Around the Bookish World : News Week-in-Review

Filed in News , The Smutty Lover Posted on January 13, 2012 @ 3:00 pm 10 comments
Welcome to this week’s news post and we have full instalment of fun links and news as well as the books to look out for the coming months!
First up, Amazon has announced that they created an ipad store which will allow readers to buy Kindle books as well browse their store and it is a way to bypass the no buy links which Apple has dictated with their new terms last year.

More Amazon news, an interesting report stated that publishers who allowed Kindle lending programme found sales of their books jump at to 26% – this has surprised Amazon who is promoting this as a huge success.

 

That ugly thing called Plagiarism has reared its head again and I think I mentioned in a previous post that Amazon is going to be the place where authors will find their stolen work being published by pirates as well plagiarists- it looks like it has happened! Author Sharazade discovered that some of her stories were being scraped  or plagiarised by an author called called Maria Cruz who wrote over 40 stories of erotica was also writing horror which was a bit of a leap of genres. After checking out the horror book, she found that passages was taken from Dracula by Bram Stoker and that all the other books that Maria was selling also had stolen content from other authors or from sites like Literotica. This wasn’t the only example of the problem as other authors were also discovered but it looks like this will be a growing problem for Amazon and sites that sell ebooks. For more info click here:

 

E.J James, the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy has been getting lots of buzz recently online on Goodreads and on the blogs with her series and it seems that Publisher Weekly is getting in on the act by reporting that Hollywood and a few publishers are interested in buying this series. However, this has caused a huge kerfuffle on some fan sites and certainly on the Publishers Weekly comments about the fact this series started out as a fanfic based on Twilight. I have read the books and I couldn’t see any similarities with Twilight because there was no sparkly vamps or werewolves but fanfiction and fandom can bring out strong emotions and it does raise interesting questions also this isn’t the only series based on fanfiction and there are some publishers who are editing and repackaging fanfic as all new stories. I suspect if this series gets picked up by a publisher or a studio this issue will crop up again.

 

News in brief:

Meljean Brook is beyond awesome! After last week’s temptouous author meltdown and it was pretty much a doozy! Meljean has written diary entries parodying authors who behave badly. I hope this continues because I especially loved the 4th entry which was EPIC!

 

And finally Jim C Hines has posted a hilarious entry about female poses in SF and Fantasy books. He strikes a pose and compares and contrast and the commentary is beyond funny!

Even better Genre Reviews have followed up with the female perspective which you can check here:

And finally I know there is a few Richard (BOWCHICABOWOW) Armitage fans lurking here – he has done a recent interview discussing The Hobbit and dang he makes a smexy dwarf – not gonna lie!

 

And now for the upcoming books that caught our eye or the ones we wantz for the year ahead!

 

Pamela Palmer has a new PNR series – Vamp City and I really like the look of this, A Blood Seduction.

Vampires live only for lust and pleasure in the eternal twilight of Vamp City. But the city’s magic is dying. The only person who can restore it? A beautiful woman from the mortal world…one who knows nothing of the power she wields.

Quinn Lennox is searching for a missing friend when she stumbles into a dark otherworld that only she can see—and finds herself at the mercy of Arturo Mazza, a dangerously handsome vampire whose wicked kiss will save her, enslave her, bewitch her, and betray her.

What Arturo can’t do is forget about her—any more than Quinn can control her own feelings for him. Neither one can let desire get in the way of their mission—his to save his people, hers to save herself.

But there is no escape from desire in a city built for seduction, where passion flows hot and blood-red. Welcome to Vamp City…

 

 

This looks like it has an intriguing premise. When the Sea is Rising Red by Cat Hellisen which is a YA.

After seventeen-year-old Felicita’s dearest friend Ilven kills herself to escape an arranged marriage, Felicita chooses freedom over privilege. She fakes her own death and leaves her sheltered life as one of Pelimburg’s magical elite behind. Living in the slums, scrubbing dishes for a living, she falls for charismatic Dash while also becoming fascinated with vampire Jannik. Then something shocking washes up on the beach: Ilven’s death has called out of the sea a dangerous wild magic. Felicita must decide whether her loyalties lie with the family she abandoned . . . or with those who would twist this dark power to destroy Pelimburg’s caste system, and the whole city along with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally Keri Arthur’s 3rd Dark Angel series – Darkness Devours.

