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

In France, a business has taken a great dislike to the way it was portrayed in a recent crime novelist’s book and has sued the author for defamation. I know that the laws for defamation tend to favor the alleged defamed (business) than the alleged defamer (novelist) but this case does surprise me.
For Walker, the [...]

One of the most attractive things about the iPhone/iTouch and soon to be iPad is the robust App community that offers everything from the ridiculous (fart apps) to the sublime (Stanza). But Apple rules the App store like Tomas de Torquemada (Inquisitor-General of the Spanish Inquisition). It’s a reign of terror and uncertainty [...]

Author LA Banks introduces President Obama at a Healthcare Summit in Philadelphia. Banks writes the popular The Vampire Huntress series published by St. Martin’s Press and a new angel based series for Pocket. H/t to Rose Fox.
Ms Banks blogged about her experience and it’s pretty moving:
But my speech had gone out of my [...]

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 [...]