Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

If you’ve been around for longer than that carton of milk in your refrigerator, I’m sure you’ve heard these words “the midlist is dying” at least a time or two, but in the last two weeks I’ve heard of two publishers who have out and out declared either to many (via press release) or privately (via an agent) that they were eliminating their midlist.

So, what does it mean and why do we care–or do we?

First, what is the midlist? Quite honestly it is made up by most authors you meet on the Internet. It is an author who isn’t just starting out, and who also isn’t at the top of the sales game. I don’t say “best-selling” because honestly that tag is bantered around so much it lacks meaning. An author could label herself “best-selling” or even “NY Times best-selling” and still be mid-list. Because, times change and just because you hit a list once doesn’t mean you haven’t fallen back down into that gray middle…and making one list does not automatically yank you out of mid-list either. I guess it’s like tar–darn hard to shake and easy to sink back into.

Another way to look at this is slots. Publishing houses have slots, as in A,B,C,D. An A slot author is getting the big support. The D slot author is getting their book published, listed in the publisher’s catalogue and going through the publisher’s distribution. The publisher in other words is putting their betting bucks on that A slot book and letting the D slot book fly as it might. Chances are the B and C slotters are mid-list. Neither the cheapest (in the way of royalties) nor the most expensive (in the way of promotion). But these authors are also missing the ever so alluring scent of possibility. They have been trotted out of the barn a few times and the chances (from booksellers and others view) of them jumping the gate and making off with the big sales prize are slim. That D slot author? They are not only cheap, they are chock full of possibility. Who knows? Maybe they will be the new hot thing. (This is all of course generalizations–the D slot could also be a mid-lister, and a newbie could be bumped to any other place on the hierarchy, but this gives you something else to look at.)

So, with this said, when I heard these two publishers were eliminating their mid-list I thought, “How?” Are they dropping everything that isn’t an A to them? Are they getting out their crystal ball and only buying the “big” books? Or are they just gouging out the middle? Keeping the A’s and the D’s but dumping those darn B’s and C’s?”

And which is better? Should we care?

I can’t say I think either is all that much better than another. But I care and I think you should too. Here’s why.

To write full time, authors have to make money. It’s a hard cold reality of life unless you were born with a healthy trust fund. Now authors can write and have a decent possibility of making a living somewhere in that mid list, but if it was gone–if they went from pennies for their books to big bucks? How would that work? A lot of authors, way more than now, would give up. You write one or two books for $10 an hour or less (after factoring in revisions, etc. and with no health, dental, etc. benefits) okay, because the promise of more is there. But if those stepping stones of the mid list were gone and your only shot was to be “big”? Well, the gamble is a lot bigger. And here’s a fact–writing is hard, not only hard work, but hard emotionally. Your ego can really take a beating. You can love something to death, but if you just love doing it and you aren’t getting paid much to do it–why put it out there to be torn up? Why deal with all of that?

So, my guess is a lot of authors who live on the mid list would just disappear. This would be okay for a while. There is a never ending supply of new hopeful writers, but eventually wouldn’t that get old? There are a lot of really good books on that mid list. (Seriously, none of us believe only best-sellers are good, right? Or even all best-sellers are good.) If you could only pick between the new and the big, I truly think you would miss what used to be in the middle.

I know I would.

(p.s. I’m travelling across Illinois today on my way to Ninc. So, talk amongst yourselves. I’ll check in when I can.)

I not only love reading books, but also looking at their covers. Especially with new-to-me-authors cover art is a very important purchase factor.

When I was only a reader, before I was ever involved as cover artist in the actual production of a book, I imagined that the author would tell the publishers how s/he saw the cover and when there would be a photo-shoot with models and all to just accomplish that vision (i.e. in case no original art was involved). I had never heard of stock art before.

Then, during my beginnings as a cover artist for e-book publishers I discovered the whole world of stock on the internet. There were, and still are, very pricey sites like veer.com — especially when compared to what you earn as e-book cover artist. And then ones who I could afford — istockphoto.com, dreamstime.com, stockxpert.com, to name just a few.

I started to recognize the expensive images on Romance covers by NY publishing houses and dreamed of being able to work one day with the same stock, to bring the NY flair to my covers.

