Giveaway: Promise Me Tonight

It’s February 2, and it feels as if I have been waiting for this day forever! The awesomely brilliant Sara Lindsey has been my partner in crime for many, many years. Together, we have undertaken the following Extremely Important Tasks:

  • Inserting citrus fruit into opportune portions of our manuscript
  • Made cut-out goats and browbeaten complete strangers into delivering them to friends of ours
  • Performed various and sundry forms of voodoo, with surprising effect
  • Employed pots of chocolate, and feathers, with aplomb

In all these things, I have to admit that Sara Lindsey–as a general rule–has completely and utterly surpassed all unreasonable expectations. It should not surprise you that Sara Lindsey and I have our debut novels out within scarcely a month of each other. It also should not surprise you that her debut novel, like everything else she has ever done in her life, is a fabulously awesome tour de force. It’s fun. It’s wonderful. It’s exciting. There are explosions, even!

But even better than the fun parts of this book–and Promise Me Tonight will have you giggling like a little girl at various parts–are the parts where you’ll feel all the emotional connection with characters that you want from a romance.

That’s why today is “Buy a Book Written by Sara Lindsey Day” over at courtneymilan.com. It’s also why I’m giving away three copies of Promise Me Tonight on this post to random commenters. And, for yet another chance to win, I’m giving away Sara’s debut novel along with my own for this month’s website contest.

Or, you can buy Promise Me Tonight from: Indiebound | Borders | Amazon | Powell’s | B & N.

Just a reminder

Are you a Macmillan author? Peeved that your book is suddenly no longer available through Amazon?

Just remember: there’s one thing that authors can and should do in circumstances like this (and, um, always). That thing is: link to lots of different bookstores. If your book is unavailable at Amazon, you can get it at Barnes and Noble or Borders or Powell’s or the Tattered Cover or any of a number of other bookstores. It’s important to link to all those places, not just Amazon. When you link to Amazon you’re sending the implicit message that Amazon is the only place to buy books, and in my opinion, the most important thing to me as an author is that readers can buy my books everywhere possible, not just in one place. If the power is distributed among many, many people, you’ll have more experimentation (please, somebody, with DRM-free formats), more attempts to try some price variation (I would pay more $ for a DRM-free format), different books being highlighted at different stores, resulting in a more diverse environment with more choice for everyone.

I know it’s a pain to set up all those links.

That’s why I created my free (both in price and in distribution rights) ebook linking script, which you can run on any PHP website.

That’s why I also created my free (in price, although see fine print disclaimer) link generator, so that those who cannot run PHP can copy and paste links to multiple bookstores directly into their website.

The real fight here isn’t just over the $9.99 price tag. It’s about whether there ends up being only one place where people go to buy books. I love Amazon. I buy from Amazon. I’m happy that they’re selling my books. But I don’t want Amazon to be alone.

If you care about consumer choice as an author, make sure you give readers choice, too.

Fine print disclaimer, rendered in regular type: my link generator defaults to using my Amazon and indiebound IDs, although it allows you to use your own or use none at all. I set this up this way because sometimes I copy and paste links myself, and I am too lazy to keep adding my Amazon affiliate data by hand. So it is possible for you to use the link generator and for me to get a kickback. If you don’t like that behavior, though, you can turn it off.

Stop! Using! Bad! Numbers!

(exclamation points, on the other hand…)

There’s a conversation I’ve had before. In terms of authors I fall on the weak end of the “Boo, Piracy!” side, and I especially fall on the extremely strong end of “Boo, DRM!” The basic gist of the conversation was something like this: “Well, you might not think it’s a big deal now, but wait until you see your book on the piracy sites, with all those downloads listed.” Well. Okay. I’ve waited. Now here I am. I am officially a published author. I officially have to worry about whether my sales numbers will be good enough, and whether they’ll justify another contract. I have, in fact, lost sleep over this.

