Happy news! In addition to Barbara Vey’s Beyond Her Book blog, Publishers Weekly will have a romance review section. You can read more about it here.

Interested in trying out a Kindle before buying it? You can now find it at Best Buy, Staples and Target

More e-reader prices are dropping. Border’s Kobo reader is $129 and the super-low-end Aluratek Libre reader is now going for $99.99, down from $120. These are the lower end products, so check reviews.

Bestselling writer Daniel Silva is following Janet Evanovich’s lead and looking for a new publisher.

“What’s driving all of this is the growing realization by authors that their next deal probably won’t be as good as their last. Dealmakers say publishers aren’t stepping up for auctions the way they once did, and nobody wants to overpay.”

Jane Friedman advises agents adapting to change not to blink. Good advice!

Feeling depressed about the industry? This should make you feel better. Scott William Carter lists 10 reasons there’s never been a better time to be a fiction writer.

In Italy, books and the film industry go together.

…the Rome Film Festival’s Business Street mart is setting up a new section called Industry/Books, proving it has a good read of Italian industry needs.
In Italy, according to recent research from Italian publishers’ org AIE, 27% of pics produced are adaptated from tomes that are increasingly becoming the basis for high-profile films — think Saverio Costanzo’s upcoming “The Solitude of Prime Numbers.”

Anyone thinking of booking a flight to Italy? You could sell a book, have it made into a movie (Eat, Pray, Lover), deduct it from your taxes, and eat great food.

The last time I posted I missed this Huffington Post piece with Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner speaking about the NYTimes reviews. Here’s Jennifer:

“I’d love it if the Times actually “celebrated” my genre, but at this point I’d happily settle for the paper merely acknowledging it. As it stands, thrillers and mysteries and speculative fiction can get daily reviews, or considered in the NYTBR round-ups. Chick lit gets ignored, unless it gores one of the paper’s sacred cows (note to self: don’t mess with Anna Wintour!). Romance gets ignored completely…and that, I think, is the most damning argument about gender bias at the Times. How can anyone claim the paper plays fair when genre fiction that men read gets reviewed but genre fiction that women read doesn’t exist on the paper’s review pages? It would be as if the paper’s film critics only reviewed tiny independent fare and refused to see so much as a single frame of a romantic comedy, or if the music critics listened to Grizzly Bear and refused to acknowledge the existence of Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. How seriously would a reader take a critic like that?”

Timing is everything, according to Eric at Pimp My Novel, especially when to put your books on the shelves.

This is old news already (9 days ago), but good news, and a great way to end this week’s post. Leah Hultenshmidt from Dorchester is joining Sourcebooks, which has become one of the top publishers in the romance genre.

In an interview at 1st Turning Point, Dorchester Editor Leah Hultenschmidt says, “Authors who have a strong network of contacts in the romance and bookselling community definitely have a leg up when submitting. The more friends you have to help spread the word, the wider your potential audience.”

This is one reason our WF chapter is so valuable. By the support we give each other and the genre, we’re affirming that there’s a market for women’s fiction.

Steve Jobs: 7 Lessons from a Marketing Genius by Carmine Gallo is a great blog on marketing any product. Books are a product! One of the 7 lessons is creating a “Twitter-friendly headline.” According to Gallo, when Jobs “introduced the MacBook Air in January, 2008, he said that it is simply, ‘The world’s thinnest notebook.’” Simple and powerful!

Looking for an agent? Writer’s Digest has a list of 24 Agents Who Want Your Work. 11 of the 24 are looking for women’s fiction.

Anyone thinking of querying a BookEnds agent should wait until the end of January. Jessica Faust and Kim Lionetti are taking a query break. On her blog, Jessica says says she stopped taking queries in the beginning of October. Since she began her hiatus, “there’s at least an extra hour in every day to work with my clients, get my office organized or even, on those rare evenings, put my feet up and read something I don’t have to. More then that though, it’s been a really nice mental break for me.”

If You Build It, They Won’t Come: A Guide to Author Websites is a GREAT article on websites. It gives percentages of what readers want in a website. And on how a website helps sell books. Did you know “Book shoppers who had visited an author website in the past week bought 38% more books, from a wider range of retailers, than those who had not visited an author site”? Neither did I, until I read the article.

Librarians visit websites, too, according to Susan Gibberman, Head of Reader Services, Schaumburg Township District Library and RWA’s 2008 Librarian of the Year. In her Romance University blog, she gives the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly about querying librarians.

She adds that library patrons can request books from librarians. I’ve done that with The Lost Recipe of Happiness by Barbara O’Neal (aka Barbara Samuel) and The Last Will of Moira Leahy by Therese Walsh. In both cases, I brought the book to the library and actually put it in the acquisitions librarian’s hands so she could read the first pages for herself.