Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

Email spam. We all get it. We all hate it. What might be surprising is how many in the industry of book publishing are not just receiving spam but also sending it.

But what exactly constitutes email spam? Wikipedia says,

E-mail spam, also known as unsolicited bulk email (UBE) or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients.

The two keywords there are “unsolicited” and “indiscriminate.” Lately, I’ve been getting quite a few emails that I think qualify as both, from unexpected sources. Some are promotional emails for a service or website concerning books in general or romance novels specifically, but most are advertisements for new book releases. I’m not talking about author newsletters that I’ve subscribed to or done anything that would have given my permission to be subscribed. No, these emails are arriving at our business contact emails (i.e. various “contact@” emails), addresses that we list on our sites but have never subscribed to any kind of mailing list. I’ve never been spammed by an author directly, but I have gotten such messages from publicists and directly from publishers themselves—big NYC publishers who, in my opinion, really ought to know better than to send unsolicited emails. So authors, be careful who you hire and make it clear to those who do promotions for you that you don’t want them to send unsolicited emails on your behalf.

Now, I’m not saying that no one should ever send an unsolicited email of a commercial nature. I’ve received commercial/advertisement emails that I didn’t feel was spam, and before writing this column, I had to figure out exactly what I would consider spam and what I wouldn’t. Here’s where the “indiscriminate” part comes into play. First of all, if the email doesn’t address us, our business, or our website title by (the correct!) name, then it’s an indiscriminate advertisement. If it does use the correct salutation but has no relevance to us or the services we offer, it’s indiscriminate advertisement. One example of this is an unsolicited new book release announcement to the contact address at AccessRomance, a community site that only promotes the books of its own authors (the ones listed on the sidebar). We don’t do reviews. We don’t create buzz on books that we personally liked on this site. We promote our authors, and that’s it. So when our contact address somehow ends up on a publicist or publisher’s mailing list, that means said publisher or publicist took it upon themselves to decide that we might be interested in spreading the word on this product product (they were wrong), and so they went to our site, found our contact email, and added it to their list.

Folks, this is called spamming. I’m not going to name names, but within the time span of a couple of weeks, I got three such emails from the same person at a NYC publisher. After the first one, I informed him that it was unsolicited and asked to be removed from his list. I had to reply to two more of his messages with the same request before the emails finally stopped arriving in my inbox. I’ll admit I was probably a bit rude to him, but the subject of spam does seem to get people unreasonably riled up, doesn’t it?

And it’s that excessive anger on the part of spam recipients that can easily get authors in trouble when they send out newsletters. As a company that runs hosting on our own server and also sends out newsletters for a huge number of authors, we get hit by the spam deluge threefold. Firstly, we’re in a constant struggle to prevent spam from being sent to our hosted clients, including ourselves. Secondly, the spam attacks on our mail system, contact forms, message boards, and blogs use up resources and cost us money. And thirdly, we have to make sure that the newsletters we send out don’t get marked as spam, the end result of which could be blacklisting by email service providers such as Yahoo! and AOL, preventing all of our authors’ newsletters from being delivered to those subscribers.

To stop that from happening, you have to play by the rules. Email service providers are under tremendous pressure to block spam, and because of that, they can be merciless on anyone that their customers tell them are spammers. If you have a website hosted by a big company, you most likely agreed to Terms of Service that stated you can’t send out newsletters to a list without a double opt-in. (You did read the Terms of Service, right? Yeah, I didn’t think so. No one does. But trust me, it’s there, and it’s something you should be concerned about if you send out newsletters.) So, what’s a double opt-in? It’s where subscribers, after submitting the form to join the mailing list, get an email asking for confirmation, and only after they’ve clicked the link in that email are they actually subscribed to the list.

This method generally doesn’t work for authors that want to build up a mailing list by running a traditional type of contest, where the entries are collected either manually or automatically in some sort of database, and the emails are then manually added to the author’s newsletter list. We currently do have the ability to ask all those email recipients to confirm their subscription, but this is an ineffective way to build a list, because very few actually click on that link.

