Saturday, May 13, 2006

If it's true - and other thoughts

This is a bit of a shocker I noticed today. I was at Romance Lover's blog and followed the link to Lisa Kleypas' updated web site. It looks like she is leaving Avon and moving to St. Martin's Press. Before spreading rumours that might not be true, anyone else hear anything about this?

It's been an interesting week following blogs and message boards. First the blow-up at Smart Bitches following PC Cast's rant. Now although I haven't read any of her books, I happen to agree with her beef. I think it is wrong wrong wrong to sell ARC's on E-Bay. I think Ms. Cast handled it in a weird kind of way though. I think her anger should have been directed at those doing the selling rather than those doing the buying. When you think about it, it's kind of an honour that some fans would be willing to spend so much money on a book that would cost a lot less if they had a bit of patience. If I were an author, my ire would be directed to those making a profit on my efforts without me seeing a dime of it.

Then there was the dust up following a post by an “anonymous author" at AAR on Adele Ashworth's newest release. I love how when an author has something
derogatory to say they hide behind the cloak of anonymity. Seems the book is chock-full of gramatical errors and said author thinks that the readers who are pointing them out are picking on Ms. Ashworth. I'm not one who notices a lot of that kind of thing when I read, but if I were it would irritate the hell out of me as a reader. Anonymous author *snort* isn't doing Ms. Ashworth any favours. Ms. Ashworth herself has entered the fray and handled the brouhaha with class though. Too bad I don't like her recent books and have no intention of getting this one. I loved Winter Garden and My Darling Caroline but her recent releases have left me cold. Interesting as that seemed to have happened when she switched publishers and moved to ....... no - I'm not going to say it.


'til later

6 comments:

CindyS said...

I think a lot of people had had their say by the time it came out that Sarah had published the e-mail without telling PC Cast that she was going to do it.

Sarah apologizes but by this time the damage is done. Imagine that you are writing to someone in private (Dickhead-isms) only to have that e-mail published on a high traffic blog. I know when I am writing e-mails, I might throw in a line that would get the person to laugh but if read by someone outside of the relationship, it might be seen as something completely different.

I'm actually quite surprised that the SB's have glossed right over this. Or did I misread the comment about not knowing that the e-mail was going to be posted. Hmmm, better go back and re-read.

CindyS

Marg said...

I had completely missed that part about it being blogged about wihtout PC knowing about it!

romancelover said...

Yikes...so much controversy! PC Cast's rant seems to be just that. I wonder what her first thought was when she realized her e-mail had been posted for all to see. Yikes again!

Anonymous said...

PC's e-mail came over as slightly vitriolic, and seemed to be aimed at totally the wrong people, but fancy sending an e-mail like that in good faith, and finding that it's been posted for everybody to rip to shreds.

I recall a while ago, a reviewer sent me an e-mail accusing another review site of plagiarism, with enough factual evidence to back it up with, but when I asked her if I could blog about it, she got cold feet, and said that she didn't want it being made public.

As it happens, I personally think she did want it out in public, but thought about the backlash, and changed her mind.

Needless to say, if she wasn't keen, I certainly wasn't going to bother making it an issue, so I deleted the e-mail. I could have done it anonymously, but doing that didn't even occur to me at the time.

So yeah, Sarah should have really got permission first, before posting, because now a lot of people will think that PC Cast is an ungrateful arsehole, no matter how many times she claims that she was not attacking readers.

Tara Marie said...

My first thought when I read the Cast rant was 'I hope she gave permission to print this', and my second was she was ranting at the wrong people, fine go after the sellers, but going after the buyer isn't a good idea.

I discovered the AAR thing yesterday. And, once again we seem to have a "romance author" with little appreciation for the people who read their books. But, on some level I agreed with her comments about nit picking. The whole thread seemed like a feeding frenzy, of course she was unfortunately doing most of the feeding.

I like Adele Ashworth enough to ignore the run-on sentences and typos, I ususally toss up to bad copy editing. I used to obsess about these things, now it's only going to pull me out of a book I'm not loving. It took me years to reach this point.

romancelover said...

Kristie,
Happy Belated Mother's Day!!! Hope you had a good one.

The Lisa Kleypas thing is true; she quit Avon and is now with St. Martins. She's got a contract with them for 3 new historicals...Wallflower novels. I posted on it but something happened to my blog and now everything is screwed up. Help!

- Daniela