Announcing Buzz Books 2016: Romance!

You might have seen, usually around BEA-time, Buzz Books 2016 and Buzz Books 2016: YA from Publisher’s Lunch. Each edition is a free collection of extended excerpts from anticipated upcoming books that publishers, booksellers, and readers are talking about. Each sampler is a free download, and each one includes a whole lot of reading.

This year, in time for RWA, Publisher’s Lunch is expanding, and has created the first Book Buzz 2016: Romance!

Woo hoo! Yay, romance!

And because I couldn’t resist, I made a picture:

Get it?

(I know. I’m ridiculous.)

Buzz Books 2016: Romance contains hefty excerpts of some excellent upcoming romances that span several sub-genres – and some that combine a few sub-genres in new ways. I was commissioned to write the introduction and to write an overview of what’s coming in the distant future – well, sort of distant. Fall and winter 2016/2017 may seem distant to me and you, but to publishing people, I think that’s tomorrow. Or this afternoon, maybe. Looking ahead isn’t something I usually do in terms of scouting out what to read, so in the process of writing the overview, my TBR got frighteningly long.

There are a lot of different book excerpts inside this collection, too – here’s a bit from the press release (if I tried to talk about all of them, I’d end up writing the intro again – SO MUCH BOOKS!):

[There are] historical romances set in different eras (Kristy Cambron’s The Illusionist’s Apprentice, Julia London’s Wild Wicked Scot, Sharon Page’s The Worthington Wife); contemporary comedy (Katherine Reay’s A Portrait of Emily Price, a nod to Jane Austen’s Emma); westerns (Lindsay McKenna’s Wind River Wrangler); sports romances (Sarina Bowen’s Rookie Move); thrillers and romantic suspense (Tiffany Snow’s Follow Me, Colleen Coble’s Twilight at Blueberry Barrens) and even some with a touch of paranormal.

There are contemporaries, historicals, suspense novels, westerns, sports romances, inspirationals and more. Seriously – plane reading on the way to RWA doesn’t get much better, or more portable. It’ll be merciless on your TBR and your book budget, but the extended length of each included sample means you get a mighty big portion of each.

And did I mention that Buzz Books Romance is free? It is! FREE CHEEZY BREAD FREE!

You can find Buzz Books 2016: Romance on the Publisher’s Lunch Buzz Books page, and for download from Amazon, BN, iBooks, and Google: Play. There are also print copies, and I’ll have a few at RWA if you’d like one. If you see me and say hi, and if I haven’t run out, I’ll give you one!

When I was originally contacted about this project, I was very excited to see romance as a genre receiving attention and focus in a venue which has already featured mainstream fiction, nonfiction, and YA for several years. I hope this is the start of a very successful endeavor for Publisher’s Lunch, and a very successful discovery tool for romance readers, too. I hope you’ll let me know what you think! Yay, reading!