This dream, though stopped later as the first articles started to appear on blogs—yes, also on RTB—about how books, even ones releasing the same month, were having the same cover. The ‘recycled-cover-trend’ had arrived.

So I evolved as artist, striving more for uniqueness and creativity instead of copying what the NY pubs put on their covers. Not that I didn’t do that before, knowing that almost every other e-book cover artist—when working with photos—used the same stock resources than I did. However, the NY pubs were no longer my role model for a great cover.

Don’t get me wrong, please! There are still tons of NY covers that get me drooling! I’m not saying one is better than the other (and I don’t even want to go into an e-book/print pub discussion), just that some events altered my view on the cover art process.

While there will always be some poorly executed e-book covers, I’m very pleased to notice that the majority of e-covers today are very appealing and don’t need to take a backseat when compared to the covers created by the art departments of the big publishing houses.

Quite contrary is the fact that the e-cover artists still use the same ‘cheap’ resources, and the covers have never been better or had more variety than they do today. There are real photo magicians at work.

(And believe me, ‘cheap’ is a very subjective matter as especially lately, the most stock sites increased their prices.)

So while the e-cover industry improved their ‘looks’, the NY pubs have started to recognize—and I’m sure the economy is not a small factor here—the value of the ‘cheaper’ stock sites. After the ‘recycled-cover-look’ you now can see a new trend: Crowdsourcing! It’s not an own, to the Romance publishing world limited, phenomenon, but shows its head everywhere.

Wikipedia: “Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.”

Two very well-known Crowdsourcing cases recently have been the TIME magazine cover and the Twitter bird. You can catch up on both also here with lots of visuals.

Nowadays, when surfing the Romance section in online bookstores, I should actually be happy about the fact that I have difficulties telling e-covers from other covers apart. Unfortunately, it’s not only because the e-covers improved so much, but due to publishers using the same $6 stock images I and my fellow e-artists use, and most don’t even do it creatively.

On the one hand, I’m thankful for crowdsourcing as photographers who offer their photos up at affordable prices, giving me the opportunity to purchase the ‘basics’ for my covers. I often merge up to five different photos to create the cover the author and I are looking for. On the other hand, I’m not as happy to see bigger companies, publishers, who could afford to pay the artists more (or even get a bit more creative with the use of such widely used images), do the same, though it’s definitely the right thing in the business world, where cheap resources and fast work are appreciated, and in the end the biggest profit counts.

So please do welcome the crowdsourced-cover-trend!

Sigh. I don’t think there’s a word in the English language to describe how annoying and frustrating this has been for me. At least, one that doesn’t only have four letters in it.

I had planned to redesign my site this year anyway, since I have a new series in a new genre (urban fantasy) coming out in 2010. But with all the hacking, it became a necessity.

The site redesign is well under way, and I love the concept that my designer has come up with. The site will be up soon (maybe even this week), so one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately has been content – and what the heck I should put on the site.

It’s all very WDRW – what do readers want?

Yeah, I know I need all the basics on there – a bio, all the info on my books/series, a contact e-mail, an appearances schedule, how to sign up for my e-newsletter, and so on and so forth. But after that is where it gets tricky.

Because, you see, I go a wee bit overboard when it comes to, well, everything. Including world building. On my old site, I had a lot of extra info about my paranormal romance series – a who’s who of characters, a tour of my fictional city, and a quiz people could take to see which character they were most like. And I want to put the same kind of info on my redesigned site for my new urban fantasy series.

But at last count, I had thirty pages of material to post – and there’s still tons more stuff that I could add. Everything from recipes to the various runes/symbols that are mentioned in the books.

But I’m starting to wonder if readers are really interested in all that stuff. Because thirty pages is a lot of material to slog through, no matter how much you might like an author’s books. I don’t think that I’ve ever visited an author’s site and read every single thing on it. As a reader, I’ve got pretty simple tastes. I want a booklist, a schedule of upcoming releases, and an excerpt or two. That’s it. That’s all I really care about.

I definitely plan to offer some free short stories on the site, as well as the first chapters from each book. But after that, I keep coming back to the same question – what do readers want? And how do I give it to them without thirty pages of material? Or is it better to just post everything and let readers decide for themselves what they are interested in?

