Annie Burrows's Blog - Posts Tagged "regency-romance"
K is for writing what you Know (or don't)
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don't know we don't know."
Donald Rumsfeld
When you first start writing people advise you to write what you know. The argument goes that you cannot write a convincing story unless you know your subject inside out and upside down. The trouble is, I wanted to write fiction set in Regency England, which is a place I have never been, and never can go to. All my knowledge of the era comes from books.
However, when I started attempting to get a publishing deal, I felt fairly confident that I knew enough to be able to create a convincing fictional Regency world. I've read stacks of Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen and the like. And whatever I didn't know enough about, I could look up, right?
So I bought loads of books about every subject I thought I might need to know about - fashion, the army, the navy and biograpies of people who actually lived in the time which would hopefully give me an idea of the mindset of people living back then.
I even go round stately homes to get an extra "feel" for the era, especially ones where I can dress up in period costume, or have a ride in a carriage.
All the little details of dress, manners, and so forth, help to create a world that strikes a reader as "real".
For example, an author sets the scene by having the hero check his cravat in the mirror. The heroine curtsies to him. Instantly we're in an age where manners are more formal than today, and the costumes easily dateable. The hero asks the lady to dance the waltz. She refuses lest she be thought "fast". We're very firmly in Regency territory. So far, so good.
The trouble is, there are things about the Regency world that I never knew I didn't know. I didn't know, for example - until it was mentioned on an author loop I belong to - that a girl couldn't waltz in public until she'd been granted permission, by one of the patronesses of Almack's, within those hallowed walls, to do so with an approved partner. I'd had no idea how close I'd come to the brink of writing one of my heroines into committing such a social gaffe.
And a lot of authors fall into the same trap. As a resident of the UK, I cringe whenever I read of Regency bucks going down to Dorsetshire to sample the local whiskey. Or having to banish their dogs to the stables after an encounter with a skunk on the South Downs. For me, such slips of the pen ruin my belief in the Regency world the author is trying to create. Though I don't suppose it has any effect on readers who don't know that in Dorset the local brew would most likely be cider, and that the only way a skunk would wander onto the South Downs was if it had escaped from some local eccentric's private collection of rare species.
Which brings me back to the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, who has been soundly mocked for warning the world about the danger of the "unknown unknowns". As an author, I can vouch for the peril of those pesky facts that hamper us in our creative endeavours. I have had my own heroes and heroines unwittingly do and say things that a person living in 1815 would not have done. I have had them use the word "hello" - which was not in common use until the 1880's except on the hunting field. I have also had them perform a twentieth century waltz, having had no idea that in the Regency era, the waltz was nothing like the rather tame dance performed today.
A Mistress for Major Bartlett
However, if I was now to describe the dance with complete accuracy, I suspect that editors and readers alike would find it hard to believe in it if my hero performed an acrobatic leap while the heroine hopped to one side. It would strike them all as bizarre, and would ruin their belief in my Regency world just as surely as it would had they arrived at the ball in question in a porsche 911.
So - I'll probably need to disguise what I actually know, so that a reader will be convinced I do know what I'm talking about.
Donald Rumsfeld might have fared better with the world's press if he'd done the same.
Donald Rumsfeld
When you first start writing people advise you to write what you know. The argument goes that you cannot write a convincing story unless you know your subject inside out and upside down. The trouble is, I wanted to write fiction set in Regency England, which is a place I have never been, and never can go to. All my knowledge of the era comes from books.
However, when I started attempting to get a publishing deal, I felt fairly confident that I knew enough to be able to create a convincing fictional Regency world. I've read stacks of Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen and the like. And whatever I didn't know enough about, I could look up, right?
So I bought loads of books about every subject I thought I might need to know about - fashion, the army, the navy and biograpies of people who actually lived in the time which would hopefully give me an idea of the mindset of people living back then.
I even go round stately homes to get an extra "feel" for the era, especially ones where I can dress up in period costume, or have a ride in a carriage.
All the little details of dress, manners, and so forth, help to create a world that strikes a reader as "real".
