The other day on Twitter, we announced that we were going to do our darnedest to profile the fantabulous people who work so hard to bring you the latest news and reviews about goings on in the world of romance reading, writing, and raconteuring (actually, we didn’t announce it quite that way, but as I’m feeling all alliterate right now, I am just going to go with it) – ROMANCE BLOGGERS!

So, now it’s my chance to shout out (as loudly as this monitor will allow me to): THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR PIPING UP WITH SO MANY WONDERFUL SUGGESTIONS!

Thanks to you guys and gals, we’ve got a bunch of romance bloggers to choose from, and they are no ordinary romance bloggers – they are all STELLAR bloggers with much to recommend them. What’s even more fun, some of the recommenders were actually recommended by other bloggers! – proving yet again just how supportive and generous a community romance bloggers (and twitterers) are.

Also, just from this random group of suggested romance bloggers it’s quite clear that romance knows no national boundaries.  It’s quite exciting – bloggers from Australia, the UK, Switzerland, Canada, and more.

Below I’ve listed the “nominees” so far.  (I apologize in advance if I missed any – and if I did, please let me know.) I’m going to start setting up interviews ASAP with each of these incredible bloggers and we’ll be devoting a special section of our website to “Behind the Blogs.” In all seriousness, these bloggers deserve mucho respect and admiration for the work they do, and we’re going to do our best to give them the attention they deserve.

In the meantime, please please please – add your suggestions about other romance bloggers you’d like to know more about. Use the comments section, or drop us a line via our contact form.

AND, feel free to suggest interview questions. (who wants to hear the same old same old? let us know what you really want to find out about your fave romance bloggers!)

And for now, please take a gander at the suggestions we’ve received so far! Thanks again to each and everyone of the tweeps who took the time to nominate bloggers to be profiled. We greatly appreciate it.

From the TwitterStream:Twitterers tweet their suggestions for the romance bloggers they’d most like to see profiled here at Quartet Press’ blog

@sarahtanner: @avidbookreader @booksmugglers @romancerookie @Leontine1976 @katiebabs @heidenkind @smexybooks @mcvane @jane_l

@CheekyReads: Smart Bitches & Dear Author

@DYockman: @smartbitches! @dearauthor @historicals Dirty Sexy Books – that is a start…will have to see who else!

@susanmpls: @smartbitches and @dearauthor

@jodywallace: Heather Massey from Galaxy Express would make for an interesting profile (romance bloggers); Rebecca at DirtySexyBooks.com also seems pretty funny and interviewable.

@mcvane: Off my head: Gossamer Obsessions; Rip My Bodice; The Galaxy Express; Racy Romance Reviews; Aneca’ss World

@aprilrickard: I love the historical romance authors/bloggers, The Chatelaines

@katiebabs: [who, by the way has recently very cutely "madmenned" her twitter avatar]: def @booksmugglers @kmont @myfriendamy @trelaina

@shilohwalker: @katiebabs even though she has scarred me horribly. @trelaina @bookbinge

@girrlitsbooks [from Down Under!] SarahT + Doc Sarah soo many to choose from how do you pick one blogger? @BookThingo @SuperWendy @redwyne @Karenknowsbest Ell yeah!

@sarahtanner:  @BookThingo @SuperWendy @redwyne @Karenknowsbest

@redwyne:  @bloghappy, @cranberrytarts, @limecello, @jmc_bks, @dogzzz (cindys), @wearedevilcow, @romancerookie @mcvane

A few events for you to ponder as well, should you so wish:

• The Amanda Project from Fourth Story Media: I was hipped to this very cool project by the lovely Miss Kate Eltham and I have been gushing about it all day. From Kate’s blog “The Electric Alphabet“:

  A while back I posted about The Amanda Project from Fourth Story Media, a cross-platform digital storytelling project aimed at teenage girls. It looks like they’re gearing up to launch it soon and there’s a slick teaser on the official site to get you excited. Highly anticipating this one…

• A two-part post by the charming Mr. Nick Harkaway – the first of which wherein he expounds upon how things (including ebooks) have costs, how authors and publishers should get paid for their work, and how you really must buy that beautiful marked down coat when you have the chance (lesson: a deal is a deal, even if it’s not as good of a deal as you may have originally thought); and the second of which wherein he rails on the evils of DRM, lets publishers know that what often passes for an ebook these days is a sorry excuse for a product, and demands that the industry:
  

  Stop thinking of the eBook as a cheap spin-off of the paper book. It’s a new, powerful thing, not something which is created simply by converting the .pdf of the novel to an ePub file. It has the potential wreck your (our) industry or to move it into a new form, or to work alongside the existing structures. What is almost certain at this point is that it’s coming, and if you don’t get on board whole-heartedly, somebody else will.

