Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

I sit here going over the line edits of my first book for Harlequin Intrigue, MAN UNDERCOVER, and I have to say that my editor is certainly keeping me honest. I was pleasantly surprised to find that her ability to cut away the frivolous and help shape it into something even better has made my first experience with Harlequin a wonderful one. How nice to be in such sure hands.

While taking a break yesterday morning, I picked up the Sunday LA Times and came across an article of interest: Harlequin recently opened a free exhibit at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas called The Heart of a Woman: Harlequin Cover Art 1949-2009. This is the same exhibit that opened in New York back in June and was featured on CNN.com.

This is an exhibit I’d love to see. And what a shame to be forced to go to Las Vegas to see it.

I’ve always been a huge fan of cover art, from literary novels to mysteries, and romances have long had some of the best graphic design. The exhibit promises to show how much that art has changed over the years, while still maintaining the underlying truth behind all Harlequin romances: that love conquers all.

And the thought of cover art has got me wondering what my own first Harlequin cover will look like. Authors are invited to submit suggestions for artwork and I came up with a few ideas I think would make great covers. But in the end I trust that these folks know a lot more about such things than I do, so, as long as they leave the writing to me, I’ll leave the cover design to them.

I find that the Intrigue covers are usually both sexy and suspenseful, and I can’t remember one that I haven’t liked. So, once I again, I’m happy to be in sure hands.

But not all writers are happy with their covers, and I’m sure a lot of readers are turned off by certain types of artwork.

Lori Devoti posted a few days ago that she isn’t particularly fond of covers with large breasts on them. So, I’m curious. For the readers in the crowd, what type of romance covers turn you off? And for the writers, have you ever been stuck with a cover you could have lived without?

Yes, Virginia, today is the day after Thanksgiving, which means that a good portion of folks got up at an insanely early hour this morning to go out into the cold and snag those holiday deals. (Not me, though. I like sleeping in my warm bed much better than 50-percent-off discounts.)

But I will be venturing out later on. And what are some of the main things on my list to buy? Why books, of course.

I give a lot of books for Christmas every year, and 2009 won’t be any different. I’ve got my eye on some fantasy and history titles for my significant other, and some historical western romances and puzzle books for my mom. My dad will get a few action-adventure thrillers and maybe a mystery or two. And so on and so forth.

But even more than giving the books, I just enjoy the process of shopping for them in the first place. Let’s face it. Walking through the bookstore is usually far less stressful than going to the mall. Quieter too. The bookstore is a bit of an escape for me, a place where I can relax while I roam up and down the aisles searching for just the right book for just the right person on my shopping list. And it always give me a sense of accomplishment when I find a great book for someone who’s special to me.

And then, of course, there’s me. Because I like getting books just as much as I like giving them. And hey, while I’m there at the bookstore, I might as well make my own wish list to pass along to Santa. This year, it includes romance and fantasy titles by Nalini Singh, Lisa Shearin, Jennifer Armintrout, and Karen Marie Moning, just to name a few.

So yeah, I’ll be going to the bookstore later, my to-buy-for list in one hand and a leftover turkey sandwich in the other. What could be better than that?

What about you? Which books will you be giving and getting this holiday season? Share in the comments.

I was at the bookstore a few days ago with a friend and I noticed what I’m hoping isn’t the new thing in romance covers–breasts. That’s right breasts. Now I KNOW romance covers are famous for some cleavage, but I’m not talking clinch where the heroine’s dress has understandably shifted a tad. I’m talking just a woman with some big round impossible to miss breasts. As in your eyes go no where else.

What is up with that? I am the market for romance novels, right? They didn’t suddenly discover that fifteen-year-old boys are making some massive shift from video games to romance novels, did they? Because, seriously a pair of big round breasts just doesn’t pull me in. Yeah, it gets my attention…but in a kind of OMG way.

I’ve noticed similar things with magazine covers too. Although they don’t seem quite as fixated on breasts as just plain old bare flesh. I buy Shape magazine because I like to work out, but they insist on putting skinny (not even muscular) actresses on their covers in bikinis. Some of those women I just really want to give a biscuit and I can honestly say I buy the magazine despite the cover not because of it…I actually cringe when I see it.

