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

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, [...]

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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 [...]

In Bowker’s 2008 PubTrack Consumer Survey, the activity in which largest amount of time that READERS spent doing any one thing was browsing online. Reading books came in a distant fourth, right behind reading newspapers and magazines and far behind TV viewing. The good news is that in 2009, the National Endowment for [...]

There were a couple of very interesting tidbits of information from Publishers Lunch today (registration required). The first is that Liz Sheier is moving to Barnes and Noble to be its “editorial director” and it appears that BN will be pursuing exclusive digital publishing agreements like Amazon has for the Kindle.
The second is that [...]

In my last piece, Morality and Romance, I suggested that the genre reflects a historically entrenched double standard around female sexuality, namely that what is largely tolerated or even embraced in male protagonists – rich and varied sexual experience – is disparaged in female protagonists. So-called Dukes of Slut can be heroic, but not Duchesses [...]

2010 came upon me so fast that I feel like I have whiplash. I feel like I barely touched the tip of my to be read pile which grows exponentially every month as I receive more books to review and I buy even more books for my ever expanding digital library. For some [...]