Archive for October, 2009
Dear Ms. Campbell:
 I read your controversial debut and while I appreciated the chances you took, it didn’t inspire me to read your other books. When Captive of Sin arrived on my doorstep, I thought I would give the book a chance.
Sir Gideon Trevithick finds a woman cowering in the stable where his horse is quartered.  She has clearly been beaten and when he extends his mantle of protection, she would rather be alone and in pain that accept his help.  Gideon will not be gainsayed and sweeps the woman into his carriage and away from the perceived danger.  He vows that he will not only protect her but he will not harm her himself.
Lady Charis Weston is one of the wealthiest women in England. Her stepbrothers are trying to force her into marriage with another man to pay off their debts. Â Charis refuses. Â She is only a few months away from gaining control over her fortune. Â Her stepbrothers engage in a series of small punishments which crescendo into threats of rape and of actual physical abuse. Â She runs away with no clear picture or plan, just an instinctive need to …
Welcome to First Page Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. You may comment anonymously.
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Fate had painted a bull’s-eye on my back. The ironic thing, I didn’t believe in fate or karma before my brother left a message on my office’s answering machine that was the equivalent to Armageddon dropping a line just to say hey. Being the self- designated, birdie-flipper of fate I had to know if listening to the message would be like Darth Vader—Phoenix, I am your brother.
After six years of silence, only one reason would have made Samuel call me. Earlier this week the family had been going through the family bible, and would I mind if they whiteout my name?
But, no, instead of letting the call stay a mystery I helped fate change my course, and pushed that stupid button to listen to the message. At least to my credit, I braced myself to hear what my brother had to say.
“I really don’t want to leave this message, but I don’t think you would call me back.” He paused, and it felt like …
As there are many ways to get romance wrong, there are exponentially more ways to get BDSM romance wrong. BDSM is tricky. If you’re writing it because it’s hot, but you’ve got no experience with it, you’re almost bound to get it wrong. Almost, but not always, I hasten to add. Examples of successful BDSM romances by authors who aren’t BDSM-identified themselves — as far as I know — are Ann Somerville’s Remastering Jerna and Matthew Haldeman-Time’s An Affair in Paradise and Victoria Dahl’s The Wicked West. So the “authenticity” of a writer who is BDSM-identified isn’t necessary, if that author has imagination, empathy, and has done their research. But still, there are many many ways to get BDSM hideously, awfully, horrifically wrong. I’ve written before about how not to write BDSM romance, but I’ve recently had a string of truly scary BDSM romances cross my computer screen, all scary in very different ways, so I thought I’d combine reviews into a discussion of What NOT To Do.
 Thirty Days by Shayla Kersten (Liquid Silver Books)
This book horrified me. So much so that I literally can’t bring myself …
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Genre: Romantic zombie comedy
Grade: Effing hilarious
When I looked ahead on the October calendar and saw that this last Friday would be the day before Halloween, I realized I needed some kind of horror film or monster film or, well you get the picture, to tie in with it. But since that genre isn’t something I normally watch and I wanted some romance in the film, I was a bit panicked. “What can I watch?” I muttered as I chewed a fingernail. A quick check of my Netflix queue and the day is saved. I’ll watch “Shaun of the Dead!” I said.
The plot is fairly simple. Shaun (Simon Pegg) is a 29 year old appliance salesman who’s having problems with his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) who is dissatisfied with their relationship, primarily because it revolves around going to “The Winchester,” Shaun’s favorite pub, every night. She wants something different, a nice dinner at a nice restaurant somewhere other than the pub. But Shaun screws even that up and tops it off by giving her flowers, complete with card, that he’d bought for his mother. She dumps him and Shaun and one of his flatmates, Ed (Nick …
Dear Ms. Andre:
 I admit that the one and only book I read by you was one about football and I had a fairly negative reaction to it given that so little of the football aspect was portrayed with accuracy.  I was  hoping that this would be different.  While Hot as Sin is readable, it suffers from the same problem as the football book.  The story is paramount and little details don’t matter so long as the story proceeds in the fashion that you want.  Accuracy, authenticity take second fiddle to the emotional arcs of the characters.
Sam and Dianna were the epitome of young love (or at least that is the set up that you want us to buy initially). Â Â Sam was 20 and I think Dianna was 18. Â Dianna, for reasons revealed later, leaves Sam at the tender age of 20 and Sam has never, ever gotten over it. Â He’s so connected to her that when he is told she was in a car accident in Colorado, he immediately flies (from the Lake Tahoe area) to be by her side. Â Sam is a forest firefighter, a “hotshot”.
The story that you tell about …
Amazon filed for and was recently granted a patent to change words in a book in order to track down the source of pirating. John Scalzi called this a stupid idea because it violates his creative control over the work.
I think Amazon has the right idea. A change to the html css stylesheet, for example, could randomly create some kind of near invisible change that would allow the source of the pirated material to be tracked down. Courtney Milan suggested something like an italized period as that would be virtually unnoticeable. You could place the substitutive words in the Author’s Note or in the ordering of the metadata tags.
This type of social DRM could create an impediment to that “casual piracy” that content creators fear. I.e., how many people are you going to share a book with if that file contains something that can be tracked back to the original user. While the Amazon concept might seem like an anathema to some authors, I do think it’s a step in the right direction. I hope publishers and vendors can work together to create something like this that would remove the impediment to legitimate …
Dear Ms. Justiss,
 You’ve been writing Regency set stories for years now so by now, I’m sure you’re more than familiar with all the conventions, the standard plots, the trope characters, all the things we’re used to seeing in this historical category. Well, I am too so when I come across something different, I’m liable to sit up, smile and say, “Yes!”
