Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Doesn’t Havens man the camera from time to time?

Hilarious, as always (Note to self: no food/drink while watching authortalk videos). See Nora perform some of the skills she picked up researching Tribute, her July release.

Authortalk.tv

In the true spirit of viral marketing, I received my first AuthorTalk link in my inbox from a friend. I’m not sure how she found it but I think it was from another person’s blog. And now I am doing my part in spreading the word.

I think the entire point of book trailers was to be an online, grass roots, viral marketing endeavor. Circle of Seven Productions owns the trademark to “book trailer” and is credited with the origination of the concept.

I’ve always wonder about the success of book trailers. The Book Standard used to have the Book TrailerPark for videos but the Book Standard is dead and so is the TrailerPark. That’s a bit how I view book trailers, a sort of promotional dead end. I don’t think that even one trailer has convinced me to buy a book.

There have been several posts about the blogosphere that discuss the book trailer with most people agreeing that the videos do very little for them. Despite the many proclamations of readers and authors who feel unmoved by book trailers, authors still keep making them and putting them …

My favorite part is the 4:19 mark. I laughed so hard that Ned came over to see what was going on. Kresley is giving us some books to give away next week or so. Stay tuned. Update: Here is the link for all the videos.

Updated to add: I’m currently being grilled as to why I find these videos funny.

Ned: What is it about these videos that you find funny?

Jane: They just are.

Ned: But what is it, specifically?

Jane: 0_0

Ned: What?

Jane: Why are you asking me?

Ned: Are they reviewing books? Making fun of something?

Jane: It’s just funny. I think it’s funny.

Ned: I don’t get it.

Final update: Have watched them all. Nearly peed my pants. Showalter and Monroe are hysterical.

Drop Dead Gorgeous by Kimberly Raye. The premise was that geek girl saw her geek boy bestfriend get super hot, super confident, and super sexy and she wanted that too. Except the reason that the geek boy bestfriend got super everything was because he got bit by a vampire and now he too was a vampire. As a vampire, he could make a woman want him. His nerd body transformed into a hard body that everyone in town wanted. I was disappointed that there was no emotional makeover other than that incited by his paranormal makeover. In other words, this guy would have never broken out of his shell if not for his supernatural power.

Geek girl, Meg Sweeney, has been making herself over since high school to turn from jock into girly girl, but she hasn’t been successful enough to make it onto the hot bachelorette list, “Tilly Townsend’s infamous Hot Chicks.” This bothers Sweeney so much that she attends humiliating classes with other members of her small town to discuss her orgasms and lack thereof. This book is over the top in …

Jill Monroe made several abortive attempts to write but didn’t get serious until she joined the RWA and began studying the craft with the Oklahoma Romance Writers chapter. She wrote eight books during that time and claims that two are unpublishable. She was a finalist in the Golden Heart and came to the attention of her current publisher through a contest at Harlequin in late 2000. Since then, she’s published six books (2 being from the original 8) and I am sure we’ll see more of her in the future.

Her current release has a unique twist. It tells the story of a brother and sister and their unusual paths to romance. I particularly liked the older woman (the sister)/younger man romance the best and thought that this uncommon coupling makes Primal Instinct stand out.

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I’ve read most of the first sale stories here at Dear Author. I really wish I had something like Kresley Cole’s Rule of 25. But really, I’ve been solidly working on a career based on one piece of bad advice after another. …

Dear Ms. Monroe:

Basically, every month I go over to the eHarlequin site and I randomly pick books based on title and cover. That’s it. I think of it kind of as a book Russian roulette or something like that. Yours was a November read that I picked because I had never read you before.

The title is a complete misnomer since the hero might be tall and dark but is not filthy rich. His lack of riches, in fact, is part of the conflict. For some reason, though, I became fixated on the idea that the title simply did not fit the book and that bothered me the whole time I was reading.

Jessie Huell specializes in catching cheaters; sometime she is hired to catch people who are in it for the thrill but most of the time, she stakes out spouses and significant other to see if they are straying. She’s asked to do an interview on a local TV show called “Just Between Us”. Jessie would like to drum up some business and she agrees only to find an old high …