The folks over at All About Romance did a cool post about 10 Things I’d Like to Tell Pub­lish­ers. I agree with a lot of their com­ments, espe­cially the one about the cheesy romance book titles. (Seri­ously, I think some­one has a lot of fun com­ing up with some of those groaners).

Inspired by them, I thought that I’d do a post about 10 Things I’d Like to Tell Read­ers. Here goes:

1. I have very lit­tle input/control when it comes to the cover art for my books. If you think the cov­ers suck, there’s noth­ing I can do about it. (And yes, I know the cov­ers for the mass mar­ket ver­sions of the Big­time books suck — they suck out loud, espe­cially the one for Karma Girl. Believe me, I know and have spent many hours bemoan­ing that fact.)

2. I do not know every­thing there is to know about pub­lish­ing. I can­not find a cover artist for your book, or a copy edi­tor, or tell you why no one wants to pub­lish the anno­tated his­tory of your belly lint. Well, I could on that last one, but you prob­a­bly wouldn’t like what I had to say about it. I get a lot of ques­tions about pub­lish­ing and writ­ing, and I’m happy to help when and as I can — but I can’t get your book pub­lished for you. Only you can do that. And yes, it is much harder than it looks.

3. Fake even a lit­tle bit of inter­est in my work, and I will sign books until my fin­gers bleed and smile for pho­tos until my face hurts for you. Buy one of my books, and I will shower you with all the book­marks and good­ies that I have on hand. Tell me that you read and enjoyed one of my books, and I will wish you joy and hap­pi­ness for all of your days.

4. I look at reviews for my books. Good ones make me happy, bad ones make me sad. Reviews where folks call my books the worst things ever writ­ten after read­ing all of two pages of said books and never fin­ish­ing them bring out my inner Hulk, who can only be con­trolled by eat­ing mas­sive amounts of straw­berry cheese­cake ice cream. Or to sum up, authors have feel­ings too, folks.

5. Get­ting asked where the bath­room is while I’m doing a book sign­ing is depress­ing. Pop! Did you hear that? That was the sound of you just deflat­ing my ego. Now, I want to crawl under the table and whim­per while I eat a candy bar — or three.

6. I don’t care what for­mat you buy my book in. Paper copy, e-copy, heck, I don’t even care if you get a copy from the used book­store. All I ask is that if you like the book, you tell your friends about it — and maybe take a minute or two to send me an e-mail about it (see 10). If you don’t like my book, that’s okay too — just be polite about it. Dif­fer­ent strokes for dif­fer­ent folks, and all that.

7. I’m a reader too, and I’m just as happy to talk about other authors’ books as I am about my own. I can prat­tle on and on and on about my favorite authors and books all day long. Seri­ously, I can make your ears bleed, folks. My sig­nif­i­cant other knows bet­ter than to get me started wax­ing poetic about my favorite books. Every­one else, you have been warned.

8. Yeah, I know that my books are not per­fect. There are typos and con­ti­nu­ity errors and some­times I repeat phrases in books. But you know what? It’s hard com­ing up with 100,000 words that cre­ate a coher­ent story, and it’s even harder to ensure that every sin­gle one of those words is per­fect. Man­u­scripts go through a lot of edi­tors as they are turned into books, and we all do our very best to catch all the mis­takes. But we’re human, and some errors are going to creep in. It’s not because I don’t work hard on my books — that’s just life.

9. My inner fan­girl squees with delight every time I see my book on the shelf at the book­store. That weird woman you see tak­ing pho­tos in at Wal­mart? That’s me, ogling my book on the shelf for about the hun­dredth time.

10. A pos­i­tive e-mail from a reader telling me that she liked my books really does make my day (see 6). Know­ing that peo­ple enjoy my books makes all the hard work and long hours in front of my com­puter worthwhile.

So there you have it. Some of my (hope­fully amus­ing) thoughts that I’d like to share with read­ers. What about you guys? What are some of the things you’d like to tell authors or pub­lish­ers? Share in the com­ments. And keep it polite, please.

I’m work­ing on Ele­men­tal Assas­sin 5 right now, and I real­ized some­thing kind of cool about it the other day.

When I get done with this book, I will have writ­ten more than 500,000 words about Gin Blanco. Yep, that’s right — half a mil­lion words about one char­ac­ter. That’s a whole lot of words, not to men­tion all the typ­ing!

Of course, I’d love to write more books about Gin beyond these five, but that’s going to be up to the sales gods and read­ers. Still, I think half a mil­lion words is a pretty cool accom­plish­ment. I’m totally pat­ting myself on the back right now — and keep­ing my fin­gers crossed that the words and Gin’s sto­ries will keep on coming!

I got a nice e-mail this week. Glenn at the Tin­ley Park Pub­lic Library con­tacted me and asked me if they could use a quote by me about libraries on their Web site. It’s part of a reg­u­lar quotes fea­ture the library does.

