Happy Anniversary to Carina Press!

Today we have a special guest on Word-Whores. To celebrate the one year anniversary of Word-Whore Jeffe's publisher, Carina Press, Word-Whores was asked to host a guest post from one of Carina's team. There's even prizes to be won!

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

Aideen O’Leary-Chung is the Director of Digital Commerce for Harlequin and Carina Press. As part of the Carina Press management team, she oversees the distribution and marketing of Carina Press titles to 3^rd party retailers, manages the cover art process and is a member of the acquisitions team. She watches more television than is healthy, often while reading a book at the same time (occasionally she remembers to speak to her husband).

My first reaction to our one-year Anniversary is denial – it can’t possibly have been just one year! Carina Press has been so much a part of my day-to-day thoughts for so long, that it’s almost impossible to remember a time when it wasn’t around. There have been so many moments in the past year that stand out for different reasons, it’s hard to narrow them down but here’s my attempt to capture some of my highlights:

• Reading my first steampunk book. Yes, I was one of those steampunk virgins who was completely unfamiliar with the editorial. How times have changed! Recently at BEA, I was perusing Steampunk art books to find imagery for covers and can’t wait to find some steam in my stocking this Christmas with our Steampunk holiday collection.

• Working on the cover art. Yes, I know it’s obvious coming from me, but there’s really nothing like opening a cover draft that is exactly what I would have wanted but could never have articulated or created myself. There have been any number of gasp-worthy covers this past year from all of our artists and receiving one just makes my day.

• Our acquisition meetings. The genuine enthusiasm exhibited by the team for books that they have read injects a passion to every meeting that is unparalleled in any other meeting I attend. I always leave with a list of titles to read and new insights on my team members that you just wouldn’t glean from them in a finance meeting (ahem, not that there’s anything wrong with numbers meetings).

• Seeing the sea of books for entry into the RITA nominations. They covered an entire table in Malle’s cube zone and it was such a treat to see them all together in one place, knowing their final, exciting destination. It was quite a moment.

• Talking about Carina Press. I have to confess, I’ve been known on occasion to go on and on about Carina Press titles when talking to our retailers and hang up only to realize that I forgot to mention our other imprints. Oops! Let’s not tell my boss.

I could go on (seriously, anyone will confirm that…) but what it comes down to is that I feel extremely lucky to work on Carina Press. I’ve been introduced to so many new authors, genres and groups of readers and everyone has embraced Carina with such warmth. I look forward to seeing what our team of authors, editors, artists and the ever-growing team of people who work on Carina Press can come up with for our 2^nd year! Thank you to everyone who has had a hand in making this imprint, once an idea we fell in love with, a reality.

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!