Celebrity Crime ... About Salon Store Communities Open Salon The Well Table Talk ... Forbidden romance? Wednesday, Sep 29, 1999 13:00 ET Forbidden romance? Why are electronically published romance novels not receiving the blessings of the traditional steamy-fiction industry? By Janelle Brown L eta Nolan Childers, gravelly voiced and extravagantly named, is a romance novelist living in a remote South Dakota town. Once an investigative journalist, Childers now spends her days taking care of her adopted son and penning books with titles like "Cupid's Revenge." ("Shannon Cassidy has no time for Cupid especially when all he's done is bring her grief and heartbreak," reads the book's promo copy. "Yet, when Cupid appears in the guise of the mother of the man she most loathes, even Shannon's firm resolve can be pierced by the arrows of love.") On her publisher's Web site, you'll find nearly a dozen Childers originals including four children's books and a game about a passel of cats named Buddy, Baby and Bug. But despite her prodigious productivity, you won't find any of Childer's books on the shelves of your local bookstore; in fact, not one of her romance novels has been published in a traditional print format. Instead, she produces, as she rather obliquely puts it, "books in electronic bindings" or, as the popular media would call them, e-books: electronic books, books that come in pixel format only. And she's quite happy with that fate. | |
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