My first royalty statement arrived from Hale yesterday and there was a cheque attached! Not much to be sure, but money is money and it means that we earnt out our advance. The strange sight was to see the 63 exported copies in there. Where to? Who in a foreign land is reading The Lady Soldier? Will they like it?
It was all rather exciting and yet another rite of passage.
I finshed my RNA NWS work. It has given me an appreciation of the very hard working editors that I did not have before. It also has shown me how several people can read something and still manage to miss the essentials.
Harlequin Mills and Boon publish romance. That is the growth of the emotional relationship between the hero and the heroine. It is their focus and they do it rather well. Because society has changed, the types of stories they have published have changed. The romantic fantasy has to reach today's woman, not the woman from the early 1980s. These plots are character driven, in that the characters of the hero and heroine play a large part in determining the bulk of the story. All subplots must connect with the main plot and the subplot must not take over the focus.
They aren ot easiy to write. It is perfectly possible to be able to write mainstream and not catagory. The converse is also true.
Hopefully some of my reports will touch a chord and provide an impetus for those writers to overcome the hurdles to publication. At least three of the manuscripts I read showed that the author could write, and if they had the correct plot, they would sell. One had a real spark and I c=sincerely hope she makes it. With the others, it is hard to tell. They may or may not overcome their flaws. Writing is a harsh business. There is little point in sugar coating something. You have to be honest. What I hope is that the writer can take something from my report and use it as a stepping stone.
Anyway, I shall be glad to get back to my own work. I have a hero I want to fall in love with. Actually Anna Lucia is using the same man as inspiration and I will be very interested to see our differing interpretations of the same source. I had decided to use him before I knew Anna had modelled her current hero on him. She gets him in contemporary dress. For me, it's Roman. If you need more convincing, you need to look at the second and sixth pictures of the episode 6 guide. or you can watch the video and hear his voice. A seriously good voice.
Writing can be such fun at times.
4 comments:
Congrats on the royalties, and good luck with the new hero and story!
Purefoy? Hmmm. I have a quasi-thing for Ray Stevenson myself. LOL
Royalty statements are fab - but wait till you get your M&B statements, where you get to see how many were sold in each country! (My line is *very* big in France.)
And I must agree with your Roman. I can definitely see what attracts you there.
I found that a copy had made it to a library in Australia... (see my blog) so that might be one of the 63 copies!
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