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

In a genre full of nice, nurturing, morally upright, and unflinchingly kind heroines, I find myself drawn more and more to the somewhat unlikeable heroine. Not the “bad girl,” per se, nor the hopelessly complicated and in need of rescue woman, but the female protagonist with an edge to her, the woman whose traits women [...]

Here’s my hypothesis: The romance genre is about the one true love. The one true love is most obviously displayed in the soul mate stories that abound in the paranormal subgenre. In historicals and contemporaries, the trope is evident in the failed past relationships of the protagonists. How many widows and [...]

Value, value, value. That seems to have become one of those buzzwords invoked in defense of corporate publishing’s status quo. But what is value, exactly?
Of the “agency model,” Hatchette CEO David Young has said, “It allows Hachette to make pricing decisions that are rational and reflect the value of our authors’ works.” Harper Collins CEO [...]

In looking over AAR’s Annual Reader poll results, I was struck with the fact that I still have not read Meredith Duran’s Written on Her Skin.  This is remarkable to me because I loved Bound by Her Touch and it is my book of the year 2009.  But there is something so perfect for me [...]

In Linda Howard’s book All the Queen’s Men, Louis Ronsard plays the villian.  He’s a wealth arms dealer who is portrayed as completely amoral.  He is targeted as the middleman who sells stolen arms to terrorists.
Ronsard was a shadowy Frenchman who gave his allegiance to no one group; he was the conduit, however, for many, [...]

see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Straight off the top of your head, do you think that authors have any ethical or moral responsibilities beyond the book?
I’m guessing that the vast majority of you answered this question the same way I did for a long time, with a fully articulated, deeply resounding NO.
As I said, this [...]

A common refrain arising out of last week’s Magic Under Glass cover controversy is that authors are afraid to speak out against their publishers — even over racial misrepresentation on their covers. It seems authors fear that if they speak out they could be labeled as troublesome, and that the label could prevent the [...]