• Jane over at “Dear Author” also set my heart aflutter laying down the gauntlet and demanding digital publishers step up their game. At Quartet, we’ve all printed this out and taped it up where we can see it. We WILL make Jane happy.

Mostly though, I’m thinking about RWA. I have attended plenty of conferences in my lifetime: conferences in every academic field you can imagine–trade shows for industries ranging from publishing to equine medicine; consumer shows for gardening, home improvement – even accessibility products. But RWA – this is the first time a conference has me feeling like I’m headed to my first school dance.

I’m excited, and nervous, and worrying way too much about what to wear.

I am looking forward to meeting all the authors, and publishers, and agents, and I can’t wait to attend some of the sessions. But, what really brought it all home to me was today’s announcement of the Rogue Digital Conference/ session. Taking place on Thursday, July 16 at 8:30 am in “The Harding Room,” this event is co-sponsored by Quartet Press,  Books on Board, Red Sage Publishing, Samhain Publishing, and Smart Bitches.

This is cool stuff. There are a lot of wonderful people in romance publishing. People who are doing some very groundbreaking, collaborative and forward thinking things, and I get to hang out with them in DC next week.

So, yup. This is what I’m thinking about on a Thursday night.

~ Kat

Do you remember the first time you got your own apartment or house and realized that the downpayment or deposit plus first month’s rent (which seemed massive) were just the beginning of the list of things you needed to actually live there? Who knew houses didn’t come fully-equipped with garden hoses, laundry hampers, shower curtains and doormats? So you headed off to Target/WalMart/HomeDepot/Lowe’s/Bed, Bath and Beyond et al and spent enough to require a second mortgage before you got the last boxes unpacked.

That’s a lot like what’s going on at Quartet now, only with more zeroes on the checks being written. The ‘house’ is our Big Idea, which we’ve described at length elsewhere on this blog. It’s nice; we like it; we think we’ll keep it. Now we need to furnish and equip it to make it comfortable for us and (more importantly) for our guests from the reading and writing community.

One of the things we decided early on was that Quartet was going to be organized as a real business with the goal of being able to grow profitably and to scale up as we grew and added more titles, imprints and community members. We’re true believers in what we’re publishing but we also believe that authors, customers and readers are best served by having a successful business model that can be sustained financially and managed well as it grows. What a concept in publishing, huh? What that means in practical terms is building a business infrastructure and partnering with advisers, software and system vendors and others so the business works as well with hundreds of titles as it does with the initial offering this Fall.

A peek at the list of just the major activities we’re all knee deep in right now gives you an idea of the considerations involved, the efforts (and funds!) expended and the complexity of building a sustainable business. These are just a few of the items on our current to-do list:

Organizational, Legal and Financial:

• Establish LLC and create bylaws and policies
• Pass appropriate corporate resolutions to allow business to be transacted
• Obtain business licenses
• Establish banking relationships
• Select and set up accounting software
• Select and set up royalty software
• Select intellectual property counsel and develop author and freelance contracts

Workflow and Conversion to e-formats:

• Iterate on EPUB XSLT re: covers, TOC, etc.
• Coordinate EPUB to mobi/Kindle conversion
• EPUB to PDF conversion
• Develop and document standards for editorial – Word mark-up, style sheet usage, etc.
• Develop Word template for editorial QA testing format/process/device capability

Editorial:

• Develop and refine submission and review policies and procedures
• Build team of freelance editors, copy editors, designers, cover artists
• Build authoring tools to streamline editorial and conversion processes

Marketing/Sales:

• Define Corporate and Imprint PR and Marketing Strategies
• Determine distribution options and establish relationships with major sales outlets
• Create community engagement strategy
• Create tools for author marketing training and support
• Create online media kit

Website and E-commerce Development:

• Website content production and copywriting
• Technical specifications and requirements
• System design and implementation
• Select and modify e-commerce platform for multiple format downloads
• Web host selection and integration

Other Publishing System Requirements:

• Title and metadata management
• Digital asset management and distribution
• Version control
• Web content management (CMS)