I’m sure that Sir Edward Greaves was, even if only briefly, a minor character in your book, “An Unconventional Match.” Alas, I don’t recall him. Shame on me as he’s a nice guy. As he, himself, thinks, he doesn’t have the lofty title of his friend Nicky Stanhope, the Marquess of Englemere, or the money his financial wizard friend Hal Waterman does but he’s not a bad catch on the marriage mart. So far, his attempts to find a wife he can admire as well as love, and who he thinks would enjoy living with him in the country, have not panned out but hope springs eternal.
In the meantime, he’s intrigued by a little property owned by Nicky. It’s far from Nicky’s other holdings and has currently …
Dear Ms. Enoch:
 After finishing the previous trilogy which I believe to contain some of the best work of your career, I was delighted when The Care and Taming of the Rogue arrived on my doorstep, ridiculous title notwithstanding. With the adventurer hero, I thought we might be getting something unique again.
While prose in The Care is a well written, the book lacked the emotional appeal of the previous three. In fact, in writing this review, I found my memory to be totally devoid of this book even though I read it only a week ago. Even the notes that I took failed to jog any emotional response.
Bennett Wolfe is a former adventurer in the Congo. He was thought dead and his journals were stolen by one of his fellow travelers. While he was presumed dead, said fellow traveler, Captain David Langley, published a memoir using Wolfe’s journals and notes and took the opportunity to paint Wolfe in a very unflattering light. Bennett’s uncle, the Marquess of Fennington, has Bennett declared dead so as to take part in the profits of the memoir. Bennett is not …
From the comments on the thread regarding the copyrights of readers, it appears that some authors believe that they aren’t getting a sufficient forum on Dear Author to air their frustrations and concerns about piracy. The pressing need to talk about piracy whenever the subject of ebooks comes up appears to overwhelm any other thoughts about digital books and readers. This post is a forum for those authors.
Before we get to the comments, though, I want to state two things.
First, Dear Author is not a blog devoted to authors or author causes or author issues. We are a reader blog and our focus is for the readers, from the reviews, to the giveaways, to the opinion pieces. We are not author advocates and yes, often our reader interest is at odds with the authors. We do not exist to advance any author position nor any particular author. If it appears that we do, it is because we have an interest in an author topic or a particular author, not because we exist to do service on behalf of authors and their self interests. To state it more bluntly, we at Dear Author owe …
There was a person who mentioned that the idea of a book or a phone or a laptop in the bathroom is pretty disgusting to them. I confess, in a manner of TMI perhaps, that I read in the bathroom. Do you?
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Okay people, listen up. This is the last book in the series and the whole thing is a spoiler for the first three books. You have been warned.
Dear Ms Hoyt,
 Capturing my attention for an entire series before I’ve even read the first book is something. Me remembering that a new book in a series is coming out without having someone remind me of it is something. Keeping my attention and enthusiasm for a series all the way into book four is something. So don’t be bummed that the grade for this one is lower than most of the others.
At last, here we are at the final book of the series when the bombshell, which was hurled at us in the preview included at the end of the previous book, explodes. For the length of the other three books and all during the seven years since the horrible events at Spinners Falls in the Colonies, everyone has known that Captain Lord Reynaud Hope, heir the Earldom of Blanchard, is dead. The pitifully few fellow Englishmen taken with him as captives by the Indian allies of the French saw poor Reynaud die. Two …
Notes: It is impossible for me to write this review without giving spoilers for the series so if you just want to enter the contest, skip to the comments and tell me your favorite soul mate story. We are giving away five copies of this book (and by we, I mean Dorchester and Dear Author).
Dear Ms. Wilson:
 I can see you don’t hesitate in ripping out the reader heart and squeezing it until we are gasping. Â This is not a bad thing. Â Â ne thing that sets you apart from other authors (not all but some) is that you are willing to take chances with your characters. Rain and Ellysetta, the main protagonists, remain inviolate. Their love continues to flourish, but war is not without its casualties and the knife of the soulmate can create real tragedy.
Ellysetta Baristani is a Tairen Soul, one of the only female Tairen Souls in the land. Â She was found living amongst the humans in Celieria when a dangerous glimpse through time, aided by magic, revealed to Rain, a Tairen Soul and leader of the Fey, that she would somehow help to save his …
Cultural Appropriation in Romance
Earlier in this year of 2009, there was a Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, dubbed racefail09, that centred mainly around the SF/F genres. If you clicked on that link, it leads to a set of many, many, many links about race, racism, cultural appropriation and white privilege. (If you’ve never heard of these terms before – or your knee jerk reaction is to say “I don’t have white privilege!” – this is a good place to start reading.)
Romance suffers from the same problem SF/F does. It’s very, very white. It would also seem that readers are far more okay with reading about vampires and werewolves and demons and angels than characters of colour. That is not okay. Think about what this means for a second. And imagine, if you will, being erased in stories or always in the background, a victim, evil, maybe the best friend or sidekick. . .but never the hero of your own story. This is what appropriation does to people of colour. It is not diversity to have white people running around in foreign lands without much thought to the people who are native to those lands. I can’t say …
Dear Ms. Lyons:
 This is a witch/witch hunter paranormal and while witch stories are not proliferous within the paranormal sub genre, the underlying tropes are familiar. Â Wing Slayer hunters, men chosen by the Wing Slayer to protect witches, must find their soul mirror or succumb to the rogue state where they live to slaughter witches. This story tries to inject new life into the soul mate saveth trope by placing into question whether love can overcome magical destiny.
