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

This is a quite hilarious ad by Verizon mocking AT&T’s pathetic coverage (I am an AT&T customer via my move to the iPhone). Watch until the end.

Guardian asks whether crowdsourcing author advances is legitimate. Deanna Zandt wanted to write a book on using social networking for social change and action, specializing in [...]

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 [...]

The message that I heard from others yesterday is that they were underwhelmed by the iPad. Significantly, it lacks the ability to run applications simultaneously, has no camera, lacks a USB port or external memory slot. Further, there is no innovative input, only a large screen keyboard. I’m not certain how easy [...]

Amazon’s offer of 70% applies only to those using the DTP platform so those who are vendors will not be affected.   Amazon and publishers are in pricing death match that Amazon intends to win. Amazon’s first move was to discount all hardcovers to $9.99. Publishers have retaliated by withholding ebooks for its major [...]

I hope you are enjoying the holidays. We are taking a mini vacation this week (if you haven’t noticed the light schedule this past week) which means only one review a day and no opinions. Today we’ve got a link roundup and a review. We’ll be back to our regular schedule on January [...]

More rumors abound about the Apple Tablet.  The Financial Times is stating that it will be due out by Christmas (registration required).   There is a supposed launch of a new iTouch complete with camera and microphone in October so it’s possible that the Apple Tablet will be announced at the same time.
Red Sage author, Leigh [...]

All the links I should have posted this week but didn’t:
Kovid has released Calibre 0.6, a major upgrade to the best software program in existence for digital book readers. This program allows you to manage, rate, sort, tag, convert your ebooks. If you don’t have it, you should. Calibre is available for Windows, [...]