And these are only a few balls we have in the air. Add that matters as mundane as ordering business cards (and fighting over their design) to as grand as determining pricing strategies and you (oh, that’s “WE”) have a full plate of things that we think have to be just right to accomplish what we hope to accomplish with Quartet. So far, we’re very happy with our progress and have had to good fortune to select (and be selected by) some unbelievably smart and helpful partners and advisers including the thoroughly knowledgeable and irrepressible Laura Dawson of LJNDawson.com for overall systems advice, the brilliant and hilariously funny Liza Daly of Threepress.org who’s helping us navigate the wiles of epub file conversion, and the very talented Josh Tallent who’s lending his advice and services in  our Kindle formatting. Our approach has been (to borrow from Jimmy Carter) “Why not the best?” and we will have several more key partnerships and relationships to announce in the near future.

These and a million other little pieces are what we have in the works…all with the intention of creating a remarkable experience for readers, authors and others in the bookish community. A solid business plan and excellence in execution are not mutually exclusive with great books and we hope this overview (and others to follow in the coming weeks) sheds light on the process and puts to rest the myth (that Kassia’s addressed in a response to a comment here) that anyone with a computer and an internet connection can be a digital publisher.

Continue to follow our adventures and most of all, keep telling us what you’d like us to be when we grow up. And for heaven’s sake, tell us if we’ve forgotten anything important!

Lovely, isn’t it? And, it really embodies what Quartet aims to be all about. We want to be a hub for the bookish community, and we really want to get to know our readers.

So, we’re starting with getting to know someone who we hope already feels at home in our community: Lori Green!

Recently I asked Lori a few questions about books, and ebooks, and reading, and publishers, and writing, oh – and winning contests! Read the interview below. And once again, thanks to Lori, and thanks to all of you who entered the Quartet Press Tagline Contest!

~ Kat

Q: How’d you find out about the Quartet Press slogan contest?
A: Saw the contest announced on Twitter and went over to see what it was. I’m a contest ho and was following Quartet Press and it’s founders. Just seemed fun. I’m really grateful for the variation of my slogan being picked (as is my daughter who grabbed that package out of my hands so fast you’d think she was a frog and the ipod a fly).

Q:What’s your literary poison (or should I say, passion)?
A: I’m a huge fan of contemporary and paranormal romance written with humor. Also, I love literary fiction.

Q: Do you write?
A: My own writing is a pastiche of the three genres which explains my unpublished status.

Q: When it comes to dealing authors and readers, what are publishers doing right?
A: I’m a huge fan girl of Angela James and Samhain, simply because her authors stay with her even once they move to the big New York sales. If some of the top names in romance are still writing for Samhain, you know they’re doing things right.

Harlequin also embraces its readers and writers with remaining contemporary and market savvy as well as treating their authors and readers respectfully.

Q: What irks you about publishers?
A: I love imploding publishers. Makes for great reading on the writer’s blogs!

Q: What are you currently reading and how are you reading it?
A: I’m reading Witch Heart by Anya Bast (Book 3 in the Elemental Witches series). It’s a paperback. After that I’ll be reading either Friday’s Child by Georgette Heyer, or Too Good to be True by Kristan Higgans or … well, the pile of books is daunting.

Q: What’s your all-time favorite book?
A: To Kill a Mockingbird is the finest book I’ve ever read and reread. Elegant, deep and makes me cry even after the 100th reading. My all-time favorite romance is Crazy for You by Jennifer Cruisie: it’s hot, funny, and I think I love every character in it.

Q: Any thoughts on pricing of ebooks?
A: I know epubs have overhead, but ebooks need to be priced cheaper. Otherwise why would I buy an ebook when I can get a paperback and either resell or trade it, something I can’t do with an ebook. And trust me, I am a great fan of paperbackswap, resell book stores and Amazon customer sellers.

Q: Do you read ebooks or print books exclusively, and if so, why?
A: I mostly read paperbacks because I don’t yet have an ereader (I will with my next tax refund check). But I do have a number of ebooks on my computer although I’ve read more e-novellas and short stories than full length books because I hate reading at my computer.

Q: What would your ideal ereading device look like, do, and cost?
A: I’ll probably buy a Sony because as much as I crave the Kindle I don’t like that it doesn’t take pdf files. And I think they’re all priced too high but I want one anyway.

I’d like to add that myself and some of my friends are very excited about Quartet Press. Seeing people with the backgrounds that you and Kassia and Kirk have are making us eager to see another quality publisher coming to the table.