This is is Part 1 of a series.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent rash of images on Facebook and elsewhere, of gorgeous women, who are in no way, shape or form, slender.  There’s a motivational poster out there called “Thick women” that has four not-slender women in various sexy poses, that encourages people to celebrate women in all their sizes.

It’s a laudable sentiment, and I encourage it.  Women should be appreciated for their inherent beauty, regardless of their current size.

BUT

Heroines in romance novels aren’t “thick”.  Every Hollywood A-List actress you could name is not “thick”.

When you read romance novels, do you ever image the heroine to be carrying the same excess weight as you?

I know I don’t.  The heroine is always the perfect weight I have never been.  She is my mirror image perfected.  She is me as I’ve never managed to achieve.

There was a short-lived attempt to portray “realistic” heroines, about fifteen years ago.  The Rubenesque romance line lived a short life and died quietly, unremarked.  These days, any romance heroine who is less than perfect is usually only found in chick lit or romances with a high comedic element, like Bridget Jones’ Diary, where the excess weight is part of the humour … as pathos.

We don’t like our heroines to be less than perfect.  I don`t believe Hollywood will be allowing their actors to gain weight any time soon, because the box office receipts will drop as the actors’ weights soar.

For the same reason, I don’t believe I would be willing to experiment with an overweight heroine in one of my romance novels.  I’m sure it would tank, just as my novels that feature non-Caucasian heroines do.

So while we’re saying we should celebrate the “real” shape of women, why do we cling to this perfect – and slender — image in books and movies?  I know I do it.

Next:  Slender Is A Status Symbol

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In the swirling whirliegig that is publishing, these days, indie authors and indie publishing is the newly-emerging cottage industry…or is it the way of things to come?

I get to wrap up Indie Author month at Vampire Romance Books with an overview of Indie Publishing today. Have your say. After all, indie publishing is an open source project.

And if you scroll back through Rhonda’s archives, you’ll also get a month’s worth of introductions to some great indie authors, too.

Cheers,

Tracy

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I actually am bummed at not going to RT.  It’s my second year I’ve missed.  Money is the primary issue – the conference is always thousands of miles from me, and it’s an expensive sucker to attend in the first place.  But I have a ton of friends I only ever get to see at RT and the conference pretty much stopped being business about five years ago.  It’s more of a week of parties and talking.

And you have to understand…parties, drinking and talking isn’t something I do a whole hell of a lot of, most of the time.  In order to get books written and published, I do the day job, write, and get some necessary chores completed in between. And sleep.

I have a few non-writing friends — they understand my pecularities.  Most of them are readers, who devour books and movies by the cartload, and get the obsession.  But my real friends…ah, well, most of them I met, or met in the flesh, at RT or some other conference, and it is there that actually going to a party and drinking and talking starts to make sense.

So, I’m hanging out at The Romance Studio over the weekend, to take off some of the sting.  TRS are giving away prizes (including one of my books), and there are dozens more authors (who also aren’t going to RT) who will be chatting as well.

Come on over.

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I’ve tweaked the layout and added more titles to the still growing list of recommended MMF romances.

This will be an on-going project, of course.  There’s new titles hitting the shelves every day — probably more than ever now, thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey.  And no, I’m not being facetious.  If you’d like to see me witheringly ironic, point me toward the growing number of “literary” blogs that are critiquing Fifty and making remarks about the sex in the story along the lines of how new a concept it is to put BDSM inside a romance for mainstream readers.  That makes my teeth gnash…

I’m starting to wonder now if this list of MMF romance titles is a project I really should have started at all.  I underestimated the size and effort involved.  But now I have started, I won’t ditch it –  there’s enough traffic blips on the list to make me think it’s of use to readers.

But…I don’t mind help!  If you know of any 4 or 5 star rated MMF romance (and they really do have to be MMF – MFM doesn’t cut it), do let me know!  I’m still working my way through Amazon and Goodreads, so it’ll be a good long while before I catch up on the backlists yet.  However, if there’s a book you would like to see on the list now rather than later, speak up!

