Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of romance novels marketed by their primary trope, like:
I can’t decide if I think this is brilliant marketing or a terrible shame.
I don’t know about you, but I kind of like writing in a bubble.
Not literally! I mean, a bubble where my writing is beautiful and perfect and only my opinion matters.
Writers must, I think, start out in a bubble. But, at some point, you’re going to want to get some feedback.
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I loved books, as a kid. The first book I remember loving was The Robber’s Daughter by Astrid Lindgren. After I read it and we returned it, whenever we visited the library, I would walk by the shelf where it was housed, feeling like it was this special, secret gem, this thing no one else knew about or understood.
I felt the same way about the Harper Hall books by Anne McCaffrey. I was fairly young when I read them (maybe grade 5), and to me they were these fantastical things.
That love is what planted the writing seed for me. I wanted to write something that made people feel that way.
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When I was growing up, my mother read romance novels. There were often piles of them lying around the house — mostly Harlequin Presents or Harlequin Superromance, but you could find the occasional single-title, Silhouette Special Edition, or Harlequin Desire.
I’ve always kind of wondered how she had the budget for it, since my father was in charge of the money and he could be a bit ‘tight-pursed’. (Is there a polite way of saying that?) But I guess romance novels are easy to hide on a grocery bill.
I, too, loved to read — maybe in part from her example. And around age ten, I got really into the Sweet Valley High series. Everyone was reading them. Gorgeous, blonde, blue-green-eyed, Californian identical twin sixteen-year olds (with perfect size-six figures!), getting into adventures?
Who can’t relate?
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When I tell people I write romance novels, as I occasionally do, they always ask, “Are you published?”
When I say, “No,” they seem to lose all interest.
I get it. If someone told me they’d written a novel, I’d definitely wonder if it was published. And if it wasn’t, I’d probably assume it wasn’t that great.
Not that being published means a book is good, necessarily. ‘Good’ is, of course, subjective. But, if a book has made it through a publishing process, that’s at least some arbiter of its quality. Even if a book is self-published, you have to go to some trouble to do that, so I’d assume its quality might likely be higher than a book sitting solely on the author’s computer.
Read More…Hi, I’m Winter. Welcome!
This blog is about romance — the concept of romance, the science of romance, romance movies, romance writing, and my experiences as a romance writer.
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