Dear (Insert Name Here),
How is a man supposed to be a man when he’s trapped in the body of a wolf? And what is the woman who loves him supposed to do about this rather awkward situation?
GARWAF (Old French for “werewolf”) is a fantasy complete at 90,000 words which blends elements of Beauty and the [...]

I received two publisher alerts and want to share them with the community. One relates to a Yaoi publisher closing shop and the second is Tokyo Pop’s Manga Pilot draconian contract.
Iris Print:
Iris Print is a Yaoi publisher who apparently closed up shop and failed to tell its authors. Giapet.Net first reported this on May [...]

Dear Ms. Hart,
Your Spice Brief, Reason Enough continues the story of Elle and Dan from Dirty. Since I loved Dirty, I was really looking forward to Reason Enough and I am happy to say I enjoyed it.
Elle and Dan have been living in the first home they’ve owned together just a few months when [...]

This video answers the burning question of how to pronounce Sala. I won’t give it away. You must watch the video at least to the 4:18 mark. “Maybe that was Dinah.”
Click on the title to watch.

Rachel Gibson’s first book was Simply Irresistible, a secret baby romance, which featured a “charm school graduate and Southern belle extraordinaire” who runs away from being a trophy wife, has a one night stand, and goes on to build an empire (a small one, but still). I knew then that Gibson marched to [...]

Updated to add, Brenda Novak’s auction for diabetes ends in just a few days.
Dear Ms. Novak:
This is my first Novak book and I am happy to say it won’t be my last. I’ve been fortunate to read some good romantic suspense released this month and yours was right up [...]

Ingram Digital is offering “to transition all participating Microsoft Live Search Books publishers into its Ingram Search and Discover platform at no cost, enabling publishers to continue making their content searchable and available to readers.”
Microsoft announced last week that it would be discontinuing its Live Search program. Microsoft scanned in, digitized, and indexed 750000 [...]

276,649 new titles and editions were printed in 2007 which is a 1% increase over the previous year. Print on Demand books increased from 21,936 titles to 134,773 titles per year. It’s no wonder that Amazon is flexing its market power with requiring POD authors and publishers to use its own POD service, [...]

In this political season, the candidates have received endorsements from people that they have had to “reject and denounce*”. The Good, The Bad, and the Unread, featured a promo for the September release of Double Enchantment by Kathleen Kennedy which is the second book in her Relics of Merlin series. Kennedy’s world is [...]

For our UK readers, the 100 Years of Mills & Boon Centenary Exhibition opens on June 6th at the Manchester Central Library. According to the Manchester site,
The exhibition explores the evolution of 20th century social and sexual mores in Britain, alongside the development of the world’s leading romance publisher. You’ll also find a company [...]

Dear Ms. Coleman,
When your publicist offered us the chance to review your latest novel, all that truly penetrated my brain was ‘women’s fiction’ and ‘western.’ Which is fine since I’ve enjoyed several books of this type and genre before. It wasn’t until I actually dove into the prologue that I realized it’s the story [...]

update: this program is through DailyLit. You must sign up with Daily Lit to get the Harlequin book for free.
Harlequin will be offering Kate Walker’s new June Presents title, Spanish Billionaire, Innocent Wife, to their subscribers for free. Beginning June 1st, people can sign up and receive the entire book [...]

Dear Mr. Archer
Thank you for sending your book to us to read. You may, however, regret this decision if you read the review. I suggest not reading it. Reviews are for readers and in this case, that maxim is doubly true.
Summary of the story is that Lloyd Vance, a detective from [...]

What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture by the third press secretary for George W. Bush will be released on June 2, 2008, but copies are popping up in stores. Politico bought a copy from a Washington bookstore and provided a review of it. Scott McClellan talks in his [...]

Deals for May 22 – 28th
And let me guess, they both have mommy issues. Pass.
RITA-nominated author Kate Moore’s INTO THE DARK and INTO THE LIGHT, the first two books in a Regency historical romance trilogy, concerning the sons of a famous courtesan, to Wendy McCurdy at Berkley, in a nice deal, by Pam Ahearn of [...]

Dear Mrs. Quinn,
Even after I failed to appreciate your last book, I was eagerly awaiting this one. I knew nothing about it until I started reading it and then read the review at AAR. I do agree that the plot, a young highwayman being abducted by his Dowager Duchess grandmother because she’s [...]

Dear Ms. Hunter:
I know that you are a gifted writer and I certainly feel like I am supposed to understand the underlying dynamic of the characters’ motivations but I admit to being lost. I do think that you are challenging norms here and I appreciate that but somehow I could never [...]

