Someone mentioned this to me via email. Torstar Corporation, Harlequin's parent company, is in really bad shape (or so I'm told - quick check on Google shows a news article mentioning they are $585.9 million dollars in debt back in September 2009), so clearly Ha-Ho is an effort to keep the money rolling. So, if Ha-Ho ends up getting ditched and Harlequin faces massive layoffs and such, will those Harlequin I Got Published With Integrity authors be happy if *they* lose their editors and get dropped as a result? Is having to suffer the presence of Ha-Ho really that terrible, especially when, like other vanity lines, Ha-Ho books won't "contaminate" bookshops alongside those "real" books?

I don't know what to say. Money versus, ahem, artistic integrity. When times are hard, I guess the choice is never that easy. What do you think?

Maybe it's the result of back-to-back wanky blog circuses like LAMBDA, RaceFail, Piracy, and now Harlequin Horizons, but I'm starting to become wary of hit-and-run commentators. Flame Warriors define online xenophobes as old-timers who mistrust newcomers in the playing field, and I think I'm turning into just that.

It's not that I don't welcome new blood, I do. But I'm tired of seeing all those dozens of new faces that show up only to screech and rail about topics du jour like race and piracy, only to vanish when topic goes back to romance novels. My reaction to these people is pretty much, "Look, you don't read romance, and judging from your tone, you probably don't think much of romance novels, so why are you telling romance readers how the genre should be like?" I couldn't help but to remember the handles of a few Angry Livejournal Grrrls who showed up on blogs across the romance community to screech and rail that we are all racist homophobic transphobic privileged white people, but now that the dust has settled, they are nowhere to be seen. I wonder what they have read lately. Are they even reading anything other than entries on Fandom Wank? Have they read the most recent interracial stories to support their Love The Races campaign or are they back to writing hot slash and snickering on Fandom Wank? Hmm.

No doubt that some issues are universal. But these people are like strangers who burst into one's house to scream at the owner all kinds of things, only to then remove themselves from the house in self-righteous indignation, leaving the owner to wonder what the hell all that noise was about.

At any rate, it will be nice if those indignant new faces that show up only to rail, bitch, and moan will stay around once the fun is over to show us their happier side. The romance community doesn't bite... much, so why don't they stay around a little longer?

Even if we assume that the early sales estimation is underestimated by a significant margin, it's still official: Kris Allen is the lowest selling Idol winner so far, with first week sales of 70k - 80k.

Ouch.

Don't gloat, Sparkle Cows. Adam's singles have fared worse than Kris's, so his album sales won't be any much better. The American Idol glitter is truly over.

Let's be honest with ourselves now - not many agent or author will stop sending stuff to Harlequin now that they have lost the, ahem, prestigious RWA recognition thingy. I also doubt the higher-ups at Harlequin are losing sleep over this.

But given that losing HQN as part of their stable means that the RITA nominations are going to be much shorter and everyone would have to go back to bed by 9pm as a result, how long do you think before RWA comes up with a new rule that allows them to welcome back Harlequin into the fold? Two months? A year?

This song is actually better than anything I've heard so far from Adam Lambert and Kris Allen. Oh god, I'm going to kill myself now for admitting that.

Here's the Mandarin version. Don't know who's the singer though - does anyone know?

Yes, Harlequin Horizons has plenty of dodgy issues associated with it, but looking at the forums and blogs out there, it seems to me like there are a whole bunch of folks who have never even heard of "self publishing" until now but are eager nonetheless to join in the bitch fest. Let me try to clear a few things up.

The Yog's Law thing, money flows towards the author should not be applied to self publishing, because that is a law devised to allow authors to weed out unscrupulous publishers. Applying that law to self-publishing is like, I don't know, going to a meat-eaters' convention to screech that meat is bad. Of course money flows away from the author in self-publishing - that's the point of the whole thing! If you are opposed to the idea of the self-publishing model, fine, but that doesn't mean the whole self-publishing model is in itself an invalid one. Tar the unscrupulous vanity publishers, in other words, but please keep in mind that self-publishing is not useless or unwholesome.

