It’s almost the New Year.
2012.
I’m just going to come out and say what we’re all thinking. Zombie Apocalypse.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t be more excited. Why? Because with zombies come Zombie Hunters.
To those who follow the Carina Press Editors’ submission calls and anyone who follows me on twitter—and just about anyone nearby who is willing to listen—it’s no secret that I’ve been on the look out for zombie hunter romances. Now, I’ll tell you why.
As readers we’ve followed Vampires/Vampire Hunters, Demons/Demon Slayers, etc. We are entering the age of the Zombies. And the possibilities are endless. My good writer friend, who has heard this argument more times than she would like, would respond with, “Eww.” When Zombies are first mentioned, most people immediately picture noses falling off, decaying skin, crumbling noses…
But I say, only if you wish it so.
That’s the beauty of this new age. Are zombies drones? Part of a hive mind? Controlled only by animalistic instincts? Do they act as loners? Group together? I say, they are whatever the author chooses.
But don’t let me stray from the key issue here. Zombie HUNTERS. I get chills just thinking of the potential. A series surrounding a brand of brothers type guild. Or a single, lone wolf vigilante. Do they keep the existence of their prey a secret? Or do they defend the world from overt destruction?
And setting… It’s all fair game. Any place—past, present and future. Space zombies? Steampunk? Regency England? Present day New Orleans? Yes, please. All of the above and anything else your brilliant minds concoct! There are no rules for worldbuilding. No set expectations from readers that must be met.
I say, let 2012 be the year of the Zombie Apocalypse. Let us all be wowed as authors bring characters to life upon the page. Let us become engrossed in vivid action scenes. Let new worlds be built and love be discovered.
And let’s all cross our fingers that they end up in my inbox. 
If you look at the acknowledgments page of The Last Slayer, you’ll find a reference to Magic and Mayhem Writers. It’s a group blog of four new paranormal romance and urban fantasy writers: Amanda Bonilla, Shawntelle Madison, Sandy Williams and yours truly. I can’t tell you how much I adore them… but maybe a shameless plug will suffice. You should check out their ever-so-awesome debut titles: The Shadow Reader, Shaedes of Gray and Coveted.)
In any case, that acknowledgments page was added at the very last stage of editing. By this point, I’d read The Last Slayer at least twenty times; my husband, the ever-reliable Hero Material, had read it at least a dozen times, and my editor had been over it five or six times as well, for developmental editing and line editing. This isn’t counting beta readers, of which there were several. Thanks to my various readers, editor and the copy editor (who said that it was one of the cleanest manuscripts she’d ever seen), I was confident that the book just had to be error-free when I turned it in to be formatted into epub. I know, I know — the rule is that every manuscript has a typo or two, no matter what. But let’s not be boring, dahling… that was for other authors, not pour moi.
A few weeks later, I got an email from my editor. She said the proofer who had been reviewing the converted book found something that looked like a typo and wanted to check with me. Naturally, I held a perfumed hankie to my lips and suppressed an ever-so-slightly-superior tinkle of laught–
It turned out that I misspelled Shawntelle’s name! I’d added an extra n by mistake and written her down as “Shanwntelle Madison” on the acknowledgments page. Talk about embarrassing!
Thankfully, I was able to correct the error before the book was finalized.
I’m red-faced enough about this whole situation as it is, so none of you go out and tell Shawntelle about it, okay? Let’s just keep it our little secret. 
The Last Slayer is now available from Carina Press. Get a DRM-free epub or a Kindle edition!
About Nadia
Nadia is a bilingual writer who likes to read, eat, travel and enjoy life. She lives in Japan with her husband and baby boy.
Visit Nadia on her website nadialee.net.
Stay Connected with Nadia
Sign Up for Nadia’s Newsletter
Like Nadia on Facebook
Follow Nadia on Twitter
Follow Nadia on Tumblr
Add Nadia on Google+
Friend Nadia on Goodreads
Subscribe to Nadia’s Blog
I love alpha heroes, but unlike some ‘common wisdom’ I disagree about what they are. I say they can be jerks, but they aren’t full time jerks. Can be control freaks, but know when to back down to greater knowledge or experience. Can be dominant, but know sometimes compromise is the best way.
So what do I think an alpha male and hero is? Down to the basics…a natural leader. I like to use my husband as an example. He’s a reserve soldier and a civilian cop. He also might (occasionally) think he’s smarter and knows better than everyone else lol. But he’s also smart enough to know he can’t bulldoze over everyone around him. Instead he draws them in. He’s sarcastic and witty and really good at what he does. Even the people that think he’s a jerk? Like him. It’s the damnedest thing.