Dear Mr. Battis,
While it can be said we have a female author bias here at DearAuthor (and maybe that’s true to a certain extent), we have previously reviewed and enjoyed books written by male authors here. If a book interests me, it interests me regardless of who wrote it. So [...]

Borders had initially partnered with Amazon to serve as its online retail vendor. A year or so ago, Borders severed that relationship and made plans to start its own e-tailing presence. The beta launch is over and customers can now buy from Borders.com direct.

Over the past couple of months I have read a handful of books in which the heroine resists a relationship with the hero. I’m not talking about the ‘Oh, I really shouldn’t’ women, or the ‘no means yes’ girls, the females who are just playing coy so as not to appear desperate, or even [...]

Dear Ms. Brand,
I’ve been on a WWII kick the last few weeks which is what made me focus on the blurb for “Blind Instinct.” The heroine obtains a Nazi codebook that’s going to lead to all kinds of secrets and threats to her life. This is what brings her together with the hero as [...]

Of the three books reviewed below, two have that distinct HP feel to them replete with the high powered arrogant hero and the less empowered female. The two with the distinctive HP evoked more emotional response than the first one, His Mistress by Arrangement, but I gave higher marks to HMbA because it focused [...]

SB Sarah wrote me and asked if I would think bad thoughts about her if she bought a Kindle. I said yes but if she agreed to write a review for me, I would think less bad thoughts.  Here it is.
***
My introduction to eBooks came largely when I started reviewing romance novels, because [...]

Microsoft scanned in, digitized, and indexed 750,000 books and 80 million scholarly articles for its “Live Search” program which is similar to Google Booksearch. Microsoft decided to terminate the program and provide the digital copies of books scanned to the publishers. Microsoft will now rely on crawling the content repositories of other sites [...]

I received my RWR this month and the news that jumped out at me was the Virgin Cheek line is no longer accepting submissions. The words are “The Virgin/Cheek line is suspended after February 2009.” Michelle Pillow, a recommended read by Jayne, is a Cheek author (I think she also has published with some [...]

SB Sarah got a heads up from a Janet Evanovich fan that early reviews were disappearing from the Barnes and Noble site. Of course, the only deleted reviews were the negative ones. Google cache which preserves snapshots of past versions of a webpage showed at least two negative reviews that are nowhere to [...]

Dear Ms McCabe,
Happy days, it’s something different. Tudor England with a French heroine and Russian hero. Definitely not the same old Regency we get offered everyday. Thank you Harlequin Historical.
Sinful Alliance starts out wonderfully with a Venetian brothel scene showdown between two spies. One of them knows what’s up but the other [...]

Welcome to Query Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a query to be read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. Published authors may do so under their own name or anonymously.
Readers, though, the way that I look at it is this: Would the hook [...]

Dear Ms. Gibson,
Though I have read all of your books, in all honesty I’m not sure why. I liked your first book, Simply Irresistible, quite a bit, and loved your second, Truly, Madly Yours. Since then, your books have ranged from mediocre (I show five B- grades in my book log, which goes back [...]

SB Sarah posted about the new antitrust lawsuit filed by publisher Booklocker against Amazon. Booklocker is asking for class action status. The suit alleges an unlawful tying arrangement between Amazon’s bookstore and Amazon’s printing arm (Booksurge).
We discussed a tying suit briefly in the comments when the news of Amazon’s requirement to use its [...]

Tor started giving away a free ebook version of one of its print publications every week. This week’s book is Touch of Evil by C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp. (Direct link).  This is one of the books in Tor’s paranormal romance line.
You have to sign up for their newsletter to get the email. [...]

I’m reposting this because I stupidly miscommunicated with someone about this date and the first sale series and so I’ve got nothing. But given the fact that I think Loretta Chase’s Your Scandalous Ways is one of the best romances I’ll read this year, I thought I’d pull it up again and pimp her [...]

Fiction DB, a one stop resource of authors, titles, publication dates, and even purchasing, is free. FictionDB used to cost money to see entire backlists of authors and take advantage of its 200,000+ book database. As of Tuesday, May 20, 2008, the entire database is free. This site contains a comprehensive backlist [...]

Dear Ms. Shearin:
This may have been a case of mismatched expectations. The cover quotes and inside the book endorsements said that it was “fall out-of-your-chair funny” and that you had “mastered writing with humor.” I confess my reading experience was quite different. This is not to say that I didn’t find [...]