There are ways around all of this, however. Here’s what we’ve done to make sure we play it safe and are still able to help our authors grow their list numbers:

Read the rest of this entry �

Tis the season for contest judging! Last year, I received many invites and never once did I look at the due dates on when I needed to return those contest entries. I have two in the month of June alone! What was I thinking? Especially with Book Expo happening right in the middle of this.

Now, when I judge a contest, I do try and write notes in the margin to the writer in the hopes that maybe a few comments will be helpful or shed a light on how I judged the entries.

What’s interesting to me is that often a contest organizer will provide a sheet with specific criteria listed on it and I’m suppose to select a number 1-5 or 1-10 in order to rate how well accomplished a certain aspect might be.

It might just be me but I find the point structure rather difficult to use in judging.

For example, I judged this contest once where I was supposed to rate how apparent the hero and heroine’s conflicts were in the opening chapters and were those conflicts handled strongly (as in not contrived). Then I had to choose a number between 1-10. The number 1 being an obvious disaster and 10 being exceptional (with numbers in between that could mean “throw out this work” on the low ranges” to “this is decent but still needs to be worked on” in the higher ranges.

Well, I had one contest entry where the conflict was quite apparent and nicely handled but highlighting that wasn’t going to help the manuscript any. The writing was actually quite good but the story itself was more suited to those old-time (much missed) category regency historical lines that went the way of the dinosaur about 4 or 5 years ago. Do you remember those lines? Harlequin, Kensington, and Signet all had them at one point in time but poof, they are no more. This contest entry would have been perfect for those now defunct lines (although you could argue that Harlequin Historical might still be doing a few). But this contest was for single-title historicals.

So how in the heck do I choose a number 1-10 to describe it? On one hand, the conflict was apparent and aptly handled. On the other, it wasn’t going to be a big enough conflict to float a 100,000 word single-title historical romance.

I don’t even remember what number I chose (I think a 7) and then I wrote a comment in the margin as to what I was struggling with. I haven’t any idea if that will help the writer or not. I did end up writing a longer, more detailed comment at the end of the point-oriented, judging sheet so perhaps that will make it clearer.

As you can see, I struggle with the point-oriented judging sheets. On a recent contest I judged, points could be awarded for correct format. I was a little flummoxed by that. Seems a bit more apt for the contest organizers than for the final judge but heck, it’s easy to give a 5 (out of 5) point rank for an entry being formatted correctly.

I’ve decided I’m point inept; I’m more of a “rank ‘em and then write comments separately” kind of judge.

(Originally posted 01-29-2005 by Laurie Gold)

After having shared my views on romance novels online for nearly nine years now, one might wonder what in the hell I still have to say that could be of any interest to anyone. As long as I run a website devoted to romance and keep reading romance, I’ll never run out of things to talk about.

These days I’m watching the tremendous growth of Romantica (when juxtaposed with the current growth of Inspirational Romance it’s particularly fascinating). Although online romance readers in no way represent the real romance-reading public (of this I’m convinced), online trends may disproportionally affect the mainstream publishing industry. The growth of Romantica in e-book form (and via fan fiction) is something I’m sure Harlequin, Kensington, and Berkley (to a smaller extent) took into consideration before deciding to focus and expand the market.

And this is of interest to me these days because I’ve begun to read quite a bit of short story Romantica (my favorite guilty pleasure read from 2004 is Merry Christmas, Baby, mostly because of the delightfully naughty entries by Donna Kauffman and Susanna Carr).

I owe most of this interest to MaryJanice Davidson (and to a lesser extent, Alison Kent - had authors like her not pushed the Harlequin Blaze envelope, I’m sure I’d be reading even fewer Blaze titles than I do now – how many more virginal sex therapists, uptight lingerie store owners, and frigid talk show hosts and librarians can you stand to read about? ).