For example, an author sets the scene by having the hero check his cravat in the mirror. The heroine curtsies to him. Instantly we're in an age where manners are more formal than today, and the costumes easily dateable. The hero asks the lady to dance the waltz. She refuses lest she be thought "fast". We're very firmly in Regency territory. So far, so good.
The trouble is, there are things about the Regency world that I never knew I didn't know. I didn't know, for example - until it was mentioned on an author loop I belong to - that a girl couldn't waltz in public until she'd been granted permission, by one of the patronesses of Almack's, within those hallowed walls, to do so with an approved partner. I'd had no idea how close I'd come to the brink of writing one of my heroines into committing such a social gaffe.
And a lot of authors fall into the same trap. As a resident of the UK, I cringe whenever I read of Regency bucks going down to Dorsetshire to sample the local whiskey. Or having to banish their dogs to the stables after an encounter with a skunk on the South Downs. For me, such slips of the pen ruin my belief in the Regency world the author is trying to create. Though I don't suppose it has any effect on readers who don't know that in Dorset the local brew would most likely be cider, and that the only way a skunk would wander onto the South Downs was if it had escaped from some local eccentric's private collection of rare species.
Which brings me back to the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, who has been soundly mocked for warning the world about the danger of the "unknown unknowns". As an author, I can vouch for the peril of those pesky facts that hamper us in our creative endeavours. I have had my own heroes and heroines unwittingly do and say things that a person living in 1815 would not have done. I have had them use the word "hello" - which was not in common use until the 1880's except on the hunting field. I have also had them perform a twentieth century waltz, having had no idea that in the Regency era, the waltz was nothing like the rather tame dance performed today.
A Mistress for Major Bartlett
However, if I was now to describe the dance with complete accuracy, I suspect that editors and readers alike would find it hard to believe in it if my hero performed an acrobatic leap while the heroine hopped to one side. It would strike them all as bizarre, and would ruin their belief in my Regency world just as surely as it would had they arrived at the ball in question in a porsche 911.
So - I'll probably need to disguise what I actually know, so that a reader will be convinced I do know what I'm talking about.
Donald Rumsfeld might have fared better with the world's press if he'd done the same.
L is for...loneliness.
"But hold onto your loneliness and your silence. They are part of what make you a writer."
I've got this quote pinned up in my study. I cut it out of The Author magazine some time ago - I think it's by Terence Black. Whenever I start wondering if I'm in danger of becoming agoraphobic, I read it and take heart. I'm not abnormally antisocial, no - I'm just a writer.
Because, you see, I could quite easily be a hermit. (Apart from the growing a beard thing - whenever you see a picture of a hermit it's always a man with a huge bushy beard. I suppose I could throw away my tweezers...) For example, when I go to put the bins out on a Friday morning, I sometimes realize that it's the first time I've been outside all week - and I'm not bothered.
I don't even like going out shopping. The thought of wandering around, browsing has always seemed to me like a huge waste of time. If I have to go into town, I try and get as many things done as I possibly can while I'm out. I write a list, get everything done as fast as I can and get home. And thanks to internet shopping I can have life's necessities, like groceries and books, delivered. Nor do I have to visit an actual library very often. I do most of my research online nowadays.
About the only time I really look forward to getting out of the house is to meet up with other writers, to discuss...yes, you've guessed it, writing. It's only when I'm in the company of other writers that I don't feel odd. They totally get that I have several stories drifting through my head at any one time, and that I would rather spend my day writing down the adventures of my imaginary friends, than going out for coffee with real ones. I don't have much of a social life, apart from having lunch with other writers, or attending writers conferences. But I'm not lonely. Not at all.
What I am, is a bit of a loner.
I think to be a writer you have to be. You have to be content with your own company. Prepared to set your own goals and reach targets nobody else cares about.
And only a writer would completely empathise with Oscar Wilde when he said: "I'm exhausted. I spent all morning putting in a comma and all afternoon taking it out."
That's pretty much my life!
A Mistress for Major Bartlett
I've got this quote pinned up in my study. I cut it out of The Author magazine some time ago - I think it's by Terence Black. Whenever I start wondering if I'm in danger of becoming agoraphobic, I read it and take heart. I'm not abnormally antisocial, no - I'm just a writer.
