My December book hotness: Women in Lust and Best Bondage Erotica 2012

These are my two December book covers – I have zero information on their contents because they are still being finalized, but I promise you they’ll be hot, and that Best Bondage Erotica 2012 is heavy on the female domination but, not to worry, those who like to read about women being tied up and teased and spanked and all sorts of fun things like that, there is plenty of that too. I’m so excited about these, even though the actual process of finishing the books makes me feel like I’ve never done this before and never want to again. Maybe that means something. Very soon I should have the table of contents for Women in Lust. Official pub date on Amazon is November 8th, 2 days before my birthday, so that means I should have it in my hands by mid-October. Follow me @raquelita on Twitter to find out how to get your free copy to review on Amazon.com - flaky people, don't even bother, really. I usually send out those Tweets a few weeks in advance, so in June will be asking for reviewers for my summer release, Obsessed (click for cover and details) - stay tuned for Obsessed book party info, but short version is, August 25th at Fontana's in NYC (Lower East Side).

So, if you are at all inclined to buy these, pre-ordering helps the books by letting Amazon or whoever you pre-order from know there’s a market for them. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the sales don’t pan out, the series won’t continue, and that would be a damn shame. I’ll have more about them later and if you are some brilliant marketing whiz and have an idea of where I should be buying ad space or what I should be doing, save for getting naked in a book trailer (dying laughing on that one since Amazon rejected my Passion trailer, with all its HOT SEXY KISSING as too risque), do let me know. Right now, I will be a happy editor if I actually get them filed and out of my way so I can move on to projects that maybe are a smidge easier to deal with.

Anyway, even if you don't read them, you can appreciate the hotness - I'm SO thankful to be working with Cleis Press where they come up with dazzling covers and give me a say. If you saw the horror show that was my book Glamour Girls you'll know how the opposite of glamour it was, which is why no one bought it...well, I wouldn't really know cause Haworth went under, but that was a bad experience. I had one day to approve it and couldn't really say no. Sometimes indie publishing sucks, and sometimes it's awesome. Glad I'm on team awesome!

Click on covers below to pre-order from Amazon. Other links TK when the time comes.

2 young adult novels whose covers sold me: Populazzi and Shut Out

I'm working on lots of posts for you, including 5 books I'm reading now and very excited about that (I can multitask like that) and trying to write things (trying being the operative word these days) but I wanted to share 2 YA book covers of books I'm very excited about. And if you wanted to be awesome, you could click over to Populazzi author Elise Allen's blog and leave a comment mentioning my name. Whoever gets the most namechecks wins a galley of her book! Book titles/covers link to Amazon, where you can pre-order.

I'm posting these specific covers because they each made me want to read the book before I even knew more about them, which I think is the job of a good book cover.

Author site: Elise Allen



Populazzi

Cara has never been one of those girls: confident, self-possessed, and always ready with the perfect thing to say. A girl at the very top of the popularity tower. One of the Populazzi.

Now, junior year could change everything. Cara’s moving to a new school, and her best friend urges her to seize the moment—with the help of the Ladder. Its rungs are relationships, and if Cara transforms into the perfect girlfriend for guys ever-higher on the tower, she’ll reach the ultimate goal: Supreme Populazzi.

The Ladder seems like a lighthearted social experiment, a straight climb up, but it quickly becomes gnarled and twisted. And when everything goes wrong, only the most audacious act Cara can think of has a chance of setting things even a little bit right.

Author site: Kody Keplinger



Shut Out

Most high school sports teams have rivalries with other schools. At Hamilton High, it's a civil war: the football team versus the soccer team. And for her part,Lissa is sick of it. Her quarterback boyfriend, Randy, is always ditching her to go pick a fight with the soccer team or to prank their locker room. And on three separate occasions Randy's car has been egged while he and Lissa were inside, making out. She is done competing with a bunch of sweaty boys for her own boyfriend's attention.

Lissa decides to end the rivalry once and for all: She and the other players' girlfriends go on a hookup strike. The boys won't get any action from them until the football and soccer teams make peace. What they don't count on is a new sort of rivalry: an impossible girls-against-boys showdown that hinges on who will cave to their libidos first. And Lissa never sees her own sexual tension with the leader of the boys, Cash Sterling, coming.

Book cover love: Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer

I've never read Ann Packer's work and am not sure if I'll read her new novel Swim Back to Me, but I love the cover!

There's a cat on my book cover! Gotta Have It: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex

I just got the book cover for Gotta Have It: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex (formerly known as The Big Book of Quickies) and yes, there's a cat on the book cover! I'm told by a cat friend that this is a realistic portrayal of coupling while a cat is in the room. We haven't finalized the table of contents but when we do I'll be posting here and am hoping to do multiple readings and will have a website for it and lots of fun stuff. And, of course, postcards! Pre-order by clicking the link above; it'll be out in March. Once I get it approved, I'll post a teaser from my kinky story "Manners."

