Bitchin' Blog Posts
: Jane
December 10, 2011 | Saturday | 13 Comments
There's a lot going on here there and everywhere. The winner of the Bad Sex award has been announced. The winner was David Guterson for "Ed King," a retelling of Oedipus. The winning, ahem, passage: "In the shower, Ed stood with his hands at the back of his head, like someone just arrested, while she abused him with a bar of soap. After a while he shut his eyes, and Diane, wielding her fingernails now and staring at his face, helped him out with two practiced hands, one squeezing the family jewels, the other vigorous with the soap-and-warm-water treatment. It didn't…
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May 15, 2011 | Sunday | 13 Comments
Time again for the best sellers list from Dear Author and Smart Bitches for 10 April - 10 May 2011. As with last week’s list, we used our affiliate links, which reward the blog owner with 6-8% of the sale price for each item sold, to compile the list. I use affiliate links for both All Romance eBooks and Amazon, and Harlequin when reviewing a Harlequin novel. DearAuthor uses affiliate links for Amazon alone. So here is this week’s list. It doesn’t capture every sale out there or every sale that we might inspire, but it is a data point…
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May 09, 2011 | Monday | 24 Comments
Behold, I quote Jane: “One thing that readers have in common is our neverending search for new books. Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches and we at DearAuthor use affiliate links to help fund our sites. These affiliate links reward the blog owner with 6-8% of the sale price for each item sold using an affiliate link. Sarah uses affiliate links for both All Romance eBooks and Amazon, and Harlequin when reviewing a Harlequin novel. DearAuthor uses affiliate links for Amazon alone.” Jane thought that it might be fun to create a “bestseller” list out of the affiliate links. Jane, apparently,…
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March 14, 2011 | Monday | 18 Comments
It’s time to fill out your brackets for the 2010 DABWAHA tournament of books. If you’re not familiar with it, the DABWAHA is a bracket-style tournament that echoes the NCAA basketball tourney, only instead of college basketball, we’re using reader votes to determine the book of the year. I’ve got a lot of DABWAHA news, in convenient bullet-list format. The reader nominations are in - and each category is now complete with 8 nominees, one in each picked by readers! I am going to post the top 10 reader nominations in each category - because you need more books to…
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February 26, 2011 | Saturday | 5 Comments
At the suggestion of Jane from Dear Author and after some amusing moments looking back at various entries in the #jerseylibrarians hashtag, I think it is indeed time for a photoshop contest. In fact, it’s time for LOLibrarians! Behold, my #jerseylibrarian inspired entries, envisioning the Jersey Librarians responding to Harper Collins’ plan to limit libraries’ digital lending of their books. But you know, I don’t think LOLibrarians needs to be restricted to just digital lending, or even Harper Collins, or even the fun of making mafia movie quotes into library policy. Oh no! It is time for a fun and…
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February 18, 2011 | Friday | 30 Comments
The highlights of the first day of ToC included Margaret Atwood, Indie booksellers speaking confidently and knowledgeably about building community, and two days of hot lunch. I love hot lunches like you have no idea. The opening keynotes of ToC were rather awesome, mostly. First was Theodore Gray, who discussed the creation of his periodic table table, and the book and then the iPad app that were inspired by his strange collection. The ipad app is jaw dropping - then comes the Outer Space one, and I about leapt off my chair to go home and get my iPad so…
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February 13, 2011 | Sunday | 111 Comments
Starting Monday I’ll be at Tools of Change in Publishing, a conference that’s a sort of brainiac party at the intersection of publishing and digital innovation. Last year I called TOC a very full-brain conference because “both left and right brain perspectives are represented and explored.” This year, Jane Litte and I were invited to present a panel on digital reading devices from the user’s perspective. If you’re attending ToC, it’s Wednesday at 2:30 pm. We’ll be talking about all the different digital reading devices and platforms, and the reader’s reaction. As it says in the description, we’ll be discussing…
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February 03, 2011 | Thursday | 14 Comments
Last year, Jane from DearAuthor and I formed The TBR, where we aim to build your To-Be-Read list one good book at a time. The TBR administers the Save the Contemporary campaign, an iPhone app, as well as the DABWABA, our tournament with an improbable name, better known as the March Madness Tournament of Romance Novels. Now, we’re joining to write a newsletter that will contain book news, mini reviews, alerts about upcoming contests (such as that fabulous DABWAHA, which we’re putting together now), and information that would be of interest to you as a romance reader. Want to sign…
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December 28, 2010 | Tuesday | 10 Comments
Watch this space - at 9pm EST tonight, it will go live, and we’ll be discussing Amanda Quick’s Scandal with me, and special guest host Jane Litte from Dear Author. Plus, All Romance eBooks has set up some seriously fun giveaway shenanigans taking place all throughout the chat. I hope you’ll join us as we talk about this book, and the other old skool romances that remain ever worthy of a re-re-re-re-re-read.