You know what makes my head hurt when I worry about sales numbers and contract renewals? The fact that one of my local Borders didn’t get their shipment of my books in for two weeks, and worrying that this might be more than just a local error. You know what will make people buy my books, faster and with greater likelihood, than if I spent 20 hours a week filing takedown notices? Their finding my book in Target where they stopped by to get lightbulbs.

My guess is that maybe, maybe, 1% of the people who download my book will actually read it, and maybe, maybe, 1% of the ones who actually read it would have purchased it. I absolutely despise these “estimates” of the cost of piracy that just take the number of downloads and multiply it by the cost of the book, because that has no basis in reality.

The most recent such estimate has hit the twitter/authorosphere by means of Publisher’s Weekly, in which Attributor estimates that piracy costs the industry “as much as” $3 billion in lost sales. Already, this has been turned into “pirates cost the industry $3 billion!” Sugar plums dance in heads, as people imagine what their sales would be like with another 6 zeroes attached to the end.

But the study (you can read the whole thing here) isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on, and its findings have been lied about by the very people who ran the study. It is so egregious, that I am angry just thinking about it.

So let’s start with first things first: Note the source. Attributor is not a scientific outfit. They are not economists who have been trained to determine this sort of thing. What “Attributor” is, is a fee-charging service that tries to stamp out piracy for you. This means that Attributor has an incentive–a financial one–to convince authors and publishers that there is money to be made in stamping out piracy. Beware anyone with murky motivations.

Now let’s move on to the methodology.

Attributor estimated the cost of piracy at $3 billion dollars using the following methodology:

  1. It used the titles that it was tracking–that is, the titles where people had paid it money to hunt down and remove illegal copies. These titles are not listed in its methodology, but Publisher’s Weekly listed them as titles like, “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Angels and Demons.” Not precisely representative of book downloads in general.
  2. Somehow, it figured out what “market share” each potential hosting site represented. The methodology does not explain how it figured that.
  3. Four of those sites show how many “downloads” a title has. Using the estimated market share in part 2, Attributor stated that these sites represented 36.4% of all downloads. So it figured out the number of downloads by taking the number of downloads from those four sites, and dividing that number by 0.364. This gave them 9 million copies of books sold.
  4. Attributor looked up prices for these books, and multiplied price by downloads. This gave them a figure of $380 million.
  5. It then estimated that the 913 titles it was tracking represented 13.5% of the book publishing market. Again, no explanation is given as to how they measured this. By number of titles? (not possible; there are more than 10,000 books available for purchase). By percentage of books sold, per BookScan? I don’t really know where they get this number, but it’s pretty clear that the titles listed by Publisher’s Weekly represent very, very popular titles, and I’m not sure it’s fair to extrapolate from one set of books to the other, especially since their own findings demonstrated that there was variability in download rate for different types of books. In any event, they took $380 million and divided it by 0.135, which gave them $2.8 billion.
  6. They added $200,000,000 to the number to make it nice and round. No, I’m not joking. That gives you an idea about precisely how scientifically accurate this study is.

These numbers are useless. In the study’s methodology, it acknowledges that these numbers cannot even attempt to estimate financial loss:

(study here; page 5).

Which, of course, is why, Attributor, in announcing its findings, announced it thusly:

You know what I call that?

I call that dishonesty. The numbers themselves are drawn from nowhere, are unexplained, and use estimates that the survey methodology itself acknowledges render it useless for the determination of loss. But Attributor–who makes its money from publishers scared of piracy–has itself used those numbers to claim something that they can’t actually claim, and those numbers are now being disseminated around the web by people who call this fact.

Piracy is bad. But you know what? So is a dishonest representation of those findings, especially when those findings then become part of the debate about what should be done about piracy.

I am firmly opposed to piracy. But I am also firmly opposed to lies about piracy, and this is a lie, both in the “damned statistics” meaning of the word, and in the “knowing misstatement of the truth” sense of the word.

Shame on you, Attributor, for your misleading press release, and for your blog post stating in certain terms what you, yourself, internally said you hadn’t even attempted to estimate.

Winners

SO I just realized I forgot to pick a winner of the Completely Serious Compendium of Utterly Dire Events. In part this is because shortly after posting that post, a Dire Event happened to me–namely, my laptop got stolen–and I’ve been in panic mode ever since.