Carla is a powerful witch who helps those rescued from cults to overcome brainwashing. She works at a local clinic with her good friend Max, a sociologist (and probably a Wing Slayer to be). Max was a caring, curious sociologist until he was unable to save someone from dying in a cult. Then he became romance hero material: “The curious sociologist in Max died, and this man, full of passion, grief, anger and guilt, was born.” Max is mentioned quite frequently but plays absolutely no role in this book despite having unrequited feelings for Carla. I can only guess that he is to be hero of his own book after suitably suffering …
 I just wanted to give everyone a heads up that we will be giving away this awesome Vera Bradley quilted bag complete with the entire backlist SIGNED by Ms. Laurens herself (that’s almost 30 titles) in celebration of Stephanie Laurens’ latest release, Untamed Bride which is in stores now. This giveaway will start next Monday, November 2, 2009. Think of it as an early Christmas Present to yourself.
Want to know more about Untamed Bride? You can read the first 20% online here. There is another excerpt here and a video trailer of the book here.
This contest is sponsored by Avon.
Mobile adoption is occurring at a faster rate than any other adoption of internet in the past. Further, at the leading edge of mobile adoption is the growth of the iPhone/iTouch market. Morgan Stanley is essentially telling investors that those that can anticipate and deliver products to the mobile space are those who will be winning the future.
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Dovetailing this report are the findings that Greystripe, a mobile ad network, is releasing about iPhone moms, mothers of young children who own iPhones. Â TechCrunch reports on the usage of the iPhone by moms. Moms are using iPhones to make their shopping easier (by locating stores nearest to them and keep track of shopping lists) to entertaining their kids (59% allow their children to use the iPhone) and for personal entertainment purposes.
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Brewster Kahle announced last week that over 1.6 million books have been scanned and digitized. Â All 1.6 million Internet Archive books to be available on the OLPC. Approximately 750,000 to 1 million people have OLPC. All books that have been scanned and digitized are in the public domain.
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The American Booksellers Association wants the government to save independent …
Welcome to the My First Sale series. Each Monday, Dear Author posts the first sale letter of bestselling authors, debut authors, and authors in between. Terri DuLong’s first book, Spinning Forward, is in stores on Tuesday.
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 The older I get, the more I realize that I’ve always been a late bloomer. At age 25 I was divorced, a single mom with three children—and not much of an education. So I joined the ranks of college kids much younger than I and ended up earning a degree in secretarial science. I remarried, worked as a legal secretary and at age 34 discovered I would bloom once again—graduating from college a few years later as a Registered Nurse.
During all of these years, I wrote. No, I didn’t write for publication. I wrote because I had to write. I had been writing all of my life—volumes of pages to pen pals around the world, diaries and journals. Writing was my passion but never once did I consider that it could also be a career.
Like my mother, I’ve always been an avid reader, and it was my …
I recently reviewed His Lordship’s Mistress by Joan Wolf.  It features a young woman who, instead of marrying, decides she will try to sell herself for a short time to earn enough money to pay off the mortgage on her family home.  This book prompted commenters to reminisce about their favorite books using the fallen woman, mistress, or courtesan theme.  As Moth said, “I know I like it when the heroine isn’t totally squeaky clean.”
So bring on the mistress, courtesan or fallen woman recommendations. Â Please note if the book features a woman who pretends to be a fallen woman and is not (Bel, from The Duke, I am looking at you).
The nook, an electronic reader from Barnes and Noble, was announced on Tuesday. It is not likely another ebook reader will be released before the end of the year. Therefore it is safe to start contemplating whether it is worth buying an ebook reader this year. Author and reader Kay Sisk sent me this awesome comparison chart of current ebook readers.
There are three basic choices for the dedicated reading market:
- Amazon Kindle: Â Kindle 2 and Kindle Dx
- Sony Reader: Pocket, Touch, Daily Edition
- Barnes & Noble: nook & iRex
KINDLE
Pros of the Kindle:
 There are two flavors of the Kindle:
- Kindle 2, available internationally, 6″ screen for $259.00.
- Kindle DX, available in US only, 9.7″ screen for $489.00.
The Kindle allows for continuous access to your ebook purchase and the Amazon digital bookstore via 3G network from AT&T.  You are allowed to hook up to 6 devices to your account.  I have my iPhone and my husband’s iPhone devices registered to my account. If you are particularly trusting, you can share an account with up to  5 other readers. Anyone with a device registered to the account, however, may charge to that account.
Kindle’s refresh …
Dear Ms. Schmidt,
 I am coming to look forward to your many novels set on the Massachusetts coastal islands. Plus you use the turn-of-the-century (turn of the last century I should say) era which is something I’d love to see more of.
Nola Burns initially appears to be an uptight, dried up spinster who’s as rigid as her corset while Harrison Starbuck has been known as a scamp and a carefree rogue since his boyhood. Nola’s hardworking, having taken over the care of her siblings at the death of their parents and since run the teahouse which was her childhood home. Harry is well off due to his instinct for a good business deal. Now they’re about to clash over Harry’s latest venture.