So, what gives? Is it my age? Is it a cup size thing? Do you have to be a D+ cup to feel the pull? Is it my Midwestern upbringing? Do skin and bones and blow-up doll breasts cause women somewhere else to line up?

What?

Actually, I wanted to blog today about gifts for readers and writers, because Black Friday and the holidays are so close (not to mention my own birthday tomorrow *lol*). But instead of talking about gifts and asking you for suggestions, I want to take the time to tackle another topic that has been on my mind lately…

I love the online romance community. I live in Germany, but my friends, colleagues, clients, favorite authors, and business associates are only a few clicks away. Many take this fast and easy way of connecting for granted, but what happens when you can’t reach someone you used to chat/email with on a more or less regular basis? When you need information, but the person who knows what’s going on can’t be contacted? It’s very worrisome—and could turn into a disaster of epic dimensions for authors if it’s their webmaster/mistress who’s gone MIA.

I’d prefer to report otherwise, but exactly this case has happened way too often this year—and to say I’m fed up with it is an understatement. Unfortunately, when the trusted webmaster vanished, so did the ability to update and access the website. In cases like this, what follows are feelings of helplessness, disappointment, and anger, which are often self-directed by the victim for being so naïve for not knowing more about their own website. Because, while finding a new web diva may be manageable, starting from scratch with one’s website isn’t. It’s frustrating having to spend so much time and money on something you shouldn’t have to worry about it.

So here I am, asking you to do the following:

• Make sure that the domain name and the hosting account are in your name (with a valid email in the contact information).
• Always have all necessary login information for those accounts at the ready.
• Ask your web person to send you a copy of all edited files after an update. This way you always own a full set of up-to-date website files.
• WordPress blogs and sites allow automatic and scheduled back-up of all posts & pages (you’ll need to back up your uploaded images and templates separately) with the right plugin, such as WP-DB-Backup.
• Back up regularly!

In case it’s already too late, here’s an emergency kit of things you can do to ‘rescue’ your site:

Case 1: You have access to your domain account and know which company you host with. But you can’t access the hosting account because you don’t have the login information and it isn’t in your name.

Contact the host’s customer service and explain your situation. Often they may offer a solution like the following: Open a new hosting account. After that, you’ll need to add some information to the whois information (www.who.is) of the domain registration to prove ownership (that’s done by accessing the domain account). Once that is done, the host can then—after informing the current account holder the domain is hosted under—move the domain to the new account and allow you to host the site.
Here it may be helpful if you host with a small hosting company who knows their customers personally (less hassle).

Case 2: You have access to your domain account, but don’t know where you host.
Try going to www.who.is and enter your domain name. On the next page, click on the ‘DNS Records’ button and look into the SOA record box. There’s an email listed that will let you contact the host. Again, explain the situation you’re in.

Case 3: You have access to your domain account, but the host won’t or can’t offer you help.

Get a back-up of your site using a free program like GNU Wget (Download) that retrieves content from web servers. (Unfortunately, there are limits to such a program. For example images embedded into the design using css as well as some php scripts won’t get backed up—only images added by code within the content and the output of such scripts. However, at least the images can be separately downloaded as the css code tells you where to find them stored so you can access and download them through a browser). This way you don’t have to start from scratch. Then, go find a new host, ‘connect’ your domain with it, upload the back-up, and fix broken links/images.

Case 4: Like case 3 with the exception that you also don’t have access to your domain.

On top of the back-up-action and the finding of a new host, you will have to get a new domain.

I hope nothing like this ever happens to you, and that your site is safe and sound. If you’ve got some tips for website/file back-ups, please share them in the comments. And on second, and lighter thought, if you have a suggestion for reader/writer gifts, add them, too.

On this Sunday before Thanksgiving, I’m anticipating my son’s arrival home for a few days, my new book going on sale in one month, and the vast pleasure of a family feast. Thanksgiving is a great holiday, and in honor of it, I’m compiling a fast, joyous list of 25 things I love about being a writer.

