First, I’m a guest today at the Seductive Musings blog, where I wrote about the making of my Stud Club book video. Do come on over and say hi–you could win a signed copy of One Dance with a Duke!

Second, thank you so much to all who participated in the #recitweet contest! It was a fun way to spend release day, and so helpful to get so many easy, yummy recipes. I have all sorts of idea for feeding my family this summer, and I’ll let you know how it goes in practice.

$10 gift certificates go to the following:

From Twitter:

Cories
Dahlia Gordon
Noelle Pierce

From the blog:
Linnea
Tien “Christine”

I will try to reach you all through email or Twitter, to find out which online bookstore you’d like your gift certificate from.

During the contest, we had over 200 #recitweet posts to twitter and almost 50 posts here on the blog! Because math is not my strong point, I’m going to round that total up to 400 and make a $100 donation to Feeding America. We will see if we can get that donation upped over the course of the summer with a different contest – I do have two more release days coming up.

Hope you all are having a great week!

It’s finally here! Release day for One Dance with a Duke, the first installment in an all-new trilogy. (And if you haven’t watched the Stud Club Trilogy video yet, you really should!) To celebrate the book’s release, I’m hosting a very special giveaway. Details here.

Woohoo! Today’s the big day! The release of One Dance with a Duke, the first installment in an all-new trilogy. I’m so proud of this book, and of course, I want to have a contest to celebrate!

Usually, I just invite you all to comment to win books. That’s always fun, but I thought I’d do something different today. I’m going to ask you to help feed my family. And in the process, feed some other families.

Bear with me for a moment. There’s a method to this madness, promise.

The heroine of One Dance with a Duke, Amelia, is a true hostess and expert at menu planning. She has a little book of recipes and menus that she keeps, and she takes pride in putting together the perfect meal. Well, this part of her characterization was clearly wish fulfillment on my part. Meal-planning is not my forte–especially not with two picky darelings in the house and three books releasing back-to-back this summer. When dinnertime rolls around, I wish I had Amelia’s little book of recipes and menus. I also wish I had her servants to prepare them.

Since I don’t have those things, I figured…hey, the romance world is full of resourceful individuals. I am here to ask you to give me your family-friendly, time-saving dinner ideas. BUT. They must be easy and simple. So easy and simple that they will fit in one “tweet” (If you don’t use Twitter, this means that typed out they must be 140 characters or less, including spaces).

Here’s an example:

Lazy soup: 64oz can V8, stew beef, cubed veggies, thyme. Put all in slowcooker. Neglect. #recitweet

See, that’s barely 100 characters! Still so many to spare.

If you’re already on Twitter, you can enter by tweeting your recipe with the hashtag #recitweet. If you’re not on Twitter, you can post it here in the comments, and I’ll tweet it for you. Either method enters you to win. If you click here, you can follow all the #recitweet posts, even if you don’t have a Twitter account.

What can you win? Five random winners will receive $10 gift certificates to the online bookstore of their choice (Amazon, BN.com, Borders, MBAM, etc). There are so many great books releasing this week, I can’t even try to match them up with individual winners. This way, the choice is yours. (And if you’d prefer to have my book, I will gladly sign a copy and send it to you!)

In addition, for every tweet with the hashtag #recitweet that shows up on Twitter between now and midnight Pacific tomorrow (Wednesday), I’ll donate $0.25 to Feeding America, up to $250 total. (If you’re doing the math, that’s one thousand tweets to reach $250. We can totally do that, right? If you’re in the mood for more math, every dollar donated to Feeding America helps them get 9 pounds of food to hungry people, so that’s…. more than a ton of food.)

So if this works, I’ll get some new ideas for feeding my family, you may get some new ideas for feeding your family, and we’ll all get some food to people who need it. And hopefully, it will be fun! So please spread the word and get to tweeting your simplest recipes — creativity and humor are welcome and encouraged! I can’t wait to see what you all come up with.

And I hope this all makes sense, but feel free to ask questions if not.

