Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary

Some guy at CNET fancies himself a writer or something.  This execrable piece is either mocking or praising Harlequin’s move on the Japanese Nintendo DS platform.  It’s hard to say because the writing is so bad.
That’s why her thyroid pounded like a murderous hippopotamus’ conscience when she heard that Harlequin Books, publisher of such romantic novels [...]

Christine Brashears, owner of Samhain Publishing, brought suit against Ellora’s Cave on April 2008.  The details of the original suit I blogged about here.  Ellora’s Cave filed a countersuit, alleging Brashear engaged in misappropriation of trade secrets, defamation, breach of contract, tortious interference with existing and prospective contracts, among other allegations.
Discovery (the exchange of paper [...]

Romance gossip I picked up in New York (unattributed to protect the innocent).

The next hot thing appears to be the straight contemporary patterned after the Virgin River series by Robyn Carr.  Several houses are trying to capitalize on this through marketing and repackaging.  Mariah Stewart of Ballantine and Toni Blake from Avon are examples of [...]

Some of you might have noticed, on the top of the Samhain website page there is information and a link for the poll about the Sammie Awards this year. PGo vote for your  favorite Samhain titles in 2009.

Macmillan ratchets it up the debate by putting a full page ad in the NYTimes for Atul [...]

There is a superlative article at Publisher’s Marketplace about the windowing, agency model, pricing, and the future of digital books.  Most of the comments are made by Madeline McIntosh by Random House.  She talks in a very thoughtful and meaningful way about the challenges publishers are facing today and how quickly the landscape is changing. [...]

UPDATED TO ADD:
Harlequin has priced all the Kimani titles at 40% this month.

Commenter Dana points out Direct ebooks is selling all the romance titles at 25% off through February. All the ebooks on this site have no geographic limitations.

Hachette has a few bundling deals (usually these can only be found at the Sony ebookstore)

Get 2 K.J.Parker [...]

Here’s a recap if you don’t know what is going on. Macmillan’s contract with Amazon was up.  Macmillan decided that it wanted one of two things:
1. Old pricing scheme in which it would sell to Amazon at list and Amazon would decide at what price point to resell to consumers but Macmillan would [...]