The beachfront teahouse is the perfect location for Harry’s planned luxury hotel to accompany the cabaret he’s building to entertain the locals and summer tourists upon whom they all depend. But it’s all Nola has and she’s not going to sell it or see her business ruined without a fight.
When Nola allows the actors to stay in her house in order to fill in for the summer …
Welcome to First Page Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. You may comment anonymously.
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Maddie flicked over the page of a dog-eared graphic spy thriller and burrowed deeper in her office chair, her red Converse hightops propped on an open drawer containing scientific articles, chunks of quartzite and the odd gemological tool. God, she would love to be kick-butt Modesty Blaise coming face to face with that big ape-man Delicata. Wham! Blam! Look out ma’am! She would look so hot in black leather.
At her elbow, twenty million dollars worth of pink diamond glowed in a tiny pool of light beneath the stereomicroscope.
Whirrr. Click. The cuckoo bobbed out of the clock with a mechanical chirp. One o’clock. Maddie closed her book and tossed it in the drawer. Scooting her chair up to the microscope she pushed her glasses up her nose and peered through the stereo eyepieces. Strands of wavy brown hair escaped her ponytail and fell past the shoulders of her Geology Rocks! T-shirt. Tomorrow the gem would go on display in her Aunt Grace’s jewelry shop. Until …
Dear Ms. Wolf:
 I re-read your book recently in preparation for a year end list.  I was shocked when I checked the DA Archives and did not see a review for it.  I had to rectify that immediately.  His Lordship’s Mistress is one of my favorite books and your work in the Signet Regency line was really wonderful.  There are so many that I enjoy revisiting and I am so grateful that you decided to resell your ebook rights to Belgrave House so that I could buy ebook copies of many of them.  I do think that His Lordship’s Mistress is the best of your stellar work in that line and I’ll do my best to convey why.
As Janine noted in the review of another of my favorite Wolf traditional regencies, A London Season, your writing style is simplistic and spare. Â I really enjoy that style and it’s out in full force here. Â His Lordship’s Mistress contains all the classic elements of a Wolf book: the heroine in trouble, gambling leading to despair, Shakespeare, and horses.
Jessica Andover has just buried her stepfather, a wastrel that gambled away her mother’s small fortune and left …
Rachel and the Stranger (1948)
Genre: Historical frontier romance
Grade: B
Here’s another movie from ‘way back when’ that I first saw years ago courtesy of the AMC TV channel. In my quest for movies to write Friday Film reviews on, it came to mind. When I noticed that it’s going to be shown on TCM in early November, I hauled ass to my stack of old VHS tapes and pulled it out. Thank goodness it’s being broadcast as I’ve learned the hard way that VHS tapes are not eternal.
The film could also be called, in true romance book fashion, “The Indentured Bride.” We’re on the Ohio frontier – exact time never specified – and David Harvey (William Holden) is in need of some feminine influence around the cabin. His beloved wife Susan died recently and since then, the homestead is going to hell and his young son (Gary Gray) is taking full advantage of the lack of supervision to ignore his schoolwork in favor of going fishing and playing with his hound dogs. But it’s not until his friend, and former suitor for Susan’s hand in marriage, Jim Fairways (Robert Mitchum) takes a break from his wandering ways to pay them a …
Dear Ms. Austen,
I will confess right off the bat that I’m one of those readers who never “got” you. I tried to read Pride and Prejudice years ago, but gave up after a few pages because of your writing style. What can I say – I had less patience in those days with long, indirect sentences which seemed to use 20 words to say what could be easily said in five (hah! I’m one to talk on that score…). I read Emma a few years ago and honestly did not care for it. It wasn’t so much the language this time; it was the fact that there seemed to be about a dozen main characters and only one of them (Mr. Knightley, of course) appeared to not be a complete and utter twit. Emma herself was dumber than a bag of hammers, and every other character seemed to fall somewhere on the continuum between “moron” and “get any stupider and we’ll need to water you twice a week” (to paraphrase the late, great Molly Ivins).
I don’t really like reading about stupid people, so Emma frustrated me. Nonetheless, I picked up a copy of Sense and Sensibility recently, and though I …
Dear Ms. Ford,
 Sometimes I’m in the mood for a nice, gentle story to cuddle up with. A story that features good people who act sensibly without throwing snits over Big Misunderstandings. A story about families who get along. A story set in small town America but one which doesn’t denigrate big cities. Or have characters who all have double first names. “Her Best Bet” fits all them all.
Izzy Gordon faces the fact that in the ten years since she graduated from high school, she’s let go of her major dream. But is it too late for her to break from the perfect life her parents have mapped out for her and reclaim her goal to direct movies? With the help of her room mate, she decides to shoot a documentary for a contest and what better place then at a lake resort in Wisconsin which her parents own. Well, they don’t own the buildings, just the land, and the 100 year lease is ending soon.
Gib Murphy’s family has run the White Bear Lodge for almost 100 years but changes are coming fast. The place has gotten run down and …
Yesterday, there was an article in the New York Times about ebooks and the increase of ebook reading and possible dangers. The plus takeaway was that Kindle readers purchase more books than most heavy book purchasers.
Amazon for example, says that people with Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. That factor is up from 2.7 in December 2008. So a reader who had previously bought eight books from Amazon would now purchase, on average, 24.8 books, a rise from 21.6 books.
We romance readers know that from our own experience. Many of the early adopters of ebooks have been romance readers who buy more books than any subset of readers out there.
