AK: Right, “we can cross that one off the list.”

 

DE: Exactly, we can give up on that one. 

 

So it’s been amazing to me just how well the books have been received and how people are responding to them. It’s very thrilling to have the books out there. By and large the responses are what I would really hope they would be. It always interests me to hear what people value in the books, because a lot of times they are the things I value and it makes me happy.

 

AK: In terms of publishers, did you and Janet encounter any major resistance with the first edition when you were setting out to get it published?

 

DE: Well, Janet developed a press called Greenery press, and at the time we published the first editions of all the books there. She has since sold it to a big distributor and works as an editor from time to time, but she owned the press. She built the press to publish those books, so that she could write what she wanted to write, and so that her then partner could publish a book called S/M 101. What is amazing is that Greenery Press was unheard of, a tiny little press with no money for publicity, and that the books spread like wildfire. We wrote The Bottoming Book first, and then The Topping Book, and when we wrote The Bottoming Book it couldn’t be longer than one hundred and twenty pages, because we couldn’t afford to print it longer than that. That’s where we started from.