We’d reviewed some of Davidson’s earlier work at All About Romance, but it wasn’t until Undead and Unwed that I actually read her. That was enough…soon it was her other 2004 single title releases, and then there were her earlier Romantica short story contributions to the Secrets anthologies, which led me to Angela Knight’s Romantica contributions to the Secrets anthologies, which led me…well, you can see where this is going.

Take a reader who’s discovered one voice of an author she loves, is thrilled to discover a second voice by the same author, and sit back and watch the glom phenomenon take over…and spreads.

For those unfamiliar, "to glom” means "to seize or latch on to something," but I adapted the term in the mid-1990’s to describe what happens to readers when we discover an author we love – we become slightly maniacal as we try and locate their backlist to read. It wasn’t long after I fell in love with Davidson’s snarky Chick Lit/Romance hybrid voice that I decided I also craved her dirty Romantica voice.

I couldn’t wait to dive into her just-out Derik’s Bane, which is a the third in a series of Romantica werewolf stories. The first two were published in the Secrets anthologies while this new offering is a single title release for Berkley.

I may be the only reader I know who adored Derik’s Bane, but what Davidson’s managed to do may be instructive to others out there. She’s not only managed to parlay her small/e-press romantica success into the mainstream of romance publishing, she’s been able to take her characters with her for the ride. And for those of us readers who get off on connected stories and books – a sizable group, btw – this is exciting indeed.

Let’s get to know one another…if you’re reading (much) romantica these days, who popped your cherry, so to speak, and whom do you crave now?

TTFN, Laurie Likes Books

Lately, I’m back into romantic suspense in a big way. In fact, last week, three out of the four books I bought were romantic suspense (ok, one was more paranormal romantic suspense, but there is still suspense). One of them is by a fellow blogger here at RTB, Allison Brennan, and is the second (I think, although maybe it doesn’t matter in what order you read them) in one of her series. I read the first one twice—it was that good—and now one of my friend’s has taken off with it, because we tend to like the same kinds of books.

I have no idea why I’m craving romantic suspense, but I am. I was recently a judge for the Daphne du Maurier pubbed division. I think that’s what kick-started my lust for this kind of reading again. The books were all excellent. Some were more excellent than others, of course, but I was not disappointed by even one entry. It was truly exciting…and I wanted more.

More of the tension in my body as I know something is about to happen, but not what or when exactly. Tension as I’m just waiting to see if who I think “dunnit” is who actually did it. I seem to get into the book almost physically. I feel my heart race, my breathe quicken, right alongside the hero or heroine’s. I am alternately shocked and gripped. If someone walks up to me while I am reading one of these kinds of books, I usually jump. I am that engrossed.

I can get so drawn into the plot that I am living that world. Then, of course, every sound I hear around me turns into something that might be ominous. Because I often can’t put these books down in any logical place, it’s always dark out and the middle of the night when I finish reading, so then I’m too scared to sleep. To scared to even walk to my bathroom. What can I say? I have a wild imagination. Vivid, actually.

Why I do this to myself, I have no idea. I don’t like scary movies, I hate horror stories, but somehow the combination of romance and suspense gets me every time. Maybe it’s because I know there is supposed to be a happy-ever-after at the end. Maybe part of me takes all of my own angst and wraps it up in that suspense and what-if’s and knows that it will all turn out all right. Or maybe I just like to be a little bit scared and a little bit wooed at the same time. Hmm, does that make me weird? (That can be rhetorical LOL)

If you like romantic suspense, why? If not, why not? Have you ever stayed up into the wee hours and then been scared to sleep afterwards? Or is that just me?

I’m late (yep, the editor missed a deadline)!

I didn’t forget I was supposed to blog this morning. I just forgot to finish writing my blog post and get it posted. I could have finished my original blog post, but it will hold for another time. Instead, I think it’s appropriate to talk about heroes and heroines, since today in the U.S., it’s Memorial Day, the day we take to commemorate the men and women who have fallen in service to our country.