The negative takeaway from the Times article was that there was a reader who shared a Kindle account with someone else. She was quoted as thinking she was probably taking advantage of a loophole.
Ms. Englin has linked her Kindle to the Amazon account of some nearby friends, allowing all of them to read books like “The Lost Symbol” at the same time — while paying for them only once.
“I read much more, I tend to read faster for
…
Dear Ms. McCarty:
 Your books have a beautiful look to them. They look and feel lush, heavy, as if the reader should curl up in front the fireplace with a hot toddy, a blanket and commence reading. Unfortunately for me, if I had done that, I would have been cooked to a crisp because this book too me a month to finish. It’s a lengthy tome, nearly 400 pages, and at the end, I couldn’t really understand why it was so everloving long.
Caleb is the beginning of a paranormal series that is populated with, at least, vampires and werewolves. The first story features Caleb, a shapeshifting vampire, who is the eldest of a group of vampire brothers. (They are a group of rogues, says the blurb. By rogues, I assume that means renegade or someone who rejects the an established group, rather than say a dishonest, knavish fellow.)
The story begins quite well. Allie, the town baker, is in lust with one of her regular customers, Caleb Johnson. She tries to flirt with him, but he seems resistant. She buys a push up bra …
WARNING: spoilers for the first four books are impossible to avoid.
Dear Ms. Kenner,
 I’ve been addicted to this series since it first started four books ago. While some things have stayed the same, others, thank goodness, have changed and evolved as the series has progressed. And if there’s one thing I can count on, it’s a bang up finish with a “to be continued…” bombshell to make me frantic for the next installment.
Kate Connor, level five Demon Hunter, is once again faced with the powers of Darkness in her otherwise quiet CA beach town of San Diablo. But now her secret identity, which she struggled to hide during past books, is not so secret anymore. Her almost fifteen year old daughter knows, her best friend knows and now her second husband, Stuart, knows. Oh and her first husband, Eric, who was murdered five years ago then returned to her in the body of another man and who is now known in town only as a teacher at their daughter’s school, also knows. Yeah, it’s a lot to keep straight.
The book starts with the usual attack of a demon who utters cryptic threats …
Dear Ms. Slade:
 I confess to being reluctant to start this book. I’m not sure why. I think because there wasn’t anything about the description of the book or the cover that really stood out. It was a paranormal story about good demons and bad demons. Given that it was a free book, however, it didn’t hurt to at least read the first chapter. I was intrigued enough by the first chapter to continue given that the writing style appealed to me.
Ferris Archer is a former southern gentleman who is now one of the demon possessed. He and others like him have banded together to fight in the war against other demon possessed individuals and malices that populate the earth. Archer views himself not so much as a warrior, but a trash collector . Malices can be drained but they cannot be returned to hell and over time, just regenerate. To say that Archer is weary would be an understatement. He went from fighting in the Civil War to a non stop, centuries long battle against entities simply cannot be defeated. When others warn him that …
Dear Ms Brook:
 I participated in a debate the other day on Twitter about whether Romance keeps women in a traditional social position by linking love and the nuclear family to a woman’s ultimate happiness. The Guardians series is one of those I would recommend as an example of how powerfully Romance can subvert traditional social structures and expectations while still celebrating love as a liberating force. And in Demon Forged, these themes are in play on several levels, not only between romantic protagonists Irena and Alejandro, but also in the world of the novel more generally. The nature of love, the nature of sacrifice, fate v. free will, the purpose of being – all are at issue in Demon Forged, a novel that, like the rest of the Guardians series, is dense, multi-layered, richly textured, and slightly flawed.
Irena has been a Guardian for sixteen centuries now, making her one of the oldest of their kind, and one of the most awe and fear inspiring. Her gift is that she can shape metal, and from her Siberian forge she favors making weaponry to be utilized against demons and nosferatu. Guardians, who are …
Barnes and Noble is launching its Nook today. Some people are saying it will be in stores this weekend for hands on fondling. It’s certainly one of the best of the latest crop of devices with its dual screen nature. The lower half appears to be a touchscreen LCD which will allow faster browsing of titles, input of notes, and color access. The price is $259.00.
Updated:
- BN’s Nook has 3G connectivity and wifi.
- You will be able to access an entire ebook for free while inside the BN store, just like a paper book.
- The lending feature will allow readers to share their copy with another person using Nook or ereader. software for up to 14 days. Â You will not be able to access the book during this period of time.
- The device will begin shipping November 30 and is available only through BN stores and BN.com.
- There is no affiliate links for the nook, only for individual books and for the nook accessories.
- Nook will accept DRMed versions of eReader and ePub.
- You can load mp3s but not Audible books.
This video shows off an OLED display for a dedicated e-reader. Yeah, …
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
I loved reading the lists that people made up of their top 16 books this past week in honor of Kathleen Winsor. Â In making up my own lists of top books (either for the end of the year or for something else), I struggle with competing concepts. Â There are my favorite books. Â There are books that I think are well written. Â There are books that I find to be groundbreaking. Â These three types of books don’t always overlap for me.
Favorite Books
I have books that I love to re-read time and again. Â Are they the best books ever written in the romance genre? Probably not. Â For example, Savage Thunder by Johanna Lindsey is one of my favorite romances. Â Savage Thunder is about a half breed who is hired by Jocelyn Fleming, a recently widowed virgin duchess. Â It seems hard to believe that Lindsey was able to fit all those iconic (ironic?) tropes into one heroine, but she did. Â The hero’s name is Colt Thunder. I know! Â It’s hard to type that without giggling. Â Despite the cliches, this book works for me.