But panic has been averted, and here I am, picking a winner.

And the winner that random.org draws for the commenters is….  COURTNEY MILAN!

Uh. Oops. (Really. random.org drew me. Thanks, Random.) It turns out that winner already has a handful of copies of that book.

So, the, uh, second runner up: it’s Jeannie Lin! Congratulations, Jeannie.

For the rest of you, I am at the Eloisa James/Julia Quinn bulletin board all month, answering questions, talking about dogs, and telling you what I’m reading. Come by and say hello.

Subtle Nightmares

There are some obvious nightmares: dreams where you’re chased by big monsters, or dreams where you wake up and someone is standing over you with a knife, or dreams where someone threatens to kill your puppy. For me, these dreams tend to be dark in tone and texture; they happen at night, and they’re often stripped of most of their colors, pulled down to a very basic color palette. (Those who say you can’t dream in color are simply wrong. I do dream in color, and sometimes color has been material to the unwinding of my dream.) You wake up from these dreams with a pounding heart, glad to be back in reality.

Then there are subtle nightmares. They start out like a regular dream: the full color spectrum. Nobody’s chasing me. Nobody’s threatening me or my loved ones. Instead, they start out so subtly normal that I think nothing of it. For instance, in one of my recurring subtle nightmares, I could be anywhere: walking through the town where I grew up, applying for a job, checking the mail. And then something happens: Maybe someone comes up to me and hands me a notice, or maybe it arrives in the mail, or maybe someone makes a phone call at the job where I’ve applied. For whatever reason, the nightmare part starts like this: “Well, Courtney, we just noticed that you never took the Public Health segment in high school. You’ll have to go back and finish it, or we’re going to rescind all your degrees.” And then, before I know what is happening, I’m being pushed back into high school, I’m turning seventeen again, I’m back among all those people, back when people cared more about the name on the jeans pocket than they did about what you might have to say…. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I wake up, my heart pounding, glad to be back in reality where I desperately need to do laundry and I’ve still forgotten to pay that parking ticket, but by God, at least I don’t have to go back to high school. This is not very fun, as you can imagine. The subtle nightmares are in many ways more insidious, because they feel so much more real.

In any event, this is all by means of saying that in the last week or so, I’ve developed another subtle nightmare. And, yes, it will make you think I’m slightly neurotic as authors go, but hello. I should think you’d have figured that out by now. In any event, my agent, who is wonderful, has been sending me weekly sales reports gleaned from Bookscan. And those sales reports tell me how many copies of my book sold (although Bookscan is not complete, it is the only thing I have, and so I cling to it with irrational force) throughout the US. So far, the only reports I’ve gotten have been reports about the anthology–and I’ve been fairly blase about that in a sense, because it’s not one-hundred percent all the way mine. To be honest, most people bought it because it had the words “Mary Balogh” on the front, and I am totally cool with that.

But this… this one is all mine. And that makes it five hundred times scarier. In my subtle nightmare, I open my Bookscan report, and peer, frightened, at the number.

The number changes. Sometimes it is 6. Sometimes it is 7. It is never any greater than 8. And I say, “Wait. I bought every last mother-loving one of those copies!”

So yes. That’s my current neurosis. I don’t see how authors back in the day survived, not knowing if anyone at all had purchased their book for months and months and months.

I sometimes think that these subtle nightmares are my subconscious’s way of making me feel good about reality by managing expectations. Yes, I may be behind at work; but hey, at least I don’t have to go back to high school! And yes, maybe I am getting far too angsty about meaningless numbers on Amazon–but at least more than 6 people will have bought my book (I hope–I actually will not see these magic numbers until, maybe, tomorrow, so there is one more evening of absolute neurotic panic).

In any event, if you bought my book, thank you for saving me from my worst neurosis. Thank you.

Mr. Milan reviews Proof by Seduction

Courtney’s Note: This review was written by Mr. Milan. Courtney edited it only for length. We all know that Mr. Milan has no bias towards Courtney. None.  Admittedly, he is married to her, but a little thing like that would never lead him to soften his reviews.

