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

Dear Ms. Sheedy:

Family dynamics are always rife with inherent conflict. You use the theme again in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye to good effect. While KTG was much more romantic than the first book I read, Without A Word, and while the suspense was strong, I thought that the ending was almost too pat with all the loose ends tied up too prettily.

Joseph Worth and his friend, Julius Zern, form Guardian , a company that offers bodyguard services to the rich and famous. Joe spots a hottie on the street near his office with blonde hair and legs that go on forever. Naturally, he immediately begins to weave her into his fantasies and when she shows up at his office door, he feels like his day can’t get much better. Unfortunately, the hot blonde, April, throws a cold shower on those fantasies when she says she is there about Joe’s mother.

Joe’s mother, biologically speaking, made him a ward of the state when Joe was four so he doesn’t have fond memories …

Dear Mr. Capella,

I’m so glad your editor persuaded you to write this book. And for the positive buzz at various other romance review sites that brought it to my attention. I’ve also heard that it’s already been optioned for a movie and after reading it, I can see why. The descriptions of Italy and Naples put the reader right on the scene, the characters (even the secondary ones) are three dimensional, the humor is delightful yet you manage to convey what war was doing to these people and this country. It also brought to mind something I read while preparing an Advanced American History report when I was in high school. One British general is said to have remarked about the mingling of soldiers and prostitutes of Naples, “Some of you chaps stick your privates in places that I wouldn’t even put the ferrule of my umbrella.”

Captain James Gould arrives in wartime Naples assigned to discourage marriages between British soldiers and their gorgeous Italian girlfriends. But the innocent young officer is soon distracted by an intoxicating young widow …

I’m starting a new column for Wednesdays on USA Today Bestseller list predictions. There were a few books that were on sale last week that had street dates for Tuesday, September 25, 2007. The most notable one was JR Ward’s Lover Unbound. According to Bookscan, purchases of Ward’s book were made as early as two weeks ago which is bound to hurt the official street date week’s sales. She didn’t make it onto the USA Today list last week and I don’t think she’ll make it on this week either. In fact, according to the sales recorded by Bookscan, Monica McCarty, a new historical romance author, is outselling Ward. Would that be true overall? Probably not. I would expect to find Ward in more non traditional book locations like Wal-Mart and drugstores and grocery stores who may not be reporting point of sales data to Bookscan.

I think McCarty’s success is interesting. She writes historical romances set in early 17th C Scotland. By most accounts, historical books are selling by author meaning that historical romance …

Yes, I didn’t know that there was a National Coupon Month either but there is. I read a press release this morning from CoolSavings.com about a survey of coupon use by age. The most consistent user of coupons is the 55+ age group. 65% of the AARP crowd use coupons on every shopping trip. But the coupon use isn’t exclusive to the 55+ crowd. 51% of 35-34 year olds report using coupons on every trip. The most thrifty age group, however, is the 35-44 year old group who use coupons 61% of the time and 35% of those shoppers save $10-$20 per trip. This group, more than any other, relies on the newspaper for their main source of coupons while the others rely on a combination.

Not really book related, but I thought it was interesting.

Via CoolSavings.com Press Release.

Dear Ms. Hunter:

I really enjoyed Rules of Seduction and was greatly anticipating Lessons of Desire and the story of the independent and unconventional Phaedra Blair. When I began the book, I was even more interested because I could see that the story that was going to unfold was an exploration of a fundamental feminist issue of alone and unhappy v. together and happy. Because I knew how it woud end, I was intensely curious to see how the issue of female independence would be handled.

Phaedra Blair is the daughter of a famous independent female thinker Artemis who taught Phaedra to love freely. Her father, Richard Drury, was a respected member of Parliament and another intellectual. Richard and Artemis shared a “great love” but never married as Artemis maintained that marriage would rob her of her independence. On Richard’s deathbed he gives his memoirs to his illegitimate daughter, Phaedra, and extracts her promise to see the memoirs published. Upon reading them, though, she discovers that her mother had strayed from her father’s bed and that the lover that her mother took may have led …

Gizmodo wrote that it incorrectly reported that YouTube was going to use ad bumpers before video content. Instead, YouTube will have overlay ads. Also annoying but not so terrible as the 30 second ad bumper.

Dear Mr. Bryson,

When your books are on, they’re wonderful. “Made in America,” “The Mother Tongue,” and “Neither Here nor There” are among my favorites. They’re funny, informative and a delight to read. But while “Notes from a Small Island” starts off with a bang (love the scene when you put the underwear on your head to keep warm on your first night in Dover) it unfortunately fizzles out midway through the book and ends up limping along to the finish.

What kept me reading were your delightful stories of your first and subsequent encounters with the English and getting to know your way around how things are different there, how you met your wife and her family and discovered you couldn’t understand the appeal of their favorite TV shows, your work mates, the upheaval in journalism during the 80s, wandering around Windsor with your daughter — I continued to enjoy things like this. It’s only when you start whining …

It seems like every day we get more and more announcements of companies selling digital content without software locks on it. Last week, eMusic announced its intention of selling its audiobooks without DRM and now Simply Audiobooks, the second largest online retailer of digital audiobooks (behind Audible) will be offering DRM free audiobooks with the goal of making its entire catalog DRM free.

Via Press Release.

Last week, there was an ad by Sony for the new Sony Reader that read “Sony. Sexier than a Librarian.” Today, Angela James sent me a link to a Wyoming library ad campaign that aims to bring the sexy back to reading. Barnhart ad agency helped Wyoming libraries to create a host of sexy and clever ads to bring readers into the fold.

One thing that the New York Public Library does is offer digital content to out of state users for $100.00 a year. Wyoming Libraries might consider doing something like to expand its reach beyond its borders.

Amazon’s new music store is now open and offering over 2 million songs from artists like KT Tunstell, 50 Cent, and the Rolling Stones. Every song and album is in the MP3 format, the most universal format for digital music, and can be played on nearly every device on the market from the iPod to the BlackBerry.

The songs are priced from 89 to 99 cents and encoded at 256 kilobits per second.

It will be interesting to see whether iTunes will meet these prices. When it announced this spring that iTunes would offer EMI’s catalog of music DRM* free, it was with a catch. The DRM free music would be offered at a higher price - $1.29 instead of $.99.

Hopefully the competitive pricing Amazon is offering will put pressure on iTunes to offer DRM without the premium pricetag.

Via Press Release.

*DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and is a piece of computer code which ties the song or book to a single device. I.e., iTunes music can only be played on an iPod device or through iTunes.