Because, you see, I could quite easily be a hermit. (Apart from the growing a beard thing - whenever you see a picture of a hermit it's always a man with a huge bushy beard. I suppose I could throw away my tweezers...) For example, when I go to put the bins out on a Friday morning, I sometimes realize that it's the first time I've been outside all week - and I'm not bothered.
I don't even like going out shopping. The thought of wandering around, browsing has always seemed to me like a huge waste of time. If I have to go into town, I try and get as many things done as I possibly can while I'm out. I write a list, get everything done as fast as I can and get home. And thanks to internet shopping I can have life's necessities, like groceries and books, delivered. Nor do I have to visit an actual library very often. I do most of my research online nowadays.
About the only time I really look forward to getting out of the house is to meet up with other writers, to discuss...yes, you've guessed it, writing. It's only when I'm in the company of other writers that I don't feel odd. They totally get that I have several stories drifting through my head at any one time, and that I would rather spend my day writing down the adventures of my imaginary friends, than going out for coffee with real ones. I don't have much of a social life, apart from having lunch with other writers, or attending writers conferences. But I'm not lonely. Not at all.
What I am, is a bit of a loner.
I think to be a writer you have to be. You have to be content with your own company. Prepared to set your own goals and reach targets nobody else cares about.
And only a writer would completely empathise with Oscar Wilde when he said: "I'm exhausted. I spent all morning putting in a comma and all afternoon taking it out."
That's pretty much my life!
A Mistress for Major Bartlett
M is for...Mills & Boon
Like many people who became writers, I started off being the kind of child who always had her nose in a book of some description.
Unlike many, I didn't have a burning ambition to become a writer. It just never occurred to me.
Not until Margaret Thatcher abolished student loans, just a couple of years before my daughter was due to go to university. We hadn't a penny saved up to fund her education, and were suddenly faced with the huge cost of her getting a degree.
How to get the money to put her through college?
I know, I thought. I'll write a book. I've read so many, I'm sure I could do just as well.
Because when I wasn't reading a story, I was daydreaming. Those sort of Walter Mitty-ish daydreams where I was the heroine, getting into all sorts of unlikely adventures.
And I had been to university and got a degree in English, so I knew all about what makes great literature. I was sure, if only I put my mind to it, I could quickly come up with a bestseller.
And I did come up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. A re-working of the Babel story from the bible, which would show how it affected one family, as the world they knew collapsed into chaos around them. It was a kind of allegorical, apocalyptic examination of both family dynamics, and social conditioning, which ended up proving that we are all only as civilized as the society in which we live.
At that point I made a discovery. It is a lot harder to write a novel than I thought. You can't just sit down and write your ideas down in the order you get them. You've got to tease out the message, and have enough action going on to get that message across without boring the reader to sleep. And I learned which parts would bore the reader to sleep, because I read sections to my family as I finished them. If they really did fall asleep, I knew I needed to re-write that bit.
Anyway, that was how I learned to write - by sitting down and doing it, then trying out the effect of my prose on my poor unsuspecting family.
At last it was finished. My masterpiece. I got hold of a copy of the writers and artists yearbook and started sending it out, eagerly awaiting the thrilled reaction of publishers who would all be clamouring for the privilege of printing it.
You won't be surprised to hear that none of them wanted it. Most didn't even bother replying. Which puzzled and hurt me.
By this time, my daughter had started at college, and I clearly wasn't going to make my fortune with my book, at least not right away. So I had to go out and get a Real Job which meant I had less time to devote to writing that bestseller. Which I wasn't going to abandon. I'd got hooked on writing.
I felt I just needed to work out where I was going wrong. Perhaps I needed a bit of tuition, or something?
But since I was working I couldn't go on a full time writing course.
However, I did see an advert for a correspondence course which involved doing assignments and sending them off and getting them marked. The first assignments involved researching various magazines with a view to writing articles.
Now, this probably seems logical to you, but this was the first time anyone had suggested researching the market, and writing something in accordance with a set of guidelines. I thought I could just write whatever I wanted, and some publisher should be grateful to print it out and sell it for me!
