Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Dear Ms. Tarr:

Tara Marie’s brief post is what got me to buy this book. She said “It was dark and erotic.” Those are two compelling adjectives for a romance book these days. She was right, it was both dark and erotic. I’ll add one more adjective: brave.

Hadrian St. Claire was the son of a prostitute who begged and stole on the streets of London until he was saved and put in an orphanage. There, a patron took interest in him and St. Claire remade himself into a successful portrait photographer. He specializes in capturing women, in immortalizing their deep desires and thoughts in pictures. He doesn’t hesistate to bed the women either. Unfortunately, St. Claire has another vice which is more dangerous: gambling. After a deep night at the tables, St. Clare finds himself owing 400 pounds to Bull Boyle who liked to extract a pound of flesh for every 100 pounds a debtor owed him.

St. Claire arrives home one day to be offered a proposition. Ruin Calendonia Rivers, the leader of the London suffragette movement. St. Claire, …

Dear Mrs. Sherwood,

I’m just a sucker for books/movies/documentaries on WWII. Good was good, evil was just that and people seemed willing to make any sacrifice for the war effort. “Wave Me Goodbye” shows us the lengths to which the ordinary citizen went to do his or her part for final victory.

Cilla Watson, along with every other Briton, is already doing her part to win the war. But since over half of her school girls have been evacuated to the countryside or overseas, she feels she could do more. Her longtime neighbor, Ted Evans, is appalled at what she decides. Ted is in the Royal Navy and knows exactly how dangerous the North Atlantic is. Packs of German U-boats roam looking for convoys to torpedo and he is sick thinking of Cilla traveling to Canada as a chaperon for a boatload of evacuee children. But nothing he says or does, including asking her to marry him, will change her mind.

Cilla can understand Ted’s fears, and even shares them, but she’s made a commitment and won’t back out of it. Someone needs to be with these young and frightened children leaving their homes and families. …

Stay tuned for some exciting features at Dear Author (exciting for us at least). The week of October 2nd through October 8th we will be featuring an interview and several reviews of an author that the Two Ja(y)nes and Janine love. Today marks the first of a three part series on Romance Publishers Promises to Romance Readers. Today’s articles addresses Advertising (the delivery of the promise), next week will feature an article on Branding (the promise), and finally we’ll end with What to Do When a Good Author Goes Bad (or when the promises are broken).

Advertising is the one way that the promise of an author or publisher is delivered to readers. Of course, the writing is the ultimate delivery of the promise that authors and publishers are making but to get a reader to read the promise. In romance, the promise is that there is a committment, a love, between a core group of people. In mainstream romance, generally one woman and one man overcome obstacles to achieve a lifelong togetherness. Publishers deliver the promise a couple of ways:

spine labeling
bookstore placement
advertising online, in trade …

I had a mini debate/discussion with the readers over at MobileRead about whether backlights were important. I thought that they were and wouldn’t buy a reader without one. Most everyone over there thought that backlights were really secondary to the better display of an e-ink device. What say you?

{democracy:3}

If you don’t have an ereader with a backlight, you’ll have to get a booklight. Here are some booklights that I have used in the past:

Zelco bitty booklightI bought at Barnes and Noble because a) BN would have the best booklight available, right? And this one is packaged just for readers. It also had a battery pack and an AC adapter. I thought I would really appreciate the convenience of the battery pack while traveling and the AC adapter at home. Yet, the AC adapter cord was short and I often found myself fumbling around for an outlet near the bed. (hotels weren’t always so tech friendly). The battery pack convenient but it relied on 4 C! batteries which turned the itty bitty book light into a behemoth …

The winner of the last week’s ebook contest was Rocky. Please email me with your address so I can get you the copy of the much loved Nalini Singh’s Slave to Sensation.

11 out of 11 bloggers think Nalini Singh’s Slave to Sensation is the bomb. That’s a quorum, right? I’ve excluded DA as I think Jayne and I cancel each other out. Click on the More link for the contact form.

Dear Ms. Ames:

I hope this letter gets to you as I do not see that you are publishing any longer. Or it may be that you are publishing under a different name. Your book was recommended to me after I had finished reading Almost a Gentleman by Pam Rosenthal. I had expressed dissatisfaction at how certain parts of AAG played out. I wanted to see more of how the masquerade affected the lives of the participants. Teller of Tales is AAG only much, much better.

Jenner Page was raped as a young girl. She became pregnant and subsequently lost her baby rendering her incapable of having children. Based upon those two factors, Jenner was simply not marriagable material. She was allowed to go her own path. This lack of coddling made Jenner self reliant and very different than the average Regency female. When she was on the way to London, disguised as a male, she was nearly run over by a carriage driven by Lacey Raines.

Let me stop here for a moment and let me tell you how genius it was for you to provide Jenner with the manly name and Lacey with …

“Doireann is the proud daughter of a Scottish chieftan, her beauty renown
through the land of her father, and yet she chose to remain unbound and alone, free from submitting to the desires of any man. As the tides of war and pillage reach her homeland, she finds herself sold into the hands of the fearsome Viking pirate Thorsten, the wild leader of the frenzied Norse Bear Cult. She must survive the humiliation of being Thorsten’s woman, through pagan rituals and violent battles, as only her pride keeps her from submitting to his passion….”

Dear Ms Davis,

I first read The Winter Serpent years ago in the late 70s and lost my copy during a move. I thought vaguely about getting another but when I checked prices of OOP ones, I was shocked at the amounts. So when this was re-released in trade paperback a few years ago, I began to look for another copy. I will warn anyone wanting to read it, that this edition has a few errors in the typesetting but it’s nothing major.

This is more a historical novel than a romance. To be honest, by the end, there …

Dear Ms. Kozak:

This book. Well, let’s just say that words are not sufficient to describe my feelings about this book. So I resorted to pictures. You have my permission to use this is an ad for your book, if you like. Just wondered if your book was James Frey inspired or girl with a one track mind inspired?

edited to add summary:

Passion Flower is a writer who decides she wants to learn to ride a horse. Ivan Kozak is a professor spending his summer helping out a friend at his stables. Ivan and PF engage in various sexual escapades wherein PF is mostly dominated and humiliated but after their first sexual encounter comes to realize that she looooves Ivan. When I realized that the hero’s name and the heroine’s name matched the author and her dedication, I wanted to poke my eyes out with the pencil. That’s the story.

Best regards,

Jane

I noticed on Sybil’s blog today a cover for an Avon Red book which looked strikingly similar to the cover for Sunny Chen’s Mona Lisa Awakening. Are these too similar? They are for my tastes. It’s a great cover, but I’ll always like the first one better. Is it that there are just so many books and not enough unique ideas? Is it better to have one hot cover idea recycled continuously than have a hideous cover?

I tend to think the similar cover may backfire. I may see it and think, I’ve already read, bought, borrowed that book.