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

File this under “where have I been” but apparently Paramount is engaged in some egregious whitewashing in the Airbender movie. Aspiring author, Ellen Oh, writes about how whitewashing is racist. There is a site devoted to the Airbender casting fiasco (all the heroes are white and the bad guy and secondary characters are ethnic [...]

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Straight off the top of your head, do you think that authors have any ethical or moral responsibilities beyond the book?
I’m guessing that the vast majority of you answered this question the same way I did for a long time, with a fully articulated, deeply resounding NO.
As I said, this [...]

Reader Karen brings this great deal to readers:
I found this holiday code at Scooper Speaks blog. Today (and yesterday), all of the books on Dorchester’s site are 70% off. The promo code is Holiday70. (http://www.dorchesterpub.com/)
There’s no indication on the site that the sale exists. I called their 800 number to confirm before creating my account [...]

Cultural Appropriation in Romance
Earlier in this year of 2009, there was a Great Cultural Appropriation Debate, dubbed racefail09, that centred mainly around the SF/F genres. If you clicked on that link, it leads to a set of many, many, many links about race, racism, cultural appropriation and white privilege. (If you’ve never heard of these [...]

Dear Ms. Pappano,
One thing I’m trying to do this year is expand my reading horizons.  I usually stay within my favorite genres of fantasy, paranormals, and young adult, but sometimes you need variety to keep things interesting.  So when I was glancing through the eHarlequin website earlier this month, your book caught my [...]

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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 [...]

Borders, who financially might be on its last legs, is not going down without a fight. It opened a new store a few weeks ago and is now launching a new Latina book club (does the Latina instead Latino mean that the book club is just for women?)
Does this mean that there will be [...]