Hello again. I’m Mr. Milan, Courtney’s husband. She’s asked me to read and review her debut novel, Proof by Seduction, even though my review of her novella was less than stellar.

Maybe Courtney thinks this time I’ll succumb to the temptation to speak well of her novel for the sake of domestic peace. Maybe she hopes my tastes have changed, that a story without any swordplay, without any characters attempting to vanquish their enemies by force, without an ending that pays the price of the hero and heroine’s triumph in gallons of spilled blood, will magically earn a good review from me.

Though I love her dearly, Courtney thinks wrong. I read Proof by Seduction from cover to cover, and I thought it sucked.

Courtney’s biggest failing is that she consistently fails to focus on the most interesting parts of her own story. Before I get into my review, I want to present this tendency of hers in pictorial form. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I thought I would provide an illustration, or in this case, two.

This is how Courtney wrapped her Christmas present to me:

Courtney's gift to Mr. Milan

Are you seeing the problem? Bows. Ribbons. Curls. Flowers. The present inside was great, sure, but what was with all that stuff on the outside? I showed her how to really wrap presents with my gift to her:

Mr. Milan's gift to Courtney

I’m sure you can all see my point here: Courtney focuses on the uninteresting parts. But let’s get back to Proof by Seduction. Courtney gives us a hero, Gareth Carhart, the Marquess of Blakely, who she tells us has lived in the jungles of Brazil. Great. She has my attention. That’s cool!

But does Courtney give us any scenes to flesh out that adventure? No. Lord Blakely must have had to defend himself from jungle predators in Brazil, right? How did he do it? Did he shoot them? What kind of gun did he use? Who manufactured it? What did the after kick feel like? How many guns did he have? I want to read about that one time when Lord Blakely and his party were surprised one night as they sat around a campfire, listening to monkeys howling in the jungle blackness, by an an enormous jaguar who managed to drag away two of Blakely’s companions (to be eaten later) before coming back for Blakely, who had just managed to load his rifle and…

But instead, all we learn about the Brazil trip is… that it taught Lord Blakely how to make his own breakfast.

Memo to Courtney: Breakfast? If you want to write a really good book, write about the exciting stuff!

Courtney’s story telling ability when it comes to her heroine is no less frustrating. Jenny Keeble is the only character smart and resourceful enough to challenge Lord Blakely (who presumably doesn’t carry rifles in London, for some odd reason), and I have to admit that their (metaphorical) dueling reminded me (metaphorically) of the light saber battles between Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader, or Luke Skywalker and the Emperor, or Yoda and the Emperor. Two skilled combatants, evenly matched, kicking each other’s butt.

So how did Jenny get to be such a bad ass? We’re told she was sent to a school when she was four and abandoned by her parents, and that she was a troublemaker. She pissed off the old schoolmarm so much that years later, the old crone wants to see her get what she deserves.

Wow! Jenny must have been a real cool dude in school. Courtney, show us scenes of her being bad ass! But alas. Does Courtney give us any examples of Jenny being a rolling terror in her school girl days? How about a scene where she’s throwing spit wads at the teacher when her back was turned? Or how about the time when Jenny learned to do a karate chop and she broke this other girl’s arm, and then she whirled around and did a groin-kick to this other prissy girl, while ducking under the teacher’s arms? Where are those scenes, huh? What a missed opportunity!

Courtney could have earned a whole extra Sherman Tank from me had she written about just one of Jenny Keeble’s schoolyard fights, preferably with blood and/or breaking bones.

To sum up: Proof by Seduction has a great hero and heroine, but Courtney doesn’t write enough about why they’re great.

Bottom Line: One and a half out of five Sherman Tanks.
half a sherman tank

Happy New Year!

Hi everyone, and Happy New Year! It’s January 1st, 2010, and that means…. YES! Proof by Seduction is officially out! You can buy it anywhere fine books are sold.

