Archive for the 'Letters of Opinion' Category
Q: I’m a reader and I’ve heard about Harlequin Horizons but I don’t know what it is or what it means for me.
Harlequin Horizons is a vanity press where aspiring authors pay to have their books published and put into stores, whether it is a physical retail location like your local Borders or it is online retailer like Amazon.
Authors using this service may or may not have their books professionally edited. Some authors who are self published have very high quality standards like self published author Moriah Jovan whose epic romance books aren’t well suited for traditional publishing. Other self published authors or authors who use a vanity press will not put as much care into their books as Ms. Jovan. Therefore, the quality that you read from books published through Harlequin Horizons can be very uneven.
Q: What do you mean by traditional publishing?
Harlequin is not the publisher, the author is the publisher and therefore solely responsible for the quality of the content. In traditional publishing, authors go through a rigorous vetting process. First, their works must make it past a person called an agent. The agent then has to sell this …
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I was reading Rosario’s blog the other day and she was blogging about how much she enjoyed Linnea Sinclair’s Down Home Zombie Blues. As I was reading Rosario’s review, I was thisclose to buying the book but the fact is that Linnea Sinclair’s books just don’t work for me. I’ve tried her in the past (and on more than one occasion) because so many readers I admire love her work.
There are times when I read reviews by other readers, particularly readers like Rosario who I like and whose tastes I think are similar to mine, when I want to love that author’s work but I just don’t. I think its because when another reader articulates a love for a particular author or a particular book I find myself wishing to be in agreement with them.
I know Jo Goodman is like that for many people. I’ve heard complaints that her work is too dry or she is too wordy. Her books are too languorous. To some extent, the very reason people don’t like her or …
Ellora’s Cave is finally selling its ebooks outside of its own portal, jasminejade.com. Strangely, though, Ellora’s Cave is setting its list prices at third party vendors at twice the rate of the ebook price at jasminejade.com. For example, Jade Black’s After the Storm sells for $7.99 in unencrypted PDF, HTML, MS Reader, Mobipocket, and Rocketbook at Ellora’s Cave but at Amazon, the Kindle version has a digital list price of $18.99 which is kindly discounted by Amazon down to $9.99. The digital list price is the price that is set by the publisher. Devil in Winter, a novella by Diana Hunter is at Ellora’s Cave for a price of $4.45 and it is at Amazon for $8.99. Alien Overnight by Robin Rothman sells for $5.95 at EC and $11.90 at Amazon. You get the picture.
St. Martin’s Press and Simon & Schuster are notorious for selling its ebooks at a super premium price. Simon & Schuster lists several of the backlist titles at $9.99 ebook price even though these books are currently available in a mass market price. St. Martin’s Press lists ebooks as high as $14.00 for books that have a comparable print version in …
Google and the Plaintiffs (Authors’ Guild and representative authors and publishers) went back to the negotiating table to craft a new settlement agreement that would address the concerns of the Department of Justice and other critics. The new settlement agreement was released yesterday.
For Consumers
There were quite a few positive changes. To address the concern of price fixing that the DOJ had expressed, the Books Registry no longer has any say in the pricing of books. This is really a win for consumers and for Google. Google now has the sole right to set prices and will do so using an algorithm developed based on market pricing. Authors might not like this because pricing of ebooks is trending downwards but it’s a plus for consumers. Additional revenue models have been changed to be limited to POD and PDF/EPUB downloads.
For Authors of Books in Print and Under Contract
The revised agreement also resolves many concerns that authors of books in print and under contract may have. It has removed the requirement to arbitrate one’s cases. Authors are allowed to dictate how a book is displayed through Google Book Search and can remove the book from sale if she disagrees with pricing or …
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There is not a more common hero archetype in historical romance than the “rake”. In my early days of reading, I always viewed the “rake” as a sign of virility of the hero. In romance novels, the women titter about the rake’s scandalous reputation while parading their young in front of him. The adage “rakes make the best husbands” is passed as truth. In this post, I am making the case that the rake isn’t a very heroic trait.
What does a rake really signify? There’s the saying “every man wanted to be him and every woman wanted to be with him.” To be a rake meant that you really made no effort to turn anyone down. A rake is a man with few scruples. He sleeps with widows, married women and often engages in dalliances with young unmarried women and certainly has sex with courtesans and maybe even whores of a lower class. A rake is really a man with little honor. By sleeping with married women, he engages in cheating. By seducing the young unmarried women, he …
 Loading ... There has been some talk of publishers moving to a digital workflow based on xml markup language. The benefit of this is that it cuts down on the errors as a book moves through production. Currently books are typeset for a printer using a desktop publishing software program. When these books are converted to digital, the resulting file can have errors.