Half-werewolf, half-Aedh Risa Jones can enter the realm between life and death, and she can see the Reapers who collect the souls of the dead. Now, she is using her gifts—and the investigative know-how of a man who broke her heart—to find a cabal searching for the power to control time, reality, and fate. And this is besides her work for the Vampire Council, half of whom want her dead.
But for now the Council needs her alive. Someone is killing blood-whore addicted vampires, and Risa must find the guilty party. If she succeeds, she may finally convince the council to lift the execution order on her life. But before she succeeds, she must first survive…

 

 

 

 

 

So what do you think of books based on fanfiction? Do you think there’s an ethical issue or as long the fact there’s no resemblance to the original source and the book is rewritten it is ok? And what do you think of the plagiarism of ebooks being sold on the Kindle and other stores? Will this be a bigger problem in the future?

About Has


Has is a bookaholic and feeds her addiction whenever she can. She usually can be found lost in a Romance or an Urban Fantasy novel. Her favourite sub genres are Paranormal, Fantasy and some Scifi. Her most treasured authors are, Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews, Ann Aguirre, Lisa Kleypas and Tamora Pierce. She loves that discovery of finding a brand new author and falling in love with their books. Has also blogs a The Book Pushers - Book chatter and reviews

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10 Comments

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  • blodeuedd January 13, 2012 at 3:26 pm

    I heard nothing else than Armitage and then I drooled 😉

    • Has January 13, 2012 at 3:28 pm

      LOL He’s definitely droolworthy! 😀

  • Tanya January 13, 2012 at 4:09 pm

    First let me say every Friday afternnon I look foward to this post, I feel so much smarter after reading what is going on in the book world all week 🙂
    I had heard a lot of good things about the Fifty Shades series and I just got the first 2 books in the mail, I can not wait to read them. I do not see a big problem with fanficiton, as long as the author changes the story and acknowleges that it is fanficiton. The plagiarism of ebooks, that is so wrong and I think it will indeed become a bigger problem.

    • Has January 13, 2012 at 6:14 pm

      Aww thanks! I think the fact the author based this on fanfiction and even just recently did this again is raising a few eyebrows because of the copy-right issue. But like I said in my post – I didn’t see any similarities with the original source book and it was an AU but I think this is going to be something that will rumble on especially with epubs which dedicated to turning fanfic into books.

  • Jan January 13, 2012 at 4:32 pm

    As long as the writer acknowledges it’s based on a story and tells their own story of the characters. Personally I wouldn’t buy it but everyone is different.
    Plain stealing from books is just wrong. Also dumb as you will get found out.

    • Has January 13, 2012 at 6:22 pm

      The plagiarism thing is another aspect that will crop up again sadly.

  • Susan January 13, 2012 at 7:35 pm

    I love this “episode” of NWIR! Thanks for the great stories and links.

    I don’t have a problem w/ fanfic being published (of course, I’m not an author or publisher, so I don’t really have a dog in this hunt). Isn’t it sorta like all those gazillions of retellings of Austen or Shakespeare, minus the fact that those authors are dead and all? As long as the stories are substantially different from the source material and due credit is given for the inspiration, I can’t see the harm. In fact, would probably be good for the sales of the original work(s).

    Jim Hines is wonderful. Love his books and his blog, and this latest post was hilarious.

    Hadn’t seen the Meljean Brook posts. They were amazingly brilliant. Loved them, too!

  • aurian January 14, 2012 at 2:15 am

    Thanks for all the news Has! But that cover of Keri Arthur, Darkness Devours, I did mistake it for a new Nalini Singh book. You have to admit, they are extremely alike.

  • draconismoi January 14, 2012 at 2:17 am

    Haha! I always enjoy it when people in the publishing world point out the ridiculousness of UF covers. Maybe enough of them will pick up and it and stop producing such cringe-worthy covers.

  • Tamsyn January 14, 2012 at 7:40 am

    No problem with publishing fanfic. Sometimes you read a story which you think you can write better or with different scenes and it turns out to be substantially different. Copying word for word, that’s a big NO, NO.
    BTW, the covers are all sort of blue gray…

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