Given my background I figure it’s not odd I’ve met a few guys over the years I’d describe in really similar ways. Some are colder and more reserved and some are more outgoing and affable. The thing they all share in common is people are not only drawn to them, but want to stick with them. These are the things I think about as I write my heroes.
Dupree Jackson from Kiss of Twilight is not one of those approachable alpha males. He’s lost almost everyone he’s ever loved and he’s determined to protect the ones who are left. Even if that means from himself. It makes his romance with Kara problematic. He knows he doesn’t want to bring her into his world. He also knows he can’t live without her. And he has no idea how to compromise. Men are so cute. This one? He’s going to learn the hard way. And I think that is what is so appealing about alpha males.
Think of it as watching the fall. Take a strong, independent guy and make him bend in ways you know he’d never find acceptable, because he loves a woman he is forced to accept can handle the situation. That is what I call an alpha male.
What do y’all think? Love alphas or hate them? Give them some leeway or not?
***
Loribelle is a former Army MP who traded in her combat boots for motherhood, flip flops, and all the Diet Coke she can drink. (She almost misses the combat boots.) She’s the author of more than 20 books, herder of three energetic children, and an occasional sun worshipper.
Loribelle can be found at her website, Twitter, Facebook, or the eHarlequin community.
by Amy Wilkins, Harlequin Digital & Carina Press Acquisition Team
I usually don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but as 2012 looms I’ve found myself making several. I may not finally quit biting my nails (a goal before my wedding…in 2013), but I did make some reading resolutions I hope to keep this year:
1) Break my record for books read in a single year. This is a yearly goal for me since I started keeping track of my read books in 2007. I won’t say how many I read this year because it’s sort of embarrassingly low compared to some super readers I know (**coughAngelaJamescough**) 
2) Finish The Notorious Wolfes continuity from Harlequin Presents. I’ve only gotten through 3 out of the 8! I have some catching up to do…
3) Discover a new favourite fantasy author. Not that there is anything wrong with my old favourites! But I’ve been craving a new epic fantasy for a while and I’ve already read everything new from my top go-to authors (Jennifer Fallon, Juliet Marillier, Jacqueline Carey). I put a couple recommended titles on my Christmas list this year, including Star of the Morning by Lynn Kurland and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin. Do you have any recommendations I should add to my list?
What are your reading resolutions for 2012?
Writers know what it’s like to live with voices in their head. Characters calling them. Stories begging to be written. Dialogue, random thoughts, or complete scenes that pop into mind, sometimes at the most inopportune times.
It’s all part of the crazy, fun world of authorship.
Hopefully, what those voices translate to is a great story, characters who come alive for the reader, and a book that cannot be put down.
Somewhere between the writing and reading process is another step. Editing.
And let me tell you, we editors are not immune from those voices.
When we’re editing a book, we can get completely immersed in the story. We question the motives of the characters, trying to get inside their heads in order to make the story as strong as it can be.
Why does he do that? What is she hoping to achieve here? Why do you think this character would act this way? These are some of the questions we often ask authors in the margins of their pages. It doesn’t always have to be explained in the story, but everything has to have a solid reason. It is this that helps make a book believable, the kind of book you read deep into the night to find out what happens.
We get sucked into the world the author creates and it’s sometimes hard to come back to reality. During the summer, mid way through editing a pirate story, my husband asked me a question and I glanced up from my computer completely puzzled as to where I was. Where were the billowing sails? The salty air? Why had the pirate I expected to see morphed into a man who looked kind of familiar but wasn’t at all who I expected?
When this happens, I know two things: one—I have a story readers are going to love; and two—not to admit to my husband that I was in any way disappointed he wasn’t the pirate.
(Because you know, I wasn’t. Not really.)
You can read my debut book ONE PERFECT NIGHT in a day (hopefully with something yummy to eat and drink within reach) but the book has taken YEARS to get to the point where it is actually available for you to read.
Once upon a time (about three years ago), I had a vision of a hero with night terrors and a heroine dressed in a fairy outfit. I knew it was Christmas but that was it. I started dreaming and brainstorming to see where these characters would take me.
The seed of an idea grew roots and blossomed into a partial. Full of new story love, I submitted the partial in Dec 2009 to an editor I’d been working with at Mills & Boon. I got revisions in weeks. This felt like a step closer to achieving the elusive publication, but the downside was they wanted me to lose the Christmas and the boss/employee element and also much less focus on the hero’s family. These parts were crucial to my story but I knew if I wanted to be published, I had to learn to embrace revisions.
