometimes used against her when she entered the world of book publishing, Rose said. "Sometimes they saw me as too pushy, too aggressive -- which they never would have said about a man."
And even though she was getting a lot of online interest in her work, Rose had difficulty making the leap from successful online publisher to player in the otherwise analog world of book publishing.
She got a critical break when writer Sally J. Walker saw Rose's work on the Internet and put her in touch with Joel Gotler of the Artists Management Group/Renaissance agency. Gotler's stable of writers include Frank McCourt and VC Andrews.
Rose said she considered it an astonishing act of generosity on the part of a stranger. But Walker told her "I know you will turn around and help another woman someday as a result."
Women are good at forming supportive communities, according to Rose, and the "Internet is the perfect medium for those kinds of communities to form."
The Net was where Rose found and hired Gwendolynn Gawlick, who books celebrities for online chats.
"I still haven't met her," said Rose. "We exchanged emails, she sent me a business proposal, and it was all very impressive. That's all I needed."
Established singer and composer Perla Batalla met with resistance from her record label, Discovery/Warner Brothers, when the CD she wanted to produce differed from what Discovery/Warner had in mind. And she protested her lack of creative control.
Expecting a baby, the record company told her, "Yes, yes dear, you're just pregnant and emotional," Batalla said. "After two years of their trying to make me fit this mold, I just said, 'I want off this label, and I don't ever want to be associated with a major record company again!'"
She began sampling her music on her own Web site, including the half-Spanish CD Mestiza she had fought over with the record company. Orders for the CD started to stream in. And so did the profits.
Normally, Batalla said, an artist makes about US$1.40 on each $15 dollar CD sold through a major record company deal. On the Net, the artist's cut is between $7 and $10.
Eventually, Batalla and Rose made their way to Amazon.com's Advantage Program, where musicians and writers and filmmakers are given their own Web pages and the infrastructure to market their work.
"Our program makes distribution possible where it was impossible," said Advantage program manager Diane Zoi.
The program was a huge boon for writer and filmmaker Susan Sussman, who wanted to achieve wider distribution for her Emmy-winning film There's No Such Thing as a Chanukah Bush, Sandy Goldstein.
"The Internet takes gender out of the equation and lets my product compete on a perfectly equal footing," Sussman wrote in an email from Spain, where she is working on a mystery novel. "As the author of many books, I often felt I received less money than my male counterparts.
"I believe the anonymity [of the Internet] is wonderful. A person on the other end, the ordering end, can view the product, read the reviews, and make a decision based solely on the product," said Sussman.
"This is to my advantage the same way it was to my advantage early on to write newspaper and magazine articles as a man, or for authors like P.D. James, who many readers still assume is a man,"