Madame Esmerelda predicts savings in your future!One of the places where fine books are sold is over at eHarlequin.com, where they are running a special promotion, in which Madame Esmerelda is making predictions. These are the best kind of predictions for a false fortune-teller to make, of course: one where the person making the predictions controls the outcome.

But there are other places to buy Proof by Seduction: Indiebound | Amazon | B & N | Powell’s | Borders

And, as always, with any release, there will be more goodies here. For instance, later on this week, I’ll be hosting what is quickly becoming an important tradition: Mr. Milan (yes, my husband) will be posting his review of Proof by Seduction. For those of you who missed it, Mr. Milan reviewed my novella, “This Wicked Gift.” It was… interesting. (We were planning to have the post go live on January 1st, but an unfortunate incident in which his laptop was stolen seems to have prevented that).

There may be a couple of other surprises in store for today, too. You’ll just have to wait and see!

Covering the cover

So! My book is officially coming out tomorrow, and before it does so, I have a very important public service announcement.

You see, I have had very mixed reactions to the cover for Proof by Seduction. People either love it, or they are completely embarrassed by it. On the one hand, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that it is gorgeous, elegant, beautiful, sexy, and classy. And it is! See? Love that corset. On the other hand, I’ve had a handful of people e-mail me to say, “Wow, Courtney, I am interested in reading your book… but that cover! It is far too sexy for my bus ride. All the other people on my commute are going to look at that cover and then they will leer at me. Also, I can’t read it at lunch, because my mostly male colleagues will rib me over it.”

Hmph. Personally, I fail to see how a mostly-unclothed woman, lying on a divan in a provocative pose, could indicate anything except the highest of high-minded high-mindedness, and I think all those people who judge books by covers should be frowned upon. But, to be slightly serious for the only time in this entire blog post, back when I first started reading romance, I would take my books up to the cash register very carefully–sometimes even buying High Minded Looking books with sepia-toned factories belching smoke on the front to hide the clinch romance books I actually wanted to read as I walked up to the cash register. Even now, I won’t whip out truly scandalous clinch covers in front of some of my older, male colleagues–their hearts just can’t take the rise in blood pressure. So I totally understand how someone could look at this cover, imagine herself taking it out at lunch in front of a bunch of unsympathetic co-workers, and wincing.

Plus, one reader said that she teaches small children, and if she took a book like this out, they might start to get the Wrong Idea, and parents somewhere would complain. How could she possibly read my book? This was an excellent point, and it got to me to thinking about something I could do to help out with that problem, especially since there are children involved. (If you have not noticed, one of the things we take seriously here at courtneymilan.com is this: lying to small children.)

Here, for the first time, for your covering-up pleasure, is a downloadable book cover. Like all High Minded books, this is a cover done in sepia (although if your printer is black and white, it will print just fine in grayscale, and it will look appropriately bleak!). This is the book you have always wanted to carry on the subway: It declares that you are so smart that you’re reading not for pleasure or enjoyment, but for the sheer thrill of scraping your fingernails across the chalkboard of literature. It can be read without hesitation in accounting firms or in kindergartens. Feel free to whip it out during dull moments at the New York Stock Exchange.

Here’s what it looks like:

This Book is a Completely Serious Compendium of Utterly Dire Events

And here’s how you use it:

What you need:

One printer; one internet connection; one piece of paper; four pieces of tape (optional); and one copy of Proof by Seduction (available here: B & N | Amazon | Indiebound | Borders | Powell’s) (other books can be substituted, but really, why would you want to do that?)

  1. Download the full graphic (warning: it’s huge at around 4 MB) here. Print it out.
  2. Fold on the white lines along the top side and the bottom side; then fold along the white lines on the right and left sides. This should form little pockets on the right and left side of the cover.
  3. Jimmy the right pocket over the front cover of Proof by Seduction; wrap the cover around the book, and then jimmy the left cover over the back cover of Proof by Seduction.
  4. For those who are extra-conscious of security, four pieces of tape can be used to make sure that the book cover does not come off.

The result:

Protective Coloration!
One of these books is read by smart people! The other is only read by people who are intelligent. Can you guess which one is which?