See you tonight!
Sizzling Book Club Chat: Scandal by Amanda Quick
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December 23, 2010 | Thursday | 7 Comments
Who is ready for the Sizzling Book Club chat? Me me me me me! I have seen folks on Twitter and Facebook talking about re-reading Amanda Quick’s Scandal, and I cannot wait to chat with you about it, and about other older romances that stand up to longtime rereading. Jane from DearAuthor is going to join me for the book discussion, and AllRomance has come up with a great idea - there’s going to be digital giveaways galore up in here, up in here, so please join us! The chat will be Tuesday 28 December at 9:00 pm EST-10:30 pm…
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October 12, 2010 | Tuesday | 58 Comments
I write this with dismay, honestly. Despite some major faults, the Kindle does digital book reading, loading, and buying so well, and works so well for me, I’m using the Kindle. Not even the Sony Mercedes ebook reader could lure me away. Every time I sit down at my computer, I find out about a new way to read, load or access books on the Kindle. I can sync books purchased at Amazon across six devices at this point, and I can email files to my device anywhere. Because of the way I interact with books (lots of them, in…
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June 28, 2010 | Monday | 0 Comments
One of my favorite things that the Harlequin Digital Team has created is the Blogger Bundles. Different romance bloggers put together bundles of books from the past and present, and they’re great for discovering great reads from back then and right now. Today, three new ones went on pre-sale. Chosen by you, the readers, as the Harlequin books that hooked you on romance, this bundle features Anyone But You by Jennifer Crusie, Prince Joe by Suzanne Brockmann, The Millionaire’s Indecent Proposal by Emilie Rose, An Officer and a Gentleman by Rachel Lee and Keeping Annie Safe by Beverly Barton. There’s…
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June 15, 2010 | Tuesday | 55 Comments
I ask myself frequently why I like romance so much. Even after running this site for more than five years, I still ask myself what has me enthralled with romance. And it’s a topic we’ve visited before - Candy wrote about genre constraints back in 2008 and asked why romance’s genre constraints are met with such derision when other genres have similar defining constructs. There is an intricate combination of factors that encourage my return to more romance after I finish reading a novel. Something about the space within those constraints keeps me coming back again and again. What is…
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May 24, 2010 | Monday | 36 Comments
When Jane Litte and I hosted a session on “Save the Contemporary” at RT this year, in the middle of a discussion, we discovered that in the audience was contemporary romance author Susan Donovan. I think my literal response was, “Oh, cool!” So when she got in touch with me later, I suggested an interview, because I was curious what she thought of the contemporary market, and romance in general. You visited our Save the Contemporary panel and we were very excited to meet you - thank you for coming. What do you love most about contemporary romance, reading and…
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April 26, 2010 | Monday | 25 Comments
This year at RT, I will be presenting two sessions and helping out with a third. Along with Angela James and Jane Litte, I’m presenting a session on digital reading on Friday 30 April at 11:15am. We are going to have a veritable smorgasbord, dare I say, a cornucopia of digital reading devices for you to fondle and ask questions about. Jane, Angie and I will talk a bit about the differences and the challenges to switching to digital reading, and there will be a digital reading device to win for those who attend courtesy of AllRomanceeBooks.com and OmniLit.com. Plus…
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