Please join me in welcoming blogger, reader and story collector, Jane Litte to Debbie's Book Bag today. Jane is the creator of DearAuthor.com. Her collection of stories Agony/Ecstasy: Original Stories of Agonizing Pleasure/Exquisite Pain is on sale now. It is flip book and provides a paper experience you can't find in digital media. The publisher is providing one copy of Jane's book for giveaway, see details at the end of the post.
The name Dear Author came from a fluke. We wanted to name it Dear Reader, after the reader letters at the beginning and end of many romance books, but dearreader.com was taken. In a flurry of emails and checking with the domain name service, I discovered that Dear Author.com was free and that was the birth of the site name and, of course, the site name informed the way we drafted our reviews. Overtime, the name became both controversial and unique. It set us apart from other review sites but caused some consternation that the letter was addressed directly to the author. But all our reviews are conversation starters with readers. We know that readers are all different and what one reader might love another reader might not.
The anthology, Agony/Ecstasy, is kind of a natural extension of the blog. Some of what we do at Dear Author is what Deb does here and that is try to highlight books that we really love.
The concept of the anthology was that sex on its edges is both full of pain and pleasure. It was an idea that Berkley came to me with because they had already had success with a very early Berkley Heat novel called Master/Slave which was also a flip book. People really enjoy the flip aspect and in an increasingly digital reading world, giving readers something different in paper that can't really be replicated in digital makes sense.
When I read erotic romance, I respond to a balance of physical and emotional and if it doesn't contain both, I come away disappointed. When I was selecting the stories, I was looking for that right balance. You can imagine how tough that is for authors in just a short space when it usually takes ten times that for a reader to feel fulfilled.
I also tried to pick books that pushed at the limits of my own comfort zone. I knew that this publication would be read (and purchased!) by people other than myself and the twenty authors. It was important for the volume to have diversity in tone, setting, genre, and sexual orientation. There were some good stories that I ended up not including because I felt that I had already the right number of stories. For example, I think that there are three femdom stories in the collection and truly there could have been five or six because of the quality of the submissions but I figured that having a quarter of the stories femdom oriented would be tiresome for the readers. Given that this is my first time at the selection rodeo, I may have done it all wrong. I'm really looking forward to feedback, both good and bad. One reviewer said that some stories were awesome and some were terrible. I think most readers will have that response and I can't help but think, because all readers are different, that the selection of awesome and terrible will differ greatly.
I hope you enjoy it.
GIVEAWAY DETAILS:
~ You must be a GFC or E-mail follower to participate.
~ US and Canadian Addresses only (Publisher Request)
~ The deadline to enter this giveaway is Midnight EST December 29th.
1. Please leave a comment for Jane on THIS post with some feedback about the flip book idea, her website, DearAuthor.com or ask a question about something that interests you about her guest post.
2. Please fill out the FORM.
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