Jane Litte's Blog, page 1038

DA/SBTB Bestseller List

Week ending August 17, 2011

Conors Way by Laura Lee Guhrke Amazon | nook | Sony | Kobo Spiders Bite by Jennifer Estep Amazon | nook | Sony | Kobo Everything I Know about Love I Learned from Romance Novels by Sarah Wendell Amazon | nook | Sony | Kobo Baby I'm Yours by Susan Andersen Amazon | nook | Sony | Kobo Captured by the Highlander by Julianne MacLean Amazon | nook | Sony | Kobo Once a Princess by Johanna Lindsey Amazon | nook | Sony | Kobo Swept off Her Feet by Hester Browne a

The No Name Tablets and Customer Confidence

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Why buy a Nook Color at $249 or a Kindle Tablet at $250 when you could buy a Lenovo IdeaPad running Android for $199?  Lenovo has announced that it will sell at an Android tablet for $199.  It has a 7″, 1024×600, capacitive touchscreen and runs on a single-core processor.  There is 8 GB of onboard storage and two cameras.  There is WiFi connectivity. It will have access to the entire Android Marketplace which includes Nook and Kindle apps; Gmail; web browsers; music streaming; games; and...

September Kindle Winner

Remember when I said that we would give one ebook reader away a month in thanks for people using the Amazon affiliate link?  In August, we gave it away to a commenter in a particular thread, but in September, the device would go to a commenter who participated in any of the threads during the month of August.   There were 3,462 comments left at Dear Author in the month of August. I deleted all the ones made by DA folks, all the trackbacks, and that left us with a little under 3,000 comments. ...

What Jane's Been Reading, week ending August 15

Lord of the Abyss by Nalini Singh. This is a December release. It's a full fledged fairy tale with an ugly heroine (described as having a hook nose, walks with a limp, and a misshapen body) and a somewhat virginal hero. He's been Lord of the Abyss for as long as he can remember and has had no woman in that time. I read no other books in the series and wasn't lost at all. I was disappointed in a reveal at the end and that marred my enjoyment of the overall story. Full review to come in late...

What Jayne is reading/watching in early September

Courting the Enemy by Renee Ryan – I liked the first book in this inspie WWII series but even 1/3 of the way through this one still hadn't got off the ground for me. When I read a book about espionage and spies during wartime, I expect some action. Perhaps I didn't wait long enough but the part I did read was all multiple pages of characters wondering about each other followed by boring dialogue then more think, think, think time. The final nail in the coffin was a scene in which the heroine ...

First Page: Unnamed Historical Romance

Welcome to First Page Saturday. Individual authors anonymously send a first page read and critiqued by the Dear Author community of authors, readers and industry others. Anyone is welcome to comment. You may comment anonymously.

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Coastal Maine

May 1851  

The scent of the sea wafting in through the tavern's open window did little to drive out the stale odor of unwashed tables and floors, and even less to dispel the equally stale aroma of the unwashed men at the table by the door.

One of the...

REVIEW: Canyons of the Night by Jayne Ann Krentz

Dear Ms. Krentz:

My favorite thing about your books is the interaction of your main characters and your dry wit that seeps through the dialogue.  "Canyons of the Night" is set in the same world as the Jayne Castle series that involves glowing green alien artifacts, rezzed amber, and dust bunnies.  The idea behind this world is that there are different talents out there – individuals who have extrasensory skills.  Charlotte Enright, for example, can tune an artifact so that it harmonizes with t...

Sunita reports from Bouchercon 2011

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Despite reading romance and other genre fiction for decades, I've never been to a writer or reader convention. I don't have aspirations to write genre fiction, and I travel enough to meetings and conference for the day job. But when a convention comes right to my front doorstep, it's hard to resist. Bouchercon is a readers and writers convention for the mystery genre. It's a fairly big event, lasting three and a half days. The panels are set up differently than I'm used to, although this may ...

Friday Midday Links: Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation Responds to DeGaying YA claims

Joanna Stampfel Volpe was allowed to use the blog of former agent, Colleen Lindsey, to respond to the claims made by authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith that they were asked to make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation. The authors stated that they felt that this was an industry wide epidemic. Malinda Lo, an author of a series that features a lesbian protagonist added a post with charts! and graphs! to show even...

Friday Film Review: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum

[image error]A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)

Genre: musical, slapstick comedy

Grade: B-

"Forum," yet another old favorite of mine, hasn't weathered the years quite as well as others but is still good for some laughs once it gets going. It's based on a Broadway production of the same name and is definitely a product of its times. It's slightly bawdy and 60s sexist, runs towards slapstick and physical comedy and features a grubby Rome that presages the recent HBO series.

I'm going to...