August 14th, 2009 — About, Authors, Between the Sheets
I have two thoughts on this subject. The first is of course! The second is heck no! In the end I decided to put together some pros and cons discussing the matter. Feel free to jump in with more ideas!
5 Pros for Authors Owning a Blog:
- You are the editor. You can treat it like a newsletter or diary. You get to decide what goes up and what doesn’t. Want to talk about your sex life? Go ahead, but it may be a little TMI (too much information).
- You’re easy to write about. Who knows you better than you? There’s so much you can take from to inspire others with: your writing schedule, writing process, writing life, future books, etc.
- Your fan base gets a regular update on your life. They came to you, they want you, if they wanted someone else they’d go look them up and follow them.
- Everything is somehow about you. Even with guest authors, they’re your friends and acquaintances, mentors, fellow authors, publicist, etc. so while you’re sharing the floor, you’re still in the spotlight.
- Increases Your Book Sales. It’s searchable and drives traffic to your main website and your books and can very easily increase your sales.
5 Cons for Authors Owning a Blog:
- Providing constant content. How do others do it? How do they provide fun quirky content day after day to keep readers interested and coming back? It’s a heck of a lot of work and can be stressful. You could be devoting that time to writing more books or personal time.
- Building a readership for a blog is tough. Why struggle getting noticed when readers and reviewers would gladly share their blog readerships with you? When something comes to you as a great blog idea, ask one of them to host it. Chances are they’ll jump on it (see last point). You’ll get coverage (and pro point five) and they’ll get good free content. It’s a win-win deal.
- Do you really want to get that close to your readers? You love them and hearing from them, but do they really need to know what you’re doing all the time? Where’s the line between the public you and the personal you?
- You’re not internet savvy. The idea of writing a blog gives you chills. You just master Google for research and now it’s time to start a blog? Which platform should you use? Is it easy to use? Does it look professional? You wouldn’t even know where to start!
- It doesn’t sound like fun. You would much rather read other people’s blogs than write one yourself. There’s no shame in that and really there are plenty of ways to get out in front of readers. Channel your time and energy into those and relax.
Middle Ground: if options one or two aren’t for you there’s always co-opting. You can easily share a blog with fellow writers in your genre or under the same publisher. That would cut out the time you’d have to devote to upkeep in both content and promotion. Plus it gives you another way to network and reach readers.
June 15th, 2009 — 3.5 Stars, Contemporary, Greece, Movie Reviews, Travel
Wow, another movie that was totally trashed by reviewers is yet another one I really enjoyed watching. I think My Life in Ruins is a smash. It uses stereotypes to make everything appear awful at first and then slowly unravels the truth beneath the façade. You have obnoxious American tourists, an old lady that steals everything that isn’t nailed down, a gentleman who thinks he’s the life of the party, Australians you can’t understand even though they speak English, a married couple at each other’s throats, a moody teenager, divorced woman on a man hunt, etc.
Georgia, played by Nia Vardalos, must take this ragtag group of tourists through Greece. She knows everything there is to know about the ruins and monuments, but she’s disillusioned. Nobody cares about history or the treasures right before their eyes. Georgia has lost her kaffee.
Richard Dreyfuss plays Irv, the tourist who thinks he’s hilarious. Irv is rude, makes terrible jokes, and wears down Georgia’s every last nerve until she snaps. To her horror she finds out this is the worse trip for him ever not because she’s a terrible tour guide, but because his wife is dead and this is his first time abroad without her.
Poupi, a terrible name if there ever was one and one of the few things that was just this side of ridiculous in the movie, is the bus driver. Alexis Georgoulis is quite handsome under his beard and long hair. Poupi crushes on Georgia and helps her rediscover her love of Greece and love of life during this trip.
The romance is cute, the bad guy gets his dues, and you get to enjoy the fabulous scenery of Greece. Having been, I’m so glad they showed the Parthenon in Athens at night. It truly is an amazing sight to see. It looked magical in person and on screen.
My one major irk, and my mother’s too, who saw this with me, was Nia’s shoes. How on earth could that woman traipse around Greece’s ruins in high heels, tall platform shoes, etc.? It just isn’t possible. Delphi for instance, was repaved by the Romans in old marble monuments. The road is slippery and sweats in the summer months and it tricky to navigate in tennis shoes! The Parthenon has gravel and chunks of rocks everywhere, no way! She would twist an ankle and fall.
Rating: 3.5 Stars
Buy: My Life in Ruins
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May 30th, 2009 — Links and Challenges
Welcome to the reinstatement of romancing the novel. This carnival is here to share with readers what others wish to highlight around the romance community. Today because appropriate submissions were short I've added some posts that I liked. I hope you enjoy! Any feedback you have for improvements to this carnival would be most appreciated.
Book Reviews
Interviews
- I particularly loved this question and answer by Amarinda Jones at Smart Bitches.
When writing erotica, what do you think are the most important things to remember about reaching the audience?
Like any genre, make it realistic, make it doable, make it something a reader can identify with or dream of.
Industry News
Many authors and reviewers do view review copies as “free books”, but in truth it is not. It’s an exchange of services.
On Genre and Subgenre
In addition, I would like to send readers to the forum to help a reader remember a book title.
That concludes this carnival edition. If you have written or found an interesting article about romance novels, I do hope you will share by submitting to the next edition of romancing the novel. Use the carnival submission form for convenience and ease. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Technorati tags: romancing the novel, blog carnival.
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May 22nd, 2009 — News, Paranormal
Here's the situation succinctly: Avon stuck its foot in its mouth.
Lynn S.: In our 2002 interview, you felt that the online world didn't have much of an impact on sales. Much has changed in the intervening years, and more and more people - including more women - are online now and use reviews as a helpful guide to the buying process. Has Avon changed its thinking in this area? Avon, also, seems not to include many online reviews in books. Are there any plans to change that policy?
May Chen: In my opinion, the online world still doesn’t have much impact on sales as, anecdotally, I’ve seen books get horrible online reviews but have done well. As far as I know, we still don’t include online reviews on our books, but that can certainly change if we see them start making a difference. Right now, the best endorsements for us still seem to be from NYT bestselling authors and from major traditional print reviewers.
Lucia Macro: Do the consumers recognize the source of the quote? I'm not sure that the vast majority of readers recognize all the online sites. When checking their rankings I'm often surprised at how little traffic they really get. We are all very plugged in, but many casual readers are just picking up a book at their local Walmart and barely have time to watch tv, much less wrestle the computer away from their kids. So an author quote might carry more weight with them.
Read the full original interview here.
This sparked a whole bunch of conversation and dialogue across many romance blog sites:
The whole thing as Jane notes is ironic and is summed up quite nicely by Amy of My Friend Amy in this Twitter message.
Pamela Jafee of Avon responds to the backlash with this comment on Lynn's post. She responds to the accusations in another comment stating that the quotes are direct without editing.
Right below Pamela's comment is one by Katie Mack linking to Jennifer Crusie's thoughts about author quotes on books and if I had any confidence in them before it's completely gone now.
What gets me most is that they assume because bloggers don't have corporate search engine ranks that we don't have power and additionally the assumption that was made about online versus offline. Before I started blogging, I did research online for books that I bought, yes I still made impulse buys, but I often gravitate toward books reviewed around the romance community. I don't really put faith in newspaper ratings for books or movies because oftentimes the reviewer is somebody who clearly doesn't share any similar tastes with me. They give it a 2 I give it a 4, they give it a 4, I'd never pick it up/go watch it even if you paid me.
As for the rankings... Alexa is complete bunk as most bloggers who blog about blogging say and they take it with a pinch of salt. Google Page Rank used to be highly sought after and now it's kind of a "well that's cool, I guess," rank. Alexa confuses me, but I do know a bit about Google PR. It's based on Log Base 10 mathematics. To jump one point you must be ten times more powerful than you were in terms of many things that are hard to quantify like: content relevancy, search relevancy, traffic, bounce rate, internal/external links, backlinks, etc. To jump two numbers you have to be hundred times more powerful; three numbers equals a thousand times more powerful, and so on.
Smart Bitches and Dear Author last I knew were both Google PR 5 (out of 10). Love Romance Passion is a 3 and I'm not quite a year old as a blog.
Think about that... that's a load of people and community sharing to build those numbers. We might not have the numbers of a corporate giant, and we certainly don't have the capital to push a book, but we're innovative and the numbers we do have shows just how big the romance community is online.
Google doesn't think we're bottom of the food chain, Avon shouldn't either.
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March 26th, 2009 — Links and Challenges, News
Today is part four of five in announcing the Top 50 Romance Novel Blogs. I hope you take the time to go to these blogs and see what they have to offer!
And as always be sure to drop a comment and let me know if I've missed any of your favorite haunts as I will be composing a fan list to supplement my list at the end.
- Romance Book Scene- for everyone who loves a happy ending.
- Romance B(u)y the Book- Dish with Michelle and the Bellas @ RBTB about Love, Sex, Family, Life, and, of course, Romance! (They have a newsletter subscription contest going on - ends 31st of March.)
- Romance Novel TV- Video interviews with romance authors, really need I go on? Make it a destination of yours.
- Romance Rookie- I have to promote Jill just because of the Florida background- though her 500+ bk reviews don't hurt either. She works at my alma mater. If it weren't for the trees and two kids I'd say we were the same person. (I loved Nancy Drew growing up and am also a Virgo.)
- Romance Vagabonds- Four ladies + romance novels + hunks = a whole lot of fun.
- Romancing the Blog- The title of this blog was my first idea for naming my blog. Isn't it cute? The columnists on Romancing the Blog are readers, reviewers, aspiring authors, and bestsellers.
- Romantic Inks- I just love the colors of this website and the design - very pretty. 15 women actively write for this blog - that's a whole lot of wonderful posts!
- Romantic Time BOOKreviews- RT News Blog.
- Sapphire Romance Realm for fabulous book reviews, movie reviews, author interviews, and other goodies.
- Shapeshifter Romance- Love Lycanthropes- werewolves, wereleopards, dragons, selkies, and more? Here's a website devoted entirely to them!
Top 50 Continued:
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August 15th, 2008 — Contests
Buy that new romance novel you've been salivating over with this Barnes and Noble gift card!
How to Win Gift Card:
Review Romance Novel is looking for contributors! Readers become reviewers this week. It's easy, fun, and painless-- plus you'll be in the running for the $10 gift card, what a deal!
Submit a review following RRN's submission guidelines before Friday, August 22nd, 2008 to be eligible for the gift card. Make sure your novel hasn't been written about yet before starting! Duplicates of existing, posted novels will not count!
Multiple submissions welcomed! Every valid one gets you another chance at winning the gift card.
All submissions can and may be posted on this blog. Content submitted must be unique and not posted elsewhere before, during, or after contest.
Be sure that the email address you submit from is current and valid. If you don't check it regularly, you won't know if I contact you for your snail mail address and you won't receive your gift card.
Winner will be chosen at random from the list of contributors and announced on the 22nd. Be sure to check in next Friday to see if you won. Winner must comment. If winner does not respond by midnight east coast time (9pm west coast time) a new winner will be selected and announced Monday.
Good luck!
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