For example, self-publishing can actually make you more profit if you already have a platform to sell those books due to the fact that you get to keep most of the profits from each sale. If you are an expert on a subject matter, constantly giving seminars to a full house audience whole year long, it makes sense to self-publish your materials and sell them to the audience of your seminars. If you have a work that is of limited marketability due to subject matter - such as a book about the local flora and fauna in your district - it makes sense to self-publish that thing so that you can give a copy to people who would like to have one.

Someone said this somewhere, I can't remember who (sorry), but I agree with him: self-publishing is right for you if you can sell those books on your own. Anyone else who can't shouldn't splurge on big money for such a venture.

Yes, there are plenty of rubbish in the self-published market. Still, there are also plenty of genres where self-publishing is used often - tabletop RPG splatbooks, GLBT, and horror come to mind - and have been used by authors in those genres for as long as the mainstream market had given up on them.

Self-publishing via Harlequin Horizons may be a bad idea, I don't know (I personally believe that it is a bad idea to publish any mainstream fiction yourself unless you have means to sell those books on your own or you have a marketing team on the standby), but that doesn't mean the self-publishing model is OMG EVIL. Stop acting like every self-publisher is PublishAmerica. Such hysteria only exposes the ignorance of those people making those dramatic claims.

PS: Can those guys at least make the Harlequin Horizons website prettier and tidy up the content? There are some sentences with missing words and the whole thing looks so amateurish. How about a professional-looking website for a change?

Remember when I blogged about that big Christian publisher Thomas Nelson partnering with AuthorSolutions to start a vanity imprint using the pretty well-known imprint name of that Christian publisher?

On top of starting epress Carina (coming soon), now Harlequin is starting Harlequin Horizons in a partnership, also with AuthorSolutions.

The way I see it, such a development is an inevitable outcome of the increasing popularity and ease of pay-to-play publishing. I'm not surprised to see another publisher follow suit in Thomas Nelson's footsteps, I'm just surprised this happened so soon. I'm trying to be optimistic here, so I'm hoping that this means more self-published genre works like romance for me to read.

Now, if only they can lower the prices of those darned POD trade paperbacks...

Time For Miracles peaked at #50 on Billboard Hot 100, and this week, For Your Entertainment couldn't even break the Hot 100 (it's at 109). This is despite the mass re-purchases of the iTunes singles, if the discussions on the insane Sparkle Cow forums are anything to go by. If the singles can't sell, things don't look good for the album. This is quite embarrassing because so far Adam's publicity gear is moving at twice the speed of poor Kris's, including AMA appearances, individual photoshoots and interviews on Detail and Rolling Stone, and celebrity endorsements. I hope Kris is feeling validated now, heh.

To put things in perspective, Adam's two singles have so far each sold worse than Kris Allen's single, while both men are dismally selling behind the two Davids of the last season.

Time for AI to take a powder, methinks.

I'd probably be updating the website after the weekend. Not feeling too well at the moment, and I've known from experience that I'd make the most embarrassing grammatical and spelling mistakes when I'm under medication.

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4254191&postcount=49

Wow, it looks like third party sellers take 60% of the sales, leaving the epublisher and the author to divide over the remaining 40%. 60%! I see some ebooks selling for $1.99 on third party sellers, so that leaves $0.80 for epublisher.  I guess this is why if you love your epublished authors, you buy straight from the epublisher...

We all know MM rakes in the dough. 

So, my question is: why are there currently only Torquere, Amber Allure, Dreamspinner Press, and MLR Press specializing in MM stuff when there are like, what, one hundred epublishers trying to do that jack of all trade thing?

Is there some kind of stigma associated with publishing only MM stuff? Or is the money isn't really that good compared to the hype? Because I'm curious as to why nobody is trying to set up more MM publishing houses. Even Carina, the upcoming player, is doing that jack of all trades thing, but I suppose that is more to Harlequin's executive decision than anything else.

