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This week over at one of my favorite Internet spots - Romancing The Blog - there was an interesting discussion about the importance of historical accuracy in romances.  A Fine and Dandy Problem was posted on the site on October 13th by literary agent Emmanuelle Alspaugh.   Check out the post if you can - Ms. Alspaugh used a specific example from one of her clients to highlight the issue and she did a fine job of tossing a meaty bone for blog followers to chase.  I chased it and lost on the site, but (cue music) I stand by my stance.

I think historical romance is any romance that takes place in a previous era.  In other words, if it's not contemporary, then it's historical.  To me, the period of a piece sets the mood.  Beyond that, I think details are pretty much fair game.  Okay, a Regency novel where the heroine e-mails a friend for advice might be (are you sitting down?) a little over the top even for me.  But precise details like whether the railroads ran a specific route, intricate details about heirs to a particular title,  the names of places and people -including dukes, earls and the like - can, and often should be created entirely from the mind of the author.   I don't care whether women were wearing a particular style during the years of my story - in fact, I don't care that much exactly what anyone was wearing.  If I describe a gown in detail, it's because those details will play an important part of the scene.  Otherwise, I don't sweat the small stuff.

...continue reading "It's Called Fiction For A Reason"

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Published on 1 Comment on Does Anyone Buy Paperbacks Anymore?

Our new project this week - the book trailer for Faerie (see post from hubby below, YouTube, Yahoo Video, & Coming Soon Everywhere We Can Think Of)  turns my thoughts to marketing and the state of the industry generally. 

Of course, it also turns my thoughts to Faerie which is my "rest of the story" spin on the famous legend of the Clan McLeod of the Isle of Skye in Scotland.  After Ian's handfast marriage to a faerie princess ended after a year and a day, per his agreement with her da, the Faerie King, the princess returned to the land of faerie.  Her braw, strong hubby watched her go, holding their infant son, without making a single protest.  Later, the babe cried and the princess returned to comfort him, leaving him wrapped in a faerie flag that could be used to protect the Clan.  Interesting story, but what laird worth his highland blood would let a beloved go without fighting to keep her?  And after she left, we have a fine laird with a castle and no lady wife.  When he marries, how will the princess feel?  Surely, the many tears she'd shed would anger her powerful father into appearing at the wedding reception and pronouncing a curse. 

Check out the trailer for A Faerie Fated Forever, and you'll get a glimpse of that handfast marriage that ended in a curse that the current laird must meet or risk living his father's tormented, unfulfilled life.  You'll also get a glimpse of the gorgeous terrain of the highlands and hints of the rest of the plot.  So watch the trailer and buy the book or the e-book. 

After watching markets recently, I'm betting you'd buy the e-book. 

...continue reading "Does Anyone Buy Paperbacks Anymore?"

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Greetings and salutations, kiddies. One of the many reasons I haven't got Mary Anne's E-mail Enticement into paperback form yet (besides being an enormous slacker) is a little project she assigned me.

It seems the newest thing in publishing is the book trailer - essentially a short video to whet your appetite for a book. It's much like a movie trailer, except more of a pain in the gluteus maximus because you don't have any video footage to begin with and you do them for authors who just looooove words, words, and more words.

At any rate, with much fury, frustration, and cursing with Windows Movie Maker, I have finally completed Quacking Alone's very first book trailer.

Behold, A Faerie Fated Forever, the book trailer:

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I write romance so, obviously, I read romance too.  Try writing a book in a genre you haven't read for years -- go ahead, I dare you. 

As readers, I think we all have some things that turn us off from the get go.  I know there are plot descriptions I can read and almost every time I'll slide the book back on the (real or virtual) shelf.  I've created taboos because if I buy a book with one of these plots, I'll almost always have buyer's remorse.  Do I hate the book because it's bad? Maybe, my preconceived ideas created hurdles so high that no writer could have written a story about these plotlines that I'd have enjoyed.

Here are some of the plots that turn me - the buyer - off:

...continue reading "Plots That Make Me Say — No Sale"

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Published on 2 Comments on Grey's 6 – You Are What You Think You Are

What theme does Shonda Sunshine want to explore on the sixth season of Grey's Anatomy?  I think it's her take on the old adage - You Are What You Think You Are.  Although the theme is rather conventional, I expect that Sunshine's take on it will be anything but standard.

Who set the theme?  Why, it was Lexie's question to Callie:  "How gay are you?"  Don't forget, Callie had been wandering around in states of half dress right in front of Lexie's beau Mark.  Callie even darted in to speak to Mark while he was wearing nothing but steam from his shower.  So Lexie put the question to Callie who could have answered it straight out, proclaiming herself a lesbian and any future romantic escapades with McSteamy impossible.  She didn't do that.  Instead, she said Mark didn't see her boobs anymore and that meant he was committed to Lexie. 

Ahmm,  yeah, right.  So now, Lexie must measure the status of her thing/fling with McSteamy by checking the degree of his boob blindness.  Can he see other boobs today?  Some boobs?  All boobs?  No boobs?    He's only as into her as he thinks he is.  So she should watch out for the cry - Boobs ahoy!

...continue reading "Grey's 6 – You Are What You Think You Are"

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Amazon's strategy for marketing the Kindle makes me think of a dictator who decides he wants all the citizens of his country to live in one city. 

People being, well, people with individual patterns and practices, likes and dislikes, it's not likely that all them will ever live in one city.  But the dictator could certainly get more of them there by showing that his city is a safe place with the best streets and parks and the most jobs.  That would attract interest.  Then he could point out that his city opens its arms to everyone and respects their differences.  I'd bet that dictator could then watch the steady influx of folks from hamlets all over the land, willing to try city life because it lets them keep big parts of the things they loved about their hamlets while letting them have more jobs, more choices,  and more possibilities. 