I knew magazine article writing wasn't for me, but at least the marks I got from my tutor were encouraging.
There was a fiction-writing segment coming up in the correspondence course, and, getting bored with the factual stuff which didn't make use of my imagination, I skipped ahead and read the section on genre fiction.
Now, because I'd studied Literature at university, I'd been taught to sneer at pulp fiction. But the one thing that caught my eye, as I read the course outline, was a little sentence that said,
"If you send work in to Mills & Boon, someone will read your manuscript, and reply."
A reply from a publisher! By this time I would have given my right arm to get a reply from a publisher.
It then went on to suggest that if I wanted to write something likely to get Mills & Boon to take an interest, I should buy several recent books published by them, so that I could see if I could write something along those lines.
So off I went to my local library, and got an armful.
I'd never knowingly read anything from Mills & Boon before. But the moment I did, I was hooked. Why hadn't I read anything like these wonderful romances before? They matched exactly the kind of stories I'd been making up in my head for years - oh, I don't mean the worthy, literary story I thought was a Real Piece of Writing - I mean the ones where I was a heroine in peril, getting rescued by some strapping great hunk with a tortured soul who needed my gentle brand of wisdom to make his life whole - or the ones where I was an impoverished, though intelligent girl from a genteel family who catches the eye of a dashing rake, or pirate, and persuades him, through a series of adventures where I demonstrated a special brand of pluckiness, that I was just what he'd always been looking for without even knowing it.
From that moment on, I had stories flowing out of my fingertips, drumming at my brain to get onto paper. Plucky heroines and rugged heroes clamouring at me to tell their stories.
Though it took another few years before the editors at Mills & Boon finally gave in, and agreed to publish one of them.
I wasn't sure exactly which line I wanted to aim at - it was a choice between Moderns (which are like reworking of fairytales such as Cinderella, or Beauty and the Beast, really) or historical, where I could indulge my imagination in tales of adventure, involving rakes encountering plucky heroines.
So what I did was to alternate. First of all, I'd write a story for the Modern line, and send it in to the relevant editor. And then, while I was awaiting a response, I'd write a historical one. So when my rejection eventually came back, I immediately had another one all ready to send out.
At the same time I was buying books about how to write, to see what I could learn. I can't say that any one book had all the answers, but every single one of them would contain at least one little nugget of advice I found useful.
And my husband got me a computer which would connect to the internet, which opened up a whole new world of research for me.
It was just after I'd signed up for an evening class at a local college in fiction writing that I first heard of the RNA,(Romantic Novelists Association) and its New Writer's Scheme. My tutor was giving me good marks for my assignments, but I was still getting standard rejection letters from Mills & Boon, and I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. Why wasn't I getting anything published?
For a fee, I discovered, the New Writer's Scheme would read a manuscript, and actually send back a report about the quality of my writing.
So, I decided that when my next rejection letter came through, I would send the manuscript off to the New Writer's Scheme so someone would tell me where I was going wrong.
However, that submission didn't get rejected. Instead, I got a very nice letter asking to read the full manuscript, and then, many months later, a request for very minor revisions. Before I knew it, I'd got the call with the offer of a publishing contract.
It had only taken me 10 years.
My first book, His Cinderella Bride, came out the following autumn. By this time not only my daughter, but also my son had both graduated from university.
But I'd got a new career.
Unlike many, I didn't have a burning ambition to become a writer. It just never occurred to me.
Not until Margaret Thatcher abolished student loans, just a couple of years before my daughter was due to go to university. We hadn't a penny saved up to fund her education, and were suddenly faced with the huge cost of her getting a degree.
How to get the money to put her through college?
I know, I thought. I'll write a book. I've read so many, I'm sure I could do just as well.
Because when I wasn't reading a story, I was daydreaming. Those sort of Walter Mitty-ish daydreams where I was the heroine, getting into all sorts of unlikely adventures.
And I had been to university and got a degree in English, so I knew all about what makes great literature. I was sure, if only I put my mind to it, I could quickly come up with a bestseller.