In reading the Audacity to Win, the errors started in the warning stage:
Throughout the book, I found several errors, the most egregious of which I screenshot for this post. However, there were frequent missing periods or quotation marks, usually at the beginning of a sentence. I waver between laughter and frustration. To some extent, I’m becoming inured to these errors. They are present from small independent epublishers like Belgrave House to the largest publishing houses like Penguin and Harlequin.
I am of the opinion that a book should be error free, but I don’t think that the casual reader really cares about this. In taking a quick poll of my family, only my mother, a former teacher, really cared that a book was perfect in its proofing. The three others, all big readers, shrugged.
I know that some …
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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 …
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 …
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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I loved reading the lists that people made up of their top 16 books this past week in honor of Kathleen Winsor. 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. There are my favorite books. There are books that I think are well written. There are books that I find to be groundbreaking. 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. Are they the best books ever written in the romance genre? Probably not. For example, Savage Thunder by Johanna Lindsey is one of my favorite romances. Savage Thunder is about a half breed who is hired by Jocelyn Fleming, a recently widowed virgin duchess. It seems hard to believe that Lindsey was able to fit all those iconic (ironic?) tropes into one heroine, but she did. The hero’s name is Colt Thunder. I know! It’s hard to type that without giggling. Despite the cliches, this book works for me.
One of the things I …
In reading reviews of Tessa Dare’s book, Goddess of the Hunt, and of Louisa Edwards‘, Can’t Stand the Heat, I noticed there were often comments about the female protagonists, or heroines, of the stories as not being very likeable. I know I struggled with Miranda, the heroine in Can’t Stand the Heat. I thought I would ask Tessa Dare and Louisa Edwards to help me jump start a conversation on the likeability of a heroine:
Tessa Dare:
 I will first say that I love Lucy, the heroine of Goddess of the Hunt. I never set out to write an “unlikeable” heroine–I set out to write a heroine who felt real to me, and whom I hoped would feel real to readers.
Lucy is young and brash and stubborn, and she makes a lot of mistakes. Many readers love that about her. Some really, really don’t. I’m okay with that. Of course, it’s nice when people love Lucy like I do, but I’m actually sort of proud of the fact that she’s inspired such a …
Over the past year, as more and more readers have become interested in ebooks, we’ve begun to realize one of the biggest problems is the mess of territorial rights. We had Fictionwise and BooksonBoard removing books from its bookstore. Fictionwise went so far as removing access to books that people had already purchased.
This past week, Amazon announced that it would sell its Amazon Kindle to 100+ countries and those Kindles would have cellular access so you could take advantage of the on Kindle book purchasing. (which is really the only advantage of the Kindle at this point). Two problems emerged from this announcement. First, the release of the Kindle didn’t do anything to make more books available to international readers. Amazon confirmed that it would be observing all territorial rights agreements. Second, Amazon will actually be charging more for books sold outside the U.S.
Territorial Agreements
As I discussed in this article published in May of 2009, rights have traditionally been sold with translation and territory rights sold as one bundle known as “foreign rights”. I argued that rights should be decoupled. World digital rights could be granted while reserving translation rights. One of the drawbacks of this is that …
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I had a different post planned for today. Really. It was from Louisa Edwards and Tessa Dare on the topic of the unlikeable heroine. But yesterday news broke that the new revised Guide from the FTC on endorsements was going to go into effect on December 1, 2009.
Let me start off with saying that I believe in transparency. When I remember, I almost always state in a review whether the book was provided to me for free or whether I purchased it because I’ve always thought that a reader’s decision making process is interesting. To some extent, DA serves as reading journal for myself.
If you note, we have ads in the feed and it says that we are paid an affiliate fee. When we had an Amazon bookstore, we told you we received an affiliate fee from that. When we got the Sony Readers, we told you that as well. We believe in transparency. We believe that it is one of the most important parts of our relationship as bloggers with you as …
Maili is guesting over at Victoria Janssen’s blog home about her favorite category books. Sadly so many of them are out of print. I’ve read all but one of the stories recommended by Maili and they are worth hunting down and not just because Jane is the heroine in one of the books. Really.
You never really know what you may get when you pick up a category romance. Will it be another tale of cookie-cutter characters, much-peddled-and-tired old story line, and insane fillers that makes you want to bang your head against a wall, wondering why you spent money on something wasteful?
Or will it make you sit quietly after it ended, musing about how much you enjoy being a romance reader?
The Daily Beast, a blog run by Tina Brown, has inked a deal with Perseus Books to create “Beast Books”. Beast Books will release the titles in digital format first, followed by a print run, the quantity of the print run determined by the sale of the digital title. The books will be primarily political and cultural and about 45,000 words.
