There was a time when a romance author’s backlist was
something that gathered dust in the publishers attic. Occasionally, a favourite
would be dusted off and reissued in an anthology, but after the first round of
publication in the US, UK, Australia
and around the world, most of the books only saw the light of day in three-in-one
reissues in places like Lithuania
unless an author moved into mainstream and hit the New York Times bestseller
list.
Authors like Tess Gerritsen, Nora Roberts and Jennifer
Crusie then found their romances
dusted off and published in fancy new covers, annoying the heck out of their
new readers who thought they were buying a mainstream Tess,
or Nora, or Jennifer,
but making everyone a lot of money. Including the authors.
Suddenly, however, the backlist is no longer in the back
room.
With the wild success of the eBook — something everyone said
would never happen — they are hot property. Many of my earlier books were
digitised a couple of years ago by Harlequin when eBooks were just beginning to
take off and they were testing the waters. And then the Kindle and Nook arrived
and my reading life changed forever. A book at the press of a button, any size
print I want. It’s an obsessive reader’s (one with dodgy eyesight) dream. But…
but… While it’s great that those books are out there for the readers who missed
them the first time around, how I would have loved to give them a make-over,
bring them up to date, freshen the writing to reflect twenty years of
experience.
Then Amazon gave us KDP and the world changed again. Now I’m
not just an author, but a publisher, too.
Last year I dug out the Beaumont Brides trilogy, longer
romances written for a British publisher in 1996/7 and gave them a new lease of
life. It was a steep learning experience and earlier this year, after
re-editing them and giving them to a new “clever clogs” to format them for me,
I republished them all, along with a three-in-one volume containing all three
books. The first of the individual volumes, Wild Justice, is free, so it will
cost you about the same whether you prefer individual downloads or the big one
— 300,000 words for $4.99.
Out of the sixty books I have written for Harlequin, just
four titles have reverted to me and those are getting that lovely makeover. New
covers — oh, the joys and frustration of hunting for the perfect image! — an
update, if appropriate, to take note of modern technology, changes in currency
in Europe, the fact that the Eurostar no longer leaves London from Waterloo,
but St Pancras (I’ve been on it, and it’s fabulous!)
The first of these, Eloping With Emmy, was published this
month and will cost you less to download now, at $2.99, than it would have done
to buy it as a paperback in 1998 ($3.50). That is a serious bargain.
I’ll be following it with Old Desires in a month or two. The
cover is done (here’s a peek), but I can’t get stuck into the serious editing
until I have the book I’m writing off my desk. And moved house.
And of course, the icing on the cake, was the chance to put
together everything I’ve learned in my twenty year career and pass it on to a
new generation of authors in Liz
Fielding’s Little Book of Writing
Romance.
It’s a new world out there and I am embracing it with both
arms.
