Blog Archive

2009 Rita Nominations

The calls are going out today to 2009 Rita and Golden Heart finalists. Official results are going up at the RWA site and Twitter is also hopping.  Just search for hashtag #rwanoms for a live feed.…

The Delights of Book Festivals

While I haven’t been to RWA, I have been able to celebrate books and reading in a more local arena. I have spent the past few days attending numerous events at the Virginia Festival of the…

Creative Book Promotion

At least in the romance genre, it has become a standard technique for authors to hold regular giveaways in exchange for readers signing up for the author’s newsletter, with the usual prize a couple of free…

Can One Really Condense a Full-length Novel into a Book Trailer?

Whenever I’m looking forward to a book release, I always monitor the message boards very carefully for any information—interviews with the authors, excerpts, reviews, etc. Lately, it’s been Smooth Talking Stranger, Lisa Kleypas’s upcoming contemporary romance,…

How Well do Category Romances Age?

With the publication of Harlequin’s Famous Firsts Collection, I recently read two romances from the 1980s, Debbie Macomber’s The Matchmakers and Anne Stuart’s Tangled Lies. Though Tangled Lies has a suspense plot, it is less prominent,…

Public Service Announcement

The message boards are back online!!! After much wrangling, some unladylike language, and finally getting to deal with a truly wonderful, helpful IT person, the boards are back up. From the email I’ve been getting, I…

Digital ARCs: Yes, Please!

Galleycat at Media Bistro is hot on the e-ARC thing. Or in hashtags-speak #digitalarcs.  And, considering that we are hearing from multiple sources these days that publishers are cutting back on ARCs, the timing couldn’t be…

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

We give many reasons for reading romance and loving it so. The comfort of a guaranteed happy ending, the feeling of being swept away to another time and place, fascination with the workings of the human…

Is This the Face of Shakespeare?