I subbed the Christmas-less partial at the beginning of 2010 and was STOKED to receive the request for the full. The result? More revisions. They were minor but took me even further away from my story. I ended up with two characters named Cameron and Peppa but a completely different story than what I’d set out to write. It didn’t FEEL like me anymore. The novel progressed to the Senior Editor but was finally rejected in August 2010.
I was gutted. I’d put my heart and soul into rewriting and felt so close to publication I could taste it. But I soon realised they hadn’t rejected me on voice, characters, plot, or conflict – none of the usual biggies. They’d rejected me because the story didn’t fit exactly into one of the Mills & Boon category lines. Suddenly the rejection didn’t seem so bad, it didn’t seem so personal.
About this time, I read my first Carina book – Exclusively Yours by Shannon Stacy. I fell in love with her Kowalski family. I was also lucky enough to have a good friend Cathryn Brunet whose book Three Over Par was published with Carina and another friend who’d just sold her book Boomerang Bride (by Fiona Lowe) to them. To me all these are fabulous, high quality, well-written and edited stories and I realised Carina Press meant business. And their motto is WHERE NO GREAT STORY GOES UNTOLD.
So what did I do? I went back to my VERY original version with the fairy outfit, the Christmas, the boss/employee hook and the family and I subbed it as is! I felt like I’d rewritten it a zillion times and had NO idea if the original version was any good at all, but I thought I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
October 2010 I heard back from my now editor. She had some MINOR revisions but loved my Christmas story pretty much as it was. The revisions I did didn’t change the essence of the story.
On April Fools Day 2011 I got THE EMAIL from Angela James wanting to buy my book. And it wasn’t an April Fools’ joke.
Almost two years to the date of first subbing this story, it is PUBLISHED.
I guess what I’m trying to say in all this is YES, you do need to listen to editors and be prepared to do revisions to sell a book but you also have to listen to your heart. I knew the new story wasn’t right the minute I started doing the original revisions but I kept on.
I’m also reminding you that Carina is a little bit unique in that it’s a publisher that does publish shorter fiction but not to strict line guidelines. So if you’re like me and have a story just begging to be told but you can’t see exactly where it fits in traditional publishing avenues, I strongly urge you to try Carina.
I’m so glad I did.
Peppa Grant’s fellow employees may call their new CEO Mr. McSexy, but she’s also heard that he’s aloof and distant. Cameron McCormac certainly seems cold toward Christmas when she meets him at the company’s annual party…but he’s also the sexiest man Peppa has ever seen. And when he offers to forgive the damage she accidentally caused to his expensive car in exchange for accompanying him to his family’s holiday get-together, she agrees.
Cameron needs a date to the family party to get his matchmaking relatives off his back. Their chemistry is instant and undeniable, leading to an incredible one-night stand. But Peppa wants love and family, while Cameron’s only interested in temporary pleasure. When their relationship takes an unexpectedly serious turn, will he run the other way—or will he give love a second chance?
You can read the first chapter of ONE PERFECT NIGHT here.
***
Rachael Johns is an English teacher by trade, a mum 24/7, a chronic arachnophobic, a supermarket owner by day and a writer by night. She rarely sleeps.
You can connect with Rachel on Twitter and Facebook and she regularly updates her blog.
I am so excited to be here today and announcing the release of not only my first Carina Press novella, LADY SEDUCTRESS’S BALL, but also the release of a story that has been waiting a long time for readers to enjoy… and perhaps one that might even spark a bit of controversy… You see, my heroine commits adultery.
Now, before you all start tossing tomatoes, my heroine was guilt-tripped into marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather, who is very ill. I don’t blame her for falling in lust and eventually in love with another more virile man. In my opinion, she deserves love and pleasure, just as all women do. The few instances that her elderly husband has made it to her bedroom have been embarrassing, quiet, uncomfortable moments. This story is not only about a discovery of love, but a discovery of one’s body. An invitation to pleasure I was so pleased that (after several rejections from elsewhere) my editor at Carina, Charlotte, actually GOT the story and was willing to give LADY SEDUCTRESS’S BALL a chance, for it isn’t an adultery tale, it is story of love and discovery.
Olivia hears women in drawing rooms talking about love making, and enjoying it. She doesn’t feel the things they are talking about when she is with her husband. In fact, Olivia starts to feel that she might truly have something wrong with her—even dubbing her affliction, amatory deficiency.
But there is one thing she’s fighting inside—her dreams. Dreams of a man who brings her to the brink of pleasure, but never to completion. This makes her feel even more inferior. She isn’t supposed to feel these things, and top of it, feel them with a man who is not her husband. And then, her dream man walks into her drawing room. Everything changes.