So, what do you think? Let me know–one random commenter will win a copy of A Completely Serious Compendium of Utterly Dire Events, as created using above method.

Win my book; read their excerpts!

So today, December 30th, Carrie Lofty, Victoria Dahl and I are having a joint contest! It goes like this.

1. I’ll be posting excerpts from Victoria Dahl’s Lead Me On and Carrie Lofty’s Scoundrel’s Kiss.

2. I will then ask a few questions about those excerpts (on this blog) and throughout the day on Twitter. One random answer will get a free copy of Proof by Seduction.

3. Carrie and Victoria will have excerpts from Proof by Seduction on their blogs, and they’ll be asking questions about my books on twitter. You can follow Carrie on Twitter here, and Victoria on Twitter here. So go read the excerpts for Proof, and you could win a copy of Lead Me On or Scoundrel’s Kiss from either of them! Carrie’s post is here; Victoria’s is here.

So, from Lead Me On:

Lead Me OnThe door opened and she expected to look up and see  Mr. Jennings walking in. What she didn’t expect was the man who’d visited her  dreams the night before. But she was cool Jane  now, the impenetrable fraud, so she merely raised an eyebrow. “Good morning, Mr.  Chase.”

“Hello, Miss Jane,” he  countered.

She almost laughed at his joke, and  what a disaster that would have been. If he knew she found him charming, he  might ask her out again. She didn’t
allow her expression to budge. “What can I  help you with?”

He held out the folder he’d  tucked under his arm. “See? Safe and sound. I’m the soul of  responsibility.”

“Mm-hm,” she murmured, trying  to hide the way he was wreaking havoc on her concentration. His sleeve had  inched up, revealing more of the tribal tattoo on his left arm. “Thank  you.”

“So…” he said.

She  jerked her eyes up from his arm.

“Have you  thought any more about it?”

“About  what?”

“Going out to dinner with  me?”

“No,” she answered as if it were the honest  truth. Actually, it was. Dinner hadn’t entered into her thoughts even  once.

“Come on.” He smiled at her, his wide mouth  curving into a very handsome grin. His dark blue eyes sparkled. “Just  dinner.”

“No, thank  you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re  not my type.” The bald-faced lie fell smoothly from her  tongue.

“You sure?” He glanced toward his arm,  and Jane felt her pulse leap. Oh, my God. Had  he looked at his tattoo when he said that? She felt her
face heat despite her  best efforts to suppress the betraying flow of blood. He’d seen her  looking. But those could have been looks of  horror, she told herself. They’d meant
nothing.  Nothing.

Her pulse wouldn’t listen to her. It  gathered speed. Chase smiled and put one hand on her desk to lean closer. His  gaze fell to her mouth, and she
could feel herself breathing too  fast.

Last night as she’d boxed, she’d imagined  her trainer was Chase. She’d imagined him grabbing her, his hands sliding across  her damp skin, his mouth
descending with a  growl…

Oh, God, her masquerade was crumbling around  her. What if she let Chase–

Her cell phone rang,  breaking the man-spell she’d fallen under. Jane looked down to the phone and the  display was a bucket of cold water dumped over her head. “MOM,” it read, the  back-light glowing red in warning. She stared  at it for a moment, skin cooling as each second ticked by. “Yes,” she finally  answered him, “I’m sure.”

“Sure about  what?”

“I’m sure you’re not my type, Mr. Chase, but  thank you very much for the invitation.”

Though his  face fell, Chase didn’t look the least bit angry. In fact he pulled a business  card from his back pocket and handed it over. “All right then. Call me if you  change your mind. That’s my cell.”

“Thank you.” She  meant to drop it in the trash. She really did. But as Chase turned and walked  out, Jane tucked his card into her purse. Then she turned off her cell phone and  stuck that in her purse too.

NICE. And I mean not “nice” as in, “he’s a nice guy,” but NICE, as in, “oh yeah, baby.” This is one of the things I love about Victoria Dahl–she knows how to get a slow burn going. And she also knows how to take a gallon of gas and pour it over that smolder. You can read more about Lead Me On here.

