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."