May 13 2012
Copyrights, particularly lengthy ones, benefit the corporations that license and/or those copyrights. The Copyright Extension Act of 1998 isn’t called the Mickey Mouse protection act because it is designed to protect individual creators. It is designated as such because it benefits one of the largest owners of intellectual property, Disney. As of 1998, the [...]
May 1 2012
In the wake of ubiquitous popularity for The Book That Shall Not Be Named, the reality that women do experience – and even enjoy! – sexual fantasy has collided with far more than 50 shades of judgment about who, what, where, when, why, how, and whether that’s okay. Last week, Leigh at AAR wrote [...]
Apr 24 2012
When I started reading erotic romance back in the early to mid-2000s, erotic romance meant “bedroom door wide open”, the author would use graphic terminology that most mainstream romances wouldn’t. The act of love making between the hero and heroine was captured in all its glory, so to speak, instead of closing the door [...]
Mar 25 2012
Publishing is being remade every day, from print only to digital first; from traditionally published to self published. With the advent of coordinated fundraising sites like Kickstarter, there is a move toward mass patronage. Patronage is a system of private support of the arts that has existed for centuries. The Medicis, for example, were well [...]
Mar 20 2012
Short Answer: It depends. Longer Answer: The courts have constructed a two part test to determine if characters enjoy copyright. This test has been unevenly applied across the circuit courts (the courts just below the US Supreme Court). The first test is to determine whether the character is capable of copyright. In other words, a [...]
Mar 18 2012
Introduction: The issues of plagiarism and copyright overlap in fan fiction (and fiction in general) causing a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding. Wholesale copying without attribution (giving credit to the source) is plagiarism but not always copyright infringement. Copyright infringement can happen even when credit is being given. This piece attempts to talk about [...]
Mar 6 2012
I asked Molly O’Keefe and Caitlin Crews if they would share some thoughts on shame and the romance heroine. The two were obvious choices for me because Crews and O’Keefe both write about the topics in their books. In the Disgraced Playboy, the heroine’s entire life is shaped by some modeling photos she had done [...]
Feb 28 2012
Remember in the movie Say Anything when Lloyd Dobbler, broken-hearted that Diane Court had ended their relationship, stood outside her window while she was napping blasting Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes? Rather than thinking of this as creepy, stalkerish behavior, my teenage heart swooned. Imagine, a boy who will do anything to win your love. [...]
Feb 25 2012
Last week, IPG had all of the buy buttons pulled on the ebooks it sold through Amazon. The two could not come to agreement on terms. IPG wanted to have the same terms and Amazon wanted better terms. IPG took to the internet and sent out an email aka press release denouncing Amazon, encouraging its [...]
Feb 14 2012
A couple of months ago at a news site for mixed race readers, one commenter self-identified as an “Asian Cajun”, which got me remembering my journey of assumptions and corrections years ago as a romance reader. At the time a few years ago, a huge number of “Cajun romances” – contemporary and historical – pretty [...]
Jan 31 2012
Some conversations in romancelandia never go away: accuracy and authenticity in historical romance, whether Jamie Fraser of Outlander is a great hero or the greatest, and whether series books are wonderful or maddening or both. Coincidentally, I was about to finish the last book of an eight-book series when I saw a column lamenting the [...]
Jan 24 2012
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a lot of bluster in the YA community over what reviews “should be” and how they should be written and defined and what they should and should not contain. It’s a conversation that was very common in the online Romance community not so many years ago, and the [...]
Jan 17 2012
On Wednesday from 8 am EST to 8 pm EST, Dear Author will join others like WordPress and Wikipedia in going dark. We are joining these other sites in solidarity to protest SOPA and PIPA, in their current incarnation, bills that will be used to censor the internet. Think of it this way. A number [...]
Jan 17 2012
As more authors bypass traditional publishing to bring their products directly to the consumer, the greater the risk is to the reader that she wastes her money (albeit a low amount of it) and her time (possibly more precious) on a sub standard product. The benefit of a book that is published by an [...]
Jan 14 2012
You wouldn’t believe how long it took for me to find a LOLCat capable of expressing the rage and hatred that all of romancelandia is feeling today toward stupid fathead Merlin Bracks, who revealed that she has been using a million aliases and faking reviews all over the place. Is this the work of one [...]
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