And here’s a sneak snippet from Scoundrel’s Kiss, by Carrie Lofty:

Scoundrel's KissWhen one step separated his body from hers, Gavriel breathed the scent of lemon and skin warmed by the mineral-rich spring water. The more he breathed, the more lightheaded he became. He felt every heartbeat in triplicate: beneath his ribs, in his skull, at his groin.

Gavriel brushed his mouth along the curve of her shoulder. Ada shuddered but did not pull away. The moist heat of his breath raised goose bumps on her skin and reflected back against his face. He waited, glorying in that intimate caress, knowing he would take her if he tasted her.

“Order me to go,” he rasped.

Ada looked over her shoulder. He let his eyes fall down the line of her brow and her cheeks and her chin. “I won’t do that,” she said.

“Why not?” The need to touch her again burned like hell’s fires. “No respectable woman behaves as you do.”

“We both know I left respectable behind some time ago.”

“Then you do this as a game or as punishment.”

“You’re mistaken if you believe this involves you alone.” She spoke with less deliberation and more speed. “Perhaps I do this simply to see what I’ll do next. I hardly know who I am anymore. It makes me wonder.”

He reached out to trace the line of her shoulder blade but pulled back. “Wonder what?”

“Am I the kind of woman to seduce you outright, or will I wait for you? Either way, you’ve become a most welcome distraction.”

“Ada, don’t–”

“You think you’ve cured me because I no longer shake or cry,” she said. “But in that you’re mistaken. The need is still here. Right here.” She clenched one hand over the other and pressed it to the hollow between her breasts. “It’s like thirst or hunger or lust. A need. Can you understand that?”

He could only nod, a weak one at that. A delicious and wanton angel stood before him, his own parable of temptation. The redness of the hot spring had faded, leaving the smoothest white porcelain skin–a feast for his eyes. But he wanted more. No matter his aims or his vows, he was a man who needed more.

“I can understand,” he said thickly.

“Then help me, Gavriel. Give me something new to crave.”

Oh, Carrie Lofty. I am definitely feeling some cravings right now–a craving for a really awesome book! You can read more about Carrie Lofty’s Scoundrel’s Kiss here.

So, for the first chance to win a copy of Proof by Seduction, answer these two questions (one random commenter will win):

1. What kind of parable does Gavriel think Ada is?

2. Where does Chase have his tattoo?

Giveaway: Lead Me On by Victoria Dahl

So, it’s December 29th, and a Tuesday, and that means that new books are on the shelf. Those of you who are familiar with this drill know how it goes: Almost every day is “Buy a Book Written by Courtney” day, which has been very inconvenient, as Courtney has (up until this point) only had novellas (rather than actual books) available for purchase.

Naturally, since today is Tuesday, and since the semi-official release date of my actual book is in a few days, my book is probably going to be on the shelves just about everywhere. So am I going to tell you to buy my book?

No! That would be weird. I’m going to tell you to buy Lead Me On by Victoria Dahl. It’s no surprise that I’m a huge Victoria Dahl fangirl; I think there’s something about her heroines that really just speaks to me. They’re never the sort of person to give up and let someone else solve their problems; they always dig deep and figure out how things move forward on their own. They don’t need heroes.

But they do deserve them. And I think, more than any of Victoria’s other books, Jane Morgan deserves her hero. I absolutely ached for her to have her happily ever after, and this book stretched her, forced her to really look into herself and decide that she was worthy of happiness. I just adored this book–so much so that I pushed a copy of it off on my sister who is visiting for the holidays. I don’t want to give away too much, but today is definitely a holiday: Go buy a book written by Victoria Dahl, and don’t wait to read it. Because Lead Me On is really, really fantastic.

(If you are reading this after December 29th, the link won’t work–in that it will no longer be a holiday in which you are supposed to buy a book written by Victoria Dahl. You can find out what I think about the book by clicking here instead.)

In any event, leave a comment and some lucky person will win a copy of this awesome book.