Beautiful book cover of mermaid YA novel: Forgive My Fins by Tera Lynn Childs

I love how gorgeous this cover of Tera Lynn Childs' new YA novel Forgive My Fins is. I recently read her first two connected novels, Oh.My.Gods. and Goddess Boot Camp, about a teenager who discovers she's a descendant of Nike and goes to school with other descendants of Greek gods. Both were hilarious and delightful. I don't usually read anything fantastical but wanted to check out this mermaid novel.



Official description from Tera Lynn Childs' site (click to read an excerpt):

Lily Sanderson has a secret, and it's not that she has a huge crush on gorgeous swimming god Brody Bennett, who makes her heart beat flipper-fast. Unrequited love is hard enough when you're a normal teenage girl, but when you're half human, half mermaid, like Lily, there's no such thing as a simple crush.

Lily's mermaid identity is a secret that can't get out, since she's not just any mermaid—she's a Thalassinian princess. When Lily found out three years ago that her mother was actually a human, she finally realized why she didn't feel quite at home in Thalassinia, and she's been living on land and going to Seaview High School ever since, hoping to find where she truly belongs. Sure, land has its problems—like her obnoxious biker-boy neighbor, Quince Fletcher—but it has that one major perk: Brody. The problem is, mermaids aren't really the casual dating type—the instant they "bond," it's for life.

When Lily's attempt to win Brody's love leads to a tsunami-sized case of mistaken identity, she is in for a tidal wave of relationship drama, and she finds out, quick as a tailfin flick, that happily ever after never sails quite as smoothly as you planned.

I'm in Alison's Wonderland

I mean, my fairy tale-inspired science experiment story "Let Down Your Libido" is going to be published in Alison Tyler's Harlequin Spice anthology Alison's Wonderland, out this summer. Via her blog (click there for big version - my name's on the back cover, woo-hoo!). I will post my own book cover for them both once it's finalized and when I'm finally done with it. I know, it's been a looooong time coming (you don't even know the minute fraction of that saga, trust me).



Below is the table of contents. I'm still sorting out themes for the rest of 2010 for In The Flesh. August will be Sex on the Beach and perhaps I can have someone read from this book (or maybe I can!).

The Red Shoes (Redux) by Nikki Magennis
Fool’s Gold by Shanna Germain
The Three Billys by Sommer Marsden
David by Kristina Lloyd
Managers and Mermen by Donna George Storey
The Clean-Shaven Type by N.T. Morley
The Midas F*ck by Erica DeQuaya
Sleeping with Beauty by Allison Wonderland
Unveiling His Muse by Portia Da Costa
Always Break the Spines by Lana Fox
An Uphill Battle by Benjamin Eliot
Moonset by A.D.R Forte
Mastering Their Dungeons by Bryn Haniver
A Taste for Treasure by T.C. Calligari
The Broken Fiddle by Andrea Dale
The Cougar of Cobble Hill by Sophia Valenti
Wolff’s Tavern by Bella Dean
Slutty Cinderella by Jacqueline Applebee
Kiss It by Saskia Walker
Let Down Your Libido by Rachel Kramer Bussel
Dancing Shoes by Tsaurah Litzky
Gold, On Snow by Janine Ashbless
After the Happily Every After by Heidi Champa
Cupid Has Signed Off by Thomas S. Roche
The Walking Wheel by Georgia E. Jones
Rings on My Fingers by Alison Tyler
The Princess by Elspeth Potter

Cover of And The Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould

Updated

I'm told by the author herself that the book is not actually related to her New York Times Magazine cover story or Gawker/blogging so I changed this post to reflect that, but is in fact a memoir of her teens and twenties. I'm looking forward to reading it either way and will surely be posting and hopefully interviewing her about it for some publication or other, so stay tuned.

Emily Gould's And The Heart Says Whatever, is on my list of 2010 Books I Want To Read (which is incomplete, but I'm making my way through it). The cover just got posted on Amazon, with a blurb by Curtis Sittenfeld. (I tried to book her for In The Flesh but no luck, alas.)

Megan Hart book cover hotness: Switch

OMG, Megan Hart's Harlequin Spice novels have seriously the hottest covers. I'm drooling over this one:



Switch will be out in January 2010, here's what's on her site:

Switch
• Paperback: ? pages
• Publisher: Harlequin Spice, January 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN-13: 978-0-373-60539-2

Don't think.
Don't question.
Just do.

