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

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 [...]

Amazon filed for and was recently granted a patent to change words in a book in order to track down the source of pirating. John Scalzi called this a stupid idea because it violates his creative control over the work.
I think Amazon has the right idea. A change to the html css stylesheet, [...]

Sydney Morning Herald has a nice article about romance in conjunction with Beyond Heaving Bosoms, a guide to romance written by SB Sarah and SD Candy.
So thank Eros for two Americans, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, who dreamed up Mavis for their book Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels. It’s an [...]

Recent comments from Amazon seem to directly dispute the idea of a hack or external tagging issue, but rather an internal cataloguing error. I don’t think that Amazon’s explanation is any explanation at all. It doesn’t address what it’s “adult content” policy is and what it will do in the future to books in [...]

UPDATE 1: Here is a spreadsheet of books denoting their catagory metadata along with whether the book has an amazon rank. If you are a gmail user, you can (I think) access the spreadsheet for sorting. If you aren’t a gmail user, here is a web page of the spreadsheet.
Additionally, there [...]

UPDATE No. 2:  Amazon executive customer service email is: ecr@amazon.com and the customer service phone number is 1-800-201-7575. You can use Robin’s template:
Dear Amazon,
It has come to my attention that you are de-ranking books, supposedly on the basis of “adult content.” Apparently, according to the Amazon Dictionary, this is defined as books that have anything at all [...]

Is Richelle Mead and her Vampire Academy series the next Twilight phenomena?  PW reports that the three books have a totle of 600,000 in print.  Jia has read these books and likes them.  Maybe she’ll do an omnibus review for us.
David Carnoy, a journalist/editor at CNet, wrote a fiction book which NY publishing wouldn’t buy.  Having [...]