Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Dear Editor:

I read today on your author, Victoria Laurie’s, website that you have been in discussions with her about a voice mail message that you have received from a blogger called NovelReads about a statement Ms. Laurie made on her website. I felt that Ms. Laurie’s accusations of this reader being a “psycho” and a “cyber stalker” should not go unchallenged. The timeline of events occurs as follows:

1. In July Ms. Laurie takes exception to a review left at Amazon by a reviewer with the handle Butterscotch.

2. In July Ms. Laurie blogs about this reviewer and says these things in a blog post has since been deleted by can be read here via Google Cache). The blog post, in case you do not care to read it, includes the following comments:

And you should never pick a fight with an author….well….because, honey, we know how to get even. ;)

and

And so, come September…my little “fan” and some of her close friends and family will likely read about a character with a very similar name, (i.e. nearly identical but not enough to get me sued) depicted in one of the most comical and fabulously …

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Last week we saw yet another author/reviewer contretemps in which an author, upset over a review, engages the reviewer in a comically bad mannered way. When we’ve witnessed this in the past, it almost always seems to be over a C review. An average review. A review that says this book is competent but it’s not for me. Often these reviews articulate carefully exactly the reason a book does not work for the reader.

After some head scratching, I’ve come to the conclusion that a C grade means a failure to many authors. I remember that Jamie Sobrato once wrote that she would rather evoke some strong reaction than a lukewarm reaction, even if the strong reaction was not positive. It might be stating the obvious since I am referencing a post written over two years ago, but Sobrato’s comments really stuck with me. I’ve never really understood it. I might be conflating lukewarm with average, but I don’t think so. Maybe the C review signals to an author that she’s failed to move the reader emotionally and thus is a failure overall.

While …

When I was at RWA, I had the opportunity to see the Kindle and the new Sony Reader with booklight and the Asus EEE PC. These are all viable ebook readers that you can purchase today, along with my personal favorite, the iTouch/iPhone.

Neither the Kindle nor the Reader is a perfect device and frankly, I don’t know if there is a perfect device in the near future. The perfect device has the instantaneous purchase ability of the Kindle with the versality and look of the Reader. The keyboard of the Kindle is quite nice as is the ability to highlight and annotate. The Reader’s lightwedge style booklight accessory provided two levels of brightness for the light flooding the surface of the screen. It’s a perfect look and fit that the Kindle doesn’t have.

Last week, though, I said that if you were interested in eBook readers you should wait until October. The reason for this is that there are fairly credible rumors that Amazon is going to release an updated Kindle. I find the report a bit odd given that the Kindle was released in mid November of 2007. …

UPDATED: Ms. Laurie has apparently deleted her post. The cached version is here.

Victoria Laurie, a professional psychic and author, engaged in an Amazon contretemps not too long after the Deborah Anne MacGillivray. This led to a mass deletion of reviews and comments at Amazon on all sides.

Apparently Laurie, who says

“Thanks to Candy Thompson and Deborah MacGillvray for their support, advice and for hanging in there and thanks to everyone else who clicked that “not helpful” and “report this” button - I most appreciate it!”

has taken to instructing readers not to pick fights with authors.

And you should never pick a fight with an author….well….because, honey, we know how to get even. ;)

The reason that Laurie gives is that if you do decide to “slam an author”, you’ll be inserted into their books in an unflattering way:

And so, come September…my little “fan” and some of her close friends and family will likely read about a character with a very similar name, (i.e. nearly identical but not enough to get me sued) depicted in one of the most comical and fabulously scandalous scenes within Death Perception. And trust me…this …

One of the search terms that brought a reader to the site in the past week was why plagiarism bothers authors. Given the size of the recent panel on plagiarism at RWA, it appears that it doesn’t bother some authors. Or is that the wrong assumption to draw? Needless to say, the panel was not well attended. The room seated about 200 and it appeared that there were 40-60 people there. I did see editors from a couple of different houses which was encouraging. I will admit that I never thought a panel that I sat on at RWA would fill a room of 200 but I did believe that Nora, who hasn’t spoken in room that wasn’t standing room only, would be greeted with a full crowd.