Yesterday, as I traveled back from a short conference in Florida, I saw quite a few service men and women in the airports. I don’t know about you, but something about seeing someone in uniform always gets my imagination going (and yes, I am one of those women who’s a sucker for a man in uniform). I think there’s a certain zing that comes just from putting on that uniform. And not just a military uniform, but many different “uniforms”—firefighter, police officer, nurse, race car driver (okay, McDonald’s, not so much!). And not every uniform is an obvious one—the power suit of the CEO, the clean cut appearance of the FBI agent, the kick-ass boots of an urban fantasy heroine (because it’s hard to kick ass in flip flops, really). In our minds, we’ve assigned a kind of uniform to different heroes and heroines.

Maybe it’s because those recognizable uniforms have become a symbol for power and authority? For having a measure of control? I’m not sure what it is, but I do know that when I read a book where a hero or heroine wears a certain kind of uniform, as a reader, I expect them to have certain qualities. Going back to the military, and the men and women who wear those uniforms, I automatically expect a warrior. And warriors as heroes and heroines—whether in a Scottish historical, a contemporary military romance, or an urban fantasy—are sexy. They fire the reader’s imagination, make them believe in safety and protection, maybe make them think of a partner who’s going to take control in the bedroom.

When I looked at those soldiers in the airport this weekend, it reminded me of how much I love a warrior hero or heroine, I love the implied strength, the drive to protect and defend. Sure, they’re not always perfect, they’re not always all-good, but they’re willing to risk for lives for me, for their loved ones, for their family, for people they don’t even know and never will—and that’s pretty sexy, don’t you think?

So let’s talk warrior heroes and heroines (whether they wear a uniform or not)—who are some of your favorites, those special men and women who are sexy and strong?

And for those who are reading, who are active or former military—thanks for being my hero.

By Kimber An

Like many, I’ve been rather upset by the raid on the polygamists’ compound in Texas. However, it also brought to mind an anthropological theory of mine – romance is the catalyst for the societal evolution.

In a totally male-dominated society, men corral their women and train them to behave like dogs. Children have no more identity than cattle. Childcare is entirely provided by mothers, which means sons acquire a narrow definition of womanhood and daughters learn to take the crap. Aside from the technological advances brought on by incessant warfare, humanity stagnates.

Puppies die in the streets and no one cares.

Men need the balance of women as equals.

If Man must win the affection of Woman, he must prove himself worthy. In order to prove himself worthy, he must do a variety of things. He must behave in a considerate manner. He must learn to negotiate peace. He must bathe regularly. He must become a sensitive lover.

I believe God created Man and Woman to be this way and this is why women are capable of multiple orgasms. When a man realizes the incredible experience of selfless love, it motivates him to greatness!

It’s no wonder to me the Romance genre has boomed alongside the acquisition of women’s rights.

The Romance genre teaches and/or reinforces the fact that a woman deserves the love, respect, and complete devotion of her man. In my observation, women cannot experience the full joys of love unless they believe they deserve it. If women cannot believe they deserve true love, they cannot insist upon men proving themselves worthy by winning their affections.

The Worthy Man and Deserving Woman form a pair-bond and their love and devotion carries over into the shared parenting of their children. Their sons learn to respect women and their daughters learn to tell the difference between real men and jerkwads. These children grow up emotionally balanced and intelligent. They obtain excellent educations and go on to advance society by building space stations on the Moon and finding cures for cancer. They also continue the cycle by forming pair-bonds of their own.

So, bring on the Romance novels! Next time you’re in the grocery store and you pick one up, just remember you’re contributing to the betterment of our society.

The other day as we rode the train home from work, a coworker and I started comparing educations. Not in the snotty one-upmanship sense—we both went to small liberal arts colleges so trying to outbrain one another would have been useless—but more to look back at our paths to this point. I’d been Pre-Med, ready to commit eight more years (at least) of my life to schooling, and she’d gone the business route with a minor in accounting. While both driven fields, our choices of science and commerce would have little to compare except for the small fact that we both had an epiphany our Junior year.

I couldn’t be a doctor, I realized. I liked to sleep! Residency would kill me, and before it did, I’d probably kill someone as sleeplessness made me a less than friendly (or focused) individual.

