Feb 3 2010
Wednesday Midday Links: February Book Specials
UPDATED TO ADD:
Harlequin has priced all the Kimani titles at 40% this month.
Commenter Dana points out Direct ebooks is selling all the romance titles at 25% off through February. All the ebooks on this site have no geographic limitations.
Hachette has a few bundling deals (usually these can only be found at the Sony ebookstore)
- Get 2 K.J.Parker books for the price of one: Devices and Desires and Evil for Evil for $12.99.
- Get 3 Ione books for $14.68 or 30% off the retail price for Pleasure Unbound, Desire Unchained, Passion Unleashed. ( this is a fun, sexy series and I’ve liked most of the books).
Samhain is offering these Kindle promotions.
- 2/1/2010 — 2/14/2010: Icy Heat: A Heat Series Story by Leigh Wyndfield
- 2/15/2010 — 2/28/2010 Wolf Signs: Granite Lake Wolves, Book 1 by Vivian Arend
For paper lovers, Borders has launched its “Buy 4 get 1 Free” special both in store and on the web. I used to buy books like crazy under that sale.
All Romance eBooks (ARe) and it’s sister store, Omnilit, are celebrating February with “28 Days of Heart” Campaign. The campaign is designed to raise money for heart disease prevention. The bookstores will release one novella per day for 28 days and the proceeds from the sale will all go to the American Heart Association. Because I’m one part lazy and two parts very busy, I’ve uploaded the graphic of the 28 novellas but you’ll need to click on the small graphic to see the bigger version.
The folks at Shelf Awareness really aren’t a fan of the nook. Part 1 and Part 2.
Part of me thinks, well, it’s new technology, what did I expect? The other part of me replies, BETTER!
Amazon’s Third Annual Breakthrough Novel contest commences. Given that the past winners have been more literary than popular fiction, I would guess the chances of a romance writer winning would be low to zero. But, hey, the contest is free. Contest details are listed below, and further information and official rules can be found at www.amazon.com/abna. To get tips on how to enter or sign up, visit www.createspace.com/abna. Grand Prize includes:
[A] full publishing contract with Penguin to market and distribute the Grand Prize winner’s winning manuscript as a published book, including promotion for the published book on Amazon.com and a $15,000 advance.
Lauren Willig and Cara Elliott are teaching a college seminar on historical romance at Yale this semester. The reading list is here (Doc file). I would love to audit this class but unfortunately I live too far away. I will be reading the books on the list because there are several I have never read. What a great guide.
Liza Daly has a great collection of things book publishers must do in creating ebooks with value for readers. Simple things like including the color cover, getting the metadata right, and making sure the formatting looks good. In order to demand higher prices from readers, publishers really need to start delivering a quality product, not the half assed stuff we ebook readers put up with now.
Stanza was told to stop including USB synching in its iPhone App and many people have seen this as a sign of evil by Amazon. I’m not convinced and here’s why.
USB synching was never officially allowed by Apple. Stanza got around that by hacking Apple’s SDK. With the iPad, Apple is allowing USB synching but in a particular way:
[T]he beta iPhone OS 3.2 SDK includes an API which allows access to a shared storage folder, which will be mounted as a readable and writable disk when you plug it into your computer
My guess is that Apple is requiring its developers to use the new authorized USB function rather than the hack it had allowed in the past.
Send to Kindle
Feb 03, 2010 @ 10:58:34
You linked to the course’s supplemental reading list, which was interesting to me because even though I’m not an avid historical reader, I’ve still read quite a few titles on that list. Does that show the list does a good job of being universal?
If anyone is interested, here’s the link to the course syllabus and the required texts. Notably included on there is Beyond Heaving Bosoms!
http://www.laurenwillig.com/news/2010/02/03/reading-the-historical-romance/
Feb 03, 2010 @ 11:26:44
I can’t open the pages about the nook – is there an html problem?
Feb 03, 2010 @ 11:37:19
@becca Sorry about that. Fixed.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 11:37:37
@Angela James Egads. Clearly need to work on my own reading comprehension. Thanks for the links.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 11:40:25
Thanks, Jane.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 11:54:23
I just started reading K. J. Parker recently (a free eBook was my entry!) and I enjoy reading her books, but I would almost characterize her as an anti-romance writer. Love is the cause of a lot of ills in this trilogy. Anyone unfamiliar with these books probably should read a few reviews before buying.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 12:10:20
I’ve got an additional link:
HarperCollins is renegotiating pricing for Kindle Books:
LINK HERE
I knew that would happen. Apple now controls ebooks.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 12:48:18
Direct ebooks is having a 25% off sale on romance ebooks throughout Feb. http://directebooks.com/
They don’t have the biggest collection, but all the ebooks on their site are ones with no geographic restrictions.