One of the things I …
Dear Ms. Michaels,
 If the purpose of the novella “How to Woo a Spinster” was to get me to buy this full length novel, it worked. But as I started to read How to Tempt a Duke, I wondered if I would get through it. Let’s see…Regency era, Duke hero, feisty younger sister, heroine with Dark Secret in her past who starts to bicker with the hero as soon as he shows his face at the old homestead. Hmmmmm, where have I read all this too many times to count?
Rafe Daughtry, son of the younger son, never expected to inherit the Dukedom. After all, his uncle was healthy and the heir and a spare were still up to their wicked, disgusting ways. That is until all three were drowned – along with some barques of frailty – in a yachting accident. Once word finally caught up with him in Paris, Rafe decided to stay and escort Bonaparte to Elba before heading home.
When he arrives in England, it’s to discover that his newly married aunt has left his two much younger sisters in the charge of his old neighborhood friend, Charlie. And hasn’t …
I started a Why I Read/Why I Write series earlier in the year but couldn’t sustain enough submissions to keep posting them. Â Courtney Milan sent this to me earlier in the year and I promised to post it near her release date.
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 Insert the depressing numbers of your choice into this paragraph: Of the wannabe authors who start a novel, only one out of a gazillion will finish. Of those who finish a novel, one out of a thrillion will find a publisher. Maybe one out of a bobillion will get a second contract, and of those, a mere snarkful will make more than thruppence per hogshead of sweated blood.
Another depressing fact: In order to write a novel, an author must sweat many hogsheads of blood. So why would any rational person ever voluntarily write a book?
Here’s the socially acceptable answer: “The pleasure of writing is compensation enough, and publishing is just be an added bonus! I write for the sheer joy of it.”
Um. Sometimes writing is a joy for me. But sometimes I despise it, and so I harbor dark suspicions whenever anyone claims writing …
No first sale today. Â Instead we have two essays. Â Later by an author on why she writes but right now, a very very special Why I Read.
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I learned to read when I was 4, just as my 4-year-old best friend Danny became sick (he was dying of leukemia) and I was starting to be sexually abused by a next-door neighbor. I quickly discovered that when you open a book you could jump into a new world and escape the world that you are forced to live in.
Danny was the one who first made me realize the power of books. No matter how crappy he felt if you read him Put Me in the Zoo he would giggle and glow with enjoyment. I read him that book hundreds of times before he died when we were 6 and it never failed to make him feel better.
By the time I was 6 and raped for the first time by that neighbor, I was reading at a 6th grade level and the books I devoured were the likes of Nancy Drew, the Hardy Brothers, Trixie Belden, the Box Car Kids, Little Women and The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil …
Introduction
This is a long article. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in. Â I wrote this article and sent it to the RWR but it wasn’t suited for publication so I thought I would share it with you. Â The right to sever a copyright grant after 35 years came to my attention when Evan Schnittman mentioned it briefly at the end of one of his articles. Â I went off to research the issue because I found it fascinating. Â This is what I learned.
A new author enters a publishing contract with very little negotiating power. She is presented with a contract with stock terms and an offer of an advance in exchange for an assignment of her intellectual property rights to the publisher. Often she is in the position of either taking the contract with little changes or not publishing. The Supreme Court noted that “authors are congenitally irresponsible, [and] that frequently they are so sorely pressed for funds that they are willing to sell their work for a mere pittance.” Fisher Music Co. v. Witmark, 318 U.S. 643, 656 (1943).
Congress, who is responsible for setting the parameters of the copyright law in the United States, recognizes the economic imbalance …
Welcome to First Page Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. You may comment anonymously.
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“Shit.” Andy’s voice was in a pitch that would rival that of a dog whistle. She had rounded the corner at five knots and slammed into a scrawny chest and a huge red Slurpy.
Five minutes ago Andy had been sitting in the library, chewing on her lip, blinking back tears and mulling over what Molly had told her. The clock had been screaming at her that she was late and she almost didn’t notice. As fate would have it, she was very late and on the day of her Business Economics final. If she didn’t make it to the room in forty-seven seconds the door would close and she would receive an F on the final which would likely force her to retake the damn class. Of course that would mean that her entire scholarly plan would be flushed down the toilet.
“Wow, where’s the fire?”
“I am so sorry.” Andy only missed half a beat and was running down the hall again. “Really sorry. I …
Dear Ms. Lee:
 The previous two books in the series have told us some awful things about James, the hero in Billionaire’s Bride of Innocence. James was desperate to have a family and when his super model girlfriend could not deliver the goods, so to speak, he divorced her, impregnated a nice young woman, and married the nice young pregnant woman. Â Yes, James is a classy guy. Â But he’s a billionaire who wants children. Â Doesn’t that really absolve him of all sins?
Megan, James’ docile sweet, innocent wife, loses the baby. In the hospital, she overhears James’ two friends, Hugh and Russell, speculating as to whether the marriage will stay together now that James has lost the one thing that he wanted. Â Hugh is incensed that James impregnated and then married Megan in the first place, knowing that James did not love her. Â Â Megan is distraught over this news and basically moves into the pool house, refusing to allow James touch her.
James is upset because, well, he wants to be a dad and how can he get her with child again unless they have sex?