Perseus is paying The Daily Beast a five-figure management advance to cover the costs of editing
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Last week, I posted an “If You Like” query looking for good werewolf romances. I commented that the Urban Fantasy genre is replete with werewolves but that the werewolf is much rarer in mass market romances. Indeed, in the comments, many a reader referenced popular urban fantasy series like those from Patricia Briggs and Carrie Vaughn were mentioned, but there really weren’t many romance authors mentioned. Given that there are hundreds of published romance authors and paranormal romances are one of the more popular sub genres, I figured that there were dozens of series devoted to werewolves. Alas there is not. There are the odd scattering of werewolves amongst larger paranormal groups but few series devoted solely to the werewolf.
There is even a debate about the wolf shifter v the werewolf:
IMO, a werewolf is a person who has no ability to shift into the wolf mode at will. A person involuntarily shifts into the wolf mode because of, say, the moon or an extreme emotion, which means he or she has no control over his or her ability to
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In today’s First Page, Laura Kinsale brought up a question in the comments regarding unfamiliar terms in a story.
I have a question, as a writer, about one of the comments. This isn’t a loaded question, or any sort of commentary on this excerpt itself, it’s input for me.
DS said
I had to look up “drafts on collection” to find out what he entrusted with,
As a reader–and I think I mean a romance reader here, vs say an SF/fantasy reader where world-building is more common in the genre–when you come across a term you don’t understand, do you tend to feel uncomfortable until you look it up? Are you willing to trust the author to define it for you in context?
I tend to do the latter as a writer, try to define the term in context without spelling it out in a dictionary sort of way. But having lost my ability to read as a non-writer many moons ago, I was intrigued by DS’s comment.
Which would you prefer, for an unfamiliar technical term like “drafts on collection?”
To try to figure out the meaning from the context? To stop and look it up? To avoid the term entirely? For the author to
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Lambda Literary Awards have redefined its focus:
The Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) seeks to elevate the status of openly gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people throughout society by rewarding and promoting excellence among LGBT writers who use their work to explore LGBT lives.
As such, it should be noted that the Lambda Literary Awards are based principally on the LGBT content, the gender orientation/identity of the author, and the literary merit of the work.
Essentially Lambda Literary is requiring that only GLBT authors will qualify for the LGBT awards. I thought that this might be a good opportunity to discuss the issue of LLA and the concept of m/m fiction as a whole. I invited Dr. Sarah (aka Joan) to discuss the issue with me.
Jane: I think this is a direct response to the rise of straight women writing m/m fiction. We review m/m romances here at Dear Author without thought to the gender of the author. I did bring up the issue regarding gender of an author in a post I did regarding authenticity. The comments exploded. At least one person accused me of being a zipper sniffer.
It’s obvious that the gender of an author, as well as his or her sexuality, is a …
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Courtney Milan’s first published work will be her novella contribution to the “In the Heart of Christmas” anthology headlined by Mary Balogh. I had the opportunity to read this story and I was struck immediately by the fact that the characters were of the lower class. William is a clerk earning not very much money and Lavinia tends the bookstore owned by her family that also generates very little money. William feels like he could never get married because he doesn’t have sufficient income to support a wife, particularly in a lifestyle he believes someone like Lavinia deserves.
Few books really deal with the issue of poverty. If poverty is an issue, it is almost always resolved because one of the main protagonists is rich or at least very well off (usually the man). There was one Stef Ann Holm book I read years ago where the heroine was beyond broke to the point that she constantly wondered how she would feed her family or keep a roof over her daughters’ head. The incessant …
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I was telling a friend of mine about Christine Feehan the other day. I had picked up Dark Slayer to read after a long absence. I realized that if my friend picked up Feehan today that she would think Feehan was derivative. After all Feehan’s books are marked by the soul mate, a group of good vampires fighting against bad vampires, seeking out a life mate to save the good vampire from turning bad. Sounds familiar, right?
But the fact is that Feehan was writing about vampires that would lose their mind unless they found their mate before JR Ward came on the scene. Dark Prince, the first in the Carpathian series, came out in 1999. Susan Sizemore’s fantastic Laws of the Blood series began in 1999. While not romance, it was an interesting look at a vampire world, a kind of progenitor of what is now considered urban fantasy. Sizemore also published a number of other high fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction books with romance plots in the …
 Last week, I wrote that publishers had sacrificed the quality of the printed book in order to preserve their margins reducing the shelf worthy quality of hardcover, trade and mass market fiction. Because of the decreased quality of the printed books, it’s no real sacrifice to move to digital books.
<—-this is the first of a set of redesigned covers for Harry Potter series as imagined by MS Corely.
Digital book technology, however, can help publishers make creative and unique collectible books at a much lower cost. Ebooks are simply one by-product of digital book technology. Digital book technology encompasses a new way to process books, manage backlists, and distribute title information.