I know that Nora was disappointed and she voiced her disappointment from the podium. The room should have been full. The reason I say that is because I think that not everyone understands the difference between Plagiarism and Copyright. And I don’t know that everyone understands the reason why plagiarism isn’t such a good thing. …

When I first started DearAuthor two years ago, I thought I would be just another reader blog. I had a couple of friends who had blogs (Rosario and Keishon) and I loved reading Maili’s blog (miss McVane terribly). I wanted to part of that reader network.

As DearAuthor grew, though, I began to fret about its growth. I started checking the blog’s statistics constantly, not just once a day but several times a day. I wanted to be bigger and appear higher in the google rankings. While on the one hand I was stunned and appreciative of the growth, I began to want more. The worst offshoot of the DA growth was the animosity I started to feel toward the Smart Bitch website. Around the winter of 2006, I began to resent the SB site and the SB creators tremendously.

With every accolade they received (and they have been nominated for bloggie awards, featured in Sadie Magazine, guest columns at Tango, named one of PC editor’s top blog reads and rightly so), my little green monster was fed. I would get …

Karen Scott links to a post by Lee Goldberg who linked to a post here at Dear Author. Certainly that is some kind of circle jerk, but on an interesting and important topic.

Apparently Affaire de Coeur has a policy of providing positive reviews and articles to publishers based upon the amount of page space that is purchased. Additionally, and possibly more damning (I know! what could be more damning) is that according to Goldberg:
I’ve just discovered that their advertising director, Bonny Kirby, co-owns the disgraced Light Sword Publishing company with Linda Daly (a court recently fined Kirby and Daly thousands of dollars for defrauding authors). This explains why Light Sword titles consistently got positive reviews from Affaire De Coeur and why Daly was the subject of a cover story. No reputable magazine would review books published by their advertising director…or feature her partners on the cover. It’s a sleazy, unethical conflict-of-interest.
I’ve not ever read/purchased/seen an Affaire de Coeur magazine but I have seen them quoted multiple times in books and have been in business for over 26 years. It seems that the paid review is becoming more and more commonplace. I know that …

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1. Label the books in a series either on the spine or on the front or both (preferably the spine if that is the only place). I.e., Kresley Cole’s Hunger Like No Other is Book 2 in the Immortals After Dark Series so it should have #2 on the spine or on the front. The first story is The Warlord Wants Forever which is part of the Playing Easy to Get anthology.
Readers need to know these things so that when they go on a glom, they can easily pinpoint the books that they are missing in the series.
2. Include a relationship chart in the beginning of every book. Most books published today are series books, all somehow related to one another. It would be very helpful if, at the front of the book, all the books in a series are identified in the way in which they are related to one another and what characters appear in which books.
I.e., in Meljean Brook’s series, the first full length story features Hugh and Lilith in Demon Angel. …

Over at the Smart Bitches, SB Sarah blogged about the workshop that Courtney Milan is doing about wills. The workshop will take place on July 30 as part of the Beau Monde conference. This conference is in San Francisco so it fits neatly into the RWA conference schedule.

Among other things, Courtney Milan will tell you why you can’t condition the money in a will bequest on marrying another person. While this is a historical romance conference, it affects contemporary romance books as well. If I don’t see another “You must marry x person or you will not be given the millions in my estate” plot, I would be pathetically grateful.

Will related plots are possible the worst offenders of the law out there (although poorly written sports romances are right behind it). If you are thinking about writing a book featuring a will plot device, please go to this workshop and be educated.

I mentioned recently how much I would love for publishers to move to e-arcs as it would be so much cheaper, allow for more copies to be distributed, and create a smaller ecological footprint. Another reviewer asked me the appeal of ebooks as she wasn’t quite there yet.

I think that becoming e- acclimated takes time and an open mind. If you aren’t prepared to allow yourself to take a chance with e-reading, I think that you’ll not ever like it. And I think that each reader has to be ready for the e-reading experience because it isn’t just for technogeeks like myself.

Each person’s entry into the e-market will be different. There will be some readers who will never go, tied too strongly to the paper and glue. Other readers will make the transition gradually due to various reasons, but I’ve seen, time and again, that those who do make the transition using a decent e-reading device often become e-vangelists.

Readers who read on the desktops/laptops alone will never be ebook aficionados. The constant flicker of a monitor screen tires ones’ eyes and it might seem to much like work with so many of …