And Ellora’s Cave is running a Buy One, Get One for a Friend deal: http://www.jasminejade.com/driver.aspx?Topic=bogo&aspdnsfid=pGGbjsBZjUo%3d
Feb 03, 2010 @ 12:56:57
Omigod, they’re teaching the historical without mentioning Roberta Gellis? How can they do the Napoleonic wars without her Heiress Series? And no Medievals, at all, that was what the 80s were all about.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 13:17:34
I own an Nook and sort of found their complaints to be silly. How can you be shocked that you can only buy from B&N on your Nook?
All devices require charging when you get them.
The packaging is funny but to be fair, B&N does include instructions on how to open it.
I have had no problems side loading my existing elibrary into Nook with Calibre.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 14:56:45
No gay historical romances in the college seminar?
Feb 03, 2010 @ 14:59:59
Hmm, HarperCollins renegotiating Kindle prices (for higher prices) makes me pay attention, because I can think of several HC authors that I buy regularly. (Hello, Kelley Armstrong for YA, Lois Bujold, SEP, Beverly Jenkins, Laura Lippman, Deborah Crombie, Rachel Gibson, plus all of Avon’s Regency-lite stable). Fewer paper or ebooks for me if the price goes up.
Willig/Elliot’s supplemental reading list is interesting. I’ve read a lot of the books, although I’m not a particular historical fan. The only comment I would make is to wonder about the three selections from Carla Kelly’s backlist. Marian’s Christmas Wish is an early book, and is very unlike most of her other work; The Surgeon’s Lady, while addressing social class issues, is not the best of her more recent work that touches on the same themes. [shrug] Still, a very nice list of historical romance.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 15:10:10
I am shocked there are no books by Laura Kinsale, Judith Ivory or Patricia Gaffney on that syllabus or on the supplemental reading list.
Feb 03, 2010 @ 15:45:31
I own a Nook, and I agree with the previous comment that the complaints listed were just plain silly. The Nook has plenty of real problems to complain about such as freezing up frequently, losing bookmarks and last page read, battery life, etc. Those are the real failures not the packaging and charging up!
Feb 03, 2010 @ 21:35:32
That Lauren Willig reading list is actually phenomenally helpful because I will be giving a presentation on writing historical fiction versus historical romance at Stonecoast College in Maine. Thank you, and thank Lauren for making my job a little easier!
Feb 04, 2010 @ 00:31:27
Hopefully this comment will not get gobbled up by cyber gremlins! OK, totally agree with Janine: excuse me, no Gaffney, Ivory or Kinsale? How do you discuss rape without Sebastian? Rakes with no Christian? Sorry, that’s just so huge: I would fix your reading list right quick were it me.
And just a point of order: Fleur, the heroine of The Secret Pearl (Balogh) … she weren’t no courtesan. Try streetwalker. Starving streetwalker. It’s sort of an important distinction.
But I’m being picky: it’s thrilling to think of people reading Regency Buck for the first time: that was my first Heyer!!
Feb 04, 2010 @ 09:22:40
Hi, all! Just wanted to pop in and say, if you have any suggestions for the supplemental reading list, please do email them to me (lauren.willig@yale.edu). Both Cara and I consider it very much a work in progress.
The class is limited narrowly to the Regency-set romance novel (the “long” Regency, interpreted as French Revolution through 1820, rather than the actual Regency of 1811-1820), which is why several of our favorite Kinsales and Ivorys didn’t make it on there. Although, I confess, “Devil’s Cub”, which is Georgian, did manage to sneak onto the list. (We have put a short Georgian/Victorian section on the supplemental list, for comparative purposes, but we don’t want to distract too much attention from the main time period).
Feb 04, 2010 @ 11:46:02
Thanks so much for replying Lauren. Clearly I was hasty in my comments! The era is certainly huge enough … and what fun everyone will have reading Regencies from Signet that dearly deserve a re-visit.
Thursday Midday Links: More on Amazon and Macmillan | Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary
Feb 04, 2010 @ 14:23:21
[...] of admiration and respect for them. Both of us look forward to being back in business as usual. As commenter Deb noted, HarperCollins will be negotiating with Amazon to get the agency model in place whereby the [...]