Why don’t you give it a try, too, and post in the comments section?

1. I never have to wear anything uncomfortable to work. No high heels, no scratchy uniforms, no tight anything. Yoga pants, warm socks, soft pretty sweater and I’m ready to go.

2. I never have to drive to work on snowy days

3. Conversely, on a brilliant December Tuesday morning, I can head out to the trails while everybody else is working

4. I love research, and writing books means I can dive into whatever enthusiasm snags my fancy, and then I can pick a new fancy for the next book, and I can read and read and read and read all about said enthusiasm and…

5. ..Learn new things all the time. All kinds of new things. Obscure things about botany and chemistry, or practical things like how to fix a broken pipe or fire a revolver, or delicious things like how to make pain au chocolat.

6. Writing is never masterable. There is always, always, always something more to learn. For a magpie brain like mine, that’s a powerful thing.

7. I can travel to faraway places and it’s still called work.

8. It’s quiet and I never have to listen to anybody else’s conversation/radio/phone conversations.

9. Reading is part of writing, so I get to read a lot.

10. It’s unbelievably thrilling to see a book in the stores. I’ve never yet seen anyone reading my book out in public, but my sons have.

11. I love opening a book I’ve written and seeing all those sentences that came out of my head…they’re never all brilliant, but wow…they’re mine.

12. I love, love, love reader mail, that connection with a person I would never have met, sometimes from towns I’ve never heard of, or countries I’ll never get to, and we connect, over something so magical as a book.

13. I love being part of the smart, verbal, quirky, clever, strange, eccentric world of publishing. Writers are smart.

14. I love readers. All readers, even if they don’t love my books.

15. I love sitting down to a page and not knowing exactly what’s going to happen, then finding out Something New!

16. I love that taking naps is part of the creative process. Really.

17. I love making collages.

18. I love realizing that I’m shopping for a coat that my character wants to buy, not me.

19. I love the process of structuring a novel, figuring out all the puzzle pieces, seeing how they fit together, or don’t.

20. I love the stack of pages piling up as I print them out, day after day.

21. I love the shelf of books, so concrete and solid, that is the evidence of the way I have spent my days, year after year.

22. I never, ever wonder what my job is on this planet.

23. I love when somebody I’ve known socially finds out I’m a writer and they suddenly have that look of surprise—and yes, awe—on their faces. It might only last a minute, but it reminds me of just how amazing this job is.

24. I love being deep in the Other World, writing and writing and living so deeply in another land that I almost forget this one.

25. I love the anticipation of a new book about to arrive on the shelves, the reviews coming in, the pleasure of seeing a new cover, the delight of offering the book to whoever it is dedicated to. Awesome fun! My next book, THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING is dedicated to my father, and I get to give him a copy of the book on his 70th birthday this Wednesday. How cool is that?

Now you. What do you love about being a writer? Let’s have a big juicy Thanksgiving fest.

I watch a lot of crime dramas on television. Tonight’s (11/18) episode of Law & Order: SVU featured a storyline revolving around DNA replication. The protagonists of the show, two cops, discovered that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence that can lead to wrongful convictions. The antagonist laughed and said, “It’s a whole new world. Guess your free ride is over.” and the camera panned away to show the horror on the main characters’ faces. I sympathized with their reaction to abandoning what was considered inviolable and facing an unknown future with changed rules. I knew just how they felt.

A year ago today (11/18/08), I wrote a column here at RTB titled Less is More where I talked about the state of the economy and how it might affect the publishing industry. I have to say, looking back a year later, I have been blindsided by certain developments. I’ve been saddened by the number of friends struggling with their careers, and I have felt pessimistic about the future of career-focused authors. I have heard of print run numbers so low my jaw drops. I’ve watched one writer after another take on new pseudonyms, new genres, new agents… trying to stay published.

