Welcome to this week’s news post and we have full instalment of fun links and news as well as the books to look out for the coming months!

First up, Amazon has announced that they created an ipad store which will allow readers to buy Kindle books as well browse their store and it is a way to bypass the no buy links which Apple has dictated with their new terms last year.

More Amazon news, an interesting report stated that publishers who allowed Kindle lending programme found sales of their books jump at to 26% – this has surprised Amazon who is promoting this as a huge success.

 

That ugly thing called Plagiarism has reared its head again and I think I mentioned in a previous post that Amazon is going to be the place where authors will find their stolen work being published by pirates as well plagiarists- it looks like it has happened! Author Sharazade discovered that some of her stories were being scraped  or plagiarised by an author called called Maria Cruz who wrote over 40 stories of erotica was also writing horror which was a bit of a leap of genres. After checking out the horror book, she found that passages was taken from Dracula by Bram Stoker and that all the other books that Maria was selling also had stolen content from other authors or from sites like Literotica. This wasn’t the only example of the problem as other authors were also discovered but it looks like this will be a growing problem for Amazon and sites that sell ebooks. For more info click here:

 

E.J James, the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy has been getting lots of buzz recently online on Goodreads and on the blogs with her series and it seems that Publisher Weekly is getting in on the act by reporting that Hollywood and a few publishers are interested in buying this series. However, this has caused a huge kerfuffle on some fan sites and certainly on the Publishers Weekly comments about the fact this series started out as a fanfic based on Twilight. I have read the books and I couldn’t see any similarities with Twilight because there was no sparkly vamps or werewolves but fanfiction and fandom can bring out strong emotions and it does raise interesting questions also this isn’t the only series based on fanfiction and there are some publishers who are editing and repackaging fanfic as all new stories. I suspect if this series gets picked up by a publisher or a studio this issue will crop up again.

 

News in brief:

Meljean Brook is beyond awesome! After last week’s temptouous author meltdown and it was pretty much a doozy! Meljean has written diary entries parodying authors who behave badly. I hope this continues because I especially loved the 4th entry which was EPIC!

 

And finally Jim C Hines has posted a hilarious entry about female poses in SF and Fantasy books. He strikes a pose and compares and contrast and the commentary is beyond funny!

Even better Genre Reviews have followed up with the female perspective which you can check here:

And finally I know there is a few Richard (BOWCHICABOWOW) Armitage fans lurking here – he has done a recent interview discussing The Hobbit and dang he makes a smexy dwarf – not gonna lie!

 

And now for the upcoming books that caught our eye or the ones we wantz for the year ahead!

 

Pamela Palmer has a new PNR series – Vamp City and I really like the look of this, A Blood Seduction.

Vampires live only for lust and pleasure in the eternal twilight of Vamp City. But the city’s magic is dying. The only person who can restore it? A beautiful woman from the mortal world…one who knows nothing of the power she wields.

Quinn Lennox is searching for a missing friend when she stumbles into a dark otherworld that only she can see—and finds herself at the mercy of Arturo Mazza, a dangerously handsome vampire whose wicked kiss will save her, enslave her, bewitch her, and betray her.

What Arturo can’t do is forget about her—any more than Quinn can control her own feelings for him. Neither one can let desire get in the way of their mission—his to save his people, hers to save herself.

But there is no escape from desire in a city built for seduction, where passion flows hot and blood-red. Welcome to Vamp City…

 

 

This looks like it has an intriguing premise. When the Sea is Rising Red by Cat Hellisen which is a YA.

After seventeen-year-old Felicita’s dearest friend Ilven kills herself to escape an arranged marriage, Felicita chooses freedom over privilege. She fakes her own death and leaves her sheltered life as one of Pelimburg’s magical elite behind. Living in the slums, scrubbing dishes for a living, she falls for charismatic Dash while also becoming fascinated with vampire Jannik. Then something shocking washes up on the beach: Ilven’s death has called out of the sea a dangerous wild magic. Felicita must decide whether her loyalties lie with the family she abandoned . . . or with those who would twist this dark power to destroy Pelimburg’s caste system, and the whole city along with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally Keri Arthur’s 3rd Dark Angel series – Darkness Devours.

Half-werewolf, half-Aedh Risa Jones can enter the realm between life and death, and she can see the Reapers who collect the souls of the dead. Now, she is using her gifts—and the investigative know-how of a man who broke her heart—to find a cabal searching for the power to control time, reality, and fate. And this is besides her work for the Vampire Council, half of whom want her dead.
But for now the Council needs her alive. Someone is killing blood-whore addicted vampires, and Risa must find the guilty party. If she succeeds, she may finally convince the council to lift the execution order on her life. But before she succeeds, she must first survive…

 

 

 

 

 

So what do you think of books based on fanfiction? Do you think there’s an ethical issue or as long the fact there’s no resemblance to the original source and the book is rewritten it is ok? And what do you think of the plagiarism of ebooks being sold on the Kindle and other stores? Will this be a bigger problem in the future?