Back to Front

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.

A QUESTION OF VIEWPOINT

I had an email recently from a writer who is still at the learning stage; a rejection beneath her belt, the second book in progress. She’d been told that she should never change point of view in the middle of a scene but she’d been reading my books and was sure that I did. But wondered if perhaps she was imagining it.

I know a lot of writers and writing tutors insist that you should never change viewpoint in the middle of a scene and there are sound reasons for that, the major one being not to confuse the reader.

I have to tell you that I recently read a crime novel from an important mainstream publishing house where the mid-scene viewpoint changes were so bad that I had to keep back-tracking to catch them and whoever edited it needed a slap. This is actually rare in crime fiction, but the two detectives (both male and heterosexual) were so closely involved over a past case that their thoughts were entwining rather like a pair of lovers and I suspect that was the author’s reason for using this technique.

My first twelve books were written from the heroine-only view point, which was the norm back then. I broke out with Eloping With Emmy but stuck with one viewpoint per scene until, four books later, I wrote Dating Her Boss.

I was in the middle of a scene in which they were dancing; it was a big scene — one of those pivotal scenes that were part of the recent Mills & Boon New Voices competition — and I wanted the reader to know what they were both feeling. Not her now and him remembering later, or vice versa. It was important for both of them and I wanted the reader to feel that in the instant it was happening. So I switched viewpoint mid-dance.

Re-reading the whole scene now I can see that in places it was a little loose in execution but at no time is the reader in any doubt whose head they’re in. And that’s the trick of it. Make it clean, make it clear and you’ll keep the reader with you.

Here’s how I did it —

Putting her arms about his neck, laying his head against his chest was by no means a penance, and her lips softened into a smile as he put his hands about her waist and pulled her closer so that she was listening to the slow thud of his heart overlying the sensuous beat of the music. Two hours ago she’d been enduring hell at the hands of Rich Blake; quite suddenly she was being transported to heaven.
        Max shifted his hold slightly, so that his hands rested on the soft curve of her hips. It was heaven and it was hell too. Like the pain when frozen fingers began to thaw, and for just a moment he felt dizzy…

I did this intuitively but it’s a writing technique and therefore something that can be learned.

Using a character’s name, as I did here, is one way of doing this. Writing a short paragraph, no more than a sentence, describing something neutral such as a sound – something outside the internal thoughts of the characters – to divide two viewpoints will also help.

I confess that having once started I did get a little carried away, changing backwards and forwards with abandon. These days I think carefully about it and don’t do it nearly as much but in what is basically a two-hander romance (as with Harlequin Mills & Boon) I think it has a place, adding internal movement to what would otherwise be static scenes. As long as you make it clear whose head you’re in, because sloppy changes won’t get past an HMB editor.

But don’t just take my word for it. Nora Roberts, who’s sold more romances than most of us can ever dream of changes viewpoint at the drop of a hat and the millions of readers who love her books, send them flying up the bestseller charts time after time, don’t complain. The only people who tut are those who are obsessed with rules rather than telling a brilliant story.

Rules are for grammar. The rest is imagination.

WHAT KEEPS ME WRITING?

Asked to write about this for eHarlequin recently, I have to say that my first, slightly cynical response, was that it’s the same thing that drives everyone to the office each morning. The need to eat. And that’s true, of course, but only up to a point.

It can’t be the need the eat that makes Stephen King sit at his desk each morning. Or John Grisham. Or Nora Roberts. For the writer, the artist, the actor – anyone who produces a “performance” out of their head, their heart, there has to be something more that drives them on when, by most standards, they have the kind of financial security that would have most of us switching off and heading for some luscious beach.

When I was a newly published author, a journalist asked me if I’d ever give up writing. It’s a pretty weird question now I think about it. Would she have asked a banker if he’d ever give up banking? Anyway, on a bit of a high I replied that even if I won the lottery (not likely since I don’t play!) I would still write.

Fifteen years and fifty-plus books later I sat down and asked myself if that was still true. I have to be honest and tell you that there are days when I never want to see a computer again. Writing is tough. It’s tough on your back, on your eyes. It makes your brain ache (it makes my brain ache, anyway). And unlike other jobs it doesn’t get easier with practise. On the contrary. The more you write, the harder it gets to find a brilliant new way to tell what is, basically, the same story. I actually read somewhere yesterday that there are only two stories – Romeo and Juliet and … I forget.

So, if I was asked the same question today, would the answer be the same? I guess it would, because writing isn’t just a job, writing is who you are.

I’ve always written. Always seen writing a book, being published as my personal goal in life. But if it was simply that, surely I would have been happy, content, once AN IMAGE OF YOU was published back in 1992? Picture in paper. “Mum, 40, Writes Book” headline. (Did Stephen King’s first headline read “Dad, XX, Writes Book”? No, I didn’t think so.) A book with my name on it in the local branch of W H Smith. Mission accomplished.

But one of the things that drives me, drives every writer I suspect, is the impossibility of a book, any book, ever matching the soaring vision in your head, in your heart. I once said to an editor, after A STRANGER'S KISS (my fourth, I think) had been accepted for publication, that I wished I done something more with a particular scene.

“Next time,” she said. “Do it in the next book.”

We both knew she wasn’t talking about that particular scene. She was telling me that next time I’d get closer. And that’s what keeps me writing. The goal of the perfect book. A book that, when I it take out of the box and read it through to check that all my corrections have made it through the final copy edit stage, doesn’t leave me thinking that I could have done something more in any one of a dozen places. That nagging little feeling that I could have done better.

It’s never going to happen of course. No writer is ever completely satisfied with the finished result and, since I get more critical with experience, not less so, I’ll always have to keep writing, always seeking an illusive perfection.

And as if that isn’t enough to keep me going, there are the characters I left behind. A handful of difficult teenagers who are clamouring for their own stories. Men and women who play a role above and beyond the call of a “minor character”, who have stories of their own that demand to be told, some more urgent than others.

At the moment I’m writing a follow up to my August, Harlequin Romance, REUNITED: MARRIAGE IN A MILLION. The hero’s sister was not, as first glance, heroine material and yet she came through when the pressure was on and I wanted her to break free of her past and find happiness. And how would that happen if I didn’t write her story? Being an author is a lot like being a mother. You never stop feeling responsible for your offspring.

But on the days when the writing is going so badly that I’m tempted to buy a lottery ticket, or just cut down on food and head for a quiet beach, what keeps me turning up at my computer at seven o’clock each morning are the letters from readers, the encouragement and camaraderie of colleagues, the faith of my editor – and a publisher who has paid me in advance to deliver this book, on time. And the memory of how it feels when the postman brings a box containing my latest book. The sheer pleasure of the moment when you open it, take one out and hold it for the first time. The new book smell. Checking the cover. The blurb.

It’s those moments that make this the best job in the world. Bankers are welcome to retire to whatever dream takes their fancy. Romance writers write out their dreams, their fantasies. Lying on a beach, just watching the world go by would be a kind of agony. About two weeks would be all it took before I had to go and write about the couple who are clearly having a very bad time. The lonely guy sitting throwing pebbles into the sea. The scarred woman… Fixing in my head the world that I see because that’s what I do. That’s who I am.

A writer.