Q: Tell us a little about your experience with Linden Bay Romance.
A:
I cannot say enough good things about my experience with Linden Bay, especially since I have had experience with other publishers.Of paramount importance to authors is Linden Bay’s respect for the writer’s voice and story. Manuscripts go through a content edit where the editor points out issues and/or inconsistencies, many of which are not apparent to the person crafting the story. The content editor looks at the manuscript as a reader might, making suggestions. The difference I have found with Linden Bay is that the decision to publish, and/or what to publish, is mutually arrived at by the editors, publisher, and author.
Why is this important when what every writer wants to be is published? I had a young adult novel published (mercifully under another name) which was such a dreadful experience I have never been able to read the book through. Suffice to say, I was a novice and I should have known to pull the plug when they changed the book drastically, cut out what I considered the best parts, and, in the end, lopped it off and ended it in the middle. It was, however, well-marketed and has made money for me, which is something, but honestly not the most important thing.
Being published with a work you are proud of is far more important than just being published.
Trust me!
Q: What tips/tricks do you use for marketing or promoting your own titles?
A: I have to admit that promotion and marketing is not my strong suit. (Okay, we can all stop laughing now—I readily admit it remains to be determined if I even have a strong suit.)
One of my issues is living in a small community where I’m a little reluctant to show up at the local bookstore for a signing. Why?
People who know you just don’t seem to get that it’s a “story”—they think it’s really your story. (Which of course it is, in many ways, but not in the obvious ways everyone thinks. Because redheads are underrepresented as heroines, mine frequently are, but that doesn’t mean that the redhead in the book is me. No one, I fear, really believes that.)
However, I have just drawn up a new organization schedule for myself with goals to be met weekly in marketing.
I think it probably helps to join a number of groups, something that I’ve done, but haven’t mustered up the organization to post on a periodic basis. I have also joined a local writers’ group, with the intent that group-marketing might work better for me.
Q: What is one thing you’d want to tell a newer author, just coming into the game?
A: Don’t give up. Persevere. Try different genres—all writing experience informs you. Enter contests where you receive feedback.
The best advice I might give is—always read your work aloud. If you have a critique group with whom you are comfortable, read aloud to them. But always remember it’s your voice! Even if you only read aloud to yourself, it works.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your latest release?
A: The Not-So-Victorian Viscount is set in mid-19th Century Hong Kong, then a British colony.
Forever letting her curiosity get the better of her, our heroine, Angelica Aldrich, has refined her penchant for listening at doors to a high art.
Just out from Virginia, Angelica joins her brother, David, and his wife as the couple await the arrival of their first child.
When David’s business partner, the dashing Viscount St. Alban, returns from a sea voyage, Angelica is surprised to find that the shortage of appropriate housing for foreigners requires the Aldriches and St. Alban to share a house.
Despite Angelica’s shock at St. Alban’s rakish ways and unsuitable female companions, she is quickly charmed by a pup he took in as a foundling.
Angelica gradually develops a friendship with the enigmatic, mysterious St. Alban himself, a man whom so many women find attractive but who seems to have no close friends.
Exotic Hong Kong excites Angelica’s interest. Unlike most of the expatriates, she is fascinated by Chinese culture, considered by the others inappropriate and even dangerous. St. Alban alone encourages her, even persuading one of the mandarins to instruct her in painting.
The expatriate community is startled when the Black Dragon, a mysterious pirate, begins raiding ships in the vicinity.
Will Angelica’s curiosity put her in the path of danger?
Will St. Alban’s secret plot for revenge on an old rival succeed?
Q: Can you tell us a little about your current WIP’s?
A: The alpha males ride again! Hey, I love these guys and they work better in historicals. I’m taking a chain saw to a Victorian novel set in India, hoping to cut it in half. (Even Tolstoy was not as wordy as I can be.) My characters have enough adventures to stock a television series.
I’m also at work on a historical set in Central and South America.
My heroes tend to be Clark-Gable-as-Rhett-Butler playing a new role. That’s the kind of man I adore and my heroines do, too.
Q: How do you come up with your ideas?
A: I daydream. My mind wanders when I drive and I end up in all sorts of unexpected places. I keep a notebook beside me in the car and I have learned to make notes without looking. (I know, I know, this woman is even more dangerous than someone yakking on a cell phone while driving.)
Q: Why do you like writing romance/erotica?
A: Maybe it was growing up in the South, but I always knew my most important degree would be my MRS. Despite coming of age during the feminist revolution and becoming a charter subscriber to MS. magazine (that subscription caused the first fight between me and my husband-to-be), I was always looking for Rhett Butler.
My dolls and my paper dolls were romantics. I kept a diary which I hoped in later years would beguile me into thinking I had a hot romantic life, too. Unfortunately my mother read that and I was always getting lectured about something that (sadly) never happened. I wrote excruciatingly sweet romances in high school that all my friends read. (Surprisingly, they remain friends today.)
When I went off to college, I was more interested in romance than studying (rather the sort of thing my own Student Prince does today).