The anonymous note wasn't for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in the habit of reading other people's mail, but it was just a piece of paper with a few lines scrawled on it, clearly meant for the apartment upstairs. It looked so innocent, but decidedly-- deliciously--it was not.

Before replacing the note--and the ones that followed --in its rightful slot, I devoured its contents: suggestions, instructions, summonses, commands. Each was more daring, more intricate and more arousing than the last... and I followed them all to the letter.

Before the notes, if a man had told me what to do, I'd have told him where to go. But submission is an art, and there's something oddly freeing about doing someone's bidding...especially when it feels so very, very good.

But I find that the more I surrender, the more powerful I feel--so it's time to switch up roles.

We play by my rules now.

Books I want to read

In no particular order...



I saw Let Me Eat Cake by Leslie F. Miller on a cooking book table at Barnes & Noble last night - love the cover and can't wait to read about her cake adventures.



The site someecards.com has 4 books coming out; I got the Christmas/holiday one at BEA and it's hilarious!



I like author Robin Brande's blog and sadly kept losing my copies of Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature, but do plan to finish it...well, before Fat Cat comes out in October!

Adventures in book covers: Bitten and In Praise of Indecency

forthcoming from Chronicle Books


forthcoming from Cleis Press (actually found this one looking up Susie Bright on Amazon)

Adventures in book covers: Corpse on the Cob

I've now read 3/4 of Sue Ann Jaffarian's Odelia Gray mysteries and can't wait for the next (5th) one, Corpse on the Cob, out in January. Love this cover too:



via Sue Ann Jaffarian and The Book Resort

Cutting Up Playgirl: two covers, two subtitles

The UK cover (full title is either Cutting Up Playgirl: A Memoir of Sexual Disappointment or Cutting Up Playgirl: A Cheerful Memoir of Sexual Disappointment - I love how "cheerful" is thrown in there):



And the US cover (and UK paperback cover):



It's not out until January 2010 in the US.

The Daily Mail on the book:

Carrie Jones hasn't had sex with her husband Hal, a City banker, for the past four years. Nor does she want to. Sex is something she can no longer summon the effort to endure - with the man she married, at least.

She admits she stays in her sexless relationship for the sake of her children, aged nine and 11, and will remain celibate until the day they are grown up and she feels able to leave. At which point, she confesses, she will probably abandon her husband and begin a sexual odyssey to find the satisfaction that eludes her.

An unusual case? A sorry lack of libido? She insists not. "If I thought I was unique in my sexual disappointment I'd probably be suicidal," muses Carrie, 45, a publishing executive, who lives in North London with Hal and their children.

"I remember the first time my girlfriends and I admitted that we all felt the same about married sex as parents: we couldn't be bothered with it and felt guilty for not wanting to sleep with our husbands. It was a revelation. I remember thinking: 'Thank God! It's not just me!'

The Guardian summed it up: "...her honesty is so heartbreaking that she becomes irresistible." Also from The Guardian:

At Cambridge, by now "a little mad" with sexual frustration, when Jones finally gets to lose her virginity, "I didn't feel any desire . . ." Her description has the awful ring of familiarity about it, echoing most of the accounts I've ever heard of women losing their virginity. Many more sexual encounters follow, but with little improvement, still less a reconciliation between her private fantasies and actual experiences. "If you'd asked me, I would have said that sex was good because it was intimate, but, in truth, sometimes it made you feel further away from the other person than ever . . . It wasn't erotic, it wasn't transcendental, it certainly wasn't 'orgasmic', it was usually just sticky." In those early years, Jones is obliged to acknowledge, "the best thing about sex for me was the discovery that people wanted to sleep with me."

It's definitely on my to read list, but I'm really fascinated by this US cover.

Addition: One fabulous book, three covers

My friend Mary Pols just posted about her reaction to seeing the girlified British version of her memoir Accidentally on Purpose. I've been raving about Toni Jordan's excellent OCD-themed first novel Addition. Here are three version of the cover (top is the U.S. version) culled from her site.

Personally, I don't think the U.S. version does the book any favors or represents it very well. It makes it seem more chick lit-y than it is, and I say that as someone who likes chick lit. It's very intense in its look at mental illness, but is also about love and sex and family and relationships, but the protagonist's relationship with numbers and counting is the paramount one here. I like the toothbrushes best, but that's having read the book already.

Adventures in book covers: Hot Mess

I just read a review of this book Hot Mess and the cover totally wowed me. I've been reading a lot of YA lately so the cover just intrigued me, especially cause, well, it's not summer anymore, at least in my city.

Adventures in book covers: The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie

A good book cover should, well, make you want to pick up the book. And, ideally, want to read the book, but first it needs to get your attention. Grab you amongst a sea of other books eagerly awaiting your eyes. This cover grabbed me when I saw it at the Shakespeare & Co. on the Upper East Side. I was intrigued by the bra, by the fact that I know nothing about Syrian lingerie, by the very concept. It's out from Chronicle Books and I'll be reviewing it here soon.

