I do love meetings at Harlequin HQ. I usually end up off my chair laughing or at the very least learning new romance concepts (How do you spell monogamous ménage again?). So when the opportunity to join the Carina Press Acquisitions Team came up, I jumped at the chance. Not only does the team have a reputation of giving good meeting, the “overheard” tweets from them are always pure gold.

Por ejemplo:

#Overheard at Harlequin It’s not your typical dom/sub relationship. @carinapress

— Malle Vallik (@MalleVallik) January 10, 2013

“It’s a lightsuspense w/paranormal elephants. I mean elements”. <-overheard in acq meeting. Paranormal elephants wld have been awesome!

— Angela James (@angelajames) June 19, 2012

Overheard at @harlequinbooks HQ: “Back to erotic Christmas.” (in a @carinapress meeting of course!)

— Harlequin Books (@HarlequinBooks) July 20, 2012

(To get a glimpse of “overheard” tweets all around the romance mothership in real time, follow @carinapress and @harlequinbooks on Twitter. And if you’re so inclined, follow me at @pattyanasco too!)

Fun times aside, acquisition meetings are usually filled with discovery. Every week, I learn more and more about the different books we publish and watch how the rest of the Acquisitions Team respond passionately (for good or bad) to their assigned reads. My personal preference is contemporary or erotic romance so hearing Jenny talk about Eleri Stone or Malle discuss New Adult teaches me a bit more about genres I should start reading!

Another thing I particularly enjoy about Acquisitions is that we are free to talk about books we love using terminology not used anywhere else in Corporate America/Canada. Just yesterday, while giving feedback on an erotic romance submission, I mentioned that it was “accessible BDSM, which I never thought I’d say”. There were nods around the room (after, of course, a bit of laughter) but they got it.

So to my Carina Press family, thank you for welcoming me into the fold so warmly. I’m having such a great time being a part of the team and am looking forward to more reads. Maybe sometime soon I’ll get the chance to use “more naked cowboys” in my feedback, yes?

*****

Patty Anasco is Assistant Manager, Site Operations for Harlequin.com when she isn’t busy reading submissions or losing to her mom on Words With Friends.

Tags: acquisitions, Behind the Scenes

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2013 at 10:15 am and is filed under Behind the Scenes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.