Links: Dragons, Cats, & Wine

Workspace with computer, journal, books, coffee, and glasses.Happy Wednesday! RWA18 is about to kick off in Denver. Safe travels to those who are attending! Sarah will be there, so be sure to say hi. I will be moving apartments soon and have nearly packed up all of my books. I unfortunately made the mistake of packing up my TBR pile though. Rookie mistake!

This August, the United States Postal Service is coming out with dragon stamps! Yeah, you read that right: dragon stamps. There are four different designs. Which one is your favorite?

Buzz Books 2018: Romance is officially out! For those who haven’t heard of Buzz Books, these are samplers that include excerpts upcoming romances. Excerpts include In a Badger Way by Shelley Laurenston, The Sweetest Thing by Judith McNaught, and Solace Island by Meg Tilly.

Download the sampler here and check out the other Buzz Books editions!

Love a good wine cocktail? The Kitchn has done the lord’s work and compiled several great recipes for “wine slushies” this summer. I plan on making at least half of these, especially the Riesling Peach and Cherry Slushies.

The Romantic Novelists’ Association and author Rhoda Baxter, had Sarah over at their site for a great interview. Check it out!

I have recently discovered the Cream Heroes YouTube channel. What are the “Cream Heroes,” you ask? Well they are seven adorable cats.

Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!

Comments are Closed

  1. Julia aka mizzelle says:

    I assume SB Sarah is in line presently for the dragon stamps.

  2. DiscoDollyDeb says:

    A long and detailed, but quite interesting, deep dive into “Cocky-gate”: (Warning: some rather dismissive comments about certain romance books.)

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17566276/cockygate-amazon-kindle-unlimited-algorithm-self-published-romance-novel-cabal

  3. Ren Benton says:

    Avon Books announced the Beverly Jenkins Diverse Voices Sponsorship to send own voices writers entered in the RITA/Golden Heart to the RWA conference. Full announcement here:

    https://www.rwa.org/p/bl/et/blogid=20&blogaid=2259

  4. Ren Benton says:

    I looked at the dragon stamps and thought, “Oh. I hoped they’d look more like real dragons.”

    All the photographs of real dragons must still be under copyright or something. 😛

  5. QOTU says:

    Deb, I was going to mention that article, too! I found The politics of K.U. to be fascinating. Love how they try allvthe scams on Romance first and the roll them to the less popular yet more acclaimed genres. Made me question if another service like Kindle Unlimited exists that treats authors a little better that I could use instead. Sadly, my library’s overdrive offerings are slim.

  6. Qualisign says:

    I’m still hoarding my beloved villains stamps from last year, and it looks like that was a wise move. I’ve gotten ties with better dragons than those depicted on the stamps. @Ren Benton: Copyright be damned when it comes to dragons.

  7. Ren Benton says:

    @QOTU: Scribd pays about the same as the royalty for a sale. A subscription is $8.99 USD per month. They do offer a free trial.

    The drawback from the user side is that Scribd states, at their discretion, they can throttle your “unlimited” use by making some books “not immediately available” if you’re a power reader who’s going to bankrupt them… which is a lot of romance readers. They don’t specify what the threshold is, though.

    Unfortunately, if you want to sustain a subscription program, you can’t charge $9 and pay out $120 in royalties when a subscriber reads a book a day — unless you’re Amazon and your subscription model is a loss leader to suck people into your bigger ecosystem where they’ll spend gobs more money.

  8. LML says:

    If you pay Scribd a year in advance their fee drops to about $4.00 per month. It isn’t very obvious on their site. I learned about the annual fee from a SBTB comment a couple of years ago.

  9. kitkat9000 says:

    Dragon stamps? Dragon stamps. DRAGON STAMPS- YES!!!

    <> Wait. What? They call these dragons? Phppbt. Don’t think so.

  10. kitkat9000 says:

    Hey! My comment was weirdly edited. Between the brackets I had inserted ‘Looks at stamps’. May I ask what happened?

  11. Amanda says:

    @kitkat9000: My best guess is that the brackets messed with the text, since we use brackets for formatting HTML in the comments. Using parentheses will probably avoid that in the future!

  12. Anonymous says:

    I guess I’m in the minority, but I think the dragon stamps are very cute — not at all what I was expecting, but still very cute, especially the orange one.

  13. Amanda says:

    @Anonymous: I like them too! The first and third one give me Maleficent vibes.

  14. Amy says:

    Oh god, until now I haven’t seen wine slushies anywhere outside of upstate New York. I’m so glad they’ve been discovered by smartbitches.

  15. Ruth C. says:

    That cream heroes video. How was the apartment so clean? There were seven cats in it, and the only fur was on the cats!

  16. Amanda says:

    @Ruth C: As someone who only owns ONE long-haired cat, I need to know her secret.

  17. SB Sarah says:

    I suspect dark forces at work. I would like to hire them for my house.

  18. SB Sarah says:

    @Julia: Yup. I have a tent and everything.

  19. Katie Lynn says:

    @Ren Benton @QUTO I wouldn’t use scribd again if you paid me. I was one of the people who got throttled when they first started doing it, but without any sort of warning. And it wasn’t that books weren’t immediately available, they were *hidden from me using specific search for title or last name of author*. I was reading maybe 4-5 books a week. Contacting customer support was honestly insulting with how I was treated. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth and I can’t recommend them.

  20. Ren Benton says:

    @Katie Lynn: Yeah, I figured that was about how it would go. Sorry that happened to you.

    Kobo has been doing a trial run of a subscription program in Belgium and the Netherlands, and if they can find a way to make that economically feasible (lol), they would surely expand to other territories.

    But like I said before, somebody has to get screwed to make the subscription model work, and it will never be the vendor brokering the transaction.

    Kobo inked a deal with Walmart recently, and maybe Wally will be willing to run a sub at a loss for a while to spite Amazon, but sooner or later, ventures that don’t turn a profit get killed.

  21. chacha1 says:

    Personally I love the dragon stamps and can’t wait to buy a whole bunch of them. They remind me of 1960s travel posters crossed with the art of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

  22. kitkat9000 says:

    Couple more things:

    -The cat videos were adorable, thank you kindly. They left me wondering just how many pans she has available for them. Forget the lack of stray hairs, my comment is about the overall cleanliness of the house- who in God’s name has a house THAT clean? Also, I really like her slippers.

    -The wine slushies were completely unnecessary- I did not need to learn just how easy they are to make, damn you, Amanda! (Kidding, just kidding, I promise!) However, I am totally going to blame you every time someone comments on my glass contents.

  23. Ren Benton says:

    Kind of anticlimactic without the tournament of reviews, but the RITA winners have been announced:

    https://www.rwa.org/page/2018-winners

  24. GHN says:

    You will probably have seen this, since at about 1 week old this is _old_ news now, plus it has gone viral since it was put up. Still, this thing about Brooch Warfare is just about the funniest and coolest thing I’ve come over in quite a while.

    https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2018/07/17/queen-trolled-donald-trump-brooch-best-thing-youll-read-today/

    This whole thing was started by Ravelry user SamuraiKnitter – laudatory thread here: https://www.ravelry.com/discuss/lazy-stupid-and-godless/3808115/1-25

  25. Amanda says:

    @kitkat9000: I know! (sorry!) Most of them are just booze, frozen fruit, and then blend.

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