If the money in MM is really that good and I have the chance of set up an epublisher in order to make a profit, I think I'd set up an MM epublisher, but maybe that's just me.

Taking away the hype, I managed to learn the following, although of course these are subject to change as they haven't opened their doors yet.

• They are offering 30% royalties... gross, I believe, which I know some authors are claiming to be on the low side for epublishers with no advance model. To compare: Harlequin's current ebooks have a 6% royalty rates, but of course those authors have advances. And another point of comparison - Spice Brief authors get advances. 
• Pays twice a year. Some established epublishers pay monthly.
• Carina is going to be very separate from Harlequin, so do not bank your hopes on getting Harlequin readers to cross over to Carina. Also, sales of Harlequin ebooks are low enough as it is, so the Harlequin reader base is not ebook-friendly in the first place. Carina is going to be starting from scratch to compete with the big girls for the slice of the pie. 

I'm actually intrigued by this development because this is the first time a big publisher is putting some dough into a true epublishing venture. If it succeeds, I wonder what will happen. Will Pocket buy over or become a major shareholder in Ellora's Cave? Will Kensington do the same with Samhain? (To me, it makes sense to buy/have a partnership with established epublishers with a steady fanbase and author stable instead of starting from scratch, but that's just me.) I'll be watching this one, that's for sure.

It's called gamebooks, actually, because Choose Your Own Adventure is a trademarked brand name. I review gamebooks, but I have to say, I have never read an adult version that involves sex, and it looks like erotic gamebooks are also coming back in fashion. I know Jody Wallace had one with Red Sage Press, and now Carina Press is looking for such books.

Personally, I'm not sure what to make of it. Will I be required to roll die to determine the hero's sexual prowess? Will the heroine's ability to seduce the hero dependent on a roll of dice against her Seduction score? If the heroine hits enough Skanky Whore points, does this mean she fails in her quest to snag a hero and instead is forced to eke out the rest of her life as a Skanky Whore? Will she be automatically deified if her Martyr Score reaches a certain value?

Erotic/romance gamebooks. Interesting.

What do you think?



ETA: here's another one!

We all know that heroines are subjected to a more stringent code of behavior than heroes. The hero sleeps with the entire cheerleading squad, he's a woobie who hasn't found the right woman to reform him yet. The heroine sleeps with two men, neither of which are her true loves, and she's a whore. And so forth.

But one thing I noticed lately (yeah, I can be a bit slow) is how it seems acceptable for romance heroes to neglect the children from their previous marriage. You have read romances, I'm sure, where the hero is either too busy drinking and whoring while his children either run wild or remain silent in some kind of traumatized despair... until the heroine steps in to become everyone's mother and bring happiness back to their lives. But heroines who are stuck with children or stepchildren from previous marriages are always doting and loving types who often forgo career and everything else to raise these children on their own. The message is quite disquieting, especially if this happens in a contemporary romance - real men don't need to bother with kids, while real women must be perfect mothers. 

I wonder why this is the case. Is it because taking care of the kids is still considered the woman's responsibility in this genre? 

 Linking to Datalounge is a tricky affair, so I'll just mention that at the moment there is a thread called "When Did Severe Plastic Surgery Become a Problem in Hollywood?" and it's an interesting read. I've never thought of it, but I think these guys are right.

Plastic surgery has been around forever in Hollywood, but those who did go for it seem to look far more "natural" and attractive than those who go for it today. Compare, say, Jaclyn Smith and Michelle Pfeiffer to the plastic and unnatural looks of those lion-like women with big puffed-up lips, scary sharp cheekbones, and such. It did seem like in the past you want to enhance or improve aspects of your face while today it's more about warping your face into something else altogether. Is it because there are too many hack plastic surgeons around or is it because those scary-looking enhancements are considered sexy nowadays?