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 [...]

Value, value, value. That seems to have become one of those buzzwords invoked in defense of corporate publishing’s status quo. But what is value, exactly?
Of the “agency model,” Hatchette CEO David Young has said, “It allows Hachette to make pricing decisions that are rational and reflect the value of our authors’ works.” Harper Collins CEO [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The much maligned Harlequin Horizons (which authors and readers had begun to refer to as HarHo after what I presume to mean that some one is engaging in prostituting herself) has transformed into DellArte Press. It has essentially the same look and feel but there is no mention of Harlequin anywhere. Even the contact person [...]

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 [...]

Mobile adoption is occurring at a faster rate than any other adoption of internet in the past. Further, at the leading edge of mobile adoption is the growth of the iPhone/iTouch market. Morgan Stanley is essentially telling investors that those that can anticipate and deliver products to the mobile space are those who [...]