Hello, Japan & Awesome Romance Novels

At last, Friday is here. To paraphrase one of my favorite party songs, Bang The Drum by Todd Rundgren, I certainly don't want to work all day.

Got my authorial lariat so I'm going to round up some of the important news for Readers and Writers from this past week.

Awesome Romance Novels

Popular author Donna Fasano has renovated her blog that features romance novels and re-launched it with great design and a reader-friendly and writer-friendly format.

She was kind enough to feature my series Texas One Night Stands yesterday.

If you'd like to be featured, visit Awesome Romance Novels. On the Menu Bar, click Authors Submit Your Book and follow the instructions.

Selling To Japan

This week, if you were an indie author, you were probably excited to hear that Amazon has opened a Kindle Store in Japan. They're late to that particular party since the highly-competitive Kobo entered the Japanese market this past summer with their device, the Touch, priced at 7,980 yen ($100).

Since I lived in Japan for several years, and my books are on Kobo and Kindle, I'm very excited to about all this. Japanese students learn English from the time they enter school, and most of them are very proficient in reading the language even though they may be hesitant to speak it.

Just as Manga and Anime invaded and changed American pop culture, so did Rock and Roll and blue jeans several decades ago, opening the gates there for other genres of music. I'm hoping that the Kindle and the Kobo Reader will eventually be big successes there.

According to Amazon's press release, the Kindle 3G version costs 12,980 yen --about $163.00 USD. They'll begin shipping November 19 with other Kindle devices rolled out after that.

The Japanese Kindle Store opens with over 50,000 local language e-books (15,000 of them are manga). Amazon had some challenges to overcome in reaching agreements with Japanese publishers. Add to that 50,000, another 1 million English language books as well as a selection of titles in other languages.

Takeaway Truth

Friday, affectionately known as TGIF (Thank God it's Friday) is a good day to catch up on tidbits of news.

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