When I'm not writing, or otherwise occupied, I'm reading. I'm reading romance novels of all kinds. I consider it research. I'm looking at what works in other peoples' books, what doesn't work, how they arc their story, what they do to create dramatic tension, etc. If a book is horrible, I read it anyway, trying to figure out what could be done to fix it. I believe this all improves my writing. On average, I probably read a book a day (Romances typically aren't that long). Even at .99, that can get to be a pretty expensive habit, so I only read free books. So, I read a lot of awful ones. But, I have found some gems, books that I never would have picked up if I was paying for them, because I'd never heard of the author, the plot looks like something that doesn't appeal, or whatever. Recently, I've run across two websites who compile data from authors (I signed up for both) and after aggregating the data, send emails to readers based on their likes and dislikes. I kind of like the personalized service, so I'm sharing them with you guys, in case you want to sign up and have book titles delivered to your in-box...
http://www.thefussylibrarian.com/
www.readcheaply.com
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