Becoming a dad was what James wanted most
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Jessica from Racy Romance Reviews put out a call for readers to list their top 16 romances books in honor of Kathleen Winsor, the author of the very first historical romance, Forever Amber. Forever Amber was roundly criticized for its sexual content at the Massachusetts Attorney General requested that it be banned. Many readers around the ‘net have participated and Jessica is trying to round them up at her blog. DA didn’t participate, but not because we don’t think this is a great idea, but because we’ve been planning our own list thing since August and we will be unveiling it in December.
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Wal-Mart started a price war with Amazon over the cost of hardcovers. To combat the $9.99 ebook price, Wal-mart decided to slash the price of hardcovers of its top 20 pre-order books (including J.D. Robb’s Kindred in Death) to $9.00 and will be reducing a total of 200 hardcover titles to $9.00 for the holiday season. Amazon price matched that thus throwing publishers whose entire business model rests on making money off of hardcovers into a tizzy.
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The race to the bottom of the pricing game …
How did I miss this? Srsly, where was I? Dunno. I’ve heard about the “holding up the boom box” scene. I’ve seen it on so many “Gawd, these are the best films evah!” lists and heard from so many people that “you have to see this film, I mean it!” that I should have seen it before now. But it took doing these reviews and scanning Top Films lists for more film ideas to finally make me do it.
No one thinks Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) and Diane Court (Ione Skye) will ever last. In fact, everyone’s surprised they ever got together in the first place. Including them. The first time Lloyd asks Diane out, she says yes then has to check their recent senior high school yearbook to even know who it is she just agreed to go to a party with. But as their relationship progresses, they find something special. She feels totally comfortable with him and he starts to trust in himself because of her.
Then things start to go wrong. Her father (John Mahoney) is being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service and the time before she’s due to leave for a prestigious fellowship in England is …
Dear Ms. Sheridan.
 Thank you for sending me your story when I was moaning on Twitter one night about wanting to read a BDSM romance. I hope you don’t regret it.
When I agreed to read the book, I had no idea it was #2 of the Beautiful C*cksucker series. I had no idea that BC *was* a series. I tend to agree with the outrage over the name (Paul Bens’ original reaction, Teddy Pig’s response, Karen Knows Best’s extensive discussion) but I also know that in BDSM play, some epithets that would otherwise be unacceptable (”cunt” comes to mind) are endearments during a scene. Which is not to say that they should be used as titles to the book/series. I will admit, though, that I deliberately avoided most of the debate and arguments because it was too huge and I’ve only got so much mental energy. But if the writing for BC#1 was anything like the writing for BC#2, we should all just have ignored it and let it slip into well-deserved obscurity.
I also had no idea how BC#2 connects with BC#1. And OMFG, doing the …
Loading ... I was emailing with someone yesterday about books set in Minneapolis such as Sunshine by Robin McKinley, War for the Oaks by Emma Bull, contemporaries from Susan Johnson and Connie Brockway; the super fabulous Monkeewrench mystery books by PJ Tracy (they have a new one coming out next year!). Â Some authors really imbue their love for their towns in their books (Beth Kery’s Ode to Chicago aka Daring Time is one of those). Â One of the fun things about urban fantasy is the re-envisioning of these noted urban areas like Atlanta in Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniel series.
I loved seeing the places that I know reincarnated in fiction works. Â But there are other areas of the country that don’t interest me as much, like um, the state I currently live in and other nearby cities.
I don’t know that I would be more interested in reading a book set in a particular area but it could turn me off. Â You?
Rosario is one of the oldest (not in age but in internet years) bloggers in romance. Â She was one of my first blog stops ever. She took a few years off from blogging because she was attending graduate school but now she’s back, churning out a quality review almost every day. Â If you haven’t put Rosario on your feed reader or bookmarked her, you may want to give her a try. Â (Although, how could you give Anyone But You by Sarah Mayberry a C+? That’s my favorite Mayberry!)
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Siren of the Storm, a fan fiction writer, has a short 2 minute Regency read.
Heroine: Everyone knows that reformed rakes make the best husbands, because they have the four qualities women desire most in a husband: sexual prowess, commitment issues, promiscuity, and a diverse selection of venereal diseases!
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Motoko Rich from the New York Times published an article yesterday on the rise of digital lending. Â What caught my attention most was that MacMillan, the parent of St. Martin’s Press and Tor (among others), and Simon & Schuster were not allowing their books to be sold, in digital format, to libraries.
But some publishers worry that the convenience of
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Dear Ms. Warren:
 I went out and bought this book for myself. *runs around in circles* A while back I blogged about the seeming dearth of werewolf books, at least books that focus on the pack dynamics and the myths of the beast. Another reader suggested I try Christine Warren’s Big Bad Wolf. I admit that the one book I had tried didn’t make me a fan but I was willing to take another chance. I went off to the bookstore that evening and bought the book. I read and finished it that same evening.
Graham Winters is the Alpha of the Silverback Werewolf Clan. He is bored to the point of celibacy with all the hot Otherworld women around him. He doesn’t have any problem getting it up, but no amount of sexual innovation from even the most gorgeous paranormal is floating his boat anymore. Thirteen days ago, he walked away from one super model look alike and now he’s wondering what he’s going to do with himself. (For a werewolf, thirteen days is like a decade).
