Archive for the 'Features' Category
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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‘Em? Emily, is that you?’
Emily Standish sat down hard on the little wooden chair with its faded floral needlepoint cushion. She barely registered the small cloud of dust it gave out in protest. Her heart was racing and her breath was short. It couldn’t be. It must be nearly fifteen years – and this really wasn’t the moment for that kind of complex mental arithmetic. If someone had asked her, Emily would have claimed she barely remembered him. She certainly wouldn’t have expected that she could recognise his voice on the end of a crackling phone line in just five words.
‘Hello? Can you hear me?’
She could hang up, of course. For all he knew, she was on a train heading through a tunnel at just the wrong moment. Right moment. Whichever.
Or perhaps she could pretend he’d got the wrong number. He wouldn’t be able to tell …
I ordered a bunch of Harlequin Stationary goods that feature the vintage covers. Â The stationary goods include little matchbook notepads, bound composition notebooks and address books. I liked the address books the least. They have a spiral binding and I found them to be a little too bulky. Â My favorites are the little matchbook notepads. Â They come three to a box. Â The composition notebooks are nice as well and feature very hard cardboard front and back covers so it would be easy to write on a non hard surface.
The postcard tins are a great gift item but I don’t have anyone to send snail mail to. Should I start up a prison correspondence?
I’m going to give the notebooks and the address books away on the blog (am keeping the notepads myself). Just as a disclaimer or non disclaimer, I purchased these myself and Harlequin, which does many nice things for Dear Author, did not pay for them or give me any kind of discount.
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Simon & Schuster saw sales increase in the last quarter to $230.4 million which is up 2.4%. Â The improvement in sales was offset by “higher write offs of advances for author royalties” which …
How good is Harlequin doing? Pretty good. In a dismal economy that sees revenues at its parent company dropping, Harlequin is bringing in the profit. David Holland, the interim CEO at Torstar, said that the decline in newspapers and digital were offset by continued growth at Harlequin. (Actually Holland stated it the other way around but I decided to put the positive spin on it). Harlequin posted $122.5 million in revenue which was up 3.7% from third quarter of 2008.
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After a dismal few quarters, HarperCollins experienced a small rise for the fiscal first quarter. Sales were slightly down (1.5%). Sales of ebooks accounted for 4% of the adult group revenue. Most of the profit came from restructuring and not from sales.
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The Wall Street Journal accuses Amazon of stockpiling cash by paying late on its bills by up to 72 days or longer. I understand that late payment is fairly standard in the industry and the writer of the article asserts that Amazon has never made a profit, something the SEC filings for the past five years would dispute. However, if Amazon’s posted profitability rests …
 Loading ... Keishon, avidbookreader.com, linked to a discussion at copyblogger which debated whether the theorem that talented authors write badly when they are trying to express an idea and conversely write well when they are trying to touch an audience.
Now, the qualification in the copyblogger post is the term “talented” which can have a whole gamut of interpretations. But setting aside that term, should the author be writing for the reader or writing for herself? Unlike many of the commenters at the copyblogger forum, I believe an author should write for herself.
Interestingly, I think that there is a big difference between “writing for the market” and writing to touch an audience. The commenters, to me, are discussing creating an emotional connection with the readers (which I think is very important, thinking back to the post by Chloe and why she reads). So I’d ask you when voting that you think about the poll in terms of the development of a relationship with the reader through writing and not writing to the market.
The winners of the CL Wilson, Queen of Song and Souls are as follows:
- Pamk
- stephanie
- Rexe
- Julie
- Sharon
I have sent you an email.
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Inside the Higher Ed blog has another piece on technology and scholarship. This time, Alex Golub laments the shift of readers from paper texts to digital texts arguing that scholarship includes making the texts part of your physical environment, something that the current slate of ereaders do not foster:
Except textbooks. I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education — and indeed, just learning how to read closely — means making your books part of your physical environment.
I never marked up my textbooks. I always took notes in a separate notebook and was religious in keeping my texts as clean as possible. The digital textbook would have appealed to …
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Robin talks about this all the time. A short cut is a romance convenience, not just a convention. All genres have them but I’m most familiar with the romance genre and thus my attention is placed on its foibles.
Shortcuts are when an author relies on an archetype or trope in order to draw upon the collective memory of a romance reader to fill in the necessary motivation or backstory for a character. This often results in anachronistic behavior which confuses the reader and results in accusations of the reader not understanding. It can also result in distance between the reader and the story because the reader simply isn’t provided enough information to relate to the characters.
Despite how silly it may appear, JR Ward appears on her boards in character from time to time. She knows her male characters intimately, down to the type of liquor that they like to drink; whether they wear jeans, tailored slacks or leather pants; and if they are a boxer, brief, commando guy. Unfortunately, her heroines are not so well …
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. Sabrina Darby introduces her own brand of erotic romance with her single author collection, On These Silken Sheets (link to excerpt), available in stores now.
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 I remember getting The Call really well because I was sitting with my dad in front of my computer, watching CNN.com as John McCain introduced Sarah Palin as his running mate. I hadn’t thought too much about where or when it would happen––if it would happen––but I never would have imagined my father being the first person to know simply from the way I said hello on the phone. It was August of 2008 and it had been three months since I’d emailed the complete version of my book to Avon Red.
And I say complete, because they had already seen two of the novellas of the single author anthology I had submitted.
In January of ‘08, I had the idea for a short erotic story, which started with this one vivid interlude. From those …
Welcome to the November Promotional Thread for Authors. What’s this you say? I read quite a few blogs outside the romance blogosphere and many of the big ones have a daily open thread where the commenters drive the bus.
The rules for Author Promo Night Open Thread are as follows:
- The book has to be released in that month (i.e., anything released during the last week of October would be a November release)
- You can post for yourself or you can have a friend post for you if the idea of posting about your book paralyzes you .
- No self published authors unless you write romance. No, I am not a POD hater, I am just thinking about the manageability of the thread.
- Think about the readership. I.e., does your non fiction book about psoriasis really fit?
- This one is more of a guideline than a rule, but be smart about your comment because if it is just a link to your website and the title of your book, I doubt you are going to get any interest.
DA reserves the right to delete the post if it promotes objectionable content (i.e., no daddy/daughter incest recommends are going to be allowed. Sorry.)
That’s it. Post away.  (Please …
JMC posted last week about having problems with con artist protagonists. I’ve enjoyed the occasional assassin book such as Kelley Armstrong’s Nadia Stafford series or Barry Eisler’s John Rain series. Jenny Crusie seems to love the morally ambiguous protagonist with books like Welcome to Temptation, Faking It, and Agnes and the Hitman.
I voted in the poll that I sometimes like the con artist or criminal protagonist, but you know, I prefer the non criminal heroes and heroines. What about you?
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 …
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 …
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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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 …
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 …
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 …
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
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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, …
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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 …
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.â€
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?â€
“I am so sorry.†Andy only missed half a beat and was running down the hall again. “Really sorry. I …
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 …
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?
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Open Threads at Dear Author. Want to know what new releases are out this month and what readers are excited about reading? Check out the threads below. 
We don’t like to censor comments nor do we endorse the comments of any poster. We do reserve the right to moderate comments but most of the time will not, believing, as Justice Brandeis did, that the greater good is in “more speech, not enforced silence.â€