As for my coworker, she didn’t even like the classes she was taking. Where was the creation, the real world, something beyond the theoretical pie chart? There had to be more than numbers!

While I stuck out that last year to finish that Biology degree—albeit one that suddenly acquired an ecological bent—my coworker changed her mind entirely. Interior Design became her focus and business and accounting fell by the way side.

In the end, she’s circled a back a bit. She now works in the Treasury department for a large corporation. Meanwhile my biology degree adds nothing to my ability to process checks in Payroll other than the knowledge to identify the hawks that nest the next building over.* Nevertheless, we’re both happy with our life choices, and how they lead to the people we are now. It was fun to look back to see how far we’d come, and how different it could have been.**

Our conversation, and the need to come up with a column topic, got me thinking about how much I love to hear an author’s story. Did they always know they were going to write, despite the bad marks their poetry (obviously misunderstood) received in high school, or were they doing something else—law, medicine, parenthood, secretarial work—when they picked up a pen and started putting works to paper in some form other than a shopping list? What made the writer the writer they are? How did they hone their craft? What happened when their first book sold?

Are these new questions? Groundbreaking? Goodness no. The same questions probably get asked at every single signing a professional writer does. And I’m sure that not all writerly stories of how he or she got to that first punctuation point are interesting, but a great deal are. And those who are one of the 2 % of the population with a manuscript in their closet or those who just love an author’s work, will continue to ask and be amazed at the dedication it took to get a book to its published state.

If the path doubles back on itself and takes a few odd twists, all the better. I know I’d love to hear about it.

*Red-tailed, if you were wondering.

**Because someday, you might ask yourself…

This post is for all of us who look at our bookshelves, think ‘I’m never to finish reading all of them’ and then head out to buy more anyway.

The Ruthless Reader has no time. It doesn’t matter whether you’re single and holding down three jobs or a working single parent, nobody has enough time to do all the things they want to do.

The Ruthless Reader doesn’t have enough money. Unless you are Bill Gates, and maybe only then, you probably have less money than you would like.

The Ruthless Reader doesn’t have enough space. Books take up space. They take up a lot of space, and again, unless you are Bill Gates, you probably can’t afford enough space. There are ways around this (ebooks!) but many don’t like the idea.

These are the reasons why a reader becomes a Ruthless Reader.

And how does a Ruthless Reader read?

The Ruthless Reader does not finish every book she* starts. Some have rules about this. For instance, subtract your age from 100, and decide whether you want to continue when you get to that page number in the book. I personally think that it’s too rigid. Sometimes you just know that you don’t want to at page ten, and if you’re twenty (which I’ll be this summer), you don’t want to be reading another seventy pages just to make sure.

The Ruthless Reader does not give second chances, or at least, they are less willing to give them out. Me, I belong to the former group. One sucky book and you are one sucky writer in my book—or at least in my Excel spreadsheet. I’ve been told that I take this a bit far, because I generally don’t pick up a second book by a merely mediocre author unless somebody in the pantheon tells me to.

But it boils down to this: There are so many books out there, and the Ruthless Reader could be reading something else. Something better.

*I’m using she simply because I decided that there’s a ‘he’ in she and I cannot be bothered typing out she/he every time.

Recently I was asked by a romance-reading friend why publishers of mainstream romance, particularly historicals, don’t seem to understand that many readers are embarrassed to be caught with their noses in books with sexually suggestive covers. I told my friend that publishers do understand, but that many other readers are attracted by such covers. It’s a book’s cover, after all, that tempts a shopper to pick it up and read a couple of pages or check out the back-cover blurb. And sexy covers sell books.

Usually. The difficulty for publishers (and many authors) is that the “clinch” covers (shirtless men embracing women whose breasts are about two seconds and as many centimeters from popping out of their bodices) can sometimes discourage women from buying books. I know that’s true because I am one of those women who won’t pick up a book if the title or the cover is too suggestive. And I’ve seen women in airports and at doctors’ offices angling their bodies away from onlookers and folding back the covers of their paperback romances to hide steamy cover art.

