Dear Author » cell phone

Tuesday Midday News: AJ Llewellyn Admits Adopting Male Persona Despite Being Female

Jane — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:42:29 +0000

It’s election day in many places. I hope if you live in one of those places, you are voting today.

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Self published superstar C.J. Lyons has been picked up by Minotaur. I thought that Lyon’s books were romantic suspense but if they are published by Minotaur, it sounds like they are more thriller? I believe Minotaur was the publisher of Barry Eisler before he accepted a similar offer from Amazon. Minotaur also bought three books from Allison Brennan for over $500K soon after Eisler turned down his offer from Minotaur.

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In non related book tech news, Republic Wireless is offering low cost cellular service because it falls back and uses wifi whenever possible. The cost? $19 a month for unlimited text, data, and voice service.

As GigaOm reported last week, it will cost only $19 a month for unlimited text, data, and voice. It can offer these low rates because its phones use a special ‘Hybrid Calling’ system that relies on Wifi whenever possible, falling back to cellular connections when Wifi isn’t available. The initial cellular partner is Sprint, but Republic is working to use other carriers as fallback options as well.

Yeah for competition!

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Merrian sent me this link to the Australian Romance Reader survey. Book buying overall is down. Digital usage is up. Paranormals is the most read genre.

The most popular sub-genre this past year was contemporary romance, followed closely by historical romance and paranormal romance. But when asked which one sub-genre they read most, the majority of respondents said paranormal romance.
The most popular book format is still mass market paperback at 60.4% (but this is down from 69.2% last year). Ebooks on the other hand are up to 24.3% from 19.2% last year.
Book buying is down this year, with 59.9% buying less than 5 new romance books a month (46.7% last year) and 22.6% buying 5–10 news books (32.9% last year). Those buying more than 15 new books a month is down from 6.7% last year to just 2.9% this year.

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Updated to reflect proper pronoun usagee: M/M author A J Llewellyn has been posting as a gay man for most of his writing career. He’s allegedly written blog posts about coming out, being a victim of gay bashing, and even hired a man to sign for him at a booksigning. He apologizes to any reader “who feels lied to” but argues that he is a victim herself. Ugh.

This unsavory appropriation of an oppressed minority group’s life for profit has always been part of my problem with male pen names in the m/m genre. It’s done, of course, to gain authenticity; to increase sales of books. It’s not done because someone has some issue with transgender feelings.

Harlequin to Distribute Manga Via Cellphones in Japan

Jane — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:39:09 +0000

By now, you must have read how Japanese consumers are reading more and more on their cellphones. Harlequin is the grey old lady of romance no more. Harlequin is teaming up with Softbank Creative to sell and distribute its romance manga via cellphone in Japan.

Beginning in April 2008 SoftBank will distribute digital versions of Harlequin K.K.’s successful comics on cell phones and Internet distribution sites. Over the next five years SoftBank will carry 1,000 Harlequin manga titles chosen from over 10,000 of the romance publisher’s novels.

I don’t know of another publisher that is pushing the international and digital boundaries like Harlequin. HarperCollins is a close second, but Harlequin, for all its faults, is thinking of the future.

Via news release.

Japanese Cell Phone Novels

Ned — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:39:04 +0000

I find this so interesting. Last year in Japan 5 of the top 10 selling books were “cell phone novels”. These novels are entirely written on cell phones using all of the abbreviations emoticons that I have so much trouble understanding.

These are very short novels but very successful. In fact the number one best selling book last year was in fact a cell phone novel entitled “Love Sky” written by Mika. The author explained her success due to difficulty most of her fans have in reading actual books and understanding their long difficult sentences.

That statement seems so hilarious, but I think these “books” are obviously interesting enough for the publishing houses in Japan since most of them are turning these cell phone novels into real books.

I wonder when this trend will hit our shore?

Via Collegian Online