Welcome to Dear Author. We review romance books, talk about ebooks and digital technology related to ebooks, and post about all the issues surrounding romance novels.
If you are a first time visitor or even a long time one, you might not know of all the content available at Dear Author. This page is designed to help highlight some of our features. To make it easier, we’ve designed this page in a question and answer format. If there is a question we haven’t answered, drop a comment and we’ll do our best to respond.
About Dear Author
Jane started the blog in April 2006 with her friend, Jayne. These two provide most of the content. We also have a staff of reviewers including the following who provide weekly or monthly content. Clicking on the links will lead you to an archive of their reviews.
- Robin (aka Janet) provides reviews and contributes to the weekly opinion section.
- Jia is our YA and fantasy/paranormal/science fiction and cross over reviewer.
- Dr. Sarah Frantz (aka Joan) blogs at Teach Me Tonight and generally provides reviews of gay romances.
- Janine provides reviews of a variety of romances but primarily historical and erotic romance fiction.
Additional reviewers include:
- Jennie reviews general fiction and historical romances along with the occasional paranormal.
- John is our teen YA reviewer.
- Shuzluva provides mainly paranormal reviews.
- Sunita reviews historical romances and categories.
- Lazaraspaste reviews historicals and provided this unforgettable post about how all heroes are Scorpios.
In the past, we’ve had contributions from Jan who provided Manga reviews and from time to time we’ll have guest reviewers such as author Jill Shalvis, Jill Sorenson and others.
Q: How do you explain your review grades?
Our romance book review grades are our own opinions, obviously, and therefore fraught with subjectivity. You may or may not agree with our opinions, our grades, or anything else. We’d love for you to comment on the reviews and tell us where we went wrong or what we got right. If you are wondering if there is any objectivity in a review, we can only provide you with the information below:
- A: I loved it and would cry if someone took it from my library. I would need lots of chocolate to get over its loss.
- B: It’s good and I would buy it again, given the chance.
- C: Eh. Not bad but I probably would never read it again.
- D: I want my money back.
- F: I want my money back and repayment for the time wasted reading it.
- DNF: does this really need an explanation?
Q: Why do you write your reviews in the form of a letter?
When Jayne and Jane first started the blog, they were going to write the letters to readers, like are in the front of many books. Dearreader.com was taken however but when we checked dearauthor.com was not. So that is how we came to write reviews in the form of letters to authors. The reviews, though, are really for readers. We don’t presume that an author would find our reviews helpful or useful because by the time the book gets to us, the book is done, published. The reviews, though, are meant to be conversation starters and are not intended to be read as literal letters written to the author.
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The contents of Dear Author
Q: What does Dear Author offer?
We are primarily a site that reviews and talks about romance books. We also post links to industry news that we find interesting. Other features of interest are:
- First Sale story of new authors, bestselling authors, and every author in between. They are inspirational and a way for readers to find new authors to read.
- A reader, Alison H, approached us about profiling new authors and presented us with a wonderful debut/new author interview series. There are a few other interviews interspersed throughout the blog too but all can be located using the “interview” category link.
- We are an opinionated group and every Tuesday we post our opinions about romance, the romance genre, publishing, and anything related to one of those subjects.
- We also love ebooks and, from the inception of this blog, have been avid ebook fans. We have a whole category devoted to all things ebooks. Further, at the end of every review post, we’ll note whether you can buy the book in digital format.
Q: How many reviews do you post and how often?
We post approximately 10 reviews per week and most reviews are of genre romance books. We try to post a review of a book every day and on Friday, we post reviews of films.
Q: I need a recommendation for a book!
Every month, Dear Author recommends a list of books to read. “If You Like Series” series features readers recommending books to other readers that fit a particular theme. If you have a theme that you like and we haven’t opened a thread about it, contact us.
We also have a list of books that collectively we have considered to be some of the top in the romance genre.
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Find your way around Dear Author
Q: How do I navigate around the site?
We have a search box and an Advanced Search page. We also try to provide tags and categories to make navigation easier.
Don’t forget the navigation bar or the category links.
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Make contributions to Dear Author
Q: How can I contribute to Dear Author?
Please feel free to voice your opinion in the comments, vote in a poll, or contact us.
Q: I’ve got something I would like to see profiled on Dear Author. How can I make that happen?
You can either leave a comment or you can send us an email. You can make a suggestion, offer up interview ideas or even write your own guest opinion. Of course, we may not be able to post every idea you have, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to contact us.
Q: What’s a comment?
Comments are your, and other readers of the blog, contributions to a topic. We want to hear from you and have generally few rules about commenting. We ask you to be polite and considerate.
Q: Do I need to register or open an account?
No, you simply need to enter a name and an email account. The email account tells our website that you are a real person and not a spam bot.
Q: How do I subscribe to a comment thread?
At the bottom of the thread is a comment box and underneath is a checkbox to follow a particular comment thread. You do not need to leave a comment to subscribe.