What do you think? What do you like or dislike or want to see more of on authors’ Web sites? Share in the comments.

My parents were always avid readers. When I was a kid, I remember going into their bedroom at night and they’d both be lying there with a paperback book in hand, caught up in another world.

At bedtime, my mother would sit on the edge of my mattress and read me one of my favorite stories, and as I got older, I’d get a stack of comic books delivered to my room whenever I came down with the flu.

In my teens and early twenties, I discovered category romances and the old vintage Gold Medal thrillers, all of which were lean and fast and always readable. I’d gobble these things up with regularity and, as I did, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Once thing I love about Harlequin is that they seem to be keeping up with the tradition of publishing those lean, fast books. Try to find a 60,000 word mystery or thriller anywhere else and you’re probably out of luck. When I discovered their Intrigue line it was as if I had found an old friend who had just had a makeover and was looking damn good.

So, since I wanted to be a novelist, it was only natural for me to try writing a book for that line.

(You don’t know me, of course. My name is Alana Matthews and I’m the new kid on the block, and it’ll be awhile before you hear me sing or see my dance moves. My first book for Intrigue is coming out in May of next year and is tentatively titled Man Undercover.

And that’s all I’ll say about that.)

But I meet so many people these days who do not read. Men and women alike. And I have to wonder did they lose the desire somewhere along the line or was it never instilled in them?

I think one of the great obligations of parenting is to stimulate your children’s interests. And there is no better way to do that than to sit down and read to them. Every night. One of my favorite parts of The Princess Bride, both movie and book, is that the author, William Goldman, uses a very simple framing device: a grandfather reading to his grandson. Every time you see the boy, you can also see the excitement in his eyes as his grandpa reads that story.

I’ve run into people who think the Harry Potter books are terribly written (I disagree) or full of Devil worship (ridiculous), but the truth is, those wonderful books have almost single-handedly stimulated the desire to read in a generation of children — and adults.

Say what you will about Stephanie Myers’s Twilight series (I can’t judge because I have yet to read it), but young girls around the world cannot get enough of them. They await each new entry in the series and snatch it up on the day of publication.

Enthusiasm like that cannot be a bad thing for anyone involved.

Then we come to category romances and we all know from our own experiences how the chorus of groans rise from ignorant people who know nothing about them. Yet romance sells better than any other genre. And I would bet that the people who love them had parents who read to them every single day.

But what do we do about all the people who don’t read? How can we stem the slow loss of blood in the publishing world and get people interested in books again? How do we get them to turn off the TV, put down the cell phone, stay off the Internet and, just for an hour a day, read. Doesn’t matter if it’s romances or YA books or thrillers or comic books.

How can we get people excited about reading again when there are so many distractions in the world?

If anyone else has any suggestions, I’d be love to hear them.

In the meantime, I’ll do my part and write good books and pray that one of them will one day stimulate a new reader out there.

I can dream, can’t I?

Ah…the dreaded reading funk. I’d like to think we’ve all been there.

Or is it just me? Can an avid reader of romance suddenly lose their passion?

This time last year…
I happen to be a HUGE fan of historical romances, so you can hardly imagine my excitement to get my hands on Lisa Kleypas’ latest release. She happens to be one of my favorite authors. I’ll tell you, I could barely stand the anticipation as the stock boy at Barnes & Noble ran to the back to dig a copy for me from out of the stock room.

Yes, yes, the stock room. They hadn’t even unpacked their order, and there I was demanding my copy of ‘Seduce Me At Sunrise’, lol. But oh, the smile I had on my face that night as I sat down with my cup of coffee and cracked open the book. Pure reader bliss.

Fast forward to today…
Lisa Kleypas’ newest tale? Yeah, well, it went on sale Tuesday. Not today. Not tomorrow. Tuesday. Do I have a copy? Nope. A historical romance novel by one of my favorite authors and I STILL have not picked it up? No. It couldn’t be! Never, never did I think that would happen to me. *shakes head in denial*

For the last few weeks, I have been in one of the worst reading funks to date, and I don’t know what to do to get out of it. My heart is in it. I want to read. Heck, I LOVE to read. It’s my relaxation and escape. But when I go to pick up a book…nothing.

Oh the torture How long will it last?

