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

In no particular order, the following is a list that I would like to see all epublishers/etailers implement.

Eternal Bookshelf. An eternal bookshelf means that every purchase you have bought can be downloaded at any time. Most of the larger etailers have this feature but not all.
Mass Downloads. Along with the eternal bookshelf should be the ability to re-download all of your books. This is necessary in the case of a computer crash or some other computer related malfuction. to Fictionwise is the only etailer/epublisher I know of that offers this.
Buy a for a friend. The only site that offers this feature is Fictionwise. Amazon does not even offer this for Kindle which makes no sense. When a reader wants to buy a book for a friend, she wants to buy a specific book. She doesn’t want to send a generic gift certificate and hope her friend uses it for said book. I was quite shocked when I went to buy Kristan Higgins’ Just One of the Guys for a couple of friends of mine who had a Kindle and found that there was no option …

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1. Label the books in a series either on the spine or on the front or both (preferably the spine if that is the only place). I.e., Kresley Cole’s Hunger Like No Other is Book 2 in the Immortals After Dark Series so it should have #2 on the spine or on the front. The first story is The Warlord Wants Forever which is part of the Playing Easy to Get anthology.
Readers need to know these things so that when they go on a glom, they can easily pinpoint the books that they are missing in the series.
2. Include a relationship chart in the beginning of every book. Most books published today are series books, all somehow related to one another. It would be very helpful if, at the front of the book, all the books in a series are identified in the way in which they are related to one another and what characters appear in which books.
I.e., in Meljean Brook’s series, the first full length story features Hugh and Lilith in Demon Angel. …

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That was the end of Grogan… the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible!

If you’ve ever seen “Romancing the Stone,” you’ll recognize this line as the last one in Joan Wilder’s latest Western, the one she’s narrating at the beginning of the movie. One of the most amazing things for me about that movie is the way it makes fun of Romance stereotypes, all the while reaffirming them left and right, ending up a perfect cinematic replica of genre Romance (albeit without the Bible). Joan Wilder, who may have sighed wistfully over her heroines’ adventures, gets a story to surpass them all, full of anger, passion, villainy, and jungle humor, happy ending included. A fantasy come true.

Which some apparently believe to be the heart of Romance. If you saw the trailer featured on the Smart Bitches for an upcoming Romance documentary, you might have caught several authors talking about the genre:
“It’s a fantasy; it’s how you really . . . you want your life to …

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From Jane: One reason that romance books comprise such a large portion of the book retail business is because of genre loyalty. Romance readers return to the genre because it gives a specific emotional experience at the end of the book. Wanting a specific emotional experience, time and again, should not be equated with not wanting quality literature.

I read two industry professionals posit that the readership of books that sell do not want a quality story.

In an interview with Reading in the Dark, Paula Guran, Editor of Juno Press, wrote the following in response to the idea that “‘women’s fiction’ is [perceived to be] of a lesser quality than that read by men.”

PG: I don’t think that perception exists anymore. Publishers do know that more women buy more books than men, so they want to sell to women.

There is the idea that “romance”, which is read primarily by women, is of a lesser literary quality, And it is true. Not *all* romance, of course, but a lot of it. Plus a sizable number of romance readers want the same formula …

A week ago I pounded out an article that I was going to offer up as my guest blog post for the Love of Reading Book Fair. It was all about how tension between print reviewers and bloggers is unnecessary because blogging fills the niches that print reviewers don’t have the space or inclination to service.

Yesterday I pulled it up to polish a bit and realized it that it was dullness personified. I figured that if there were new readers from the Book Fair, I didn’t want them to get the idea that romance was full of sex and boring. What kind of representative would I be? I put away the article to bore you with another day because I’m all about treating the regulars right.

To those who might not be familiar with Dear Author, we love romance books. We love the stories that end happily. We love the stories with the pink covers. We love the stories that have, wait for it, sex.

I decided to write about my affection for reading love, sex, vampires and the escapist factor of …

The Novel of Formation

The novel of the same title by Charles Dickens is a bildungsroman, a novel of formation following a protagonist from childhood to maturity. In some cases, it might loosely be described as a coming of age story although it generally follows a protagonist from childhood to some significant period beyond adulthood.

A genre readers’ bildungsroman is the formation of their expectations through reading similarly situated books. At a smaller level, the formation of expectations can be reduced and assigned to an author or a series of books.

Series Books Foster Expectations

Reader expectation is fostered by series books. When an author writes single titles that are loosely connected, there is no continual emotional investment in the characters, but rather the author’s work. Overtime, the author can either build a relationship with a reader for quality work, uneven work, or bad work, depending on the reader’s response.

With a series where the main characters re-appear from book to book to book, the readers become emotionally attached to the characters more than the authors’ work. Readers become so involved in the characters that they almost become real to those …

Judith McNaught’s League City, Texas home sold for $3.5M this month. She’s moving to Dallas to be closer to family. See, authors, what 10 NYT Bestsellers can do for you?

Do any of you remember in the late 80s, early 90s when RT used to have a monthly spread of some author’s palatial estate? Times have changed a bit. The NYT business section reported yesterday while Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep sold 133,000 in hardcover and 329,000 on a $40,000 advance, Prep’s second novel, The Man of My Dreams has been a disappointment. To date, it has sold 36,000 copies in hardcover and 6,000 in paperback while the advance was several multiples of the Prep advance.

It doesn’t look like Sittenfeld is quite on the McNaught track. At least not yet.

One of the more interesting points in the NYT article was that publishers do little to no market research, depending solely on sales to determine what to buy, what to push, what to sell. We readers clearly see that as publishers pushed regency romances on …