www.karenknowsbest.com

Thanks for your patience. Again.

Christmas is at our house again this year, which is just the way I like it. I’ll be doing the cooking, which I really don’t mind, because it gives me a chance to show off my culinary skills. I actually do have them, I just don’t get to use them that often. I’ve just managed to finish the Big Christmas Shop today, and when I go and collect TTG from the airport tomorrow, his job will be to choose the alcohol.

This is my menu this year:

Starters

Pork and Apricot Pate (I can never remember how to get the French accent on my keyboard), served with melted applewood-smoked cheese on French toast, accompanied by mixed salad and tangy orange sauce.

Or:

Tomato and basil soup served with crusty white cobs

Main Course

Stuffed roasted chicken, seasoned with lemon pepper, accompanied by creamed button sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower, honey-glazed roasted potatoes, my special cheesy mashed potatoes and swede, sausage wrapped in Applewood smoked bacon, and pork, cranberry and apple stuffing.

Desserts

Baked nutmeg and cinnamon creamed rice pudding, Christmas pudding and custard (a shout out to TTG’s mum for making the Xmas pudding)freshly made raspberry trifle, or lemon cheesecake.

This year’s Xmas entertainment will include a Nintendo Wii tournament, Pictionary challenge, and a Trivial Pursuits competition.

As always, I’m looking forward to spending time with my family. We are all incredibly close, and I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be on Christmas Day, than spending time with the ones I love the most.

What will you guys be doing?

Anyway, thanks very much for bearing with us, and hopefully, it will be a smoother transition, than the last time I did this.

Thanks for bearing with us!

For the people who’ve bothered to pop over, I thought I’d give you a moral dilemma to chew over, so that you don’t have to keep refreshing the page to within an inch of your life, only to find no new posts.

You’re walking along one evening, when you come across a guy who’s obviously been badly beaten on the ground. You rush over to help him, being the fine upstanding citizen that you are. Once you get close to him, you realise that you know who he is.

He is the local paedophile, who served time for raping and molesting several young girls a few years ago. He’s now out of prison, and was determined to get on with his life.

What do you do?

Do you help him out, like the fine upstanding citizen that you are, thinking that he’s served his time, and should be given the chance to move on, or do you leave him bleeding on the ground, because animals like him don’t deserve second chances?

What would you do?

You’ll be pleased to know that we’re with a new host, thank the lord. Hopefully this one wont cause us as many problems, but if it does, I’ll be back at this blog.

You can now find me at Karenknowsbest.com.

Thanks muchly to Luna, for moving us so quickly.

That’s what Madris DePasture wrote in a New Concepts announcement letter addressed to her authors in 2002/2003.

It would seem that even as far back as that, Madris lacked a certain finesse when dealing with her writers.

Because I’m a bad, bad girl, let me post this warning that she included within one of the letters:

Please remember, this page is ONLY for NCP authors, so don’t give out the address to anyone else. There is no link on the main site going to the Author Lounge, so be sure to bookmark it. The address is http://www.newconceptspublishing.com/authorlounge33.htm

Ooops, again.

That should get some of the authors at the Romance Divas forum anxiously wringing their hands. Yes, I know, I am the devil herself.

Let me post you some snippets anyway, after all, the devil has no conscience:

“Any author who has NOT fulfilled the terms of their contract, or in any other manner behaved unprofessionally, been verbally abusive or just uncooperative, who demands the release of their book, may or may not be given permission to withdraw.

If money has been exchanged and/or time and effort put into marketing your book, we might then decide NOT to release you from your contractual obligations. It’s entirely up to you whether or not you wish to hire a lawyer to regain the rights. If we do decide to relinquish the rights, and state as much via email, do NOT expect to receive further written confirmation just to make you comfortable.

We will not go to any extraordinary lengths to soothe your fears. You are not welcome to submit again at a later time when we have managed to build a market and your work will never be considered again by New Concepts Publishing.

Charming woman.

For those of you who don’t understand and get nervous when you don’t hear anything and want to be continually updated on any and all progress… I’m sorry, but we just don’t have time to hold hands right now. Please repeat this mantra…..NCP is a business with much work to do.

As long as the website is there, they are there. If the phone is busy, it’s a good thing. If my emails have not been answered it’s because they are busy doing the work publishers do in order to stay in business and sell books. I am not being ignored because I’m not important, or because they’re thinking about dumping me. They are busy and I am allowing my fertile imagination to conjure paranoia.

Good grief.

