Sorry I’ve been so slack about updating my blog. No excuses. I’m just slack. lol

Of course, the biggest news is that I’ve sold the next three books in my (as yet unreleased) Dark Angels series to Danielle Perez at NAL! Woohoo! Naturally, we haven’t got release dates or anything yet, but I will pass those on as soon as I get them.

In other publishing news, fellow lulu and good mate, M J Scott, has just had her very first book placed up on Amazon for preorder. Check it out—it’s fab!

In news for writers, Stephanie Laurens has started a blog to discuss changes in the publishing world and get some discussion going about what it all means for traditional publishers and authors and the brave new world ahead. Given Stephanie has been successful in this business for a very long time now, it’s bound to be an interesting place to visit. Check it out here.

I’ll be putting up a web contest to celebrate the upcoming release of Mercy Burns in the next week or so, so keep an eye out for that one. Although if you were a newsletter subscriber, you’d be participating in a newsletter subscriber only contest right now–prizes being a Sigg Dark Angels water bottle and Tim Tams. Random contests for subscribers will continue throughout the year, so if you haven’t signed up already, maybe you should!

Ha! I have official approval to show off the US covers for both Darkness Unbound and Darkness Rising. As I said, very different but also very in keeping with the Riley books

So who is Astatalk? Until yesterday, I actually had no idea who or what Astatalk was, but I’ve since learned its an underground community of pirates. In other words, they steal anything and everything they can–books, movies, audio, whatever, and claim that it is their right. Yeah, right. So why did I become aware of them? Apparently, I’m #1 on Astatalk’s banned author list, because I’m part of a group who hired a lawyer to stop Astatalk’s stealing. Which is interesting given that, as I’ve already said, I’d never heard of them until yesterday & the only lawyer I’ve ever hired was for my divorce. But I guess people willing to steal the livelihood of others don’t really care about the truth.

What pirates don’t–or won’t–understand is that they are costing the livelihoods of the very people they love to read (and steal) from. Stealing from authors is far different from Hollywood studios (not saying I approve of this either, btw), but Hollywood studios are vastly more able to withstand the effect of such theft. An author has no outside investors, they don’t have vast merchandising franchises to feed their incomes, they just have their books. And they very much depend on sales (be it print or audio or ebook) to keep their career going. You see, publishing isn’t a benevolent employer–if an author doesn’t make what a publisher considers a decent sell-through (that is, sells enough books to make the publisher a decent profit) then that author is kicked to the curb. No ifs, buts or maybes. And even for the authors that do sell through, it can be a year or more before you see any money (because publishing accountancy is always 6 months behind, meaning they pay for the jan–june half of the year in dec). As I’ve said before, publishing can be tough, especially in bad economic times, and pirating isn’t helping. Not that the pirates care I guess–they’ll just keep happily stealing until there’s no decent authors left, and then they’ll probably scream about the injustice of that!