Welcome to First Page Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. You may comment anonymously.
***
‘Em? Emily, is that you?’
Emily Standish sat down hard on the little wooden chair with its faded floral needlepoint cushion. She barely registered the small cloud of dust it gave out in protest. Her heart was racing and her breath was short. It couldn’t be. It must be nearly fifteen years – and this really wasn’t the moment for that kind of complex mental arithmetic. If someone had asked her, Emily would have claimed she barely remembered him. She certainly wouldn’t have expected that she could recognise his voice on the end of a crackling phone line in just five words.
‘Hello? Can you hear me?’
She could hang up, of course. For all he knew, she was on a train heading through a tunnel at just the wrong moment. Right moment. Whichever.
Or perhaps she could pretend he’d got the wrong number. He wouldn’t be able to tell …
Dear Ms. Mayberry:
 I think this might be your most emotional romance yet. I certainly felt a little misty eyed (damn you) at the end of the story. Hannah Napier and Joe Lawson meet under inauspicious circumstances. Joe is exhausted and all he can hear is the loud sound of an engine next door. It’s keeping him from enjoying some solitude and it’s bound to wake his kids. Hannah is working on her motorcycle. Once it’s finished, Hannah is going on a long awaited road trip, escaping her ex fiancé and her sister who have found love together. She thinks Joe is good looking but a jerk and Joe, well, he doesn’t appreciate Hannah’s physical attraction either.
Joe lost his wife, Beth, in a car accident a couple of years ago and he is left to parent their two children. He feels like he is losing control over his kids. He does not want to be over his deceased wife Beth. He resents his body’s attraction to Hannah.
Worsening the situation is that the one place where Hannah felt safe, a bar/restaurant called The Watering Hole, has been purchased by Joe. It was …
I ordered a bunch of Harlequin Stationary goods that feature the vintage covers. The stationary goods include little matchbook notepads, bound composition notebooks and address books. I liked the address books the least. They have a spiral binding and I found them to be a little too bulky. My favorites are the little matchbook notepads. They come three to a box. The composition notebooks are nice as well and feature very hard cardboard front and back covers so it would be easy to write on a non hard surface.
The postcard tins are a great gift item but I don’t have anyone to send snail mail to. Should I start up a prison correspondence?
I’m going to give the notebooks and the address books away on the blog (am keeping the notepads myself). Just as a disclaimer or non disclaimer, I purchased these myself and Harlequin, which does many nice things for Dear Author, did not pay for them or give me any kind of discount.
***
Simon & Schuster saw sales increase in the last quarter to $230.4 million which is up 2.4%. The improvement in sales was offset by “higher write offs of advances for author royalties” which …
Dear Frankie (2004)
Genre: Drama
Grade: A-
Gerard Butler, please stop acting in rubbish films that have heroines put in vibrating underwear and do more like this one. This film is wonderful. And it’s wonderful without overdoing the important moments or slathering on the pathos in order to yank on our heartstrings.
Lizzie Morrison (Emily Mortimer) has carried on a deception for years. When her son was a baby, she took him and fled her abusive husband. Living with her mother, Nell (Mary Riggans), they’ve moved from town to town to avoid Davy. But she’s kept all this from Frankie (Jack McElhone), instead telling him his Da is a merchant sailor and writing to Frankie as if the letters come from his father.
Their latest move has taken them to Glasgow and unintentionally brought about the thing Lizzie has always worried about. The name she randomly chose for the ship Davy supposedly serves on is actually the name of a real ship and it’s coming into port soon. When Frankie’s new classmate bets him that Frankie’s Da won’t come to visit while his ship is docked, Lizzie sets out to find a stranger to play the part for a day. But the Stranger (Gerard …
Dear Ms. Fielding:
I’m not sure if you were inspired by Roman Holiday starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck but there are a lot of similarities. Audrey plays a princess who, struggling under the strictures of her position, decides to flee. Princess Ann falls asleep on a park bench and is rescued by Joe Bradley, a reporter. He takes her back to his apartment. Over the course of a day or so, Ann and Joe fall in love, but they can’t be together because of Ann’s duty to her people. Cue bittersweet ending. (I always thought that Ann shipped Joe in for regular loving because what’s the point of being a princess if you can’t bone your lover from time to time?)
Roseanne Napier is the daughter of the Marquess and Marchioness of St Ives who died during a humanitarian effort when Rose was 6. Lady Rose, or Annie to her intimates, grew up to be the people’s princess. Unfortunately all that Annie does is smile, shake hands, smile, kiss babies, smile, go to parties. Her only skill is looking good and being polite. Every part of …
How good is Harlequin doing? Pretty good. In a dismal economy that sees revenues at its parent company dropping, Harlequin is bringing in the profit. David Holland, the interim CEO at Torstar, said that the decline in newspapers and digital were offset by continued growth at Harlequin. (Actually Holland stated it the other way around but I decided to put the positive spin on it). Harlequin posted $122.5 million in revenue which was up 3.7% from third quarter of 2008.