Or, if the dictator is maddened with power and crazed with the determination to have it all his way, he could use a different strategy.  He could simply kill all the citizens who live anywhere except in his favored city.  Guess which strategy Amazon has chosen to market the Kindle?

...continue reading "The Amazon Strategy – If We Kill It, They Will Come"

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If a genre is saving an industry, wouldn't you think it would be entitled to a little respect?  Well you'd think so, or most of us would, anyway.  But not so with Romance.

Romance is the Rodney Dangerfield of genres. 

A recent article in Time Magazine (which I found from Scott Eagan's blog - see my sidebar) credits romance novels with "helping some publishers hide from the worst of the recession."  According to the article, 1.4 billion dollars of romances were sold last year.  That was the largest share of the book market.  More than 1 out of every 4  books sold is a romance novel. 

If romance is the 1.4 billion industry that's accounting for a large portion of sales, you'd think it would be entitled to a little respect.  If romance is the drain plug keeping the circling publishing industry from going under, it should be entitled to respect - and a lot of it.  But like Rodney, romance don't get no respect.

...continue reading "Romance To The Rescue"

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Published on 10 Comments on Smash It Again, Mark

Once upon a time, a handful of publishing companies decided what Americans could read.  Those companies lived in the great literary castle.  No common writers were admitted to the castle.  The publishing royals would periodically admit certain citizens that they deemed worthy to petition them on behalf of the common writers. By and large, most of the worthy citizens had either worked in the castle in years gone by, or they had worked for other worthy citizens that the royals had known for years. It was an insider's paradise and no outsider need apply.   

The worthy citizens had the loathsome job of dealing with the commoners in the Kingdom.  Someone had to do it and it wasn't going to be the royals themselves.  After all, the royals couldn't dirty their hands by working directly with those who created the products that paid for their castle.  No, let the worthy citizens deal with the rabble.  Best of all, the worthy citizens not only protected the royals from the rabble, the royals didn't even have to pay the worthy citizens.  The worthy citizens took their fees from the rabble's proceeds.  A cut of the bounty paid by the royals to the rabble rightly belonged to the worthy citizens. ' Twas a small enough price for their having to deal with the commoners and sort through their barrage of products to find the work that worthy citizens thought would be deemed acceptable by the royals.

Most of the commoner's notions got rejected by the worthy citizens.  Those esteemed folks worked and socialized directly with the royals and knew what the royals would and would not deem worthy.  Or at least, they believed that they knew.  And the worthy citizens did not, as a rule, challenge the royals to accept something too new or too different.

And thus was born -- the sacred system.

...continue reading "Smash It Again, Mark"

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Mary Anne's husband here.

I've made a few tweaks to the website so that your visits here will be more enjoyable.

  • Disabled the Snapshot feature.

You know that little cartoon speech bubble thing that would pop up when you hovered your mouse pointer on a link and show you a preview of the page being linked? I personally found it entirely too sensitive and annoying. It also took up precious bandwidth and memory. So whoosh! out the door it goes. I can put it back if enough people want it back, but I don't see that happening.

  • Added paperback book cover images and created special "large cover image" pages.

Mary Anne wanted me to show off my paperback book covers as well as the full-sized e-book covers already on the site. Doing this necessitated changing the way cover images were displayed, because I was just linking the raw large-sized e-book cover before. I decided to create a page for each book's covers, which can be accessed from the side bar under Sections or from the individual thumbnail images on the Complete List of Books page.

Who knows, you might even want to buy a paperback after seeing one of my covers or want me to design a book cover for you. E-mail Mary Anne if you would like to arrange for me to design a book cover for you. I'm sure we can negotiate a great deal in exchange for a testimonial or inclusion in a future portfolio.

  • Assigned categories to blog posts.

It's been a long time coming, but it's finally here. I had to wait awhile to see what kind of things Mary Anne would blog about so I could create categories and assign them. Now, if you want to see just stuff about the trashy TV shows she watches or about Michael Jackson or Donny Osmond, you don't have to wade through stuff about her personal life. You can just go to the sidebar, scroll down to Filter by Category, select Other Entertainment in the drop down list and VICHYSSOISE! you have all of her posts about the abominable Durrrrrrrr & Murrrrrrrrrr from Grey's Anatomy (or as I have titled it, Young Doctors Who Like To Screw So Much That Their Patients Croak and They Have Nervous Breakdowns), or whatevs. So try that out and see how you like it.

Let me wrap this up with two last things.

I wanted to make sure you knew that Sixth Sense is now out in paperback on Amazon, so click on the link and check that out.

Finally, I'm working on getting E-mail Enticement ready for paperback, which includes redoing the cover, formatting the book using our old & busted copy of MS Word, et cetera, et cetera. So you should be able to get a molecular copy of it fairly soon to launch at a loved one's head and put a romance-novel-shaped dent in a much adored skull.

Until next time... AOFM signing off.

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I can't decide whether stress is like poison, administered a drop at a time, or like an opponent in the ring of life that sometimes gets a choke-hold. Maybe it's like another voice that's always there. Sometimes, when things are going well, stress speaks in a barely audible whisper. As things start to go badly, stress speaks louder. And when your world circles the toilet bowl, stress screams.

When stress screams, my muse can't hear the voices of my characters.

Will blogging about it help? Hopefully, it will give me another outlet and I can get the stress down to a dull roar. Sometimes muse can speak over a dull roar. What am I stressed about currently?

...continue reading "When My Muse Can't Hear"