Though I do have an ongoing giveaway here.

Let me preface this with an apology. I'm about to get all deep-thoughty about digital book pricing and so forth. I feel sort of bad blogging about this when a) I blog so infrequently nowadays and b) most of the people who regularly check this blog are, I suspect, not doing so because they want my unsolicited opinions on this topic. Most would probably much rather hear about the next book, right?

So I'm happy to say firstly--I have posted a bit of info about the new series and two--count them, two!--dueling excerpts from A Night to Surrender here. Anyone not interested in digital book pricing and libraries and so forth, please do follow that link and never mind what is beneath the fold.

If you are interested, read on... (but don't say I didn't warn you!)

Read the rest of this entry »

Firstly, winners! Thanks to all who entered the Jennifer Haymore/A Touch of Scandal giveaway! We will have four winners, since Jennifer is kicking in two extra copies. (Thanks, Jennifer!) Winners, as drawn by Random.org, are:

Liz (#9)
Liza (#14)
Peggy H (#15)
Hannah (#20)

Winners, please use the contact email form (click contact in top menu) to send me your snail mail address.

While I'm announcing winners, and since I'm still on a little high from the RITA final last week, I think I'll blog a bit about contests. (If you're not an aspiring author, this may bore you to tears. Sorry! I will not be hurt if you sneak out the back.)

In the time since I sold my first book, I've sometimes been asked by aspiring authors about contests. Did I enter RWA chapter contests as an unpublished writer? Did I find them of benefit?

The answers are yes, and yes--with caveats.

I entered a total of five chapter contests with Goddess of the Hunt, and one with a very early draft of Surrender of a Siren. The entries placed everywhere from first place to "bottom third" (where they mercifully do not reveal your exact ranking). I got something out of each and every contest.

What I got out of contests:
Some helpful feedback
Some unhelpful feedback
The invaluable experience of learning to sort out which is which
A few wonderful networking connections with published author judges
A chance to thicken my skin before dealing with Amazon reviews
On one occasion, a nifty plaque
On another occasion, cash!

What I did not get out of contests:
A sale

Here is the thing I always say about contests (and I don't get dogmatic that often, so this is a clue that I really, reaaalllly believe this):

Contests are NOT a substitute for querying and submitting.

A great many writers enter contests with the goal of getting their pages in front of the final judge, who is usually an editor or agent. This is a worthy goal, no question, and I do know of authors who started great careers this way. But in my personal experience and judging by the anecdotal evidence of friends and acquaintances--speaking generally, contests are a less effective (and much more expensive!) way to sell a book than the standard query process.

Case in point, in one of the contests I entered (and eventually won), I did get a request for the full manuscript from editor judge. However, between the time I entered the contest and the announcement of the final results, I had already signed with an agent and sold the book. So if I'd waited - I just might have sold that manuscript through this one contest connection. But I guarantee you, I would not have gotten the same deal.

So if anyone looks to me for contest advice (and I'm not sure you should be, but...), here it is: By all means, enter contests! Sometimes they yield valuable advice and perspective. Sometimes they are a $25 dollar course in "Learning to Suck It Up," which is valuable in its own way. The are often a good motivator to make progress by a deadline. Occasionally, they can lead to a great networking connection or manuscript request. But I beg you, don't rely exclusively on contest judges to tell you whether or not your manuscript is any good, and please, please don't use "I'll just wait for the feedback/scores/final results" as an excuse to hold off on querying or submitting through normal channels.

Whew. With those exhortations out of my system, let me point those of you still interested in contests toward THE contest I believe to be the best of any I entered, and among the best of any out there. It is, coincidentally, my own chapter's contest: The Orange Rose.

Things that are awesome about the Orange Rose and make it stand out from the pack:
+ALL the judges are published authors. Yes, ALL.
+Entrants submit 50 pages and a synopsis.
+So at minimum, your entry fee gets you 3 critiques of a 50-page partial from published authors. Can't beat that deal.
+The ten finalists are chosen by total score, regardless of subgenre (so you don't have some people breezing through a category with only 5 entrants, while others are struggling to break out of a pack of 50)
+Each of the finalist manuscripts is sent to not one, but two editor judges - and they are guaranteed to be judges acquiring in your category. If you have a series manuscript, the contest coordinator finds two acquiring series editors to judge it. If you have an inspirational manuscript, she will make sure it goes to editors who buy that.
+Cash prizes. 'Nuff said.

All the entry information is here. This year's deadline is April 10th. So get those entries in the mail! Who knows, I may be one of the lucky judges who gets to read your entry.

Any other writers wandering by have advice to add? Contests to recommend? Or points to refute? Please fire away!

So, there was an article in the New York Times today that has generated some online discussion, much of which centers on whether it's "stealing" for a Kindle user to allow a few friends to share her downloaded books. It's not stealing, according to the terms of the Kindle user agreement. Customers are allowed to download a purchased book on up to five devices, much the same as a reader can pass a print book she's purchased to her family and friends. Courtney Milan has a brilliant post today opining that such sharing is a reader's right.

