Lip Service - Softcover

Rose, M. J.

3.55

524 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671041320 ISBN 13: 9780671041328

Publisher: Atria Books, 2000

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Crackling with eroticism and suspense, the seductive new book that everyone is talking about probes the secret world of phone sex and one woman who becomes empowered by what she discovers there. Not since Erica Jong's Fear of Flying has a novel so masterfully mined the relationship between sexuality and identity.

On the surface, Julia Sterling's life seems blessed. Married to a renowned psychiatrist and living on Manhattan's tony Upper East Side, Julia deeply loves her stepson and is forging a career as a journalist.

When a writing job exposes her to the world of phone sex, Julia glimpses a world that stirs her erotic fantasies but threatens her carefully constructed reality. As she explores her emotional and sexual connections to the men she knows and several she will never meet, she confronts evil, perversity, and her own passions.

Tracing the currents of desire, illusion, and psychological manipulation,Lip Service is an astonishingly vivid glimpse into one woman's inner life. At the same time, this electrifying thriller grips the reader as it builds toward a shattering climax. M.J. Rose has delivered a debut novel unlike anything yet experienced in erotic fiction. Lip Service establishes her as a powerful storyteller.

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Review:

Ad writer M.J. Rose's self-published novel is the first-person account of Julia Sterling, age 38, a Manhattan wife of the silver spoon set who, without telling her control-freak husband, takes a job as a phone-fantasy therapist at the high-toned Butterfield Institute. (This "progressive sex clinic" is no doubt named after John O'Hara's call girl novel, Butterfield 8.) It's not just a job, it's an adventure, about which Julia plans to write a book. Though Julia is a therapist, not a call girl, her role-playing conversations do get steamy, and she discovers unsettling things about her call-in clients. Her own banked fires of passion become aroused there, too; at home Julia's husband is far more interested in the TV's remote control than unbuttoning her blouse. Worse, he's an infuriatingly smug shrink (trained by her shrink father!) who belittles her; tries to define her as the nervous-breakdown case she was in her promiscuous, screwed-up youth; and attempts to shut her up with anti-anxiety pills. He's emotionally AWOL and refuses to discuss it, nor will he heed Julia's urgent decorating needs (there should be a green Chinese art deco area rug in their apartment, darn it). Men!

Will Julia succumb to the Butterfield Institute's director, who quotes Robert Herrick and "To His Coy Mistress" with classy lasciviousness? Or will her college newspaper chum--newly divorced and in New York--escalate their ancient flirtation? Will Julia's husband's charity foundation get nailed by the IRS? Will the Butterfield Institute get exposed as a sex shop? Julia's adventures are more logical than a Danielle Steel heroine's, although Rose lacks Steel's dizzy velocity. But if Julia's plight piques your interest, then you might be interested to find out what happens when she discards her fear of flying. --Tim Appelo

From the Author:

This is the book that started The Butterfield Institute Series. It also started my career. And some say was one of the first books to pave the way for the ebook revolution.

In 1998 I self-published Lip Service using the internet to market my effort. I'd had a literary agent and a folder of rave rejections. Publishers loved the book but didn't know how to market something that was a cross between erotica and suspense.

I put the book up for sale two ways - on line via my website for $9.99 for what we then called an "electronic download" but now call ebooks.  And from Amazon through a new program called "Amazon Advantage" for small publishers. My publishing company - Lady Chatterley's Library - was one book small but Amazon didn't mind.

Once the book was for sale, I began to seriously market it on the internet using efforts now considered de rigueur by authors and publishers. I did a virtual book tour - going to websites and offering them free books if they'd run excerpts or interviews.  And I used the social networks of the day - listservs and chat rooms - to meet potential readers and talk to them about the book.

After selling over 2500 copies (in both the electronic and trade paper format) an editor discovered Lip Service on Amazon and made me an offer.

The little book that could became the first e-book and first self-published novel chosen by the LiteraryGuild/Doubleday Book Club as well as being the first e-book to go on to be published by a mainstream New York publishing house.  And I got to ride the very first wave of the e-publishing revolution.

Rose has been profiled in Time magazine, Forbes, The New York Times, Business 2.0, Working Woman, Newsweek and New York Magazine. She's appeared on The Today Show, Fox News, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and features on her have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, including USAToday, Stern, L'Official, Poets and Writers and Publishers Weekly.

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