May 15 2012
I don’t know that you’ll find a better voice in the blogosphere for YA books and SFF books that Thea and Ana from The Booksmugglers. I’m not the only one who believes this. The Booksmugglers are one of the most trafficked book blogs on the internet. They are bloggers at Tor.com and are now [...]
Nov 9 2011
From the Press Release: TOKYO and TORONTO, November 8/9, 2011 — Rakuten, Inc. (JASDAQ: 4755) and Kobo Inc. today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Rakuten intends to acquire 100% of total issued and outstanding shares of Kobo for US$315 million in cash. Kobo was founded by and spun out [...]
Aug 16 2011
For me, it is harder to make a recommendation than to warn a reader off. The reason is because if I make a recommendation and the person acts on that recommendation, I know she has spent time and money based on something I said. Whenever I give a recommendation, I am thinking that this [...]
Aug 14 2011
Jaclyn emailed the DA reviewer group the other day with the following question: I got into an argument on Twitter with another publisher about buying ebooks and now I want to know what other readers do… With print books most of us have towering TBRs. Books we’ve bought and never read. Is the same true [...]
May 17 2011
With the RT awards handed out and the RITA awards coming up, I’m struck by the omission of romances that don’t hew to the one man-one woman formula. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have noticed, let alone felt annoyed. While I’ve read erotic and BDSM novels for at least a couple of decades, I [...]
Feb 14 2011
Sarah Wendell and I were invited to give a presentation this week at Tools of Change on the end user experience of ereaders. We want to share your thoughts so please leave a comment on what you think of ereader hardware, software, and the purchasing environment. What you like. What you don’t like. What you [...]
Nov 2 2010
A few months ago, Harlequin category (or series) romances appeared on the USAToday list. The reason for this is two fold. First, Harlequin is now assigning individual codes to each book so that the sales of each book can be tracked individually instead as a general category of “book”. Second, more category books are being [...]
Sep 21 2010
Robin (aka Janet here at the blog) wrote a paper which was presented this past spring’s PCA conference. The core of her paper is the reason that readers have different responses to forced seduction is based on the reader's grant of consent to the act. In essence, the reader is acting as proxy for the [...]
Sep 14 2010
Last week, we ran a poll asking people if there were storylines that people would just not read. A whopping 80% percentage of people said "yes." I received a few private emails by authors despairing over this poll. Fear not authors! For every reader who hates a particular trope, there are people who love them. [...]
Mar 21 2010
In the Globe and Mail, Russell Smith lamented the effect of e-books on personal book collections, writing in part: “So we lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves. Gone will be the guilty joy of spending [...]
Mar 1 2010
Romance gossip I picked up in New York (unattributed to protect the innocent). The next hot thing appears to be the straight contemporary patterned after the Virgin River series by Robyn Carr. Several houses are trying to capitalize on this through marketing and repackaging. Mariah Stewart of Ballantine and Toni Blake from Avon are examples [...]
Feb 16 2010
In looking over AAR’s Annual Reader poll results, I was struck with the fact that I still have not read Meredith Duran’s Written on Her Skin. This is remarkable to me because I loved Bound by Her Touch and it is my book of the year 2009. But there is something so perfect for me [...]
Feb 4 2010
I’m privileged to be able to give a presentation at this month’s Tools of Change conference along with Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches Trashy Books and Editor Angela James from Carina Press. Our presentation is what readers want and it is based on conversations we’ve had with ebook readers for over four years on our [...]
Jan 26 2010
Amazon is publishing four previously unpublished manuscripts through Amazon Encore. We anticipated this move back when Amazon purchased CreateSpace. I anticipate that these books will be distributed, in print, through third party wholesalers and receive prime advertising at Amazon. Avon is holding a big contest for readers. Suggest a novella idea and if yours is [...]
Jan 24 2010
Ned is thinking of getting a new vehicle and at dinner the other night, one of our friends talked about the new Ford Fusion dashboards. Apparently the new Ford Fusion dashboard is highly configurable, allowing four different types of displays. Users are pushing for the dashboards to be opensource so that people can customize the [...]
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