Polishing The Slate

I'm polishing a workshop I'm giving at Emerald City Writers Conference this weekend - Mommies Guide to Writing Around Kids. MG Braden & I have 6 kids between us and have written through death, illness, pregnancy, job loss ...we have lots of material beyond the simple tell them to play outside or put the baby down for a nap.

I love giving workshops that are interactive. Takes the pressure off of the whole having people stare at me bit. So, I'm going through my notes, rewriting my bits, and collecting prizes for the brave folks who participate in my games. This is the fun side of being an author.

The not so fun? An article in The Slate that uses the success of Compromising Positions to make a point about porn and self-publishing. Huh? The three tenets of the article don't apply to my book since it's not free ($4.40 from the link provided in the article), porn (the journalist even states no one would consider it such), or self-published (Samhain isn't even all that small of a publishing house anymore!). But, the writer opted to use my book as a stepping off point. Which is...well, I honestly don't know how to feel about it.

I do want to answer the question he posed at the end. "will the presence of e-books like Compromising Positions at the top of Amazon's charts sully the e-reader's reputation?"

Romance novels make the world a softer, more tolerable place. Whenever the world darkens - globally from natural disasters, nationally from economy or personally from tragedy - people turn to romance novels for a reminder that people are good, things will get better, and love can heal.

e-readers and romance novels have a similar reputation. They sell like fans during the first heat wave of summer, are read by the smartest and most educated, and yet are looked down on. It doesn't make sense, but it also doesn't matter.

Romance publishers have been at the forefront of the digital revolution and I'm sure e-reader manufacturers have been happy for the support. So, what would the presence of a romance novel mean to Kindle? Probably that they're doing something right.