What about you? Have you ever suffered from a reading funk you just couldn’t seem to shake?

by Louisa Edwards

I love reading about dark, tormented, brooding men. And I’m not alone—the godfathers of the modern hero, Heathcliff, Rochester, Darcy; those men with their sinister looks and dangerous appeal led straight to more recent interpretations like Loretta Chase’s Lord Dain, Wrath and the rest of the Black Dagger Brotherhood in J.R. Ward’s series, and Max Bhagat, Suzanne Brockmann’s self-hating, self-sabotaging FBI negotiator.

Countless articles have been written on the prevalence of mad, bad, and sad boys in romance, exploring what that means about the female psyche and our enduring fantasy about being the one whose love heals him and tames him. It’s powerful, most women can relate to those feelings (even if they’re sometimes ashamed to admit it), and it’s not going away anytime soon.

It’s also not what I want to talk about. I’m here because I’ve discovered how much I, personally, love to read (and write) a happy hero.

The happy hero is a rare and wondrous creature who, in contrast to the brooding hero’s grim, silent, suffering outlook, is characterized by a sense of humor that keeps him from taking himself too seriously, the ability to communicate openly, and a passion for living. He’s not without issues, but his internal conflicts have not rendered him unable to enjoy life.

I cut my teeth on Jane Eyre around age eight and that was it for me; I became a lifelong romance reader. And while you can make an argument for Gilbert Blythe in the Anne of Green Gables series, it was years before I encountered a happy hero in straight up romance.

Robin in Mary Jo Putney’s Angel Rogue. Swoon! He’s charming, intelligent and articulate—I must have read that book twenty times, at least. It’s still one of my favorites. Another favorite is Faking It by Jennifer Crusie, not least because the hero, Davy, is one of the funniest and most honestly okay-with-himself men I’ve ever read. He’s a con man, sure, but he’s not going to torture himself over it.

Adam Temple, the hero of my debut contemporary romance, is a happy guy. He’s a professional chef about to open his first restaurant. He’s got loving, supportive parents, enough money to pay his rent, and great friends.

He’s not perfect—he’s a maniac when it comes to the quality of the food his cooks put out, and he’s hot tempered, which leads him to do and say things in the heat of the moment that get him into trouble . . . like daring a sexy food critic to spend a week in his kitchen.

The alpha/beta dichotomy is too simple. Robin, Davy, and Adam are all alpha when it comes to their jobs, more beta in their approach to their personal lives. Maybe this is what some people refer to as a gamma hero, although my understanding of that is a hero who is outwardly alpha but without the arrogance, who shows deeper sensitivity just under the surface. That doesn’t really describe my happy hero, or Putney’s, or Crusie’s. It’s not really about strength vs. intellect or arrogance vs. understanding.

I think the difference lies more in the happy hero’s ability to love, and his sense that he is worthy of love.

Do you ever enjoy reading about a guy like that, or do you prefer a steady diet of Broody McAngstypants? Who are some of your favorite happy heroes?

First, I have got to apologize to the “Powers that RTB” for the tardiness of this post. Life got in the way bigtime in recent days. And second, I’ll apologize to the readers in advance for the hastiness with which I wrote it. I thought being less late and less polished was better than being more late and more polished. Some days I feel like my entire life is a series of choices between lesser evils, and today is one of those days.

Ok, so what do I mean by the title of this post? Well, by “bad”, I mean morally bad, and by “good” I mean artistically good.

I don’t care all that much, to be honest, whether writers are good or bad people in real life, and that extends to their behavior on the internet. My issue is not that I am reluctant to judge someone’s behavior immoral: I have no problem doing that. Rather, it’s that I think there is a difference between a writer and her books. If I am going to rely on that difference to write negative — even snarky — reviews (“I’m criticizing her book, not her personally.”), then I have to be consistent and acknowledge it when it comes to author behavior.

I’ll go further. I actually think it is a bad idea, in general, to reject books by immoral authors. Think of all the biographies and biopics you may have read or seen. Visual artists, musicians, film directors, and writers throughout history have been some of our most wretched human beings: liars, cheats, egomaniacs, thieves, heartbreakers, sellouts, and all purpose scumbags. A favorite example among philosophers is the painter Gauguin, who left his wife and family destitute so he could go to Tahiti and paint nudes. To use a very recent case, I agree with our President’s assessment of Kanye West (“He’s a jackass.”) but Kanye’s music is still on constant rotation on my ipod.

