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

Motoko Rich has a piece on the advisability of free giveaways on Kindle. Random House, Harlequin, and smaller publishers are giving away copies of books at Amazon. Other publishers like Penguin and Hachette believe that giving away books devalues the book itself.
Similarly, a spokesman for Penguin Group USA said: “Penguin has not and does not [...]

Cover Cafe nominations for 2010 are now open. If you want to nominate a cover for a book that has been published in 2010, please go to http://www.covercafe.com and click on Nominate. The new 2010 nomination form is now available.

All About Romance has launched its annual readers’ poll.

Author Stephen Elliott wrote an editorial [...]

Explicit sex is hard to write well and even if you do write it well, it means you are just packaging up pornography for women. Also, bla bla bla, romance books are killing romance bla bla bla. All according to this  article by Alan Elsner.  I don’t plan to comment over there because Alan [...]

How good is Harlequin doing? Pretty good. In a dismal economy that sees revenues at its parent company dropping, Harlequin is bringing in the profit. David Holland, the interim CEO at Torstar, said that the decline in newspapers and digital were offset by continued growth at Harlequin. (Actually Holland stated it the other [...]

In the ereading category:

Sony officially announced its two new ebook readers to be available at the end of the month. The more affordable device has a 5″ screen, no external memory card, 512 internal MB on board (that will allow you to load over 500 books depending on the format), and will come in [...]

The good news is that Harlequin is following up its successful FY2008 4th quarter with a FY2009 1st quarter profit.  Revenue in the first quarter rose $13.5% and operating income increased 19.1%.  Even including the forex effect, both sales and profits are showing positive gains.  The gains were in North American Retail and Overseas.  (I [...]