I can’t believe it! Release day for One Dance with a Duke is finally almost here. To celebrate, I’m working on a fun contest and giveaway for tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve at long last posted excerpts for Twice Tempted by a Rogue and Three Nights with a Scoundrel, in case you want to sneak peeks at books two and three in the series.

Until tomorrow…!

The countdown, it is on. Just four days until One Dance with a Duke releases!

In the meantime…The lovely folks at RT Book Reviews magazine asked me to contribute a “Pros on Prose” article about historicals, for their June issue. I was glad to write it, and it is indeed in the issue that’s on newsstands now. As an extra for their website, they asked me to compile a list of my favorite starting places for Regency-era research.

If you click here, you can see the list I gave them and get links to the sites. One of the sites, The Regency Encyclopedia, is only available with a password–but the site’s generous owners created a login just for RT readers. I cannot overstate what a useful, thorough site this is, so if you have any interest in the Regency Era or in writing historical romance, I highly recommend you click over to RT’s site and make use of that login!

Edited to say: Obviously, these few sites are just a smattering of the wonderful resources available. If you have favorites of your own, please list them in the comments!

Well, this is a banner day here at TessaDare.com. Three blog posts in one day. Whew!

My publisher, Random House (Ballantine being a division of), has done something soooo cool – they’ve posted a 60-page excerpt of ONE DANCE WITH A DUKE on Scribd.com. And those 60 pages are all prettily formatted and look just like real book pages, too.

So if you’ve read Chapter One here at my site and want to go read some more…just click here! (You can even find links to share the excerpt on Twitter or Facebook, or embed it on your own blog or site. Can you tell I am impressed by this? )

Note: I meant to post this yesterday, but realized I was missing some data. I have remedied that, and now it’s complete.

The Werestag is having his birthday! My e-novella The Legend of the Werestag was released from Samhain Publishing exactly one year ago this week.

Digital publishing is changing rapidly (understatement alert!), and has changed a great deal even in the past year. At RWA National Conference this summer, I’ll be on a panel titled “Digital Publishing for the Print Published Author” with some Samhain editors and authors. I think one of the themes of our panel will be that digital and traditional print publishing can mesh together as two parts of a viable, growing career.

One stumbling block authors run up against, however, is that it can be very hard to get sales information for digital publishing. How much can a writer reasonably expect to earn, if she decides to e-publish?

In many ways, this is an impossible question to answer. Because most digital publishers pay only a nominal advance or no advance, most compensation comes in the form of royalties–and there’s simply no way of knowing how well an e-book (or any book) will sell. In addition, there’s no such thing as an “average” performing e-book. They can sell copies in the thousands or in the teens.

In the hopes that it might help other authors considering digital publishing, I am going to publicly post my sales and royalty information for TLOTW, to date. (Below the fold, because it’s long)

Read the rest of this entry »

If you entered my “First Chance” contest last week and didn’t win, here’s your Second Chance.

The lovely folks at All About Romance invited me to participate in their “Books with Buzz” feature. On the AAR blog today, there’s an interview with me about the new series, and commenters will be entered to win one of ten copies of One Dance with a Duke!

The link is here. Go comment and win!

Sorry to be posting so late – this was my evening to work at the library. But I am home, and I have spent several minutes on Random.org, cross-matching with preferences and such, and lo — I have winners.

Let me just say – I wish I could send each and every one of you a copy of One Dance with a Duke. But if you didn’t win it this time, do not despair. I will be receiving more copies, and there are some other online giveaways planned. This is just the first chance, but not your last chance.

Drumroll……….

Winners of my two copies of One Dance (yes, I’m parting with both *sniff*) are:

Ann Marie – #36
Catie James – #45

Other prizes go to:
Takyra Morgan – #62 – Lessons Learned
Aimee Marie – #12 – Catch Me If You Can
Thalia – #21 – Servicing Rafferty
Rachie G – #43 – Beauty Tempts the Beast
Sarah – #5 – Jazz Baby
Kelly S – #37 – The Legend of the Werestag
etirv – #58 – $10 gift cert for My Bookstore and More
iokijo – #28 – $10 gift cert for My Bookstore and More

So if you won something, please shoot me a message from my Contact form. If it’s an ebook or gift certificate you won, I’ll just need the email address you want me to send it to. If you’ve won a print book, of course I’ll need the snail mail addy.