In other words, I think I would miss out on a lot if I restricted my intake of creative products to morally good creators, and I might even be contributing in some way to a move towards censorship.

In that sense, I think it’s a shame that the internet and the 24/7 news cycle has (further) opened up private lives of artists to public consumption. Many readers enjoy personal contact with their favorite romance authors online, but does such contact really enhance the book itself for the reader or the creative process for the writer? And at what cost, if it also opens the door to enjoyment-sabotaging judgments of the author?

I do, however, think about the business practices of companies from which I purchase products, and I do try to avoid companies with business practices I abhor (sweatshops, union breaking, race based or sex based discrimination, for example). The difference, I think, is that art is a special category. I can visit Target instead of Wal-Mart and buy the same product, but I can’t swap one author for another in the same way. I also think art has a special place in our society which paper towels and cat litter do not.

Admittedly, there are those who present tougher cases than most romance authors’ foibles. Charles Manson would be one. It’s true that he isn’t legally allowed to profit from his music, but he still produces it and people still listen to it. I’ve never listened to it, personally, so Perhaps there is some limit beyond which even I can’t go.

I don’t mean to imply some insurmountable gap between an artist and her work. For sure, a good biography of an artist can shed light on some aspects of her work. And I don’t mean to imply that we can’t make moral judgments of the work itself. But how bad can a good writer be? Pretty darn bad, I say.

The other day, I read a review of a new novel in Oprah magazine, and slammed right into this line: “What’s more, this is real literature—so we know happiness can’t last.” (Oprah Magazine, October, p. 149)*.

It stopped me cold. In disbelief, I read it again, first surprised—did he really say that?–then irked, and then incensed by the smug certainty of the critic. The fourth time through, I read the line aloud to my significant other in exaggeratedly exasperated tones. “Happiness can’t last!” I shook the magazine. “And that’s the measure of literature?”

Who says? It’s ridiculous, an exaggerated sense of ennui and cynicism that reminds me of something my father used to say. When I was a child and in a whiney mood, complaining about some petty string of troubles, he would tease me with his stock phrase: “Well, life is a swirling, sucking eddy of despair in an ever-darkening universe.”

It was a joke, meant to make me laugh, and it usually worked. How can you take that life view seriously unless you’re an angst-ridden adolescent who has yet to understand that morality is not romantic?

How can that be the only measure of our literature? How did we get here, to a place where death, sorrow, loss, and destruction are the only worthy subjects for literature, when the (uncorrected) fatal flaw is the only interesting angle of humanity?

It is true that none of us gets out of this life alive. I get it. I bet you do, too. It is also true that no matter what you do or how you live or worship or exercise, bad things will fall in your path, sometimes really terrible ones. As a reader, I’ve long been a fan of well-executed, redemptive tragedy (please note that the key word there is “redemption”, as in “order is restored by the tragedy”, i.e. “…a glooming peace this morning with it brings.”) I don’t mind a dark book, and I am happy to occasionally read literary novels that explore death, despair and dysfunction along with my more steady diet of uplifting women’s fiction, romance, and memoirs.

Unhappiness, wrong choices, and tragedy are not the only meaningful subjects for high-quality novels. Shocking as it is, happiness happens, too. People fall in love. They have children they welcome with exuberance. They do the right thing. They make their way through the challenges of falling to despair, and navigate themselves away from it to—dare I say it?—triumph. As a writer, I am endlessly exploring the question of why some people thrive in reaction to the challenges of life, while others whither.

Cynicism and despair are easy. Laughter, perseverance, and joy are much more difficult—and, in this writer’s opinion, a lot more interesting. Achieving joy requires patience and honor and a willingness to be open to life in all of its messy glory—which strikes me as a fine, fine subject for a novel. Achieving happiness is not a matter of luck, it is largely a matter of decision and character and…gusto. That to me is a much more interesting angle on fiction. Much more subtle. Much more honorable and moral.

Why or how do you think we came to this place of darkness = quality in fiction? Why is joy a less valued subject?

*Vince Passaro reviewing Generosity, by Richard Powers.

