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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 [...]

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That was the end of Grogan… the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible!

If you’ve ever seen “Romancing the Stone,” you’ll recognize this line as the last one in Joan Wilder’s latest Western, the one she’s narrating at the beginning [...]

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Last week Pocket author Karen Tabke blogged about an old marketing concept that is just now taking root in the publishing industry. Street teams originated in the urban music market when rap labels such as Jive Records used a band of teenagers to drive interest when mainstream distribution markets froze urban labels [...]

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What do Diana Peterfreund, Lauren Willig, Julia Quinn, and Eloisa James have in common? They are all Ivy League educated authors. Peterfreund is a graduate of Yale University. Willig, Quinn and James are Harvard educated. They are all, to varying degrees, commercially successful writers.
At the both ends of the [...]

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During the past couple of weeks, the Smart Bitches and Karen Scott’s blog hosted heated debates regarding the state of African American romance fiction. For the most part and with few exceptions, romance books written by African Americans are shelved with African American books. To some authors, this is a regressive [...]

We’ve had a bit of a firestorm here at Dear Author and many new readers (hello new visitors). I thought it might be worthwhile to do a bit of post mortem on the recent brou ha ha.
For new visitors, let me give you a bit of a history. I started Dear Author [...]

Apparently, there appears to be a breakdown in the comment box on the previous thread. Ms. MacGillivray was the recipient of a three star review on Amazon. She chastises the reader for not understanding the book correctly.
Reba,
Thank you for letting me know you enjoyed “A Restless Knight” so much you read it twice. [...]

This past week saw another fun dust-up involving Phase authors. Apparently, there are a certain contingent of Phase authors and other self designated erotic romance authors who share a good deal of their personal lives online, using their literary pen names. Some authors, like Selena Kitt, post photographs of nudity (NSFW) and blog about their [...]

The question of whether there is a divide between authors and reader/blogger/reviewers has been discussed and debated here and elsewhere. To me it seems clear that it does, at least in some quarters. Some reader/blogger/reviewers, including some of my fellow bloggers here on Dear Author, have called out some authors for behaving badly. [...]

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In the past few weeks, we here at Dear Author have talked about author ethics and it occurred to me that we haven’t talked alot about blogging ethics.
While I do think that ethics is a community issue, I am not trying to force my ethics on anyone else in the blogging community. [...]

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After weeks of thinking, whining, ranting, and being generally disoriented in the aftermath of Savage Gate (phrase courtesy of Seressia Glass), it finally dawned on me that all of the brouhaha, both with the plagiarism thing and the mean girl thing, is all about boundaries (yes, I know I’m slow). Where does [...]

There’s been a backlash of sorts on some authors’ blogs around the internet due to the exposing of Cassie Edwards’ borrowing. I’ll be posting on Tuesday about some thoughts about the definition of plagiarism as it could be defined in the romance writing and read community, but today, in lieu of a ebook post, [...]

A lot of questions have been asked over the past week about what is and isn’t plagiarism, and what kinds of standards of attribution we should expect in fiction. While I don’t think readers are necessarily in a position to initiate this discussion, since it was readers who found the similarities between Cassie Edwards’s [...]

“Plagiarism is the academic and literary equivalent of robbery, taking somebody else’s property. If you copy somebody’s test answers, take an essay from a magazine and pass it off as your own, lift a well-phrased sentence or two and include them without crediting the author or using quotation marks, or even pass off [...]

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From Jane: One reason that romance books comprise such a large portion of the book retail business is because of genre loyalty. Romance readers return to the genre because it gives a specific emotional experience at the end of the book. Wanting a specific emotional experience, time and again, should [...]

Dear Ms. Ashworth:
Thank you for the prank you pulled on AAR this past holiday weekend which just last year was a place you vowed never to read again or post at again. At first, I was all worried that you were serious when you went after a reader complaining about your books being wallpaper [...]

Happy Thanksgiving Dear Author Readers. I came across a special tribute by one Patricia Cornwell to all her fans and had to share it.
I saw on David J. Montgomery’s website a message from Patricia Cornwell making a call to her fans to contact everyone they know and strong arm them into leaving her positive [...]

What I don't understand is how riled up everyone is over a handful of people's comments - because when it comes down to it, that's all we are, a handful of writers and readers in a huge population of writers and readers. And yet somehow this single post with its associated comments achieved mammoth stature [...]

The Novel of Formation
The novel of the same title by Charles Dickens is a bildungsroman, a novel of formation following a protagonist from childhood to maturity. In some cases, it might loosely be described as a coming of age story although it generally follows a protagonist from childhood to some significant period beyond adulthood. [...]

Over at the Smart Bitches, a controversy is raging over the appropriateness of the outfits worn by Marianne Mancusi, Liz Maverick, and Sherrilyn Kenyon at the Literacy Signing. The Literacy Signing was attended by over 450 authors. It is open to the public and the goal is to sell as many books as [...]

I had an author email me once that while she loved the blog, she wished that I would talk about the decency of authors. I admittedly have a bad habit of referring authors as one big collective, when they are as individual as a reader. Authors are good, bad, indifferent, gracious, embarrassing, petty, [...]

There are two competing threads that took place last week amongst the romance circles. The first discussion arose out of a post by Daniela A, a reader blogger, who wrote that she did not like books featuring adultery. Some readers felt it was written in stone that infidelity could not occur. Others felt that [...]

If you were expecting an ebook weekly article, come back next Sunday. We are taking a little detour today.
Last week Barbara Samuel put up a plea at Romancing the Blog for Readers to pay more attention to the RITAs. She titled her post “Why Readers Should Care About the RITA Awards.” I [...]

Ms. Kleypas, author of new release Sugar Daddy, has reached out and touched one of her biggest fans (and not the Misery kind of fan). Kristie J reported today that a very wonderful package arrived via Fed Ex from one NY Times Bestselling author, Lisa Kleypas. I wanted to report it because I [...]

I was inspired by May's Romancing the Blog article on Saturday about group blogs. Many an author participates in group blogs and many participate in more than one group blog. But you know what many authors do not do? They do not participate in reader blogs. I find that many of [...]

Last month, I read an amazing blog entry by epic fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson who has two books out from Tor, Mistborn: The Final Empire (Mistborn) and Elantris. I had to wait a whole month before I could blog about it because it took that long before I could find the top of [...]

Alison Kent asked last week what Wendy, Superlibrarian thought was good promotion. Promotion is largely in the hands of authors, particularly new authors. I won’t begin to speculate on why publishers don’t spend more money on promotion. I have to guess that there simply is not a high enough return on investment to [...]

Much ado was raised by Miss Snark and her commenters about Anne Stuart’s statements to All About Romance. Ms. Stuart confessed that she felt “disillusioned about the lack of support” by Harlequin and that she felt the publisher is more about “slots and numbers, not about passion for what they’re putting out there.”
I recall [...]

Last week, we talked about the dichotomy between authors pleas to buy new and a reader’s desire to get the most books for her money. The problem isn’t with the authors and the readers. It is the publishers’ desire to make money without regard for anything else. Publishing houses used to focus on [...]