My world is a'rockin'

Yes, I know, it’s been a Very Long Time since I updated. This will go down as the Year of the Infrequent Blogging. I have been a lot more active on Twitter. I blame my IPad. It’s ever so much smaller and easier to hold. I can’t believe I’m even thinking this, but my desk top computer seems to becoming almost obsolete.

The good news is I now have two case managers again. That was a long haul without any. I had to take on a greater role of responsibility than I was comfortable with. So now I don’t have that role and I’m happy about that
The bad news is now I have two case managers again. That means they keep me hopping between the two of them. I love being busy, but I was getting the occasional blogging done when I wasn’t busy.

But onto the topic of the day. EReading and EBooks. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m on the slow side in discovering some of the features of my IPad. There was a follow-up article to the Connie Brockway story I mentioned previously in which she informs them that she will be an author through some Amazon Program and her books would only be available through Kindle. Bummer I though since I have a Kobo. But I was messing around with the IPad and low and behold there was an app for Kindle!! Well it’s now on my IPad along with the Kobo app too.

So, you are asking? What’s the big deal? Well, let me tell you!! AOUTHORS ARE PUTTING THEIR BACKLISTS ON EITHER KINDLE OR SMASHWORDS. This means older books that I haven’t been able to locate since UBS’s don’t take books previous to a certain publishing year. Readers have still been able to get them for as little as 1cent, but then it costs $10 for shipping – per book! So that doesn’t make it very cost effective to buy a book that way. But now, there are more and more author backlists popping up.

For example, at the moment I’m reading a very old Marsha Canham book, Bound by the Heart that I got at Smashwords – FOR FREE! And for the shallow part of me, it’s a gorgeous cover. I’ve been a long time Marsha Canham fan and mourned with her other fans when she retired. But I didn’t even know she had written this book and another swashbuckling pirate adventure book, The Wind and the Sea. Do you know how exciting that was to discover these two books? Not only that there were such books, but the fact that they available, and one of them for free?!?! I don’t have the words to express my excitement about this find. And even more exciting is the fact that in this new world of ebooks, Ms. Canham is considering coming out of retirement. It seems one of the big reasons she retired is NY wouldn’t publish the books she wanted to write and rather than compromise, she quit.

I’ve also purchased ebooks by Miriam Minger first published many years ago now. I have one book by this author and I can’t remember it, but at the price you can find the ebooks, I don’t consider it a loss even if they are terrible.

Another author I highly recommend that are now available in eversion is Alexis Harrington. I have just about every one of her books already but for those newer to romance, who are looking for emotional what I call Americana type settings, well check out and get them as ebooks!! Theresa Weir is another author whose books may be hard to find but I’ve seen in Smashwords. I just finished a reread of Amazon Lily that I purchased through them and it was wonderful – the third time around. My print copy is pretty battered with pages falling out and rips and tears in the cover. See, that’s another plus to authors rereleasing their back list in eform. We don’t have to worry about pages falling out.

As previously touched on, there are a number of authors who gave up writing romance I think because the publishers refused to publish what they wanted to write and some of them are well loved authors for me; Marsha Canham, I think that is one of the reasons Theresa Weir switched genres and now writes suspense as Anne Frasier. Another wonderful author who left the world of romance due in part I think to lack of publisher support is Laura Leone, the author of one of my favourite books Fallen From Grace. This one as well as Fever Dreams, another great book are available as ebooks. I would love to see these become good sellers and have her write a romance or two again. When I was at the RWA conference last year, one of my favourite authors, Candice Proctor was there signing – or was it the year before – anyway, she has left the romance genre and is writing historical mystery though there is a romance theme running through her series of books written under CH Harris. I asked if she would ever write straight romance again and she said one of the reasons she left was ‘second verse, same as the first’ the big name publishers didn’t want to publish what she wanted to write in that genre. She didn’t say no, she would never write romance again. But as with other authors I’ve loved and lost, I would be over the moon if they were to return to their roots once in a while.

And as if all this hasn’t got me kicking my heels in joy, I’ve been discovering some great books I wanted to get a while ago from epublishers and then kind of forgot about since I didn’t have a reading device. But now they are available through both Kobo and Kindle. I have added a number of them.

I know I resisted at first, but I gotta say, in the past little while, ereading has rocked my reading world like nothing has before. And I’m liking it! Previously unavailable books at incredible prices?? What could be better?