I read paper books in the daytime and the ebook at night so it doesn’t bother my husband while he’s trying to go to sleep, but I ran out of paper books in my house that I hadn’t read. On the recommendation of a friend, I picked up what was billed as an erotic historical Georgia romance (yeah, I’m into the Georgian thing right now) from the library.
genre romance
By gosh and by golly
Harlequin. I *lurrrrve* you.
Got an email from Ms. Malle Vallik today on the subject of my ebook shopping woes. She will be addressing my concerns for the Harlequin digital team and wanted me to know that.
And you know what? With that one little email, all my lingering irritation vanished.
Harlequin is not hurt by the fact that I am now also in love with Kristan Higgins.
My credit card is trembling at this very moment. With anticipation or fear, I don’t know, but it’s going to get abused.
And you know what else? With that one little email, Harlequin got a customer for life, delivery issues be damned.
The price of nice
I was over on Dear Author talking about Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer, which I have not read. One commenter expressed disapproval of Meyer on the basis that she’s a Mormon mother and shouldn’t be writing stuff like that anyway. I will go so far as to guess this commenter was not Mormon because she spelled it “Morman.”
I could crack on Meyer for a couple of different things, but when the religion gets broken out as a generic weapon to say “You can’t write that because you’re a Mormon,” I’m on Meyer’s side. Period.
Take my money, please!
I remember when I was a kid, going to The Jones Store and Macy’s around Christmas time gathering our Santa choices, then wandering around to find a clerk to take your money. Unfortunately, “there was no one there to take my money and they wasted my time by making me go fetch them” isn’t a good defense for walking out of the store with what you want, even if you can break it out on a wage basis and demonstrate adequate opportunity loss.
Harlequin. Bite me.
I haven’t bought a Harlequin in years. Dunno why, just didn’t get around to it, I guess. But I was reading the recommends on Dear Author and saw Just One of the Guys by Kristan Higgins and said, “Must. Have.” So I scoot myself on over there and what do I get? The runaround. Takes me 30 minutes to buy 4 ebooks, WTF?!?!?
- I shopped in Firefox. My bad. Most days I don’t even remember what “Internet Explorer” is.
- You have DRM, which means that if I want to put these puppies on my eBookWise, I have to buy the Microsoft Reader version, then crack it with ConvertLit (file name: clit.exe … I grin every time I open file manager and see that).
- I have selected my purchases (about 10 books all told—I’m such an addict) and go to checkout, but I have to register for your site.
- Yet ANOTHER ONE. Do you know how many passwords I have now? I have to keep a password keeper (portable app, Yadabytes Passwords, brilliant and fabulous) on my thumb drive now. Why do I have to register for your site? Why can’t I just hit “pay,” enter my credit card number (or better yet, allow the use of Paypal), and be gone? [This is a serious pet peeve of mine anyway.]
- But wait! I have to download and activate MS Reader.
- But wait! I already have it; why aren’t you recognizing it?
- But wait! I have to go activate it. For the fourth effing time (I’ve only bought 3 MS Reader formatted books thus far, so that’s an activation for each time I want to buy one).
- And then I do that, come back and oh! I can’t get my download from Firefox. I have to open up IE to do that.
- I do that. I go to eHarlequin.com thinking it’s the ebook site and fill up my cart with all my goodies again (because you know, it didn’t save my selections in my cart from my excursion through with Firefox), only to figure out (thankfully before I purchased anything) that it was the dead-tree site.
- Empty cart.
- Go find ebook section of the store.
- Fill up cart again (by now I have about 7 fewer books than I would have bought at the front end of this process because I don’t want to go find them all again).
- Can’t find the ebook I originally came for using any search parameter you can name. Go back to Dear Author and copy the direct link. Put it in cart.
- Purchase ebooks.
- Download ebooks.
- Blog it because I’m seriously steamed.
Now, I like Samhain’s books and their customer service (’cause I had to call upon them one day and they were super responsive), but I can’t stand their Zen Cart checkout process.
Yesterday I wanted to follow an ad from Just Erotic Romance Reviews and ended up at Total-E-Bound’s Zen Cart catalog—and not at the page for the book I wanted to look at.
I love ebooks. My mission is to convert everyone to the Gospel of eBookIsm. But damn, people. Could you make it any harder to buy the things? Here I’ve been thinking the Kindle doesn’t have a long-term chance in hell, but they make everything so easy for the customer (and when one is out and about, to boot!) that I can’t see how it won’t kick everybody’s ass—because you make it so hard to buy anything!
Harlequin. Really. The only reason you got any money from me last night was because I wanted Ms. Higgans’s book so badly. Otherwise, you would have lost the $23 I did spend. That’s not counting the other $35 I would have spent as well, but you gave me the runaround.
I work hard enough to earn it. I shouldn’t have to work that hard to spend it.
My guilty pleasure
My first full-on real-life romance novel was Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss. Naturally, it’s on my keeper shelf right next to The Wolf and the Dove. I have the ones with the original covers, though they are far from mint. The namby pamby covers on the ones with the links are meh. Unlike most of my contemporaries whose first (or close to it) romance experience was Woodiwiss, mine wasn’t with The Flame and the Flower or Ashes in the Wind, neither of which I cared for.
But she’s not my guilty pleasure.
It’s Carole Mortimer of Harlequin Presents circa 1979 through, oh, I guess around 1986.
An embarrassment of half-assed riches
See, the thing is, I keep getting these great ideas to blog about, but then I get distracted and they don’t gel and I have about 6 half-written posts in my drafts folder that kinda sorta mean something to me now, but not really. Prepare for leftovers, kiddies, because mommy’s tired and she doesn’t want to cook dinner.
Re: Ann Herendeen and Phyllida
This is what’s apparently called “good” gossip. I shall take the liberty of bragging.
Getting the job done
In my review of Phyllida, I made a reference to an average review it earned at Amazon with the caveat that the reviewer “stayed up all night to read the last two hundred pages, because I was engrossed with the characters’ stories.” To which my response was, that’s the mother lode.
I’ve thought a lot about this lately, what I pick up, what I put down. I’ll finish a book regardless; it’s just something I do. I can’t stand to leave a book unfinished, no matter how torturous. Also, I’m not one of those readers who has to be absolutely captivated by the first or third page. I’ll give an author a good 50 pages to live up to the blurb (which is what would have hooked me enough to buy it), sink that hook in my mouth, and reel me in. (Which is kind of a moot point anyway, since I’m going to finish it.)
Genre, let me show u it
I am bored with the below discussion (but don’t let me rain on your parade, so carry on). However, I do need to use it as the springboard for what’s on my ADHD mind today: What, precisely, defines a genre?
We’re very specific in romance. Got an email yesterday from my newest BFF (kidding! but the offer’s open!) who said, “I know you don’t write romance…” Well, yeah, I do. It’s just got so much other STUFF in it that it can’t be classified, which is why I’m publishing it myself. In fact, it’s got THREE (count ’em, 1, 2, 3) full-length romances going on at the same time all woven together (which is why it’s going to top 700 pages and who-knows-how-many megabytes). And they have sex and there is no fade-to-black and they say the f-word and the c-word. They live a certain political philosophy (some more than others) that will probably be uncomfortable for other types of readers. The story takes place over the course of 5 years and oh, by the way, they’re all in their late 30s and early 40s and wow is that so not part of genre romance.
Genre romance as trailblazer (as usual)
In my wanderings around the ’net, one thing has become perfectly clear to me: However harried and hassled, looked down upon, sneered at, spit toward, and generally disrespected as a valid art form, genre romance (just after science fiction and Cory Doctorow) seems to be at the leading edge of the ebook revolution.
<donning pimp hat>
Read more
I rode this train for so long…why?
I have a buncha novels on my hard drive that have been sitting around collecting dust since, oh, 1990 some time, I guess. In ’93 I wrote one that got me an agent another that year that got me a contract—before they were shut down (because, according to the rumor at the time [get this] it was making too much money and it had been created to take a loss for tax purposes) (remember Kismet? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?); one in ’95 that got me an early-Saturday-morning phone call from Harlequin to pleasepleaseplease overnight the manuscript; and a fourth novel in ’98 that got me a different agent.