Yet despite how downright depressing some of my conversations with writer friends have been, I’m still holding out hope. I have long been one to embrace change. While some people crave stability and hate surprises, I love to try new things. If there’s something better, different, unusual… whatever, I want to check it out. From moving residences to changing genres, I like switching things up. I’m waiting/hoping/praying that the publishing industry finds a viable and sustainable new business model–soon!–that will benefit writers and readers as well as the publisher.

What will publishing look like in six months? A year? How will writers be getting their stories into the hands of readers? Any guesses?

My RtB bio says I started reading romance in 2007, but that’s not really true. I actually read a bunch of romance, at age 13, in 1982, when I had mono, and my harried mother brought home an unvetted pile of romance novels to help me get through a couple of weeks of bed rest (she’s not a romance reader). I remember two things really clearly from those books. In one of them, an antebellum romance, a Southern belle got splinters from being backed into a fence post and ravished by the hero. That sexual intercourse might cause splinters was a new and frightening idea. The second thing was heroine makeup. The heroines, at least in the contemporaries I read, looked great with just a bit of mascara, lip gloss, and a barrette. And this fact was often remarked upon by the hero, who compared her favorably to other women of his acquaintance, who piled it on. This idea of “nearly natural beauty” served as a kind of ideal for me in my early teen years.

I haven’t read any romances that feature butt splinters lately, but the naturally lovely heroine is still with us, especially in romances set in contemporary times, whether straight contemps or romantic suspense or erotic romance. It’s not that heroines don’t wear makeup — the romantic suspense novel I read recently that featured a heroine on the run who left her hiding place to buy foundation springs to mind — but there seems to be a happy medium, a kind of virtuous amount, that many authors have settled on. The makeup free female character is often portrayed as asexual or unappealingly lazy, while the Tammy Faye Bakers, often in real or imagined competition with the heroine for the hero’s attention, are demonized for their vanity and superficiality. Not their looks per se, but what heroines do with their looks is often used to convey important things about their characters.

Feminists have had a complex relationship with women’s makeup in the past 25 years. When I started teaching women’s studies over a decade ago, it was common to contrast the time and money average women in the US spent on cosmetics with the much cheaper and easier male regimen. Add that to the social disapproval and materially worse career prospects for the woman who has “let herself go” or “isn’t making any effort”, and you didn’t have a hard time arguing that the cosmetics industry wasn’t really a friend to women. When makeup’s defenders protested that makeup application was an artistic means of individual expression, many feminists responded, quite reasonably, that the purpose of makeup — except when Lady Gaga is wearing it — is to make all women look the same, according to the beauty ideal of the times. Other feminist voices were more pragmatic, acknowledging that while in an ideal world of gender equity, women would feel no more naked than men without their lipstick, we live in this world, and if women need lip gloss to feel confident, or if they recognize they need it (but not too much of it) to be taken seriously by a potential employer, then so be it.

I’ve been in the online romance community long enough to know that many here think romance novels, because they are written by women for women, and published by companies in which women have important positions, are empowering, even “subversive.” A lot of these arguments could be applied to the cosmetics industry itself. Think of Estee Lauder, Mary Kay, Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein. I’m not sure how far I can push this, but those cosmetics pioneers helped change the perception, common in the first half of the twentieth century, that makeup was for whores, just as romance writers and readers (while often buying into myths about women who wear a lot of makeup) often rejected the idea that a woman embracing her sexuality was a whore. And, just like romance novels, makeup rituals can serve to create community among women: moms teach their daughters about makeup (sometimes, not to wear it at all, of course), women shop together for makeup, share makeup tips, and trade makeup.

A whole new wrinkle, one I don’t have the space to explore, is men and makeup. Those stark contrasts between the rigors of male and female beauty regimens no longer hold. Men, with their own cosmetics lines, are catching up. Is there a similar “golden mean of makeup” in romance novels for heroes? I’m thinking romance novels are a bit behind the times on this point. When’s the last time you read a hero, as opposed to some vain rival for the heroine’s affections, applying brow gel, concealer, or oil absorbing face powder? Would a romance work for you that had the hero and heroine sharing kohl eyeliner?