I love reading historical romances, although I don’t enjoy the explicit sex scenes found in most of them. But I’m an inveterate page-skipper, so I suppose flipping past those scenes is no real hardship. Yet I don’t want anyone thinking I’m buying romance novels for sexual titillation, so I’ve been known to put certain books face-down in my shopping cart lest strangers and chance-met friends see what I’m buying and leap to wrong conclusions about my personal values. (And before anyone rushes to comment on my attitude toward eroticism in romance novels, I have no interest in what others choose to read. I’m talking about my own values and preferences and those of women like me.)

Many romance readers share my aversion to sexually suggestive bookcovers. But while publishers are aware of our preferences and know very well that sexy covers are causing them to lose a few sales, what can they do apart from offering a less sensual cover every now and then?

I’ll tell you what they can do.

An idea struck me when my May 12 issue of The New Yorker arrived with two different covers on it, one behind the other. I never learned what the magazine publisher’s aim was, but the double-covered issue made me wonder why certain kinds of romance novels couldn’t have two covers, also.

They do, sometimes. Sort of. “Step-back” pages have been around for years. A book might feature a G- or PG-rated cover design, often something floral, followed by another page of the same heavy, glossy paper which features a couple writhing on red satin sheets or going at it in a meadow. But step-backs are generally seen only on the books of bestselling authors because it’s expensive to commission and print art for two covers instead of just one.

My suggestion to publishers is a variation on the step-back idea. For the outermost cover, a sensual image could be used to grab shoppers’ attention. But that cover would be perforated, enabling sensitive readers to tear it off and reveal a second cover, one with an inoffensive design that would allow them to enjoy the books in public without embarrassment. Production costs wouldn’t even begin to approach those of a step-back as long as the second cover was a no-frills affair, perhaps just showing the author’s name and the book’s title in a two-color design that might be standard for the imprint.

Yeah, you’re right. It’s never gonna happen. So I guess my only options are to avoid buying “those” books or to slap a strip of duct tape over the hero’s ripped abs and the heroine’s heaving bosoms before I take a romance novel out in public.

I have a rare lunch hour free wedged between a brain sucking meeting from hell and a destined to be as equally entertaining sit down with 7 hostile executives. I need a pick me up in a bad, bad way. Seriously. Before I run through the cubicles like a madwoman, yelling and pulling at my hair.

I look at my options.

I can pop across the street, playing Frogger in busy traffic, and buy something at the convenience store, that something consisting of chocolate, caramel and maybe a nut or two. Not a good choice for the waistline, butt, or the coworker having to deal with me post-sugar high.

Or

For the same cash, I can download Michele Ann Young’s Christmas Masquerade at Coffee Time Romance. This 58 page holiday novella with our tormented axe wielding Earl and our broken down outside the wrong residence heroine might be just the thing to put me in a mellow enough mood to love foaming at the mouth V-P’s. And Christmas Masquerade is calorie free.

I decide upon the Christmas novella. Yes. In May. Why? Because I can. That is the beauty of the internet. I can read holiday romances all year round.

This holds true for all holiday romances, explaining why I read Amy Ruttan’s Halloween themed Masque Of Desire in January. Yep, as my granddaddy used to say, I am often a day late and a dollar short.

Another wonder of the internet? Easily obtained quick reads like Stephanie Bedwell-Grime’s A Darker Passion (I have a serious thing for flying men) or Kalen Hughes’ absolutely free (did I mention free?) Rakes Of London short Something Wicked.

This is all new to me. I am not a paper short reader. I never bought anthologies. That changed with the eSales. For a dollar or two, I can buy a short romance, read it over a break, and then carry that loving feeling into the rest of my day. All without leaving my desk. Wonderful.

The issue I’m now having is finding recommendations for short reads. Have you read a novella or romance short lately that you loved? Have you written a short? Do my coworkers a big favor and tell me about it.