Carina Blog Tour!

In celebration of our one year anniversary, I asked as many of our Harlequin team members and Carina Press freelance editors as possible to write a short blog post, talking about what the past year or so has been like for them, working on Carina Press. I deliberately didn’t provide any direction other than that, because I wanted to see what people came up with, in the spirit of Carina’s 1st anniversary. I was so pleased when I saw what they’d all come up with, and had to say (and some of these posts made me just a little teary)! I hope you enjoy the post, and look for your opportunity to win a Carina Press book at the bottom of this post. ~Angela James

 Angela Hill – “The Other Angela,” as she’s known in Carina Press circles – works as the assistant manager of email marketing at Harlequin. Putting together the Carina Press newsletter is the highlight of her workweek. When not at work, she can be found swimming, eating cake and being a mom to a toddler who is just learning how to sleep through the night(!). You can follow her on Twitter.

I vividly remember the day of the Carina Press launch – and that’s saying a lot because the first half of 2010 is mostly a haze of late-night nursing sessions with my then-infant and hurried days at work, interspersed with miserable cross-townTorontocommutes.  

I made a point of coming in extra-early on June 7 to help out with the launch. I was startled to find the office as empty as one of those scenes from a Western where the tumbleweed rolls by. People didn’t start arriving until about 7:45 or 8, and I was in a panic. But they calmly explained that everything was ready to go. Turns out the big panic was in the weeks and months leading up to the launch, and I was blissfully oblivious, my nose deep in newsletter edits. Oops!

Since my very first Carina Press email newsletter deployed (on launch day), it’s been my favorite newsletter to work on – really, it’s my favorite part of my job. Why?

I learn something new every time I work on this email. For example for the launch I was cruising around the site. “What’s BDSM?” I asked. “Do NOT Google that!” came Eleanor’s immediate reply. She followed up with a brief explanation. Oh.

1. Every time I create a new version of this newsletter, I find at least one more title to add to my TBR pile. And with the magic of an eReader, my TBR pile doesn’t look any bigger, so my husband is happy.
2. I love writing about books that I love to read. It’s a bit of a chicken/egg thing, I guess (see #2).
3. The HTML code for this email is so pretty. I realize most of you will never see it, but it is. Almost  all HTML coding for newsletters looks like it was created in 1999, but the Carina code is just laid out so nicely that it makes it especially easy to navigate, edit copy and fix.
4. When I send out each version of our newsletter to our group to test and ask for feedback, I actually get feedback, because everyone who works on Carina is so engaged and excited. That’s a great work environment.

Okay, I can’t write this post without at least one little email sign-up pitch. So here it is: sign up to receive our email newsletter! You’ll help me be able to keep doing the part of my job that I love most.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

To celebrate Carina’s one year anniversary of publishing books, we’re giving away some prizes. Today, on each of the nineteen blogs our team members are featured on, we’re giving away a download of a Carina Press book to one random winner (that’s nineteen total winners!) All you need to do to be entered to win is comment on this post. You can enter to win on all nineteen posts. In addition, on the Carina Press blog, we’re giving away a grand prize of a Kobo ereader and 12 Carina Press books of the winner’s choice. Visit the Carina Press blog to enter to win, and to see links to all 19 of today’s blog posts.                                           

And a sincere thank you from all of us, to our readers and authors, for making Carina Press’s first year a success!