And the prize goes to....

The Beatles Memorial Prize for Humility goes to Sheniqua Waters for her website domain of TheWorldsBestBook.com which takes the designation previously given to such pulpy rubbish as the Bible or Ulysses and bestows it on the Slave Girl.

"We're glad you decided to visit TheWorldsBestBook.com ... Here you will find out more about the newest up-and-coming author Sheniqua Waters and her breakout new historical romance novel Slave Girl ... Sheniqua Waters knows how to put "love" in a love story. She has a unique writing style and creates vivid scenes and intriguing story lines unlike any author we've seen. In our opinion, that is what makes her "The New Face of Romance".


Meanwhile the Inaugural Veinglory Prize for Chicken-Fingered Typing goes to Dark Castle Lords for the email to subscribers excerpted below (explaining that no newsletter will be forthcoming for October):

"Pam and I have gone through all the survey resutsl and will be implementing some of your suggestions next month. the first chagne you will notice will be that th enewsletter will be delivered in PDF. I have also moved the newsletter from the start of the month to towards the end of the month ... These chagnes are not set in stone and we hope you wil let us know if the changes we make are worthwhile and a benifit to YOU."

Acronyms R Us

I see that Midnight Showcase is now going by MS Fiction, or just MSF. They share this strategy with the august publishing enterprise of DCL (Dark Castle Lords) and the increasingly smokey TWRP (which is either The Wild Rose Press or the sound you make when you zipper up too quickly). Oh, and I guess EREC. Thus proving definitively that acronyms are pretentious....

Some Epub Updates

Rogue Phoenix Press charges fees for POD publishing: "In this case, the author will agree to purchase from pawprintspod.com, 20 copies of the book (at wholesale price) plus shipping costs ... The author agrees to pay the pawprintspod.com fee and the formatting fee ...."

Dark Castle Lords seem to be trying to rebrand themselves as "DCL Publications".

Ebook earning figures: a few of the specific reports look a little, um, unlikely. But the overall patterns fit well with the EREC data.

The "spellcheck me please" award of the week (yes, I know, pot:kettle) goes to the Affaire de Coeur newsletter: "Please subsmit a sample review of any book ... If you would like to put xomelthing in our newsletter, let us know".

Writing and day jobs (I relate).

Loose Id in the Washington Post: The Wizardess of Id: Romance and Sex and Werewolves, Oh My!

Links--veinglory

* An interview with Holly Schmidt re: Ravenous Romance (now open for business).

* Website for DCL's main cover artist.

Dark Castle Lords in Print

Dark Castle Lords is preparing to release their first print novels:

* The Lord of Merewood Keep by CH Admirand
* Naked Visions Silver Dreams by by Veronica Towers/DCL Peter DeCicco
* Deadly Sins by Annmarie Ortega, Kate Hofman, Adra Steia, Serena Knight, S.J. Ronayne, Skyler Grey & Veronica Towers/DCL Peter Decicco Edited to Add: it appears there is an update on the line-up pf authors contributing to this volume's current edition. I will post it when I receive it. -- Further edited to add I still have received no updates. But according to the yahoogroup this book has an as yet undisclosed author line up. So the only correction I can offer is that the author list shown is out of date.
* The Tudor Falcon by Pam Seres

The Tudor Falcon seems rather like the odd one out, having not been published by DCL as an ebook as the other three were. The other three were presumably selected on the basis of ebook sales volume? One must assume that the fourth book is selected because it is the basis of DCL's movie project and/or because Ms. Seres is co-owner of the publisher.... In my opinion the cover art is not consistent with the usual appearance of 'print' romance works.

#

Edited to Add: it has been suggested that this information is incorrect so I would like to offer my sources

#1: DCL yahoogroup dated June 1st, 2008 [links in this post now broken due to message archive being set to members-only]

"Stuart & I are happy to announce our first DCL Publications, LLC print run!

Congratulations to the following DCL authors and the Dark Castle Lords that will grace their covers which will be done by Annie Marshall, of Beyond the Book Productions.

We would also like to thank Ines Dinn, of InesCreations for her wonderful e-book covers of these novels that helped create the following author’s sales.

NAKED VISIONS SILVER BLUE DREAMS by Veronica Towers/DCL Peter DeCicco

THE LORD OF MEREWOOD KEEP by C.H. Admirand/DCL Bill Freda

DEADLY SINS by Annmarie Ortega, Kate Hofman, Adra Steia, Serena Knight, S.J. Ronayne, Skyler Grey & Veronica Towers/DCL Peter Decicco

Look for more information coming soon!"

Althought this message is fairly old I see no corrections or changes offered in later posts. If there have been updates I would be happy to hear about them.

#

#2: yahoogroup messaged dated August 24, 2008

"I have been traveling some and gearing up for the next faze of the first THE DARK CASTLE LORDS/THE TUDOR FALCON movie which will be filmed in the NYC area.

For movie updates and progress check out:
http://www.myspace.com/thedarkcastlelords_movie

After much consideration and offers from NYC publishers, I have decided to have DCL Publications publish the movie novel which will be available in print and e-book next year before the movie comes out. The cover will be done soon."

#

Updated with correction as provided to the yahoogroup:

"This information is not correct:

DEADLY SINS by Annmarie Ortega, Kate Hofman, Adra Steia, Serena Knight, S.J. Ronayne, Skyler Grey & Veronica Towers/DCL Peter Decicco

The sin novel will go into print and the new authors will soon be announced along with our release dates."

#

Further Edited to Add: Commentary from Pickled Cupid.