_______________________

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As an author, I’ve found the phenomenal success of the “vanilla BDSM” novella, Fifty Shades of Grey, at times either bewildering, astonishing, or encouraging.  At all times I have been curious to know why that book, rather than the staggering number of erotic romances — including some very good BDSM novels written by actual members of the BDSM community — that have graced the e-shelves for nearly ten years.

But if the publishing industry had ever figured out why one book breaks through to the top of a best seller list and not others, then it would have been able to ensure every authors’ income for the five hundred years since moveable type was invented.

The great thing about the success of Fifty Shades of Grey is that like Twilight and Harry Potter before it, it will open the general reading population’s minds and tastebuds to erotic romance, like Twilight and Harry taught everyone to gobble up anything to do with the paranormal.  Not everyone will find the BDSM in Fifty to their taste:  You are either hardwired for pain/pleasure or you aren’t.  But readers may turn to the other erotic elements in the novel as more appealing if the BDSM doesn’t do it for them.

And erotic romance will find a massive, new audience.  A mainstream one.

There’s plenty of titles for them to explore.  Thanks to ebooks, where erotic romance first found traction, there’s nearly fifteen years of titles still “in print,” and available, that have never left the virtual shelves.

But…some of those really early titles are likely to be disappointing, if these new readers are looking for hot, like hot hot, because the earlier titles aren’t as hot as what’s being produced today.

Romances in general are getting spicier by the year, to the point where what was once considered erotic, even ten years ago, is today’s average romance novel.

Consider this sliding scale.  If this is what was “hot” back in 2000:

I published my first erotic romance in 2003, and it was considered an averagely hot romance novel.  The hottest novels were really pushing the envelope, dealing with (gasp!) anal sex — Lora Leigh’s infamous hot August Brothers series were flying off the shelves at this time, for example.

Around 2003/4 erotic romance exploded all over the romance industry and really broke through in mainstream romance readers’ consciousness — but only within the romance industry for now — thanks to TV series like Sex and the City.  And suddenly everyone was writing erotic romance, or publishing it.  And everyone was clamouring for hot, hotter, hottest.

Spin through the years to 2012 as the envelope for “hot” got pushed harder and harder.  And here we sit:

What the romance industry considers “erotic romance” has shifted far to the right.  Just graphic sex won’t do it anymore.  Two years ago, Ellora’s Cave set the standard with its authors that all sex scenes had to include some sort of anal penetration of the heroine in order to be considered acceptably hot enough for Ellora’s Cave, which meant that standard MF sex had fallen off the radar as “erotic romance” as far as Ellora’s Cave were concerned, and tumbled into the merely “sensual romance” domain, regardless of how graphically it was described.

On the other hand, publishers of what used to be considered non-erotic romances have been steadily pushing their standards to meet reader demands, and now what they are releasing looks a lot like what was first being produced as erotic romance ten or twelve years ago, but is now labelled merely as “spicy romances”…and is, according to today’s standards.  Yet there are erotic romance publishers out there releasing exactly the same sort of novels, but under the “erotic romance” label.

This year, The Romance Studio did away with their “Erotic” category altogether in their CAPAs (Cupid and Psyche Awards), and combined the categories together.  There is no longer, for example, a CAPA for Best Erotic Paranormal and a separate one for Best Paranormal.  There is just a single CAPA for Best Paranormal.  This is a telling statement from one of the most influential review houses in the romance industry.  They clearly consider the erotic distinction to be no longer useful when romances in general have shifted ground so much to include elements of erotic romance.

In the next few years, as erotic romance boundaries keep sliding, I believe that erotic romances will shift completely to the right and become a highly specialized, tiny (but not as tiny as it used to be thanks to books like Fifty Shades of Grey) niche market catering to select readers with exotic tastes: BDSM, extreme sexual situations, and more.  The rest of us will enjoy our romances with frank open-door sex, menage, MMF and more, but it will all be one market again:  Romances.

Then we’ll be left with the pleasureable problem of sorting out which romances we want to read, out of the thousands now hitting the market each month, instead of the merely hundreds it used to be.

It’s a tough ol’ world…

___________________________

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As I’m quietly and steadily working my way through Blood Stone, and the weekend started out with an empty email in-tray, and nothing moving on Facebook or anywhere else, I thought this was going to be one of those bulletins where I would have nothing to report, except for progress.

But Sunday, which is usually the day when everything on the Internet falls quieter than the grave, suddenly got busy.

And, I’ve had a small flurry of reader emails with questions about future books that I thought I would answer here, as well as the private answers I gave, in case others were wondering the same thing.

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Bannockburn Binding was nominated for Book Of The Year 2011 by The Romance Reader.  It just manages to scrape in for this honour because it was released on December 13 last year, so it was a great surprise — especially as the book is indie-published.  A nice hats-off.

Now, though, the winner is selected by reader votes.  I’m always reluctant to trawl for reader votes.  There’s so many polls and reader-vote elections out there, and in my category alone there are about twenty books, each with their individual author possibly hounding readers for votes!  So…I’m not begging you to vote.  However, if you have read Bannockburn Binding and really feel you would like to vote for it, you can click here, then scroll down to the erotic paranormal category (about half-way down the page).  Bannockburn Binding is the second book is the category.

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The Royal Talisman received a very nice 4 Star review from Love Romance Passion.

The review itself was short on detail about why the reviewer liked the book so much, but she did like the special features a lot, which was nice.  She also gave Dar Albert, the cover artist, a lovely thumbs up, too.

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From the mailbox:

A reader was anxiously asking if there will be any more books after Byzantine Heartbreak, and another reader/reviewer wants to see Brenden’s story…and what are the release dates.

Yes, there will most definitely be more books in the series.  At this point in time I can’t say how many more, but this is not a simple trilogy, by any means.  I consider the series to be open-ended with ambitious, complex story-lines and character arcs.

Look at the cover montage for the series.  There’s two way to do that:  Place each book cover for the series side by side to build up the montage that way.  Or “cheat” and jump to the series information page to see the full montage spread in one view.  Apart from being awed by Dar Albert’s artistic talents, you’ll also notice there’s a lot of room for a lot more covers on that montage.  I planned it that way. :)

Release Dates

As for release dates…well, that’s one of the joys — and pitfalls — of indie publishing.  The advantages, especially to you the reader, is that I can release these books as fast as I can write and edit them, plus or minus a week or two for formatting and for Dar Albert to build covers (and she’s very fast).   The down side is that it does take time to edit, format and upload to all the various retail sites, and those sites won’t hold or delay a release, nor will they guarantee exactly how long it takes to build a sales page for a book.  So there is no way to predict, for example, the exact date and time a book will appear on the Amazon site, even though I know exactly when I upload it to Amazon.  That part of it is out of my control.  The same applies for all the retail sites — Barnes & Noble, etc.

Therefore, all I can say in regard to a release date for future books in the series is that they will be as soon as I’ve written the books — and I’m a pretty fast writer — and that your best best is to either sign up for my newsletter or sign up for the email version of my RSS feed, so it is delivered to your email in-box.  That way, you’ll get an alert about the release of any books, and won’t miss out.

___

I’ve updated the Recommended MMF Romances list.

I’ve added some more titles, and I rearranged the list into sub-genre groups.

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A reader asked what happened to the Kiss Across Time series, and Kiss Across Chains, the third book in that series, which up and disappeared.

The Time-Crossed Love series was first released under the Teal Ceagh pen name with Ellora’s Cave.  It’s one of my favourite series of all time, and I love and adore Brody and Veris and their extreme alpha-male outlook on life and time.  I was never so happy as I was when I was prompted into writing Kiss Across Swords by readers and reviewers who belly-ached politely asked for more about their histories and…well, just more of them.

I have the third book of the series, Kiss Across Chains, half-written, and ideas for six more in the series.  Like Beloved Bloody Time, this is not going to be a simple trilogy.

But, the first two books of the series remain with Ellora’s Cave for now.  I am working to have the rights returned to me, but until I do, I won’t release the third book in the series.  To do so would only further cement the first two books where they currently sit, and there are things I want to do with the first two books before I release the third (including issue them with uniform covers, expand the first book to make it a longer book, and more.)

So for now, this series must wait in the wings.

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“I wish I could join a board or something and review your books, they are that great.”

There’s two parts to this:  Reviews and discussion boards.

Reviews. 

There are any number of places you can leave a reader review about my books, if you feel moved to do so.  I encourage you like crazy to do this.

As more and more indie authors start publishing more and more books, one of the few ways readers will be able to figure out which are the good books and which are the duds are through other readers’ reviews — and there will be more and more duds:  It’s part of the price we pay for the flood of cheap, great and really interesting reads on the market.

Your review doesn’t have to be perfect prose.  Just a paragraph or two of simple, clear English saying what you thought about the book, and why you did (or didn’t) enjoy it — what made it work for you?  Keep it impersonal (no attacks on the author themselves), and rate the book, and you’re done.

The absolute best place to leave your review is Amazon.  Even if you didn’t buy your book there.  That’s because huge numbers of people research about what book they want to buy next on Amazon, and then they sometimes buy the book elsewhere because they want a different format, or can buy it cheaper elsewhere, or for other reasons.  But they’ll research on Amazon first, because the information about individual books is so thorough and complete.

So you’ll be doing me all sorts of favours by leaving your review about my book on Amazon.

Discussion Boards

Amazon to the rescue again.  Did you know that every single book on Amazon has its own unique discussion board?

If you scroll down to where the general discussion boards start, way down the bottom of the book’s page, just above those board subject lines, there is a live link to the book’s discussion page.  Most of the time (well, all of the time, for my books!  LOL!) the discussion is empty.  But if you want to start a discussion group for a book (anyone’s book), or join it, you’ll find the link to the book’s discussion group right there.  Click on it, and dive in.

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The biggest news of the weekend, and the last to arrive in my in-box, was the brand new cover for Delly’s Last Night.  The cover, another Dar Albert spectacular, is mind-blowing.  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the time to double-click on the covers here on the site, and look at them when they’re at full size or better.  It’s worth it.  Then you really get to appreciate the full stunning detail.  They’re mind-bogglingly beautiful.  And the amazing thing is, Dar builds these covers from scratch.  She creates them out of nothing.  She doesn’t use stock photos except in the background sometimes, when I insist on historical accuracy, or well-known buildings.

Check out the cover for Delly’s Last Night, and click on it to see it at full size.

I stayed up late on Sunday night and formatted the book for release, so now you can buy it, too.  :)

________________________________

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I’m speaking as part of a panel of romance authors giving a talk at the St. Albert Public library tomorrow.  If you’re in the area, stop by and hear what we all have to say about the state of the industry, and linger afterwards to say hello.

Mention you saw this post.  I promise I’ll be tinkled pink.  :)

St. Albert Public Library
5 St. Anne Street
St. Albert  AB T8N 3Z9

Phone 780-418-6622

The panel starts at 3:00 p.m.

Here’s a mudmap just in case you’re not super familiar with that end of the city (I’m not!):

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This post is part of a series.

Part 1: Damn Good Romances
Part II: Romantic Tension
Part III: Romantic Conflict
Part IV: Emotional Intensity
Part V: Heart-Stopping Moments
Part VI: Uncertainty of Outcome
Part VII: Moment of Ultimate Vulnerability
Part VIII: Happy Ever After…For Now

_____________

Emotional Intensity

When I first started writing romance novels, I was still living in Australia.  Everyone writing romance back then seemed to be reading Harlequin Romance and Harlequin Presents books.  We knew them as Mills & Boon novels.  The big sweeping historical romance novels that most American readers grew up reading were unavailable to us.  So when we started writing, we naturally turned to Mills & Boon as the market we wanted to break in to.  It was also a very lucrative market.  There were dozens of authors making very good money indeed writing four books a year for M&B, and many of them were Australian and New Zealand authors.

Back then, Mills & Boon in London had a standard rejection letter which was notorious in writing circles, and universally dreaded by writers just starting to market their work.

The body of the letter — all of it — ran:

“We have considered your novel Wuthering Heights, and although it is well written, we feel it lacks the extra degree of emotional punch for which we look.”

Trying to crack this “emotional intensity” code was the subject of endless working sessions where manuscripts were critiqued to death in search of the answer.

The telling thing about this rejection letter is that it is standard — in other words, it serves to explain the majority of rejections.  This means the majority of manuscripts received do not have enough emotional intensity.

It’s a good demonstration of how important this element is to a romance novel.

Emotional intensity isn’t a single element you can put your finger on, and say “there it is.”  It’s a by-product of a dozen different elements in a romance novel all working together seamlessly, to build up the emotional tension to a fever pitch, then mercilessly holding it there until the endThe bigger elements that contribute to the emotional intensity include:

• The characters
• The plot
• The romantic conflict

To some degree, the setting can also contribute.  Historical romances, for instance, can add to the reader’s sense of emotional intensity, if they’re historical lovers, and the author has done a good job of description and scene setting.  Paranormals, with atmospheric settings, can work the same way.

But settings can also kill off the positive romantic emotional tension, if they’re the wrong sort.  That’s why romantic suspense authors are possibly the most underrated authors in the genre.  They’re constantly juggling hard, gritty storylines against the need to keep the romantic storyline tension wound up tight.  It can be an enormous challenge.

But you will know when the emotional intensity is creeping upwards, because whenever a scene shifts away from the hero(es) and heroine and their problems, and you are mildly annoyed, because you just want to get back to them and see what happens next — that’s emotional intensity at work.

That’s when a romance novel starts to become “unput-downable.”

Next: Heart Stopping Moments

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This post is part of a series.

Part 1: Damn Good Romances
Part II: Romantic Tension
Part III: Romantic Conflict
Part IV: Emotional Intensity
Part V: Heart-Stopping Moments
Part VI: Uncertainty of Outcome
Part VII: Moment of Ultimate Vulnerability
Part VIII: Happy Ever After…For Now

_____________

Romantic Conflict

Romantic Conflict is perhaps one of the most misunderstood functions of a romance novel.  It gets misused by writers and critics.

But when it is used well…wow!  Then you’ve got a romance on your hands that you can’t put down because you simply have to find out how it all turns out.

Because “conflict” sounds like arguing, stress, people at loggerheads, you might be forgiven for thinking that romantic conflict is when the hero and heroine are standing toe-to-toe, going at it over some minor or even imagined slight.  Actually, that’s more a function of romantic tension than anything else, as I pointed out in the last post.

But I suspect many new writers and readers may mistakenly think that aguments, misunderstandings, shouting, and negative confrontations between the hero and the heroine constitute romantic conflict, and that’s why so many romance novels feature high stress scenes like this.  Perhaps this is where the Big Misunderstanding plot originated?

Believe it or not, you can have a hero and heroine perfectly in synch with each other, even madly in love and sublimely getting along, and still have a plot that is highly charged on the romantic conflict meter.

Romeo & Juliet - Leonard di Caprio & Clare Danes

The perfect example:  Romeo and Juliet.  They never had a moment of negativity between them.  They were in love almost from moment one.  Yet that classic plot is still incredibly high in romantic conflict and I’ll explain why in a moment.

So what is Romantic Conflict, if it isn’t characters arguing?

The simplest way to define it is to ask a question.  Romantic Conflict is what is keeping the hero(es) and heroine apart.

What’s stopping them from committing to each other?

As you can see, that question is a fundamental plot and character question, not a petty, “You didn’t put the seat down!…Again!” type of question.  It really digs into the heart of the story.

Can you see why, if romantic conflict is constructed properly, the romance turns into such a humdinger?

It is also why Big Misunderstanding plots are not really strong on romantic conflict, even though they’re favourites that keep turning up, even on the virtual shelves these days.  I suspect they’re more sentimental favourites these days, but writers have to work extra hard to make the story pay off for the reader, because when the hero and heroine can resolve their differences simply by talking to each other, Big Misunderstandings become somewhat strained and superficial when they’re dragged on too long.

If romantic conflict is what is keeping the hero and heroine apart, I’m sure you can already see, thinking about your favourite romance novels, that there are all sorts of things that can keep a couple/group apart.

Generally, a writer focuses on two different types:  external and internal.

External conflict is anything that comes from outsides the hero and heroine.  Forbidding families, interferring friends, lack of money, countries, politics, religion, crime, spies, wars, kings, enemy action, you name it.   Here is where all the conflict for Romeo and Juliet lay.  The two families, the Montagues and the Capulets, were feuding and would have forbidden the pair to be together, period, finito.  That was the sum total of their conflict, and Shakespeare built a classic story that has lasted centuries around this purely external conflict.