To all the rest – If you haven’t done so already, you can use this form to request free bookmarks as a consolation prize.

Thank you all so very much for playing!

Warning: Loooong post ahead. But so worth reading to the end.

I returned from RT on Sunday – and what did I find awaiting me? My first two print copies of One Dance with a Duke!
There is something so special about seeing your book in its bound form for the very first time. A big part of me just wants to clutch my preciouses to my chest, but instead I’m going to give at least one of them away. Today! Here! But that’s not all!

You see, I worked very hard on One Dance with a Duke, and I am so proud of it–as I am of all the books I’ve written for Ballantine. But while I was at RT, it also hit hard for me how very proud I am to be a Samhain author. It was just about a year ago that my very first published work, a tongue-in-cheek novella called The Legend of the Werestag, was unleashed on the world as an ebook from Samhain Publishing. As a small press, Samhain is on the cutting edge of innovative romance. I tell you, the editors and authors were everywhere at RT, just bubbling over with excitement about new titles, print programs, awards.

I had the pleasure of hanging out with Kate Davies, who won the 2009 RT Reviewer’s Choice award for Best Indie Press Contemporary Romance, for Lessons Learned. Kate (pictured left, next to author Wendi Darlin) was kind enough to sign a copy for me at the Bookfair. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but hello–it’s an RT Reviewer’s Choice winner, which means it must be fabulous. (And I am so not saying that because I also won an RT award.)

While in Ohio, I also had the pleasure of having lunch with Janie Mason (and why didn’t I take her picture?), the author of one of my favorite Samhain titles, Servicing Rafferty. This is a sexy, charming friends-to-lovers romance featuring characters who have stuck with me ever since that first read.

Blogger Lisabea, who writes m/m (male/male) romance as L.B. Gregg, was my partner-in-crime for the champagne reception and Mr. Romance pageant. (The champagne would be responsible for our “rosy glow” in this picture, I think!) After leaving RT, I bought her Samhain release, Catch Me if You Can, figuring if Lisabea was even one-tenth as entertaining in prose as she is in person, I knew I would in for a treat – and I was sooo right.

Then yesterday, Leslie Dicken‘s fabulous Beauty Tempts the Beast came out in a print edition. I read this last year as an e-book, and I loved it. It’s a sexy, gothic historical romance–think Daphne duMaurier, only scorching hot. A funny coincidence is that her hero is named Lord Ashworth. That’s the title of my own scarred, tortured hero in Twice Tempted by a Rogue, so I felt an immediate kinship.

And I can’t forget Lorelie Brown‘s amazing Jazz Baby! What could be more sultry and smoldering than a romance set in the Prohibition era? Jazz, gin, a speakeasy, bootleggers, and a hot undercover agent. Oh, yeah. 8)

I could go on and on. So many good books!

So to recap, here are the books I’ll be giving away:

One Dance with a Duke (print, exclusive early copy!)
Lessons Learned (print or ebook, winner’s choice)
Servicing Rafferty (ebook)
Catch Me if You Can (ebook)
Beauty Tempts the Beast (print or ebook, winner’s choice)
Jazz Baby (ebook)
The Legend of the Werestag (ebook)

To enter, just comment and list the three titles that most tickle your fancy. Clicking on the titles above will give you blurbs and excerpts. (And no, you will not be disqualified if One Dance with a Duke is not in your top three. ) Using Random.org and some kind of alchemy, I will create a list of winners. Because these are but a fraction of the awesome titles Samhain has to offer, there will also be two $10 gift certificates to My Bookstore and More in the pot.

This is a one-day contest. For serious. Entries will close at noon Pacific time on Thursday, and I will post winners Thursday night so I can get to mailing prizes on Friday. So get the word out and get your entries in!

(Note: Please don’t hesitate to enter if you don’t have a special e-reading device. All Samhain titles are available in DRM-free HTML and PDF formats, which means they can easily be read on any computer. If you’re reading this post, you can read a Samhain ebook.)