Gone with the Wind was my favorite book (yes, Rhett came back to Scarlet) and Anna Karenina and Dr. Zhivago were close seconds. (There are no happy endings in real literature.)
I like writing romance because I like reading it. I’m a romantic at heart. In my view, love is an extraordinary force.
I don’t consider my writing “erotica,” but it is indeed more sensual than books were fifty years ago. I sort of think a higher degree of the sensual is the norm for contemporary writing. To omit it in adult literature would almost render the writing archaic in sound. Sensuality is even pretty much a given in the mysteries and spy novels my husband reads.
Having said that, portraying hints of passion and sexuality (not to mention the book covers!) do inhibit some of my attempts at marketing. I grew up in a small town and shedding the notion of “what people think” is not easy. Sometimes I feel like a split personality. I’m very active in my church. Wow, would a “church lady” write stuff like this? Would a docent at a premier American art museum write romance? Would the lady who reviews art exhibitions for Philadelphia’s Main Line weeklies write romance?
LINKS:
Homepage
Blog
E-mail: MarieCarroll@mariecarroll.com
Publisher
Q: Tell us a little about your experience with Linden Bay Romance
A: Working with Linden Bay Romance has been one of the best experiences in my writing career. Barb Perfetti makes certain that each book LBR publishes is “worthy” of four and five star reviews.
I’ve written SF, fantasy, and horror for a number of years, but In Trysts was my first romance. Barb was really patient with her explanations regarding the distinctions between romance, which is character-driven, and my other novels, which tend to be more action-driven. I have to say that I had never been through so many edits as I was with In Trysts. By the time it was released, I could feel confident of its technical, and hopefully content, quality.
Q: What tips/tricks do you use for marketing or promoting your own titles?
A: Blogging, ads, interacting in chatrooms with readers, posting excerpts and book titles on sites which specialize in that genre.
Q: What is one thing you’d want to tell a newer author, just coming into the game?
A: Patience, perseverance, providence: if you’re patient enough, and work long and hard at perfecting your craft, some day you’ll find yourself in the right place at the right time, and you’ll be published.
Q: What types of research do you do for your books?
A: Scientific journals, archeology journals, history journals, and all the databases therein. I’m a student as well, and I’ve done postgrad mycology as well as archeology, with a little virology tossed in. My problem is frequently too much information! Once something interests me, it’s difficult for me to let go.
Q: How do balance family and writing?
A: I get up at 4 a.m., and 3.30 a.m. when the situation calls for it. I have 14-year-old at home, but not so very long ago all four of my kids were still at home. I’d steal time when I could between work and mothering, read parts of my fantasy novels aloud to my children to determine whether they flowed, and basically give myself impossible deadlines that I’d then somehow fulfill.
Since I’m solo parenting, I do the 4 a.m. rising, sandwich in class and projects around writing, and quit everything at 3.45, when my daughter gets home from school. That’s her time, and she needs to feel valued. A lot of the time we may just watch TV, yak, do the DVD thing, or I’ll read aloud to her. She still enjoys that. We may shop or sing, goof around. She understands if I have the occasional urgent project, but I try to manage my time around her. It’s a matter of priorities. Published books may feed my ego and my pocket, but my children fill my heart. They come first.
Q: Why do you like writing romance/erotica?
A: Actually, I don’t! Oh, horrors!
I find it much more fun to write SF or fantasy, with a bit of romance tossed in. I actually find it a bit boring to slant the entire book toward the interaction between two characters. It’s something I haven’t really been able to change about my writing, either. All my books tend to have multiple characters, undertones of horror, and threat coming at the characters every which way.
I think it gets to my romance editors every once in a while – the way my action jumps here and there to tear the characters apart, maybe with another character, a monster, a demon or a mutant. Sigh! These things happen. You never know when you’re about to kiss someone, and he suddenly begins to arc electricity. LOL
Q: What would you do if you weren’t a writer?
A: What I’m already doing, only more of it. I oil paint, plus I’m a full-time postgrad student in archeology. The goal remains the same: finish up and do two-week research stints throughout the Pacific Islands. I’d also paint a heck of a lot more, and maybe begin to market my work again. I have pieces in eight countries, but always worry that I may have lost my “edge”.
LINKS:
http://MelodyKnight.com
http://www.NDHansen-Hill.com
Books at fictionwise
Publisher Author Page
CP Publisher Author Page
MySpace
To be eligible to win one of the many prizes Linden Bay Romance Authors are offering, comment THIS WEEK on their Marketing with Mandy blog spots. Winners will be announced on Sunday!
Here are some of the prizes they’ll be giving away:
Samantha Sommersby will give away a signed print copy of Forbidden: The Awakening .
Nancy Henderson will give away a note/stationary set.
Shiela Stewart will give away a signed print of her book ‘Secrets of the Dead’
Cat Johnson will give away a signed print copy of Trilogy No. 102: Opposites Attract
Peter Brandt is giving away an ebook download of his romantic comedy novel “The Secret Life of Harden Long”
Jane Beckenham is giving away an Ebook download of her book “Hiring Cupid”