Ladyhawke - Rutger Hauer & Michelle Pfeiffer

However, purely external conflict is exceedingly rare these days.  You might find the odd historical romance where the lovers are utterly in love and the world forbids them to be together.  Also, paranormal romance is another genre where such parirings could be forbidden or impossible.  A really good example of that forbidden love is the movie Ladyhawke.

However, the contemporary romance and contemporary circumstances rarely provide stiatuions where anyone would be unable to overcome barriers to love for long.  And if a hero wasn’t determined enough to find a way…how much value as a romance novel hero is he, really?  Romance heroes are supposed to be ardent, determined, and somewhat superhuman.  Love conquers all, even in contemporary romances.  That’s part of the romance novel’s charm.  So a really powerful romance novel needs something more than a family’s wrath to keep a pair apart, these days.

That something is internal conflict.  Internal conflict is just what it sounds like.  It’s barriers and conflict emerging from inside the hero’s and heroine’s own minds and hearts.

The range of reasons and conflicts are endless.  Think of any of your keeper novels.  Pick one.  And ask yourself “What kept them apart?”  You’ll quickly build up your own list of reasons and internal conflicts as you work through your keeper novels and memorable romances.

The art and craft of romance writing is in selecting really strong, realistic internal conflicts for both the hero and the heroine.

There are also external conflicts that can be added to the mix — yes, we’re not done yet!  Family feuds and arranged marriages are not longer barriers to happy love matches in our romance novels anymore — except in historical novels — but even in historical romances, the better ones have strong internal conflicts as well.  But external conflicts are still around and still provide lots of grease to the romance novel mill.

The external conflict that we love to adore these days has changed significantly.  What keeps the hero and heroine apart can be so much fun to write and and read:  military thrillers, paranormal suspense, vampires, urban fantasy, romantic suspense…and the sub-genre plotlines that go along with our romance novels are added to the romantic conflict in a way that makes the romance hum and zing — as far as we, the reader, is concerned.

Even erotic romance adds to the romantic conflict, if the author knows what they’re doing.  The sexual storyline is a perfect opportunity to add to the romantic conflict by introducting more conflict, more tension, more reasons to keep the couple apart romantically, even as they’re twined together between the sheets.   Lora Leigh is a perfect example:  Her couples are always dealing with a sexual issue before the HEA moment.  Often it’s something the hero is demanding of the heroine — anal sex, or an extreme form of BDSM — that they must work through before love is possible.

Can you see, now, how powerful and all-encompassing romantic conflict can be?

Next:  Emotional Intensity

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Every year, All Romance eBooks produces a Trend Analysis that they distribute to all their publishers.

The report is naturally focused upon All Romance eBooks and their position within the industry, but once you sift through that bias, it contains some very interesting information.

I thought I’d share some of the highlights.

 Some buyer highlights

We’re continuing to experience triple digit growth in the U.S. and the bulk of our sales are to U.S. customers. We are currently selling in 202 countries.

Top ten markets: United States, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, India, New Zealand Philippines, Malaysia, and the Netherlands.

Female = 89%

Male = 11%

I find this one very interesting, because I believe it’s not just specific to All Romance eBooks.  I suspect the growth trend they’ve experienced can probably be applied to ebooks in general and romance ebooks in particular, for all ebook retailers.

The sales to the non-US countries is even more interesting, because many of them do not claim English as their primary language, and All Romance eBooks don’t sell foreign language editions.

J.A. Konrath, who is probably one of the loudest champions of indie publishing, has predicted that non-English translations will be one of the primary sources of income for indie authors over the next few years.  All Romance eBook’s sales trend is supportive data for that prediction.

Some bookish highlights

Heat Rating = over 97% of sales are on books rated 3 or higher, of significance is that the 5 and 4 flame sales have see a combined drop of 4% over last year with most of the difference shifting to the 3 flame rating.

This could mean one of two things.

1)  Readers are getting sick of erotic romance and are choosing “tamer” romances once more, or

2)  The definition of “hot” has shifted along the scale so far that what was once considered 5-flames for ARE is now only 3-flames.  The 5-flames is now kink, BDSM, and extreme erotic, while readers who still love their erotic romance are still buying them, they’re just buying 3-flame romances, not 5.