Then at the same party in which Graham …
Dear Mr. Nicolls,
 We get lots of arcs and finished copies of books offered to us at Dear Author. Some I am anticipating, others I recognize the author’s name and in a few cases, I’ve never heard of either book or author. Your debut novel, “The Good Mayor” falls into the latter category. I say this not to denigrate it but to point out that I had no idea what I would be getting myself into when I started it. The US cover of the book enchanted me. When Jane sent this in a box of other books, that is what made me pull it out and check the back blurb.
In a busy little city in a forgotten corner of the Baltic, in an office on the square, the beloved mayor of Dot lies on his office floor, peering beneath his door. Tibo Krovic has come to work from his house down at the end of a blue-tiled path. He’s taken, as usual, the tram seven stops, and walked the final two. He’s stopped for strong Viennese coffee. And now Tibo Krovic is looking at the perfectly beautiful feet of his voluptuous,
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So at the request of some people and the assistance of Sarah from Smart Bitches, we have constructed a google bomb for those who want to help Scott Baio get the publicity he so desperately wants (despite his claims that he is fulfilled by golf and family). A google bomb is really the only way to fulfill Scott Baio’s desire to regain his fame. If you aren’t helping, then you are standing in the way of a true American grain from finding his destiny.
Chachbag
also chach bag
Function: noun
Alternate Form(s): chach bagger
Pronunciation: chah-ch bahg
1. an individual who has little-to-no sense of humor and perceives threats to his reputation at every social media corner.
2. a grain
Example of usage: “If that idiot tries to call me out for not following them, I’m going to lose it. What a chach bag.”
Synonyms: douchebag, tool, halfwit, D list celebrity
Antonyms: Ron Howard as Opie
Related entries: See also Chach Block
Etymology: From Scott Baio’s behavior on Twitter wherein he threatened to sue a romance novelist because she unfollowed him on Twitter due to references he made about President Barack Obama being a “shitfuck” and other sundry remarks.
Making this the top result requires help, I’ve …
 For those in their 30s and 40s, Scott Baio is best remembered for playing Chachie, a wannabe punk, nephew of The Fonz. Â He was also Charles in Charge, a manny. Â Today’s generation might best remember him for a three year stint on VH-1 as a reality star and now for his Twitter addiction run amok.
He started tweeting about how his wife calls President Obama a “shitfuck” and other pretty rude things. Â Gwen Hayes, an aspiring romance author, decided to unfollow him. Â Charles got upset and compared Obama to Michael Vick (not seeing the connection here) and then when Gwen tried to respond, Chachie engaged in what we shall now call the “chach block” which is the Twitter equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “I can’t hear you”.
Things have escalated to the point where Charles in Charge has taken  his show about “being the grain” (yeah, I have no idea what that means) to the Glenn Beck radio show.
BAIO: I don’t know which is worse. But and somebody said on the Twitter, why am I going against the grain in terms of my beliefs. And I said,
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Last night, author and reader Nadia Lee, tweeted me a link to JA Konrath’s most recent blog post. It is incredibly illuminating and a must read for anyone interested in publishing and ebooks. Konrath has been experimenting with releasing his own fiction (mostly short stories) on the Kindle. He had shared his success earlier this year. You’ll need to go and read the entire post to get a full sense of what is going on with Konrath’s Kindle sales. Suffice to say that in the first half of 2009, he’s sold 1237 ebooks of his New York published books netting him $2008. Of his self published titles, he has sold 9800 ebook netting him $6860. Konrath does the math to figure out what he would be earning if he sold his NY published titles directly on the Kindle and well, read it for yourself.
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Booklist Online is hosting a FREE webinar about the state of the romance genre in libraries and the marketplace.
Romance is hot . . . in the library, that is. Join Donna Seaman, Booklist’s romance fiction editor, and a panel of librarians, authors, and publishers to discuss the
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 PLEASE NOTE: this conversational review does contain some spoilers.
Jennie: I was one of many readers mightily impressed with Carolyn Jewel’s previous historical romance Scandal, which I read in January and graded an A-.
Janine: Totally with you on that. Scandal was one of the most impressive books I’ve read this year, and it’s stuck with me so much that I recently went back to my own review and raised the grade from an A- to an A-/A.
Jennie: I was very much looking forward to Indiscreet. While I had some problems with the second half of the story, overall, it did not disappoint.
Janine: Agreed again, although, as readers will see our opinions about what works in this book differ a bit more than they usually do.
Jennie: The book begins:
How everything started.
This incident took place at about two o’clock the morning of September 3, 1809. The location was the back parlor of a town house owned by the Duke of Buckingham but lived in by the Earl of Crosshaven on a ninety-nine-year lease, presently in its twenty-third year. It should be remarked that Lord Edward Marrack, the younger brother of the
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Dear Ms. Hewitt:
 Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. The thing that stuck out most in my mind at the end of the story was how apt the title was. The story really was about the sheikh’s forbidden virgin. This is part of The Royal House of Karedes miniseries. Â These series books generally don’t work for me because so much of the story is dependent on the overall arc. Â Fortunately, while the miniseries theme and arc was present in this story, it didn’t dominate.
Aarif Al’ Farisi lost a brother when he was young. Â He believes himself to be at fault for this and since that time, he has devoted himself to his family, allowing no room for failure. Â His brother, King Zakari of Calista, is to be married to his betrothed, Princess Kalila Zadar and Zaraq. Â Zakari and Kalila have been betrothed since they were young as the dynastic pairing will bring the richness of Calista to Kalila’s people and the stability of rule from Zaraq to Calista.
On the eve of Zakari’s arrival, Kalila’s father reminds her “Tomorrow is not about …
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