Is my Dirty Girls book cover sexist?

I'll be responding more to this soon, but I wanted to post about it so you can go read what's being said.

Apparently my Dirty Girls cover (photo by Merkley???) is causing controversy. Again.

from Erotica Cover Watch:

Time and again, women are put in the position of ‘object of desire’ rather than ‘subject actively desiring’. And the object of our desire – a man – is missing from the picture entirely. For a woman to say she wants a sexy man is not, as is sometimes thought, a weakness, a chink in the armour of female liberation. Expressing your lust, claiming your right to sexual satisfaction, being a person who is actively desiring is poles apart from the caricature of a needy, dependent woman who yearns for a man because without him she is a moony, ditzy sap foundering in her own inadequacy.
In rejecting this caricature, let’s not chuck out the baby with the bath water (or the penis with the patriarchy). Let’s not be afraid to say, as women, ‘I want a hot guy.’ We can retain our autonomy and do this without adding the usual fucked-up twist – I want a hot guy to want me, to find me attractive, to look at me with lust as I lie on this couch in a sultry mish-mash of availability and aloofness.

from the Lust Bites post:
Sure, if you’re a bi woman, you might like the picture too but presumably you’d be equally happy with a gorgeous guy. And it’s odd, isn’t it – suspicious even – that on erotica covers, the only aspects of female bisexuality represented are the ones that heterosexual men get off on quite majorly? How jolly convenient! Because the fact is the preponderance of the female form in erotica isn’t an act of generosity towards women who like women, anymore than the plethora of hot-honeys-go-pussy-crazy porn is about lesbian consumer choice. It’s just a side effect of what straight men like.

What I think is interesting is that I'm publishing a piece from Lust Bites by Kristina Lloyd, co-creator of Erotica Cover Watch, called "The Pleasure of Unpleasure" in my non-fiction anthology Best Sex Writing 2009, out in January from Cleis Press. The cover, shot by the fabulous Christine Kessler (do check out her drool-worthy Flickr account and her blog and her book Pervy Girls), is below:

Adventures in book covers: The Bitch Switch

via Black Voices

The bitch is back and this time, she's teaching lessons!

Reality TV's most popular star Omarosa has signed a lucrative book deal with Phoenix Books to release her debut tome, 'The Bitch Switch: Knowing How To Turn It On and Off.'

"I am thrilled to have my first book published and I am so happy that it is a self-help book for women – and some men – who are tired of being doormats," she told me.

You want this book: Hillary Carlip's A La Cart

Some of you may know Hillary Carlip as the editor of the insanely good essay site Fresh Yarn or author of the memoir Queen of the Oddballs. Now, though, she has one of the most amazing photo books out I've ever seen. It's called A La Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers. It also makes an amazing gift, or inspiration if you write fiction (or nonfiction) because Hillary truly becomes these characters, not just through the use of a makeup artist, but through empathy, creativity, and imagination. From her introdoction: "On countless occasions I've been tempted to snatch lists right out of shoppers' hands--especially the woman at Whole Foods who was buying soy milk as she was breast-feeding her baby. But then it would lack teh mystery, the pleasure of getting to know these strangers, sight unseen, through their abandoned lists." The best part is that just when you think you've gotten to a favorite, you turn the page and there's another outrageous, stunning, hilarious or tender or WTF? or "I want to know them" moment. The photographs are by Barbara Green, and you can check out some related links here.

Also, for any writers out there: both of Hillary's book web sites are excellent models to follow, not necessarily to the letter, but they have everything you'd ever want to know about her or her books, in an easy-to-find find, fun layout. Probably because Hillary is also a web designer!

She's been collecting discarded shopping lists for a long time, and in the book, winds up impersonating all kinds of people. Please watch the trailer and an interview with her (in a grocery store!) from The Wall Street Journal. The book is truly stunning; she takes these relatively small lists and truly transforms herself into these characters (male and female), figuring out what makes them tick. It's creative, humorous, and will make you look at your neighbor's grocery cart in a whole new way.

Adventures in book covers: Don't You Forget About Me

Jancee Dunn's first novel, Don't You Forget About Me, out July 29th from Villard

Adventures in book covers: Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave - hardcover vs. paperback

Ellen Sussman's anthology Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave has a new cover for the paperback edition. I like the hardcover much better. And it's not on Amazon yet but the cover for her Dirty Words: An Encyclopedia of Sex, which is going to be an amazing book (and will be making an appearance at In The Flesh) is also brilliant. Will post when it's here (I have a galley).

Hardcover:



Paperback: