Monday News: Carina’s 5th Anniversary, Scammy book sites, RNA award for best new writer, and unrealistic Hollywood heroes
Carina Press Celebrates Fifth Anniversary -Carina is five years old today, and to celebrate, they’re having a sale! Until 11:59 p.m. EDT, June 8th, you can get 55% of all titles on CarinaPress.com with coupon code HAPPY5. Carina’s milestones include:
- Sold more than six million books
- At the end of June 2015, 848 titles will have been published
- Broad range of editorial including romance, science fiction, steampunk, fantasy, erotica, gay & lesbian romances, mystery, family sagas, horror, thriller and more!
- Authors Marie Force and Shannon Stacey have each sold over one million copies of their Carina Press titles –Carina Press
PSA: BestNovel.Website is a Scam of Some Kind, But Not Necessarily a Pirate Site – There are a number of sites floating around via social media that authors are posting as “pirate sites.” Nate Hoffelder and Techdirt’s Tim Cushing have investigated one of these sites, and their findings are that it’s more about getting credit card into than piracy. However, Carolyn Jewel has told me that some of these sites are actually about distributing malware, I don’t know if BestNovel.Website is one of those, but please beware of ANY link that purports to distribute books, legally or illegally, that you do not recognize.
Tim Cushing of Techdirt and I have spent some time looking at this web of sites, and while we think it’s scammy we’re not exactly sure what is going on. We each went down the rabbit hole several times and kept randomly ending up at different sites.
It turns out that the one site mentioned above is actually the honey pot for a couple dozen different cloned websites. Each site looks slightly different but serves the same purpose: to separate you from your credit card details.
None of the sites let me download ebooks before they tried to get my credit card info, and I suspect that getting my CC number was their main purpose and not piracy. –Ink, Bits & Pixels (aka The Digital Reader)
BRIGID COADY WINS 2015 JOAN HESSAYON AWARD – The Romantic Novelists Association, while not precisely the UK counterpart to the RWA, has a similar mission (to promote romantic fiction and support its writers). The Joan Hessayon Award is given annually to a new writer for an outstanding book. This year’s winner, Brigid Coady, won for her novel, No One Wants to be Miss Haversham, a Dickensian romantic adventure featuring Edie Dickens, a lawyer who doesn’t believe in love. I don’t know anything about the book, except that it’s currently selling in Kindle format at Amazon for $3.99. The shortlist of award finalists is as follows:
- Karen Aldous The Vineyard Carina
- Caitlyn Callery The Bankrupt Viscount MuseItUp
- Ashlinn Craven Maybe Baby Crimson Romance
- Brigid Coady No one Wants to be Miss Havisham HarperImpulse
- Joan Fleming What the Future Holds Tirgearr
- Kathy Jay What If He’s the One HarperImpulse
- Natalie Kleinman Safe Harbour White Glove (originally published by Safkhet)
- Nikki Moore Crazy Undercover Love HarperImpulse
- Margaret Pardoe Meant for Each Other DC Thomson novella
- Janice Preston Mary & the Marquis HMB Historical
- Caroline Roberts The Torn Up Marriage HarperImpulse
- Heather Rosser In the Line of Duty New Generation Publishing (originally accepted by Attica Books)
- Georgina Troy A Jersey Kiss Accent Press
- Jules Wake Talk to Me Choc Lit
- Gwyneth Williams Echoes in the Sand Endeavour Press –RNA – UK
Action Movies, Stop Taking Away Our Everyday Heroes – This is an interesting piece by Jordan Crucchiola on the way Hollywood is promoting an impossible ideal for men via the completely beautiful and buffed out movie hero. This argument has implications for Romance, as well, I think, because while we tend to focus on the way heroines are written and conceptualized as models for readers, we don’t often examine heroes with the same critical eye.
The reimagining of Jack Burton as The Rock is only the latest development in a much more insidious plot devised by Hollywood to brainwash us all. It is the problem of The Impossible Man. Average dudes looking for hope, you can shout “Dad Bod!” all you want, but once Chris Pratt whipped his Andy-the-everyman physique into certified hero-body shape, your argument blew away like a handful of creatine powder.
On one hand, I’m loving this trend with everything my reptile brain can muster. Knowing that I can go to the movies and select from a dessert table offering up the Tom Hardy, Henry Cavill, Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello, and Chrises Pratt/Hemsworth/Evans is wonderful. Each of them in 2015 is a human specimen carved from stone and misted just enough to optimal sheen. They’re living monuments to anatomical design at its highest levels—but just as they lack diversity in skin tone, so too do they lack diversity in appeal. There’s only room for one type of hero at the Tinseltown Table, and making Jack Burton into a human mountain is perhaps the greatest act of hostility so far in this aesthetic Cold War. –Wired
I actually just finished reading this and will post my review this afternoon. The Ghosts of Weddings Past, Weddings Present and Weddings Future are hilarious.
If someone is going to the work of setting up and managing a website plus stealing books (or not), I can pretty much guarantee there’s a payoff for him or her somewhere.
Some pirate sites are listing books I haven’t even written yet. (That’s one of the dangers of sharing upcoming releases in a series – the scammers use that information)
When in doubt, email the writer. She/he will tell you if the site is legit.
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My understanding is that authors will sometimes post links to sites they assume are pirate sites, but are more likely malware distribution channels. So I would absolutely discourage people from clicking on any link that is not familiar. If you don’t want to email the author (I’m someone who would not want to do that, btw), you can contact the publisher or ask around on social media, or check out blogs like Ink, Bits, & Pixels (aka The Digital Reader) to see if anything has been posted about the site in question.
I remember arguing with someone about illegal torrents, trying to explain that there’s NO way to know if they actually have whatever the file’s name was.
In the end, I won the argument my searching torrent sites for books that I knew were not yet out. Books within two/three weeks of release* could be found.
When friend insisted, I downloaded. “You need to fill a survey over here to get a password”. Survey’s offered can be found by googling “survey scam”.
In the end, friend also stopped clicking on ads that give malware. Win for her computer, I guess.
*(Yes, I happened to know off the top of my head the dates and titles for the next release for Sarah Morgan, Kate Noble, Tessa Dare, Karina Bliss and Sarah MacLean. Doesn’t everyone?)