Q: Will you delete a comment?
If requested, we will delete a comment so long as it does not impair or impede the flow of conversation. In other words, if you leave a comment you are not happy about but several others have incorporated it into their responses, we are not likely to delete it.
Q: Do you edit comments?
If the comment contains links to pirated work or if the comment would invade someone’s privacy (in our discretion), we will edit or delete the inappopriate information.
Q: Can I get banned from commenting?
From time to time, commenters will abuse the privilege of commenting and if we feel that it impairs others from enjoying the blog, we will place you in moderation. We may also ask that you refrain from commenting in the future.
Contact us
Q: How do I contact you?
Please feel free to use the contact form at the bottom of the page or you can email jane directly at jane @ dearauthor.com.
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I tried leaving this on the reply sheet at the bottom of the first page, but it didn’t seem to take. Here goes again.
Congratulations on your new web look. I absolutely love it and the information is much more easily read this way. The manner in which the individual blogs are arranged take up much less room and allow for more columns to be scanned on the page. The masthead is clean, yet colorful, and not overbearing. Way to go!
@Tee: Awesome. You tried to leave a “contact us” comment and it didn’t work? Just trying to troubleshoot so that I can fix it for the future.
looks very nice, but could you increase the contrast on the type? the gray is hard to read for those of us with vision problems.
@becca:
I probably won’t change the font, but I can increase the font size, I believe. Let me look into that and see if I can offer that as an option/feature.
[...] For Readers [...]
You’ve got a typo at the end of this bit:
It should read “inappropriate information.”
Please feel free to delete this comment whenever it suits you.
P.S. I’m editing this to ask why the blockquote tags don’t seem to be having any effect. I put them round the quote in this post.
can we write reviews???
@Vasudha Bachchan: We do invite readers to share their opinions of books in our monthly reader thread
hi,i wanna know if any character remind you of someone in your personal life?Which character?How? in the book Three Men in a Boat.
Hi, I submitted a comment for the first time yesterday, and I’ve noticed a sudden huge upsurge in spam at the email address I used to post. I wanted to warn you in case email addresses are being harvested from your site.
@Lindsay Thanks for commenting Lindsay. I’ll look into it. The platform we use is wordpress and the email is requested simply to prevent spammers. I am not sure how the email would be harvested, but as I said, I’ll definitely look into it.
@Jane: I just tried to Unsubscribe from another blog who uses WordPress and it’s ridiculous. The blog owners didn’t know how to do it.
You have to sign up with WordPress to get an account to view all your subscriptions and THEN you can Unsubscribe, but you will be on their mailing address no matter what.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t harvesting email addresses.
I’ll be using RSS Feeds from now on.
Jane-Do you have an easy way for your subscribers to be removed from the email list without going through WordPress Hell?
Thanks.
Lyn
Hello,
I would love to know the correct order of the Charlaine Harris books due to the fact that every website I go on to ask they never give me the correct information! I really want to know the order so that I can finish the series because I just love the books!
thank- you!
@Vanessa: There’s an ad card in the book with the list. I think it’s at the end:
DEAD UNTIL DARK
LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS
CLUB DEAD
DEAD TO THE WORLD
DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
DEFINITELY DEAD
ALL TOGETHER DEAD
FROM DEAD TO WORSE
DEAD AND GONE
DEAD IN THE FAMILY
@Vanessa: I use FantasticFiction whenever I am not sure of the correct order in a series (I even do that with some favorites like Sherrilyn Kenyon). It is very well kept. This is Charlaine Harris’ page, scroll down to see the order of the books:
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/charlaine-harris/
@Vanessa: Like Fantastic Fiction, Fiction Data Base is another great option. They list the reading orders also.Fictiondb is not as bright and colorful as Fantastic Fiction and easier on the eyes if that is a concern for readers. They both offer book cover views but with fictiondb you do have to register (for free) to see covers. One other difference, Fantastic Fiction is from the UK and fictiondb is based in the US if that makes a difference. Here is a link to fictiondb:
http://www.fictiondb.com/
Check them out and compare. They are both great tools for readers.
Would very much like to contact Lisa Kleypas via email. Recently discoverd her fascinating and wonderful novels. Wanted to tell her this and ask a few fan related questions. Cannot seem to find an email address anywhere.
Please advise. Many thanks, Babs
Is there a reliable way to find out what titles are published in hardcover? I have ordered and paid a reasonable hardcover price, then receied paperbacks and the information that the author never published in hardcover–I am particularly interested in the work of Elsie Lee Sheridan. I know she published some of her regencies at least in hardcover, because I have them.
@ann vanrosevelt on certain sites, it should say in the book info detail what format it is. Amazon and BN both provide that information.
I am interested in being a book reviewer and was wondering how I would go about doing that? Looking forward to hearing from you.
@Eva Eva – I started a blog using a free service like wordpress and just put up reviews every day. (Or every other day). You can also use services like goodreads and library thing to build a little resume.