***
After a dismal few quarters, HarperCollins experienced a small rise for the fiscal first quarter. Sales were slightly down (1.5%). Sales of ebooks accounted for 4% of the adult group revenue. Most of the profit came from restructuring and not from sales.
***
The Wall Street Journal accuses Amazon of stockpiling cash by paying late on its bills by up to 72 days or longer. I understand that late payment is fairly standard in the industry and the writer of the article asserts that Amazon has never made a profit, something the SEC filings for the past five years would dispute. However, if Amazon’s posted profitability rests …
 Loading ... Keishon, avidbookreader.com, linked to a discussion at copyblogger which debated whether the theorem that talented authors write badly when they are trying to express an idea and conversely write well when they are trying to touch an audience.
Now, the qualification in the copyblogger post is the term “talented” which can have a whole gamut of interpretations. But setting aside that term, should the author be writing for the reader or writing for herself? Unlike many of the commenters at the copyblogger forum, I believe an author should write for herself.
Interestingly, I think that there is a big difference between “writing for the market” and writing to touch an audience. The commenters, to me, are discussing creating an emotional connection with the readers (which I think is very important, thinking back to the post by Chloe and why she reads). So I’d ask you when voting that you think about the poll in terms of the development of a relationship with the reader through writing and not writing to the market.
Dear Ms. Dunlop,
 A friend of mine married her Frenchman so when I see books with French heroes, I check them out. Since I’ve found that the Desire line tends towards less assholic heroes, I decided to give “Transformed into the Frenchman’s Mistress” a shot.
If there was anything Charlotte Hudson had learned in her twenty-five years, it was how to be proper. So how had the ambassador’s granddaughter ended up on a wild movie assignment, ensconced in a centuries-old Provençal castle with notorious French playboy Alec Montcalm? While her relatives from Hudson Pictures were busy filming at Chateau Montcalm, the real drama was going on behind the antique wooden doors–beneath satin sheets. Charlotte knew their crazy, scandalous secret liaison wouldn’t last. And then she discovered she was pregnant….
This is a hard book for me to grade. There are some things about it I loved and other things that drove me nuts.
Charlotte actually has a backbone and is fairly intelligent. When she arrives at the Montcalm chateau to ask her school pal Raine Montcalm
if her family can rent it for a movie location and finds she’ll have …
Dear Ms. Monroe:
 Is it too corny to say that this book delivered for me? I’m not a huge fan of the Navy SEAL books anymore because I think that there are so many of them and I worried about the machismo level of the hero but nothing about the book was very expected. That was a good thing.
Hailey Sutherland and her sister have taken over the family business, a San Diego institution that was once the place for social events like showers and parties and small receptions. Hailey was not as excited about the revitalization of the family business as was her sister for although she had been engaged three times, she doesn’t really know much about party planning. Because she was engaged three times, had her heart broken three times, she really isn’t in the mood to celebrate others’ newfound love.
When a SEAL team exercise plays out in front of a shower party and the women are drawn to the beach like George Clooney to brunette cocktail waitresses, Hailey recognizes that the Sutherland’s position on the beach could present some unique marketing opportunities for The Sutherland.
Lt. Commander Nate Peterson is stateside helping to train …
Grand Central Publishing has these November deals. If you haven’t tried Elizabeth Hoyt yet, it’s a safe bet at $1.99. Even if you don’t like it, you haven’t spent too much money on the try.
I thought about not posting this because I really dislike Macmillan’s ebooks policies. Most of the prices for ebooks by St. Martin’s Press are $9.99 and above for mass markets. But alas, it is a deal.
- Marked by PC & Kristin Cast for $2.99
Random House has been releasing freebies for months now. This month we have the following:
- A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K Hamilton (Sony is supposed to replace all the files you buy through the Sony eBookstore with epub files so even if you don’t have a Sony, you might want
…
|
-
-
November 2009
| M |
T |
W |
T |
F |
S |
S |
| « Oct |
|
|
| | 1 |
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 |
|
|
|
|
Open Threads at Dear Author. Want to know what new releases are out this month and what readers are excited about reading? Check out the threads below. 
We don’t like to censor comments nor do we endorse the comments of any poster. We do reserve the right to moderate comments but most of the time will not, believing, as Justice Brandeis did, that the greater good is in “more speech, not enforced silence.”