The fact that The Romance Studio have thrown away their “erotic” categories in the CAPA awards this year and melded the erotic and non-erotic all in together would hint that romances are all erotic these days.  Erotic romance is losing its distinction.  “Extreme erotic” is now the uppper end of the scale, while we are simply enjoying “normal” romances.

Despite everything I’ve said here, it is only the books that I label “erotic romance” and put the highest “hot” rating on that sell the best for me, personally.  If I lower the rating or label in the slightest (down to 4-flames for instance), the sales plummet.  My ARE sales figures do not match what All Romance eBooks are reporting, here.

Sales Revenue DRM v Non DRM = 97% was for Non DRM titles for 2011

96% was for Non DRM tittles for Nov & Dec

These figures are misleading.  Can you see the catch?  ARE don’t state how many DRM titles v’s Non-DRM titles are available.  If there is only 1% protected titles available overall, then naturally, the non-DRM titles are going to out-sell the protected titles.    So even bothering to compare from year to year is meaningless.

But, much further down in the report, ARE had this to say about DRM protection:

A special note about DRM, the impact of agency, and piracy.

While ARe supports both the DRM and non-DRM business models, we advocate that publishers refrain from using DRM and provide open access – it’s what our customers overwhelmingly want. We appreciate and understand the concerns expressed about potential revenue loss due to piracy. We believe the best deterrent is to provide customers with easy access to appropriately priced content.

Tens of thousands of DRM titles were removed by what has commonly been referred to as “Agency” publishers in April of 2010. Data from Q1 of 2010 seemed to indicate DRM might have ended up being approximately 12% or more of sales in 2010, as opposed to the 4% that resulted. Although we certainly realized some lost sales due to the decrease in that inventory, data supports the fact that many readers simply found alternate content to interest them and accordingly shifted those purchasing dollars to non-Agency publishers.

The market share of DRM titles decreased further in 2011 to 3%. We attribute this to two factors: the decrease in overall market share of DRM inventory due to the loss of Agency publishers, AND buyer preferences shifting to Non-DRM publishers and Indie Publishers.

Agency Publishers returned to the site in early November. The DRM/Non-DRM market share split did improve during the subsequent two-month period of time (from 3% to 4%). We anticipate a 4-6% share in 2012, a far cry from what we believe we possibly would have seen without Agency interruption.

So if ARE are carrying 3-4% DRM titles and readers are choosing about 97% non-DRM, then that would seem to indicate that readers are not choosing based on whether the book has protection or not.  Which belies what ARE are saying, above.

Although, there are other sources (J.A. Konrath is one) that say readers do care, very much, if a book is protected or not, regardless of whether they have illicit intentions or perfect innocent ones.

I know I get mildly vexed by all the heinous “we are watching you!” safeguards on ebooks, when I buy DRM proected ones, but I don’t think it would stop me from actually buying a book I really wanted.  Would it stop you?

File Formats

File formats = PDF and ePub account for 85% of files downloaded. Next is PRC/Mobi at 14%, other file formats combined equal less than 1.

NOTE: We believe PDF, ePub, and PRC/Mobi are the “must have” formats.

Agree, agree, agree.  With one proviso.

PRC/Mobi, by the way, is the platform that Kindle is built upon.  It’s actually identical to Kindle, except for a change in serial number and file name.

If you’re buying ebooks in a format different from these three/four, then you might want to think about starting to change over to one of these four.  Actually, three.  I’d give up on PDF, too.  It’s too unweildy for the fluid ereaders.  It’s a useful will-open-on-anything format, but as a permanent, native format, it has problems.  Pick either Kindle, ePub or Mobi, and find an eReader you love that uses that format (or use your cellphone, iPad or tablet), and start trading over.   Soon, everything will be available in these formats.  Yes, everything.

In terms of which romance sub-genres owned the biggest piece of the pie in 2011, the top 10 are = Erotica, Vampires/Werewolves/Shapeshifters, Gay Fiction, Paranormal, Contemporary, Sci-fi/Fantasy, Multiple Partners, Interracial, Historical, Time-travel, Drama, and BDSM.

No big surprises here.

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