Interview with M.K. Hobson + Giveaway

Today we are happy to welcome to Book Lovers Inc. M.K. Hobson, author of the acclaimed and beloved The Native Star, a unique mix of western, fantasy, steampunk, as some called it a thrilling “witchpunk” novel! Book #2 The Hidden Goddess is to be released in May and Mary kindly agreed to indulge our curiosity and answer our questions.  Please give a warm welcome to M.K. Hobson!

BLI: Mary can you please tell us a bit about yourself?

Well, I’m a mom (to both a beautiful 13 year old daughter and a beautiful yellow lab), a wife, and a marketing manager for a large corporation (not necessarily in that order). I love to sew and am particularly fond of historical costuming. And sometimes, in between all that other stuff, I write books and even short stories.

BLI: Describe a typical …

Around the Bookish World: News Week-in-Review

Welcome to this week’s newsy post which is a bit brief because its been a bit quiet this week but we do have some interesting tidbits and goodies for y’all!

First up – some interesting new developments from Amazon which may help the Kindle to become the prominent format/reader in the DRM and format wars.
Amazon has announced that it will team up with Overdrive who hosts and offers e-books to libraries. Previously epub was the only format that was available for library ebook lending. I think this will herald the Kindle/Mobi as the winning format since one of the main reasons for getting an epub book was borrowing ebooks from libraries and it looks like Amazon has offered another arrow in their quill for choosing a Kindle!

It looks like the rumours about a tablet is gaining …

Around the Bookish World: News Week-in-Review

Well this week we have had some interesting developments with Amazon and some goodies with new covers and blurbage from long awaited books!

First up – Amazon is going to offer a new Kindle that will be cheaper than the current Wifi/3G models the Kindle will be around $114 which is $25 cheaper. But to make up with the lower price it will host ads in the screensaver mode or at the homepage. They have stated that the ads wont be intrusive and will hope to reach a wider audience with a cheaper price. Now I am not sure about this because I am not a fan of ads even if is on a standby mode and I am not sure if this will catch on because its only 25 dollars cheaper but who knows!

February wasn’t a …

Review: Amber Frost by Suzi Davis

Format Read: EbookNumber of Pages: 292 pagesRelease Date: December 7th 2010Publisher: Ireadiwrite PublishingFormats Available: E-BookPurchasing Info: Author’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon

Blurb:

Grace Lynn Stevenson is an eighteen year old girl who recently moved with her wealthy, but busy parents to a new city. She’s popular, pretty and rich – what more could a girl want? But deep down, she’s sad, lonely and plagued by nightmares.

When she meets Sebastian Caldwood at her new private school, she’s inexplicably drawn to him and his strange tattoos. Sebastian always gets what he wants – he simply has to wish it; but he’s fighting his own inner demons, and struggling to remember a past that eludes him. When he remembers that he is much older than he looks, he realizes that he’s seen many people live and die, including Grace. …

Around the Bookish World: News Week-in-Review

A few weeks ago, I reported that Amanda Hocking had signed a huge deal with a major publisher for her upcoming series. Not only this produced headlines and a change of direction with the indie self pubbed author, another interesting tidbit emerged during the bidding process. Amazon who is traditionally an online vendor for books and ebooks although they offer self published authors to sell their books via their site. However it was recently known that Amazon teamed up with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt during their bid for Hocking’s new series, with HMH offering the print rights while they would offer the world ebook rights. The combined bid actually beat out St Martin’s Press’ offer – but this is just another sign that Amazon is focusing more on the publishing end of things.

I think right now there will …

The Write Factor

Breaking News: The Around the Bookish World News Week-in-Review post has been postponed to tomorrow (Saturday) due to some spontaneous happenings on Twitter (ie. hence the topic of this post).

Yesterday morning a post about grammar errors and typos diminishing the experience of reading had Twitter aflutter. This post made us think about whether ARCs are a different species than finished books, or whether they should be treated the same.

For those of you who don’t know what ARCs are, they are Advance Reader Copies, which are review copies printed from galleys/proofs during the copy edit stage, meaning that both the author and the editor are still going through some proofreading and last minute changes/polishing. Meaning that ARCs are far from being finalised and that is why each and every ARC has two notes/warnings on the cover:
1) that the book we are about …

Around the Bookish World: News Week-in-Review

Well after last week’s bonanza of news – things are pretty quiet this week, but I have some fantastic books/covers to watch out for and a few tidbits that will please a few people.

We have a bit of an update of Trisha Telep and the Wicked Pretty Things anthology.More authors have pulled out , Brenna Yovanoff, Seanan McGuire , along with Karen Mahoney and Lesley Livingston, Lisa Mantchev and Jessica Verdey. While Melissa Marr has announced she does not want her name to be associated with this anthology in any manner to recommend it. But that is not all, authors Ann Aguirre and Saundra Mitchell have also pulled out in a different anthology again edited by Telep. I definitely think now, Wicked Pretty Things anthology wont go ahead with its current form with only 7 of …

Around the Bookish World: News Week-in-Review

Wow this week has been choc-a-bloc with news, Google book developments and even a WTFERY or two. We also had major announcements from a popular author going indie/self pubbed route while an indie self pubbed author has recently sold a 4 book series in a MAJOR deal to big publisher plus a lot more!

The major news that broke this week was Google Books settlement has been rejected due to a class action suit about the scanning books and the automatic opt in issue with orphaned works. Dear Author covers the ruling comprehensively and lays out why it was deemed illegal in a great summary here.

This wont be the end of the matter but it has probably thrown a spanner in the works for their plans of scanning books especially with the matter of orphaned works.

I find this …

Around the Bookish World: News Week-in-Review

This week in the blogosphear we have Goodreads questionable policy and trashtalking galore for Dabwaha which has commenced this week in style. (Note this year has been brutal and if anyone follows Dabwaha on twitter – I apologize with the penis pics and the altered tweets which has led to cries of foul cheating!) But good luck to everyone who has entered Dabwaha!

Lauren Dane has highlighted another issue with Goodreads. She noticed that more and more star ratings are given to books that have hardly been written, and contacted Goodreads about this issue because it wasn’t realistically reflective of a book’s ranking. Goodreads replied with the following:

“Thanks for writing in with your feedback. While I can understand your frustration, it is not a requirement that …

Around the Bookish World: News Week-in-Review

Welcome to this week’s news post which I almost forgot to write, because for me it has totally zoomed past for me. This week its been pretty quiet although last weekend was pretty eventful with a new brouhaha online about authors and reviewing again and a mysterious non existent YA Mafia group. This has reignited the debate again about who can and shouldn’t review books and I suspect this issue will arise again and again in a different way and in a different genre – although it could be Ninja mystery writers lurking in the wings when the next hoopla happens. But for a good summary and insights, check out Dear Author’s post as well as Katiebabs and Smexybooks write ups.

This actually links up to Goodreads implementing a new rule about authors responding to negative …