On topic, off topic and what topic?--veinglory

Most annoying quote of the week. A man who used 13 minutes of computer time and 12 cent's of electricity to create computer compiled books from internet sources says he might do computer-constructed romance next, because "There are only so many body parts." I hope some of the medical writers scavenged by his algorithms get their teeth into some of his more tender body parts.

Thanks to new archive you can now see Darwin's handwriting here. Do any of you have hand written outlines, manuscripts or character pictures to share? I would love to see them.

Hmmm. "Twenty books later, Holt cracked the New York Times Best Seller list in March and has earned herself the title “Queen of Erotic Romance,”... I have a question, who decided she had that title? Because if I was going to crown anyone the name would probably start with ... well, who would you pick? I mean at least Tina Turner had Beyonce call her the "Queen of Soul" rather than self-coronating (although I'm with Aretha on that one). Am I wrong on the crown being self-bestowed? Please let me know.

At Piers, and by direct report, it seems that Dark Castle Lords don't require artists to buy the Lordy art. But is seems they do sometimes require (rather than permit, or allow) payment for advertising. I remain interested in sales figures for this press as so far it looks like it would take... well, let's just say a long time, to earn a $100 share in a print ad. Meaning that authors might effectively not be paid in terms of net profit?

Finally I must say that after years of skepticism I am starting to be more convinced about the bad ides for Ellora's Cave. I do not think they are in serious trouble as a business. But with 8 releases a week and sales that really do seem to be slipping they look to be in danger of losing their front runner status. Add to that their print books are fast vanishing from stores--go check your local store and count EC books versus say Samhain, you may see what I mean. In fact if you get a chance to do this please let me know the figures.

From Dark Castle Lords--veinglory

Hi,

Here is an email from the folks at DCL. Issues raised (in bold) are mine. It seemed simpler to just post the replied verbatim with Stuart's permission. As of now I am leaving DCL in 'smoke' status.


Hi Emily,

Thank you for your email and a chance to reply to your questions below and will try to answer each point in turn.

1) Sales are often very low

We as a business have only been in operation for just on 18 months. We started out with approximately 4 eBooks and about the same number of authors and yes I will admit that sales where slow and not on a regular basis.

Since then and with several website redesigns, we have attracted over 15 new authors and our sales are up 400%. At the request of several of our authors, we approached Fictionwise and ARe as other outlets to sell the authors books.

As with all new business, it does take time to become established and for the search engines to pick up your website and rank it well enough that you are on the first page of their search results for a particular keyword/s. So yes, at the beginning our sales where low but that was expected and as I have mentioned above we have now seen a increase in sales from our website of 400% and this does not include sales a Fictionwise and ARe. I am continually striving to improve the look of our site with the view of making it more inviting and user friendly.

2) Sales figures are not being provided promptly.

With sales figures generated from the website, I send out quarterly emails to all our authors advising of the number of books sold via the site as well as royalties earnt. As you may or may not be aware, Fictionwise do not provide their sales figures until 6 weeks after the quarter has ended so there is approximately a two month delay on that side of things. They also advise not to use their weekly updates.

Due to the long and winded process of forming an LLC, we where not able to open a bank account as we did not have our Tax ID which would not be given until we had received our papers back. With that in mind, my business partner and I thought it might be better to hold of on releasing sales figures from Fictionwise until the bank account was open. Once opened we where then looking at releasing figures and making payments at the same time. As with all plans they do not always go accord to what we hoped.

This issue has now been resolved and all sales figures along with royalties’ earnt are currently being passed to each author concerned. I guess hindsight is a great so long as you can learn from it.

3) Covers with human figures must be paid for by the author

This was an idea/suggestion brought about by our models and is currently under review with input being sort from both authors and models

4) DCL and romance models may not be entirely separate businesses

I can say that they are separate in their own rights. Our Romance Models site was started up at the suggestion of one of models, Bill Freda who thought it was a good idea to have an outlet for our models to display their work. We have several models that are just starting out and we hope this will give them a platform from which they can launch their careers. All our models have input on the design of the site as well as which photos they sell and the price they wish to charge for them. Yes! We hope that some of our authors will purchase photos from them in view of using them to create their book cover.

In closing I would just like to reiterate that I am always in constant contact via emails with all our authors advising them on updates and possible policy changes. Right from the start I have always sort their advice and input in to how to operate and run this business. In hindsight, our earlier policies may have not been the best and these have now been addressed.

DCL is constantly changing and with the help of our authors and models and we are all looking forward to the next 12 months in which we will no doubt have more ups and downs. Such is the life of a constantly evolving business.

I would like to thank you for this opportunity to answer your queries.

Regards

Stuart Bazga
DCL Publications

Smoke at DCL--veinglory

I am leaving the branding question (two posts ago) open until Saturday and hope to hear from more of you. If you submitted pen name please let me know what you think of the others on the list ;) This question is open not only to what you think of the pen name but their general 'branding' and works. I have 5-6 replies but would like at least 10 to provice a reasonable sampling of opinions.

I am moving Dark Castle Lords to the 'smoke' category of epublishers where there are signs of trouble. I have emailed them directly for comment on complaints that they are tardy in reporting and payments, and charge fees for cover art showing a human figure. In the absence of a convincing reply and/or flood of supportive comments from their authors I will eventually move them to 'not recommended' status.

Requesting author input--veinglory

I am requesting information regarding Dark Castle Lords: charging of any fees, promptness of payment or any other positive or negative experiences. Also remember the happy-ometer. Just let me know are you basically satisfied or basically disatisfied with this puhblisher as an author or other paid service provider (editor, artist) for this press. All information treated confidentially as a basis of giving general feedback to other authors.