Otherwise, keep in mind that your reputation is our reputation and our reputation is your reputation. If NCP is thought well of, then our authors have status as our authors. If our authors are thought poorly of, then NCP is not considered a good publisher. Whatever doubts or anxieties you might have, when you make NCP look bad, it makes you look bad.

Watch what you say, where you say it and to whom you say it. Don’t share your hysteria, anxieties or disappointments. Don’t play the blame game. Whether you realize it or not, YOU always get tarred with that feather.

I realize that people are either confident, or not. Nothing anyone can say or do can build confidence in those who lack it. Everything anyone says or does can further deteriorate a fragile confidence. However, I am sick to death of hearing ‘we’re not as good as’ NY, or any other publisher for that matter.

I have a feeling she’s not that big on trying to build confidence in the first place.

Rumor has it that Ellora’s Cave is so desperate for ‘romantica’ that they’re asking their authors to add sex scenes to previously written books. Anyone who’s been in the business for a while, and learned their craft, will know that this is a formula that will generally not click.

Hehe, she dissed Elloras Cave. That should go down well with the folks over at EC. We all know how precious they can be.

Before I go further, I need to address one serious problem that frequently rears it’s ugly head in this business, particularly when I try to talk shop to our authors—jealousy. I do understand that this is something that is a part of some people’s nature, hard to control and hard to combat. However, it is a totally useless and unproductive emotion. If it empowered a person to strive harder, then it would have some use. I’ve yet to see that—I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but in general it just causes problems.

Set your jealousy aside. The plain, hard, indisputable fact of life in publishing is that you are an entertainer. Sometimes your ideas appeal, sometimes not. I wish I knew the exact formula to produce highly successful books every time, but no one knows that. Even authors who regularly sell well occasionally write one that flops, and usually some that do not perform as well as others—this isn’t an exact science and it is useless to try to compare your books to anyone else’s.

Hey, it’s not all bad, she does give props to one of her authors:

Now, having said that, I want to give credit where it’s due, Autumn Dawn ‘lucked’ out by writing a wonderfully appealing book, effective promotion, and being in the right place at the right time with the right story.

I wonder she couldn’t just say the author in question did a good job, without having to say that her success was due to ‘luck’?

What a great ambassador for her business eh? I can’t believe how bad she is at addressing her writers. It is possible to write a communication document without leaving the recipients feeling like they just had a fight with a cruise missile.

Oh, and for those folks over at Romance Divas who insist on wringing their hands over the legality of posting Madris’ e-mail, and discussing whether it should have been posted in the first place, rather than concentrating on the fact that your fellow authors are being shafted left, right, and centre, let’s hope you’re never in the same position as Ellen Ashe eh?

Thanks to you-know-who for the link.

I was sent this link by a source so anonymous, even I don’t know who he/she is.

It’s a post from one of the Torquere authors who apparently belongs in the ‘In Crowd’ over there:

Ya know… If I really wanted to hear all the frickin’ mud-slinging that goes on within this biz (namely on blogs), I’d have gone into politics. For the record: I love my publishers. So for those idiots who have nothing better to do than drag pubs through the mud just for the sake of blog hits, feel free to step out in front of a car.

Have a nice day.

Apparently, he/she also writes under the name of Kaye Derwydd. No idea who she/he is of course.

I’ll post some of his accompanying comments shall I? (FreePublicityFreePublicityFreePublicity!)

Torquere, Phaze… I’m happy with my pubs, and I honestly don’t understand where the drive to spout shit about pubs comes from. Between private conversations among friends? Bitch all ya want. But in public? These morons need to learn to get their facts straight.

This is a comment from one of Mychael’s cronies:

Some folks got no manners…
and no awareness of how small the biz really is. Names get noted, and remembered.

And Mychael replies with:

Yup. Which is probably why some of these people start the mud-slinging–either they or someone they know was probably rejected/not happy, and poof! The press in question is officially evil.

This next comment is from another of Mychael’s readers, and I thought it was very telling:

not sure where, who, what was said ect – I agree with you tho’ – it’s one thing to express your concerns about a pub in private – but to post in a public forum is just wrong

The above comments epitomizes a lot of what is wrong with the e-publishing industry right now.

What worries me even more is this sentiment from the Anon who sent the link:

Please don’t name this email or the source. These people are psychos. Note the threats of violence. Balanced – not.

Not much else for me to say really apart from….Am I the only person who’s annoyed at the way Mychael Black has chosen to spell his/her name? Sheesh.

Anyway, here’s hoping Luna gets the move speeded up.

And here’s hoping that you guys took down this address when I posted it originally when my blog came back up the last time.