While I was off gallivanting in cornfields, a controversy exploded in the online romance community last week. In case you’ve missed it, the online portion of it started with agent/author Deidre Knight’s open letter to RWA (Romance Writers of America), and RWA President Diane Pershing’s response. Today, Dear Author has a helpful guide to further reactions around the Internet.

At issue are RWA’s positions and policies on digital publishing. Currently, the organization does not recognize any e-publisher as a legitimate publisher (for the purposes of presenting at conference, taking pitches, etc.), because they pay on a no- or low-advance/greater-royalty model, instead of giving advances of $1000 or more for each book. This has resulted in a complete absence of digital publishing education at our upcoming conference. RWA’s current policies have also created ambiguity in membership status–members who publish with an e-press or small press are considered “published” in some respects, but not in others, leading to inequities in contest participation, etc.

I love RWA–both National and my local chapter. But I do think the national organization in particular could be doing far more to educate the membership about digital publishing and e-publishers. Today, digital publishing affects every published and aspiring writer of romance–we all need to understand e-rights contract clauses, the Google books settlement, DRM, and more. And I take issue with the president’s repeated assertion that e-publishing is not the venue of the “career-focused” author of romance. I’ve published with an e-press, and it was very much a … Read More »

At my Samhain e-novella?

I haven’t got a page for it up on my bookshelf page quite yet — I’m waiting for the cover art. But the blurb and excerpt for my May 12th release went up on the Samhain website. If you read the title and laugh, that’s good! It’s a comedy. And the story is very loosely linked to Goddess of the Hunt.

Also – I finally have a contest going on this here website! So when you click that Contest link, it gives you something other than a vague promise of “coming soon.”

I had plans to blog more today, but I am terribly sick. I did just want to comment briefly on the latest online debate. There’s been a lot of discussion in the past week about the Kindle2 and it’s TTS (text-to-speech) feature – whether it constitutes a copyright violation, whether Author’s Guild was right to protest the feature, and whether Amazon was right to back down. (See here and here, for example.) I really can’t pretend to understand all the legal arguments involved, but I tend to agree that clutching our intellectual property tighter to our chests is not the best way to protect our income. And what I can’t understand is why an organization devoted to protecting authors’ interests would not view protecting readers’ interests as paramount to that mission. What are authors without readers? Sure, authors create the words on the page, but any cultural significance of a book is … Read More »

Okay, I promised this post a few weeks ago now.  I’d been holding off, hoping I could get the blurb of my soon-to-be-epubbed novella together, but it’s still in the works.  Darn if that isn’t proving to be the hardest book ever to blurb.

Anyhow, I posted a few weeks ago about my belief that e-publishing is good for the romance genre.  And today I’m posting about why I think it’s a good move for me.   I have a NY print contract and three books coming out this year.  In terms of royalties and readership, realistically speaking, my e-pub novella is not going to come anywhere close to my print figures.  So what’s in it for me?… Read More »

Author Lauren Dane (both e-pubbed and traditionally print-pubbed) has an excellent article on her blog about the differences between the two.  Note: not the superiority of one or the other, just the differences.

I’ll be back tomorrow with an actual blog of my own. 🙂

Wasn’t that a great Super Bowl?… Read More »

There’s a lot of conversation going on right now, on various loops and blogs, about the RWA’s new rules for the RITA contest, which require entries to be “mass-produced” and effectively exclude most e-books or books published using POD (print-on-demand) technology.

I don’t really want to get into contest rules nitty-gritty–I know those kind of things are by definition arbitrary, and it’s impossible to make everyone happy.  I don’t envy the (hard-working, volunteer!) rule-makers one bit.  I’ve heard the RWA leadership has already committed to looking into the issue further, and that’s good.  What I do want to blog about is something more general.

As the RWA’s current policies are arranged, an author who publishes a work of fiction (over 20K words) with an e-press (even if that press is on the RWA’s list of Non-Subsidy, Non-Vanity Publishers) is no longer considered unpublished for the purposes of entering the Golden Heart.  However, neither is she considered “published” and PAN-eligible unless she can prove earnings of greater than $1000 for that book.  And unless her book meets the (vague, undisclosed) definition of “mass-produced in print”, she cannot enter it in the RITA.  Basically, an author who chooses to e-publish must do so with the knowledge that she’s forfeiting certain valuable RWA benefits without gaining any new ones.  To me, that adds up to an RWA organizational bias against e-publishing.  I’m not saying this was the intention, but it’s the de facto effect.  And this general bias bothers me, more than any … Read More »