You don’t get to be a blogging book reviewer for a while without learning a thing or two about what readers like and don’t like and absolutely throw-it-against-the-wall-screaming-hate. Blogging book reviewers, and there are many, are good listeners.

When you’re a good listener, people talk to you. A lot.

One of the misconceptions about Romance genre readers is that most of them loooove graphic sex scenes and those who don’t are religious prudes who hate sex.

Let’s address the first part of that assumption. While there are a lot of readers who enjoy novels with graphic sex scenes, there are many who don’t. You don’t hear from those who don’t that much because there are so few options for them in the New Release aisle. Authors and their associates, like agents and publishers and such, only make money on the sale of New Releases. Finding so few options in the New Releases, these readers head to the library and used bookstores instead where their numbers are not tracked. However, they are there and if you write, represent, or publish only novels with graphic sex scenes *they’re not spending their money on you.*

If you do put out novels without graphic sex scenes, you need to step up your marketing. A lot of these readers have given up and won’t know about you.

Now on to the second part of the assumption. There are actually many different reasons why some readers hate graphic sex scenes.

1) They hate sex. Please don’t hate them though. People hate sex for a variety of reasons, most of them tragic, like being molested as a child.
2) They’re religious. Don’t deride them for this one either. The reason behind this is they believe sex to be a sacred and private act between husband and wife.
3) Graphic sex scenes make them feel like they’re being forced to watch other people doing it and that grosses them out. They like sex, but they don’t like to watch other people doing it.
4) Graphic descriptions of naked body parts grosses them out. I’m in this camp. I’ve given birth a lot, you know, and nakedness just is not that romantic to me anymore.
5) They have vivid imaginations of their own and having sex graphically described to them ruins what they’ve already conjured up in their own heads. It jerks them out of a story they loved up to that point, which can be infuriating.
6) In real life, sex without foreplay is boring. Graphic sex scenes overwhelms their reading experience and reminds them of this real life factoid and, therefore, bores them. They want more and longer build-up of romantic tension before the couple shag like minks.
7) They’re fine with graphic scenes, but if it overwhelms the characterization and/or the plot, they’re going to hate it. They need a reason for sex, not just a place.

If there are more reasons, please let me know in the comments.

In my experience and observation, the more skilled the author, the more engrossing the story, the more vivid the characters, the more graphic the sex scenes can be and the reader will still love it even if she normally doesn’t like graphic sex scenes. This is rare skill, but definitely worth working towards. You’ll appeal to a wider audience.

Moral of the Story: Know and Respect Your Readership if You Want Them to Grow

I love paranormals because of the wild imaginativeness. I’ve got werewolves who behave the way wolves behave in nature, werewolves who get crankier and crankier as the moon waxes, and werewolves from the Scottish Highlands. I’ve got witches, shapeshifters, gorgeous powerful elves–I’m seeing it all and loving it! The world-building is an essential part of this subgenre, though, and it’s really essential to bring something new and fresh.

Historicals are an incredible journey for me, as a Jane Austen fanatic and this is where I cut my teeth. I love the details of daily life during a quieter, more restful time period, and the manly noblemen and the feisty ladies. With social mores so well defined, there’s no limit to the ways the rules could be broken and scandal could ensue!

Romantic suspense rocks my world–I love the fast paced plots, the military and the law enforcement lingo, the alpha alpha heroes and the kick-ass heroines! Credibility is a big issue in this subgenre, though–too many coincidences don’t work. The internal logic has to hold airtight, and I have to be able to believe what I’m reading.

Contemporaries are a little tougher, but I’m a complete sucker for romantic comedy, and if you give me a chance to laugh, you can lead me around by the nose.

Finally, erotic romance is so hot! Gotta have a strong love story in there, though, and a reason for the relationship other than the sizzling sex–otherwise (and I know it’s heresy to say this) it gets boring.

In every case, I’m looking for a heroine who I would love to be, or who I’d want for a best friend, a hero I can fall madly in love with (if he makes me fall in love with my husband again, that’s great too!) I’m also looking for a world I can escape into, and if it’s a book I’m looking to acquire, I need a hook I can sell with in 2-3 sentences, and a career arc for the author.

I was a latecomer to the romance category, but now I’m hooked for life!