Steve Riggio, CEO of Barnes and Noble, stated today during BN’s first quarter conference call that Barnes and Noble is open to alternative solutions to deal with unsold books. Currently mass markets are stripped and thrown away with the covers being sent back to the publisher for credit. I’m not sure how trade [...]

Barnes and Noble reported a loss for the first quarter of $2.2 million which is a greater loss than last year’s first quarter returns which were down $1.67 million. Interestingly, part of the loss was from settlement monies paid as a result of a dispute regarding collection of taxes on online sales. Same [...]

Church thinkers like Saint Jerome announced that carnal relations were “filthy” even within the bounds of holy matrimony: “The wise man should love his wife with cool discretion,” Jerome opined, “not with hot desire… Nothing is nastier than to love your own wife as if she were your mistress.”
So writes Tony Perrottet in the introduction [...]

Sarah of SmartBitches wondered if you can follow an editor like you would an author, or maybe I can take that a bit further, and ask whether you can follow an editor like another reader who you trust. I initially thought that there was no correlation between an editor’s output and reader taste, but [...]

Dear Ms. Dawson,
My goodness it’s been years since I read one of your westerns though I do have them piled up somewhere on one of my TBR mountains. Now if I had them as ebooks, as I do this one, they’d be easy to locate. I love ebooks. And I started out loving this book. [...]

Vampires are becoming mainstream just as they are losing steam within the romance genre. Last week, Candy blogged about a “certain notorious biology professor from Minnesota” who “notices the massive wall o’ befanged man-titty” at his local Wal-mart. This week sees Guardian book blogger, Will Davis, consider the allure of the vampire.
Davis sees [...]

Dear Mr. Lanyon:
I don’t ordinarily look for gay fiction but in at the urging of Teddy Pig I picked up the Adrien English Mysteries which is a two novella* collection featuring the titular character, Adrien English, a gay bookstore owner and mystery writer with a bad heart, whose situation forces him into sleuthing.
These stories are [...]

This week is an eclectic mix - some old-school type stuff, some already-played-out stuff, and zombies.
I loved the movie Lost In Translation, and this sounds like a literary parallel. I’d buy it.
Malena Watrous’s REPEAT AFTER ME, in an effort to outpace her grief, a young American woman moves to rural Japan shortly after her [...]

Dear Mrs Ford,
It’s hard to read the blurb for “Road to Love” without mentally comparing it to the Mother of All Depression Era-Widow-Marries-Ex-Con-Hero novels but I think your book will stand on its own merits. Initially upon reading the blurb I thought, “I’ve read this before. I’ve seen it done excellently
before. What else is there [...]

Teresa Jacobs, aka Teresa Wayne, formerly dba Mardi Gras Publishing, appears to still be selling books under the Mardi Gras Publishing banner at Ebooksabouteverything.com. The rights of all these books have reverted back to the authors yet the books are still for sale and no sales apparently are being reported to authors.

As of September [...]

Dear Ms. Cole:
As soon as I finished Dark Desires After Dusk, I went back to track rage demon Cadeon Woede’s character in Wicked Deeds on a Winter Night and Dark Needs at Night’s Edge (am I the only one who’s starting to feel these titles are blending into one long tongue twister?), curious to [...]

Dear Mrs. Reinhardt,
I started out thinking this book would be one thing - your attempts at cooking told in a humorous style - and ended up with something much different. Instead we get annecdotes of Southern life that involve cooking or attempted cooking or dodging cooking that do bring to mind the [...]

It has been said by many an author that their sales at Amazon account for only a small (mostly single digit percentage) of overall sales. Yet, it’s growing sales is causing concern amongst publishers. Amazon’s sales have grown each quarter by leaps and bounds. The first quarter of ‘08 say a 22% [...]

Hastings Entertainment’s sale of books has increased 5.6% in the last quarter, bettering the increases in movies and music sales. The problem for publishers is part of the increase is due to the rise in used book sales.

Hastings said sales of new trade paperbacks, including Eckhart Tolle’s New Earth, as well as [...]

more cat pictures

During the past couple of weeks, the Smart Bitches and Karen Scott’s blog hosted heated debates regarding the state of African American romance fiction. For the most part and with few exceptions, romance books written by African Americans are shelved with African American books. To some authors, this is a regressive [...]

Dear Ms. Bourne,
It’s taken me a while to get around to reading your debut, The Spymaster’s Lady. Back in the winter, Robin asked me if I would review it in a conversational review with her before your next book came out, and I promised that I would. When I got to reading [...]