I’ve always been fascinated with how sex and pleasure were treated in history. In Regency times, women were just supposed to grin and bear it. Not enjoy it. Women who did enjoy it were looked upon as harlots in Society (although I suspect if a man married a woman who enjoyed it, he counted himself lucky!). This past summer I visited the Museum of Sex in NYC, and the contraptions they had to keep people from masturbating, and then instruments physician’s used to bring women to orgasm (treating them for hysteria—more likely they were just sexually frustrated) looked painful. But more to the point, I feel that a woman’s pleasure is still looked upon as “you’re lucky if you do.” I remember the first time I read a romance novel, my mother telling me that all the sex was fake and it wasn’t so in real life. I set out to prove her wrong
LADY SEDUCTRESS’S BALL is about living out your fantasy. Taking your life into your own hands and discovering who you are. Shucking off the rigors of society and giving into your heart’s desire. It is about love, romance and pleasure.
Ever been to the Museum of Sex? I highly suggest it!
I truly hope you enjoy this tale, and I wish you all the best in 2012! I would also like to say, I have really enjoyed my experience with Carina. My editor really was instrumental in making this story come alive! I want to wish Charlotte, Angela and the rest of the Carina team Happy Holidays and a wonderful New Year!
Cheers,
Eliza
LADY SEDUCTRESS’S BALL now available!
Invitation to Pleasure
As the wife of the elderly Earl of March, Olivia Covington has never known the intimacies of the bedroom. Though her curiosity is piqued by the shocking whispers of society ladies, she is too wary of causing scandal to indulge in an affair. But Tristan Knightley, Earl of Newcastle, tempts her to throw off propriety.
Tristan wants Olivia for his own, and has sworn off all others until he can rid himself of the obsession. He is sure once he has a taste, he will tire of her, and can return to his rakish existence. Unable to wait to have her in his bed, he invites her for a tryst at Lady Seductress’s Ball…
24,000 words
Eliza Knight is the multipublished author of sizzling historical romance and erotic romance. Eliza grew up playing in castle ruins and traipsing the halls of Versailles when visiting her grandparents during the summer, which instilled a love of history at an early age. While not reading, writing or researching for her latest book, she chases after her three children. In her spare time (if there is such a thing…) she likes daydreaming, wine-tasting, traveling, hiking, staring at the stars, watching movies, shopping and visiting with family and friends. She lives atop a small mountain, and enjoys cold winter nights when she can curl up in front of a roaring fire with her own knight in shining armor. She is the owner of the popular historical blog, History Undressed.
We often see the holiday season of 2010 referred to as the season of digital devices and books. 2011 Quarter 1 sales of digital books jumped sharply after that holiday season. Of course, publishers and publishing professionals have been trying to determine if the holiday season of 2011 will see the same type of gifting of digital devices, and if we’ll see another spike in 2012 Quarter 1 sales.
I don’t have a crystal ball (I wish) but if we go by my own personal anecdotal evidence, it looks like this holiday season is shaping up to be just as popular for the gifting of digital devices, if not more popular. This year, no less than 4 family members have contacted me, asking me for advice on gifting digital devices. And some of those family members will b buying multiple devices for different people. That didn’t happen last year. None of my family was even THINKING about gifting tablets or ebook readers. This year, it seemed like the majority of them were.
Then there was my experience in my local Best Buy yesterday. The last Sunday before Christmas and of course the store was busy. But the busiest aisles? The two dedicated to tablets and ereaders. The salespeople in those aisles were hopping (three salespeople for just those two aisles, btw). In fact, they didn’t have time to breathe. As soon as they answered one question, four more people were waiting to ask questions. Which tablet to buy, which ereader to buy, is the Nook or the Kindle better? What else do I need to make this thing work? What do you mean there are three different nooks? I don’t know which one she wants! lol. I myself ended up selling a Kindle Fire while standing there (I was browsing iPad cases for my stepmom). No, I didn’t make a commission. Sadly, I didn’t have any business cards on me either, or I’d have told her to check out Carina Press books once she fired that Kindle up!
But based on what I’ve been hearing, both in my personal life and in my professional life, it sounds like everyone who didn’t get a tablet or ereader last year is getting one this year (including my grandmother!!) And along with the ereaders and tablets are also coming books (a friend asked me how her son can gift a specific book to his father, once dad gets his Kindle for Christmas), cases, gift cards, and other accessories to go with it all.
So you tell us…are you gifting (or receiving) a tablet or ereader this year? What about specific books? What titles are you giving? Or asking for!
