Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

There are a great many resources for folks who are hunting down that obscure category romance from the early back-when to the late days-of-yore, and a great many more resources for people who seek out the latest news and information about the romance world, from writing to reading to - woohoo! - shopping. When I’m looking for news of the genre, I think to myself, “Self, you know where you need to go to find out about new and somewhat innovative small online businesses seeking to serve the avid romance reader? You need to read the U.S. News & World Report.”

From their article on 28 April about the success of small businesses online despite mega-retailers and a very sad and mopey US economy comes this fascinating profile of Derek Stafford, founder and owner of (get ready to bookmark this one because I’d never spell it correctly if you asked me to) Lughnassadh Books:

Trying to compete with Amazon and other behemoths is daunting. But with the right strategy, an entrepreneur with limited resources can cash in on the boom in online retailing. Derek Stafford, who founded and runs the website Lughnassadh Books, sums up his outlook this way: “One of the best ways to compete with Amazon is not to.”

Stafford has been selling used books from his website since 1999. In the early days, he says, he would sell pretty much anything he could find. But now, he says, “I’ve gotten more and more specialized.” He stopped selling all fiction except Harlequin romance novels, for which he discovered a distinct niche market. This focus gives him a brand that distinguishes Lughnassadh from the big boys. He’s trying to create a comprehensive listing of all the Harlequin romance novels to further develop this brand and establish himself as a one-stop source for genre aficionados. “Even if I can’t be the seller, I want to be the source,” Stafford explains.

That’s right: his store has an entire section of nothing but Harlequin romance novels, and there’s a forum attached to the store for customers who can’t remember the name of the book they’re looking for (no one ever has that problem around here. Least of all me).

Thanks to Melissa, who sent me the link to this marvelous bit of Colin-footage:

Melissa asks: “I wonder if he works for the person who makes the succubus rings?”

Sarah asks: “Exactly how wrong is the amount of time I spent wondering whether the photos of Colin’s Colin were online already, and whether I wanted to pollute my search history by looking for them? 80% wrong? 90% wrong? Utterly, completely, and torrentially wrong? How does one quantify that amount of wrong?”

What, more links? Why, yes, indeed!

James Patterson discusses his new book, a “romance” with the Palm Beach Daily News, and says that romances are “hard to do,” though he cautions that this isn’t a “real romance novel” (What does that mean, precisely, no sex?) Mysteries, for Patterson, are “easy.”

Now, what struck me is his accounting of his collaborative process:

Sundays at Tiffany’s was written with North Carolina-based children’s author Gabrielle Charbonnet in the collaborative style that Patterson developed about 10 years ago. It has been a key element in his increasingly prolific output.

“We’re hung up in this country about individualism,” said Patterson, who compares his collaborative process for writing novels to the traditionally accepted manner in which film and television writers develop their products. “Why can’t a book be created this way?”

Of course, with his celebrated status and reputation for enormous sales, it’s also a means for Patterson to give a lesser-known or aspiring writer an opportunity to break into the best-seller league — and earn what he describes as a “nice” amount of money....

When the decision is made to do a book with a co-writer, Patterson takes the general idea for the story and develops a detailed outline, which lays out the content and action of each chapter.

“It’s like screenplay for the novel,” he said. “One of my agents told me that when they saw the outline they said, ‘With this, I could write the book.’”

The co-writer then does a first draft based on the outline.

“I take it from there,” he said,

It’s like an updated version of the Sweet Valley High books, or the latter-day book package concepts, only with one dude at the helm.

Patterson is also lending his name and image to marketing campaigns for the very sexy Sony Reader, which comes complete with a copy of Patterson’s latest, The Women’s Murder Club. (And if the Sony Reader doesn’t blow your skirt up, the Kindle is back in stock. ).

And completely unrelated but still cool: Lori Devoti is part of a badass panel at WisCon, coming soon to the Wisconsin near you, about Being the Heroine of a Romance Novel Doesn’t Make Me Weak . Now that is something I want to see - a bunch of feminist fantasy ladies discussing empowerment of romance heroines and their strength, narratives, and sexuality. Word up. Something tells me that panel won’t be “your grandmother’s romance,” or “Patterson’s romance” either!

And now, from the Department of Making You Click Links, we have… links.

From Walt and his cuppa: a link that will make you feel dirty even as you keep scrolllling to look for more: a blogspot gallery of David Kawena’s illustrations of Disney heroes in their undergarments. Note: Not entirely work safe - the images or the main image of the blog itself. There’s also a Deviant Art gallery that requires a login. Is it wrong of me to think Prince Eric is stare-worthy? Because I’m ashamed of myself but I’m not entirely sure I want to be right.

Note: I meant this to run on Monday, but we were using the monkeys that normally write romance to rebuild the database that hosts our site bitty bit by bitty bit. So enjoy - a bit late.

Thanks to SonomaLass for this link that about raised my eyebrows right off my forehead: PoD publisher uses Artificial Intelligence to develop books, and the total number sold puts him among the top authors on Amazon.com.

Of course, that depends on how you define “Author.”

Philip M. Parker, according to the article, has “generated” over 200,000 books on a staggering variety of topics, some of which contain crossword puzzles in multiple languages, and some of which “collect publicly available information on a subject.” Using computers and a few programming humans, Parker prints them on demand of a customer - individuals who are looking for information and who are not familiar with the internet, or medical libraries who collect “nearly everything he produces.”

The kicker? Paragraph 7, as SonomaLass pointed out:

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

And he is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. “I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”

Fire the monkeys! Return them to their happy habitats! Our genre of choice will be written by GLaDOS, and other AI computers, because there’s only “so many body parts” about which to write a romance.

Three words: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.