The showcase page as it stood in October 2005, one of the few months the crawler caught it whole.
Authors with a premium listing could put one current book on this page. The selection below spans almost the whole network: a science fiction romance with a computer for a heroine, a Norman conquest romance, a New Orleans serial killer, a Southern women's fiction title and a football coach who meets his match in an assistant principal. The original page printed the publishers' cover copy in full; we have kept the premise of each book in a sentence or two.
by Shelley Bradley
To prove her brother did not embezzle three million dollars, Kerry Sullivan abducts computer security expert Rafe Dawson and strikes a deal with him. The listing called it a single-title humorous contemporary romantic erotic suspense, which is a lot of labels for one paperback.
Listed in: Contemporary, Erotica
by Kathryn Caskie
Jenny Penny, maid to the matchmaking Feathertons, poses as a highborn lady to catch a Scottish viscount, while secretly being the creator of an aphrodisiac cream that has Society talking.
Listed in: Historical
by Patti Callahan Henry
Amy Reynolds meets her son's first serious girlfriend and discovers the girl's father is Nick Lowry, the college boyfriend who vanished from her life twenty years earlier.
Listed in: Contemporary
by Lisa Jackson
A New Orleans woman sees murders in her sleep, and a skeptical detective, Rick Bentz, has to decide whether she is a witness, a suspect or the next victim.
Listed in: Suspense
by Susan Kearney
Dora, a sentient computer, trades her circuits for a human body in the hope that the Rystani warrior Zical will want her, and then has to learn what loving someone involves.
Listed in: Fantasy
by Paula Quinn
Lady Brynnafar Dumont sets out to seduce the Norman knight who defeated her father, Lord Brand Risande, known as "The Passionate", and finds he wants nothing to do with her.
Listed in: Historical
by Dana Taylor
An uptight high school assistant principal, Maddie Harris, meets her unlikely match in the new football coach, Phil Wilcox.
Listed in: Contemporary
by Joanna Wayne
Attorney Rachel Powers chases the killer of a French Quarter dancer and finds her prime suspect, heir Logan McCain, harder to rule out and harder to resist.
Listed in: Suspense
Look at the mix and you can see where romance publishing stood that autumn. Two of the eight are suspense novels set in New Orleans, on a page the crawler captured only weeks after Hurricane Katrina. One is openly erotic and says so on the label. One, Losing the Moon, would be shelved as women's fiction today. There is a psychic heroine but not a single vampire or shapeshifter; within a couple of years a page like this would rarely manage without one.
For what readers made of books like these, browse the reader reviews. For the publisher programs behind them, from Signet to Zebra, see the publisher list.
Authors with a premium listing could have a current title showcased on this page with its description and the communities where it was listed. This snapshot is from October 2005.
Some have been reissued as e-books, others are only available second-hand. Search by author and title rather than by the 2005 ISBN, which often belongs to the first paperback printing.
Authors chose their own categories, and a book could be listed in more than one community. Bound and Determined, for example, appeared in both the contemporary and erotica communities.