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Way back in April of 2010 - the early days of indie or self-publishing - I did a post likening the NY Publishing Empire to a Castle and indies to rebels, storming the gates.  I predicted that the castle walls would fall.   It took a little over 2 years, but now it's happened.

This week, Penguin's parent company bought the self-publishing company,'Author Solutions.

What did Penguin's CEO say about the acquistion of the company that has helped 150,000 authors self-publish?

In a conference call from Author Solutions headquarters in Bloomington, Ind., Penguin CEO John Makinson and ASI CEO Kevin Weiss hailed the acquisition as the “mainstreaming” of self-publishing and outlined a plan to “ develop a global strategy and quickly identify new opportunities,” according to Makinson.

The corporate bigwigs acknowledge all the free self-publishing companies like Smashwords and Lulu, but say that “Every writer has different needs,” and Makinson agreed, noting that self-publishing is “causing more people to think about writing as a career. There’s a new category of professional author that will be more attracted to the Author Solutions model rather than the free model.”

Author Solutions now has contracts with 6 publishers which will allow client/publishers to offer self-publishing services under their own brands.  Penguin/Pearson think the Author Solutions acquisition has created a "new trade book publishing business model."

Big, huge, mega thank yous to Smashwords.  Indies alone could never have taken down the castle.  I believe that the article and the honchos' statements about Mark Coker's not-so-little company, prove that Smashwords led the charge in taking down the castle walls so that all authors could enter. Penguin/Pearson want to do what Smashwords does - except they want to get paid for it. (Think about that. Money should always flow to the author.)  Still, the big publisher acknowledged that Smashwords is a force in the industry and that Smashwords (over 5 billion words published) has skin in the game.   Just a couple of years ago, the NY majors thought they owned the game.

If anyone needs further proof that the castle walls disappeared this week, I point out that Publisher's Weekly, the insider source for all things publishing, titled their article:  "Self-publishing Goes Big Time."

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Ebooks just reached a huge milestone - they passed print in adult fiction sales for the first time evah!

These records are kept by BookStats - co-produced by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group.  And last year, sales of books on electronic devices passed printed book sales in the highly important adult fiction sales category.

388 million ebooks were sold in 2011, which is a 210 percent increase from the previous year.  In 2010 125 million ebooks were sold.  And the dollar figures - they climbed way up too.  How far up?  The dollar value of sales more than doubled in 2011, earning $2.074 billion, up from $869 million in 2010.

When AAP spokesperson Andi Sporkin was asked to don her swami hat and predict when ebook sales will overcome print as the undisputed champ, she said, "That won't happen for a while yet." Since Ms. Sporkin works for the big publishers who live and die by the sales of their high-ticket paper books, that response is about what one would respect, right?  After I dusted off my swami hat and jammed it on my noggin', I got a different vibe.

I'm betting ebook sales can play the "Rocky" theme and run up that big flight of stairs in 3 years -- or less.  As technology advances, and more companies push the gadgets, tablets and ereaders, more and more people climb on the bandwagon.  And once you go "e" - you never go back.  The convenience of having an unlimited selection of anything you ever want to read right at your fingertips beats crawling in your car and standing in line by much farther than a country mile.

It won't be long until we're questioning why anyone is still killing trees to produce books.

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Published on 1 Comment on Smart-ER Women Read Whatever They Like (Including Romance!)

A recent piece at Huffpo made my hackles rise.  It was by Anne Browning Walker and entitled "Why Smart Women Read Romance." Granted, I've been at the end of the rope so long that my fingers (my grasp on reality) and everything else is starting to slip.  So, it is admittedly easier to raise my hackles.  But I think if these were still the red-eye gravy days, this piece would tick me off.

The author of the article is, herself, a romance novelist.  She relates that growing up she hid the romances she read because they shamed her.  She believed that smart women didn't read romance novels.  She's written this piece to proclaim that this belief arose from the bad old days of romance.  Ms. Walker states as follows:

Well, I grew up and discovered that someone lied. This stereotype may have resulted from the enduring misconceptions about romance novels thanks to tropes that went out of style nearly 30 years ago. In these "bodice-rippers," heroes captured heroines against their will. The women succumbed to heroes in barely-disguised rape scenes. But just as the role of women in society has changed over the past 30 years, so have romance novels. These types of romances went out of fashion along with leisure suits and acid-washed jeans. Now, I'll admit this trope sometimes creeps back in (ahem, 50 Shades of Grey), but most romances today feature strong, smart, savvy women. And smart romance characters attract smart romance readers.

So, Ms. Walker's type of "smart women"- diploma holding grads of schools like Harvard, Princeton, Oxford & Duke - some with Ph.Ds and law degrees, they will deign to read romance if it's of a certain type.  The heroines in these "smart" romances must have "careers" where they grow and establish their independence from the hero.  In these books, the hero will never be forceful, controlling or dominant.  There could never be a forced sex or "near rape scene" between the hero and the heroine because their acceptable heroines have very strict rules about who they will and won't love.

The problem with Ms. Walker's "smart women" is that they're not smart enough to separate reality from fiction.  Many women - including some who lack pretty pieces of paper that are essentially meaningless - are smart enough AND strong enough to know that we can read whatever we like.  And we don't have to justify it to anyone.  See, the smart-ER women know that it's okay to enjoy a romance written by a writer who takes it over the top.  It may be issues of dominance and control or issues of hidden and forbidden love.  It may be a heroine who loves a man who gets excited by causing women pain. (Fifty Shades of Grey)  It may be a heroine who believes she just killed a man trying to rape her who then gets seized and taken to a ship where the thinks the man forcing her to have sex is "the law." (The Flame and The Flower).

Whatever a smart-ER woman reads is okay, because she knows she doesn't have to justify how anyone in the book behaves to friends, co-workers, strangers on the train or anyone else.  That same woman might read a Stephen King novel and enjoy the blood, gore or psychological terror.  She doesn't have to go around explaining to everyone she meets that she doesn't support maniacal, terrifying mass murderers.  It's a book.  It's fiction.  Smart-ER women will enjoy reading about many things she'd kick a man to the curb for doing.

Smart-ER women know that one of the reasons they read is to experience a slice of life from another era, from another part of the country, from another planet and from many, many other perspectives.  I've said it before and I'll say it again -- WE ARE NOT WHAT WE EAT.  WE ARE NOT WHAT WE WATCH. AND WE ARE NOT WHAT WE READ.

And yes, Ms. Walker pooh-poohs women (like me) who read and enjoyed "Fifty Shades of Grey."  I wonder what she'd make of the fact that I happen to have a law degree?  I just haven't let it hold me back, define me or control me.  I don't let my husband do that and I surely don't let my boss do it.  But I might enjoy reading a book about a heroine who reacts entirely differently.

Smart women may put their romances to a political correctness test and call their Ivy League friends to see if they're allowed to read a certain book or not.  Smart-ER women know that the books they read, just like the lives they lead, don't need anyone's approval but their own.

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There's been a lot of smexy news lately.  I guess those surveyors got tired of politics and decided to delve into the down and dirty.  Who can blame them?

The latest women's health/men's health survey says that most women (52%) want sex about 2 to 3 times a week and women's biggest complaint is not having enough sex (46.8%).  This year lots of ladies are happy with their sex lives (72.4%), with the happiness scale ranking in this order - from happiest to least happy:  dating women, women living with partners, single women and married women.

Most women have had 2-3 partners but 17% have had between 16 and 40 - so there have been some busy ladies out there.  (You know who you are, right?) Almost 30% of women have lied to a partner about their number of lovers. 

The biggest sexual mistakes men make are rushing foreplay, trying too hard to please and not communicating enough.  (They won't talk about their feelings in bed and  they won't talk about their feelings out of bed.  Has anyone tried under the bed?)

Most of the women (65.3%) said that orgasm wasn't important. (Maybe that's why they felt they weren't getting enough sex. )  The majority of women didn't know whether they had found their G-spot or not. 

The things ladies would most like to try in the bedroom? Costumes/role play, toys, porn with a partner, sex with another woman and watching each other masturbate.

With all that great sex the ladies have been having, I was mighty glad to hear about another study.  It says that the regions of the brain that control love also control sex.  This means that romance novelists are right - great sex can actually morph into great love.

“Love and sex are clearly overlapping and they are different,” says Jim Pfaus, a professor of psychology at Concordia University in Montreal who's been studying love and libidos for more than a decade. “You can have desire for sex without love.” 

However, the study found that they're also very similar and reside in the same area of the brain. A part of the brain called the insula is cradled deed in the cerebral cortex. It influences emotions. The striatum is in the forebrain.  It gets messages from the insula.  So how do the messages work?

In order to map out the location of sexual desire and love, researchers reviewed 20 studies that used fMRI technology. First, they looked at the regions of the brain that lit up when sparked by love. They then compared the findings of all the papers to see what regions were activated when someone felt aroused or amorous.  

What they discovered was a bit surprising -- love and sexual desire both activate the striatum, showing a continuum from sexual desire to love. Each feeling impacts a different area of the striatum.

Sexual desire activates the ventral striatum, the brain’s reward system. When someone enjoys a great dessert or an orgasm, it’s the ventral striatum that flickers with life. Love sparks activity in the dorsal striatum, which is associated with drug addiction.

“You don’t make a connection that love is a drug; it acts just like drug addiction," says Pfaus. "Anyone who has had someone break up with them feels like a drug addict in withdrawal. You end up getting cravings.”

Yet, that's not all.  Overlap between sexual desire and love was also observed in the insula.   “[The insula] translates emotional feelings into meaning,” explains Pfaus. “You take the internal state and give it external meaning.”

The areas of overlap indicate that sexual desire transitions into love in many cases, and the feelings aren’t separate.  “Even love at first sight, can it happen? Of course it can happen," says Pfaus. "And when it does happen, do you want to play Scrabble with each other? When it happens, you normally want to consummate it.”

So, all that great sex ladies have been having lately -  hopefully, it's leading to love. We all know where that should lead, right? 

Yep,  straight to a happily ever after.

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I made and ate barbecue chicken for supper.  As I write this, several hours have passed since supper.  Yet, I am not a chicken, barbecue or otherwise.

It's been cooking show reality TV night at my house which is a family event.  We all watch Hell's Kitchen and my kids and I watch Master Chef.  Yeah, verily,  chefs aplenty have paraded across my TV screen.  I've watched them and enjoyed all of Gordon Ramsay's antics.  Yet, anyone who has ever eaten my cooking will tell you that I'm no chef, certainly not of the master variety.  

Presently I'm reading Brenda Novak's historical romance boxed set. It contains 2 books:  "Of Noble Birth" and "Honor Bound."  I'm reading the 1st One - "Of Noble Birth."  It's about a son who should be heir to a dukedom who was rejected at birth because he was born with a birth defect - a deformed arm.  The son becomes a pirate and he's just abducted a seamstress whom he believes to be his half-sister. (She's not of course.)   Yes, I'm reading it and I'm enjoying it but you know what?  I'm not a seamstress, heir to a dukedom or a pirate.   Go figure.

What's even more amazing is that the book I finished right before I started Brenda's excellent boxed set was "Fifty Shades of Grey" - the whole trilogy.  Despite that, my hubby is not in the back building a red room of pain.  I haven't turned into a submissive who wants to be beaten.  Maybe there's something wrong with me?  I mean, I read the book and I enjoyed the book so by some theories recently espoused by arch-feminists - I should be picking out handcuffs and matching riding crops by now. 

That's the theme of a recent piece I read in the UK Independent, entitled "Do Women Really Want To Be So Submissive" by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.  The publication  is from the home country of Erika Leonard a/k/a EL James, the author  of "Fifty Shades."  Ms. Brown thinks that in creating the book Ms. Leonard "has cannily exploited "post-feminist" confusion and sexual restiveness in a period of plenty."

...continue reading "Fifty Shades of Feminism?"

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Galleycat, the people who know all things related to books, publishing and authors, realize that a lot of Twitter users don't make the best use of socializing for fun and profit.  They've put up a "Cheat Sheet" to teach writers to tweet more effectively. 

While aimed at those of us whose idea of a good time is pounding the keyboard, the tips in the article sound beneficial for all tweeters.  The tips are taken from a data report by Buddy Media, and Galleycat passes along the hints in a handy, easy to save "Cheat Sheet."

I found some of them surprising.  For example, they say that the best time to tweet is between 8 am and 7 pm and tweets during those hours receive a 30% higher engagement rate.  That surprised me because during most of those hours many poor, unfortunate writers are - like me - chained to a day job we're trying to write our way out of.  If these are the hours with the highest traffic, lots of day job writers must be tweeting on the clock.  (I take the 5th on that). 

The "Cheat Sheet" also says you should tweet 4 times a day - or less.  That, I really don't get.  Lots of the people I follow seem to tweet links to or reviews from their books alone more times a day than that!  I don't tweet book links a lot.  Some days I'll tweet one, but I worry about people thinking I'm ONLY engaged in the forum to drive sales.  I guess that's one of the reasons all writers are there, but I don't think it should be the main one - it's certainly not mine. 

The main reason I'm on the site is that it is one of the best ways on Planet Earth to interact with a huge range of people I'd never normally get to meet, and all those folks pass along lots of different info.  For example, from Twitter I knew we'd gotten Osama long before the press publicized it. 

Maybe I should tweet more sales links and reviews.  Some of the people who do - I shall NOT name them - have amazing sales numbers.  I guess my "Southernness" interferes with me being an effective tweeter of sales links -- imposing is impolite, don'tcha know?

I'm guessing most of us could use some lessons in twitterology and this "Cheat Sheet" seems to give some great pointers that pass along lots of info in a quick and easily understandable chart. 

Enjoy - and if you don't already, follow me on twitter @quackingalone.

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Recent studies say that stress, particularly job stress, has women so stretched and frazzled that sex is disappearing from their radar screens.  One such study found that 6 of 10 British working women believe that job stress "dramatically affects their sex lives."   

Author Jilly Cooper says:

Women don’t want to have sex anymore because they have too much on their plates.“Doctors’ waiting rooms are absolutely brimming these days with women suffering from low libidos,” Cooper told The Telegraph.

“I have talked to a lot of young women about this, and they just don’t seem to do it any more,” Cooper adds. “Honestly, I suppose it’s because we all have so many other demands on our time now.”

And stress has the opposite affect on some women.  A travel magazine study found that 40% of women in their 20's had a one-night-stand while on vacation and 10% of them average more than 4 sexual partners a week.

Maybe it's just that the young have more energy.  Maybe it's that they haven't yet formed dreams and had them crushed beneath the relentless burden of daily stress in a world gone mad.  I don't think it's just sex that women are too stressed for these days.  So many of us feel like the camel - one more straw will be one too many for our backs- our psyches- and our lives.     

Romance novels allow women to escape long enough to shed a straw or two from their load, so they can keep on keeping on a bit longer.  Combine that escape with racy, raunchy and over-the-top bad boy sex a la Fifty Shades of Grey, and it may even perk up enough interest for a mattress mambo. 

Hopefully we'll all get to chill out soon.  Until that happens, I'll be reading a little romance to give me an escape hatch and writing a little more to provide one for all the other women out there who, like me, are tired of racing rats.  Right now, I'm working on a new one for my Forever Series - this one is Peter's story and it's gonna be good.  I hope it'll hit the shelves in time to be on everyone's Christmas list.

Until my new one is out, boogle on over to my book list and pick up one to rev your engine enough to speed straight  through your 9 to 5 and wind up in your bedroom for the best kind of nightcap.  

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Move over blind dates, matchmaking services and online dating - the new trend for finding love is pheromone parties. 

According to dictionary.com, pheromone means: 

/ˈfɛrəˌmoʊn/ Show Spelled[fer-uh-mohn]
noun Animal Behavior . any chemical substance released by an animal that serves to influence the physiology or behavior of other members of the same species.

Partygoers are asked to sleep in a shirt for 3 nights and then put it in a zip-lock bag, freeze it and then bring it to the party.  The freezer bags are placed on a table and an index card with a number is put in each bag.  Attendees sniff the bags.  Once they find one they like, a picture is snapped of the person with the bag and projected on a wall.  Then the owner of the item should come forward and love should soon follow. 

The problem?  Some of the owners are too shy to step forward even when they recognize their bag. 

Studies have been conducted into the science behind the smell of attraction.

Research studies using similar T-shirt experiments have shown that people prefer different human scents. But whose smell they prefer is dictated by a set of genes that influence our immune response — which researchers say is nature's way of preventing inbreeding and preserving genetic adaptations developed over time.

"Humans can pick up this incredibly small chemical difference with their noses," said Martha McClintock, founder of the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago. "It is like an initial screen."

In one such study, McClintock and her colleagues had participants sniff inside a covered box without knowing that in some cases they were smelling worn T-shirts. What they found was people preferred the odors of those who had different genetic makeups from their own, but not radically different.

What it comes down to is that what smells like love to me may smell like bad news to you, and vice versa.  Love is one of the greatest forces in the universe and time after time, it has refused to be boxed, labeled or categorized.  When love is ready for you it will find you - so long as you don't try to tie it down, pen it up or define it out of existence.

So what does love mean?  It means anything and everything -- with a cherry on top.    

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Last week, I headed back to Dallas and the Southfork ranch along with a bunch of other folks.  According to news reports, 6.8 million of us watched the premiere last week, meaning that TNT won the night last Wednesday.   In case you missed it, here's a run down on the episode.  I think its well worth watching.

The series kept the music score, and hearing the theme song casts a bunch of right back into some better years when the economy looked brighter and adulthood was a bright shiny light, beckoning us to where all our dreams would come true.  Some of us (me in particular) are still trying - but the Dallas premiere reminded me why I should have my fingers on a keyboard during every spare moment. 

JR is back in true, dastardly form and has there ever been a villain we loved to hate as much as this one?  Bobby is still the white knight tilting against windmills - and both men have young, hunky sons carrying on their legacies.  Everyone wants Southfork, and a deep, abiding love of land is a theme that really resounds with most Americans. 

As the series opens, JR's son, John Ross discovers oil on Southfork, a place the late Miss Ellie refused to allow ever to be drilled, and apparently her will spoke to that.  John Ross is trying to have the will tossed out.  Christopher, Bobby's kid, has been exploring alternate energy.  In the opener, Bobby, who has run Southfork, is planning to sell it to help fund Christopher's new company.  But an explosion in China means the alternative energy may not be ready for prime time, and we learn that JR and John Ross are bonding the way only Ewing's can - by trying to stab each other in the back in their attempts to gain control of the ranch.

There are also love issues aplenty, as JR is with a girl whose true love is Christopher.  In the opener, Christopher marries another woman and we learn that his romance with JR's girl broke up because of an email he never sent.  We also learn that that Christopher's new wife is running a scam with her brother, meaning that she wants the power and the wealth more than the love of any man - so she fits right in as a Ewing.  Viewers see right away that John Ross's girl belongs with Christopher and Christoher's new wife belongs with John Ross.  Yep, it feels a lot like a nice, steamy romance novel - a good one from back in the "old school" days.  

My favorite thing about the new Dallas is that just like the old one, it's over-the-top all the way.  That's my POV and writing style for all my romance novels.  So, if you like the new Dallas, pick up one of my books and you'll see the same high-kicking spirit that takes you over the top and keeps heading upwards. 

And if you missed the premiere of the show last week, tune in this Wednesday for a Dallas-sized dose of love and lust, power and passion, honor and betrayal