How I despise country music! Is anything more annoying than a smarmy Stetson-wearing “hunk” wailing about turning to drink because his woman stole his unemployment check and his dog and ran off with his best friend? I’ll never understand how the people who produce that garbage can hold their heads up. And don’t even get me started on the listeners. From what I can tell, the typical country music fan has the brains of a sweet potato.

Before we go any further, I’m just kidding, okay? But just for a moment, let’s imagine that everyone reading this is a die-hard country music fan. Now–

Did my opening paragraph make you feel ashamed of your listening habits? Will it discourage you from buying Brad Paisley’s latest CD? Will it make you reconsider your dream of taking your songs to Nashville and getting them heard? And finally, do you believe that my foolish, mean-spirited words will have even the tiniest impact on the country music industry or its, uh, listenership?

I’m guessing most of you answered each of those questions in the negative. So why do we get so upset when people ridicule the romance industry? When they insist that any fool could write one of those “trashy little romance novels”? When they imply that the typical romance reader is a bored and boring individual of sub-par intelligence who has checked out of the real world because she can’t get a good man to love her?

Last week an author writing in another genre singled out my romance publisher’s guidelines for some heavy ridicule. His message was clear: Our books are shallow, whereas his books are deep. We have sold out, while he is willing to fight to the death for Realism and Integrity in Fiction.

Quite a few of my author friends were deeply offended and did their best to set the guy straight. Yes, his rant was a tad irksome, but he was expressing his own opinions on his own blog, and isn’t that what blogs are for? One of the things I hate about the internet is the way people leap into arguments on blogs they have never read before, leaving huffy comments because their friends have stirred them up and encouraged them to go over there and give that jerk a piece of their minds.

I cringe when I see romance readers piling on, coming from every corner of the internet to punish the hapless bloggers our friends have taken exception to. Is our self-respect so fragile that we must shore it up by slapping down everyone who ventures to express an unflattering opinion about our favorite genre of fiction?

There are times and places where a few well-chosen words can help build respect for the romance industry and its various subgenres. But I don’t think its wise for us to troop over to blogs we don’t ordinarily read and “tell off” bloggers who are complete strangers to us. When we rush into battle every single time somebody maligns the books we love, we risk appearing insecure and pathetic. And consider this: if a blogger really is mean spirited, she’ll “win” by making us angry. She’ll sit back and laugh at us all the more once she knows she’s controlling our emotions.

I’d just like for all of us to display a little more confidence, that’s all. We who read and write romance have no need to defend our choice. We don’t have to fight for and earn the right to hold our heads up. Tell a country music fan that you detest country music and she’ll probably just shrug and say, “Well, I love it.”

Maybe we romance lovers ought to do the same.

I’m delighted to say that it was only one week ago today that Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. announced the launch of Carina Press. Please go to www.carinapress.com to learn about what we’re acquiring, to the blog to meet some of the key players behind Carina Press and to the FAQs and guideline submissions to find out what we’re publishing!

I really do want to stress how excited we are about the potential of Carina Press. There are already a lot of submissions in our editdorial inbox and many from quite original genres!

I’ll quote briefly from our press release that announced the launch of the new digital publishing house.

Carina Press is a digital-only publishing house whose eBooks will be sold direct to consumers through the Carina Press Web site and numerous third-party Web sites. Carina Press will publish a wide range of women’s fiction—from romance to erotica, science fiction to mystery, family sagas to choose your own adventures, horror to thriller and more, including every conceivable subgenre of these categories.

“As a digital-only publisher Carina Press is a natural extension to our business; it builds on our digital strength and leadership position. We expect to discover new authors and unique voices that may not be able to find homes in traditional publishing houses,” said Donna Hayes, CEO and Publisher of Harlequin Enterprises. “It definitely gives us greater flexibility in the type of editorial we can accept from authors and offer to readers. As well, we hope to reach a new group of readers with niche editorial.”

Angela James has joined our team as Executive Editor. We plan to launch our first titles in summer 2010.

So, now I’m curious. Clearly we believe that digital will be a key part of the future of publishing. What do readers of this blog feel about that? Do you find new authors in digital you don’t find in print?