Of course, I said yes. You can see the quote here (it’s on the right-hand side of the page). Or here’s what I said, which comes from my bio here on my Web site:

“Most folks think peni­cillin, indoor plumb­ing, and the Inter­net are the world’s best inven­tions. Not me. The great­est thing ever cre­ated was a library. Indoor plumb­ing is a close sec­ond, though.”

You know you’ve made it as an author when peo­ple start quot­ing you. Okay, not really, but I still think it’s cool.

Fin­ished Talk Me Down by Vic­to­ria Dahl. I’ve seen a lot of folks on the Web rav­ing about Dahl’s con­tem­po­rary romances so I decided to try one.

In this book, a creepy ex-boyfriend dri­ves erotic romance writer Molly Jen­nings back to her tiny home­town of Tum­ble Creek, Colo. No sooner is Molly back in town than she runs into Ben Law­son, her girl­hood crush who is now the oh-so-sexy chief of police. Molly is eager to see if Ben still lives up to his crush-worthy sta­tus, but Ben is a lit­tle hes­i­tant, as he doesn’t date local women since the town is so small and gos­sip gets spread around so fast. Then, there’s the small mat­ter that Ben has no idea what Molly does for a liv­ing, since she keeps her job a secret from every­one. But when some­one starts stalk­ing Molly, Ben is deter­mined to pro­tect her no mat­ter what …

I liked a lot of things about this book — the Col­orado set­ting, the sec­ondary char­ac­ters, and espe­cially Ben and Molly. It was nice to read a book where the woman is flirty and fun-loving, and the guy was more reserved and seri­ous. (To me, it often seems like the guy is usu­ally the care­free one in romance books). There was also a cool twist with Molly’s stalker at the end, which I won’t spoil here. Let’s just say that I thought I knew who the bad guy was, but Dahl threw a lit­tle some­thing dif­fer­ent into the plot that I didn’t expect.

But I had one big issue with the book — the fact that Molly keeps her career as an erotic romance writer a secret from every­one, includ­ing her par­ents. I just didn’t think that was believ­able at all. How could you keep some­thing like that a secret for years? Espe­cially from your fam­ily? And more impor­tantly, why would you want to?

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, but I work hard on my books and I want folks to know that those are my words they’re read­ing. Even my most dis­tant fam­ily mem­bers know that I write books (if I haven’t told them, then some­one else has). Even if I was writ­ing erotic romance and using a pen name like Molly does in the book, I’d still tell my close fam­ily mem­bers what I was doing.

It’s not that Molly isn’t proud of what she does, but she used Ben as the inspi­ra­tion for one of her sto­ries at the begin­ning of her career and now won­ders how he and every­one else will react if they find out what she does for a liv­ing. Okay, I can kind of under­stand that, but I also thought it was pre­sented as more of a conflict/problem than it really was.

Over­all, though, this was a fun, breezy con­tem­po­rary romance, and I’m inter­ested in read­ing the read of the Tum­ble Creek books. So thumbs up.

Up next: Plea­sure of a Dark Prince by Kres­ley Cole.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.

So I thought I would talk a lit­tle bit about some of the emo­tions that authors go through (as the mood and time strikes me here on the blog). After all, we write about our char­ac­ters’ emo­tions in our books, surely we have some of our own to talk about, right?

The emo­tion of the day? Jealousy.

Yep, I’ll admit it — I get jeal­ous of other authors from time to time. I think any author who says that she never gets jeal­ous is prob­a­bly lying. Nobody is that nice all the time. Or maybe I’m just that cyn­i­cal.  

So what I’m a jeal­ous of? Lots of things. I won­der why this author got more pro­mo­tion than I did. Or why so-and-so hit the best-seller list when my books are just as good as hers. Why every­one on the Inter­net seems to love someone’s new book and not mine. Why I never feel like one of the in-crowd or cool kids when­ever I go to con­fer­ences. Some­times, when a book I read truly blows me away, I’m jeal­ous that it’s a story that I didn’t write. Why didn’t I have that bril­liant idea instead of her?

I imag­ine these are the same things that lots of other authors are jeal­ous of too. In case you haven’t noticed by now, us writ­ers are a pretty neu­rotic bunch.

But I think it’s what you do with your jeal­ousy that’s important. Me? I try to chan­nel it into some­thing pos­i­tive. I try to work harder and smarter, do more pro­mo­tion, and, of course, con­tin­u­ously work to improve my own writ­ing so that maybe I’ll be the one mak­ing the best-seller list and get­ting rave reviews the next time around.

I’ll admit that I’m not always suc­cess­ful. Whee­z­ley, my sig­nif­i­cant other, has lis­tened to me gripe and grum­ble about these sorts of things many times. He usu­ally just rolls his eyes and dis­tracts me with some choco­late. Sadly, it usu­ally works.

But at least I’m try­ing to slay the green-eyed mon­ster. In the end, I think that’s what mat­ters most. Well, that and the choco­late.

What about you guys? Does jeal­ousy ever rear its ugly head with you? How do you deal with it? Share in the comments.