One benefit of advancing technology will be better print on demand. Both Google and Amazon are looking to provide POD fulfillment services to reduce the waste of print runs (Amazon has filed a patent to include advertisements in POD books as well as ebooks). POD can be used to create one of a kind collectible items for the reader. Mike Briggs brought this idea up in the comments and I …
So Rat has a problem with paid reviews. No, wait, he has a problem with a blogger receiving any kind of renumeration, which for him includes a free book. His argument raises all sorts of issues which I thought I would lay out in a blog post.
First, though, let me be up front about where I am coming from. We accept free copies of books from publishers, publicists, and authors. Most books reviewed on Dear Author in the last two years have probably been free although I know that each reviewer buys books of her own. We also received free Sony Readers in exchange for an ad space and continual linking to Sony ebookstore in 2009. AND! *gasp* Dear Author will be having ads in 2010. Actually, we’ll be having one ad space at the top of the sidebar that will rotate between four sponsors.
When I started Dear Author, I felt like I could not take ads and still be independent. As a newbie blogger, I think I worried too much whether ads would influence my content and so I stayed away from accepting money from ads. Now I feel much more confident that I and the rest of …
A couple of weeks ago Dear Author received a number of emails congratulating us on being nominated for different categories of the BBAW, the Book Blogger Appreciation Award. (THANK YOU! to those who nominated us). This award was set up by a blogger by the handle, My Friend Amy, last year and burgeoned into a great event for 2009. As a blogger who has run contests and the tournament, DABWAHA, I know how difficult and challenging this must be to run and it certainly deserves kudos for that.
The award program is in its nascency. Over 1,000 nominations were made and anyone could self nominate. Emails were then sent to the nominees which told them in which category they were nominated and then asked for three things:
- five posts that exemplified the category
- Other Social networks you use to promote your blog
- Any challenges or memes you host for the book blogging community.
The five posts would then be judged by a panel and you would be shortlisted but you could not be shortlisted in more than one category. When the initial notices were sent, we were given about 72-24 hours (it varied from nomination to nomination) to return our top five blog posts in …
Heather Massey is a blogger who travels the sea of stars searching for science fiction romance adventures aboard The Galaxy Express. Additionally, she pens a science fiction romance column for LoveLetter, Germany’s premier romance magazine.
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When I think of steampunk, I envision Victorian fashion, airships, and oversized rivets. And lest we forget—Captain Nemo’s elegant submarine, too. It’s a heck of a lot more than that, of course, but the elements that tend to leave a lasting impression in people’s minds is the brass goggle-icious visuals.
But what is steampunk, exactly?
Steampunk as a literary genre gained notice starting in the 1980s. A subgenre of science fiction and fantasy, it developed as a rebellious response to the science fiction that preceded it. Core elements of steampunk include:
- Steam power
- Alternate history settings (mostly Victorian/Edwardian era England)
- SF/Fantasy elements
- Devices that reflect the period but are ahead of their time (e.g., difference engines, airships, etc.)
 In fact, the …
Those devoted to paper in publishing houses worry that digital publishing will lead to the loss of the art of publication. The sad fact is that the art of publication has been subsumed in mass production long ago. With increased paper costs, distribution costs, lowering margins, publishers have cheapened the physical book to the point that with a few exceptions, what is in stores today isn’t worth finding space on the shelf.
Like many regular readers, my shelves are bursting with books. The lack of shelf space is one reason I have embraced ebooks with such fervor. I simply can’t locate even one more space for my books. If I buy one in paper format, I will have to displace another book in its favor and once I am done with it, I must either sell or determine whether it is shelf worthy.
I don’t want to dismiss a person’s love for the feel of paper, the smell of paper, or even the look of a book. But for an avid reader of genre books, the mass market paperback is a disposable item. It’s print quality is fairly poor on thin paper housed behind lurid covers. The bindings are …
Every Thursday the crew at Follow the Reader host a twitter chat about some publishing topic. Yesterday was about what readers would like publishers to know. (This discussion will be summarized and posted at the Follow the Reader blog in a week or so). One of the tweets was by someone who wanted publishers to do a guide for how to get into blogging. My instinctive reaction was to tweet back that it isn’t really the publishers role to do this.
I realized then that I have never really done a post about blogging and book reviewing and at the risk of sounding like a pretentious twat, it is something that I have knowledge of. Here are my tips about getting into the book reviewing circuit as a blogger.
Edited to add: NetGalley is a company that facilitates getting digital ARCs from a publisher to a reviewer. You can sign up for free and then request books for review. I believe that the publisher will have to approve your request.
1. Be professional. The people who have the ARCs that you want are professionals and they want to work with professionals. To me professionalism includes being polite, having knowledge of the …
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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.”