My own belief is that the sharing of books is not only a reader's right, but an author's benefit and a public good (that's my librarian side showing). I'm not talking about piracy here, where a book is illegally downloaded thousands of times, but rather the sharing of purchased books amongst friends, family and neighbors. There's a huge difference between the two.

I've had readers write to me to tell me they enjoyed my book(s), but then go on to apologize for the fact that they got the book from a library or a friend, rather than by purchasing it themselves. It just makes me sad that they feel they should apologize! Please, if any of you reading this feel that way - don't. Feel free to write me and tell me your reactions about my books, however you obtained them. If your life is anything like mine, time is your most precious resource. The dedication of the 4, 6, 8+ hours it takes just to read the book is an investment worth far more than $6.99. However you got the book, if you expended the time, imagination, and emotional energy to engage with a story I wrote, I am grateful to you. You've certainly earned the right to comment on it!

Of course I like sales and royalties. Depend on them, as a matter of fact. But as an author, especially as a new author, I firmly believe that the total number of readers is the key to my building an audience. Some of the readers who've written me these apologetic letters go on to say that after borrowing my first book, they went out and bought the other two. Woohoo! That's exactly the point. It would be shortsighted of me to look at that first instance of borrowing as a "missed" sale, when it in fact led to two additional ones.

In my debut trilogy, the heroines pass a book from one to the next--a bawdy little novel called The Memoirs of a Wanton Dairymaid. Essentially, it's a romance novel. Lucy gives it to Sophia; Sophia gives it to Bel; Bel passes it on to Hetta... Along the way, a second copy must be purchased due to some of Sophia's...ahem, artistic alterations to the original. Et voila! The Wanton Dairymaid's author (Portia, by the way, from The Legend of the Werestag) has just scored a second sale--one she never would have made, had Lucy kept that book hidden beneath the false bottom of her stocking drawer.

Please, share my books with your friends. Borrow them from libraries. And don't ever feel you should apologize.

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 career-focused decision--one I'd definitely make again.

I've pretty much summed up my thoughts on the issue before, so I won't write them all out again. A few months back, I blogged about why I think digital publishing is good for romance, and then I blogged about why I think it was a good (career-focused!) move for me.

So I'm not going anywhere in RWA. I love being a member. Heck, the national conference is the highlight of my social year! I understand and appreciate the tremendous amount of work RWA officers put in, and I can imagine that wading through these thorny issues is a difficult task, to say the least. But I do intend to use my voice and vote toward the causes of improved education on digital publishing, recognition of proven reputable e-publishers, and acknowledgment that e-publishing is increasingly a valid and viable career option for many (though not necessarily all) authors. In my opinion, those things are necessary to keep RWA relevant in the digital age.

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 a joint product of the author and the readers. To put it Zen-ly: if a book sits alone, unread, in the middle of a forest, does it make a point?

Maybe it's because I was a public librarian long before I became an author, but I'm all about access. I'd let them read my books aloud over the PA at sports arenas and shopping malls, if anyone cared to do such a thing. I'm pretty sure my royalties would only go up!

What say you?

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 individual fairness concern.

My pollyanna self just wishes RWA, as one big happy organization, would adopt a basic position that e-publishing is good for romance.  I'm not talking about any particular e-publishers, nor any specific e-books...just the simple existence of e-publishing as a new, groundbreaking means of distribution, whether it's used by large or small publishers. I believe it is a good thing, for all of us, for several reasons.  Here are a few off the top of my head:

1) New markets.  E-books can be purchased anywhere, by anyone with an Internet connection.  They bring romance to new readers around the world, thereby increasing and enhancing the audience for our genre as a whole.  Good thing.

2) Niche markets.  By definition, mass-market publishers just can't (or won't) take chances on books targeted to a small, if loyal readership.  Small presses and e-publishing give them a home, which gives us authors more outlets for our work and greater creative freedom.  Good thing.

3) Innovation.  As a corollary to both 1&2, e-publishers can push the boundaries of the genre in ways traditional publishers can't or won't.  But when these experiments are commercially successful, the NY pubs take note and think twice.  E-publishing can be a kind of laboratory for cutting-edge romance, expanding our print markets.  Good thing.

4) More royalties.  E-publishers typically pay larger royalty percentages (because they don't pay large advances), but that's not all I mean here.  With e-publishing, a book can stay available for public purchase long after it goes out of print--which means an author can keep making money from it, instead of just watching copies exchange hands at used-book stores and getting no further royalties.  Good thing.

5) Oprah.  Come on, if Oprah is talking about e-books, you know the masses will follow.  Why wouldn't we want a piece of that?

Don't get me wrong - I don't want printed books to go away, not at all.  And I doubt they will.  But e-books are only going to increase in market share.  And I think it's wonderful that we as writers have this new way to reach readers, grow our audience, stay fresh, push the boundaries, and make more money.  Whether an individual author chooses to pursue e-publishing or not, the existence of e-publishing is a benefit to the genre as a whole.

At least, I think so.  Sometime in the coming week or so, I'll blog about why I think e-publishing is of benefit to me, as an individual author.