And I did come up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. A re-working of the Babel story from the bible, which would show how it affected one family, as the world they knew collapsed into chaos around them. It was a kind of allegorical, apocalyptic examination of both family dynamics, and social conditioning, which ended up proving that we are all only as civilized as the society in which we live.
At that point I made a discovery. It is a lot harder to write a novel than I thought. You can't just sit down and write your ideas down in the order you get them. You've got to tease out the message, and have enough action going on to get that message across without boring the reader to sleep. And I learned which parts would bore the reader to sleep, because I read sections to my family as I finished them. If they really did fall asleep, I knew I needed to re-write that bit.
Anyway, that was how I learned to write - by sitting down and doing it, then trying out the effect of my prose on my poor unsuspecting family.
At last it was finished. My masterpiece. I got hold of a copy of the writers and artists yearbook and started sending it out, eagerly awaiting the thrilled reaction of publishers who would all be clamouring for the privilege of printing it.
You won't be surprised to hear that none of them wanted it. Most didn't even bother replying. Which puzzled and hurt me.
By this time, my daughter had started at college, and I clearly wasn't going to make my fortune with my book, at least not right away. So I had to go out and get a Real Job which meant I had less time to devote to writing that bestseller. Which I wasn't going to abandon. I'd got hooked on writing.
I felt I just needed to work out where I was going wrong. Perhaps I needed a bit of tuition, or something?
But since I was working I couldn't go on a full time writing course.
However, I did see an advert for a correspondence course which involved doing assignments and sending them off and getting them marked. The first assignments involved researching various magazines with a view to writing articles.
Now, this probably seems logical to you, but this was the first time anyone had suggested researching the market, and writing something in accordance with a set of guidelines. I thought I could just write whatever I wanted, and some publisher should be grateful to print it out and sell it for me!
I knew magazine article writing wasn't for me, but at least the marks I got from my tutor were encouraging.
There was a fiction-writing segment coming up in the correspondence course, and, getting bored with the factual stuff which didn't make use of my imagination, I skipped ahead and read the section on genre fiction.
Now, because I'd studied Literature at university, I'd been taught to sneer at pulp fiction. But the one thing that caught my eye, as I read the course outline, was a little sentence that said,
"If you send work in to Mills & Boon, someone will read your manuscript, and reply."
A reply from a publisher! By this time I would have given my right arm to get a reply from a publisher.
It then went on to suggest that if I wanted to write something likely to get Mills & Boon to take an interest, I should buy several recent books published by them, so that I could see if I could write something along those lines.
So off I went to my local library, and got an armful.
I'd never knowingly read anything from Mills & Boon before. But the moment I did, I was hooked. Why hadn't I read anything like these wonderful romances before? They matched exactly the kind of stories I'd been making up in my head for years - oh, I don't mean the worthy, literary story I thought was a Real Piece of Writing - I mean the ones where I was a heroine in peril, getting rescued by some strapping great hunk with a tortured soul who needed my gentle brand of wisdom to make his life whole - or the ones where I was an impoverished, though intelligent girl from a genteel family who catches the eye of a dashing rake, or pirate, and persuades him, through a series of adventures where I demonstrated a special brand of pluckiness, that I was just what he'd always been looking for without even knowing it.
From that moment on, I had stories flowing out of my fingertips, drumming at my brain to get onto paper. Plucky heroines and rugged heroes clamouring at me to tell their stories.
Though it took another few years before the editors at Mills & Boon finally gave in, and agreed to publish one of them.
I wasn't sure exactly which line I wanted to aim at - it was a choice between Moderns (which are like reworking of fairytales such as Cinderella, or Beauty and the Beast, really) or historical, where I could indulge my imagination in tales of adventure, involving rakes encountering plucky heroines.
So what I did was to alternate. First of all, I'd write a story for the Modern line, and send it in to the relevant editor. And then, while I was awaiting a response, I'd write a historical one. So when my rejection eventually came back, I immediately had another one all ready to send out.
At the same time I was buying books about how to write, to see what I could learn. I can't say that any one book had all the answers, but every single one of them would contain at least one little nugget of advice I found useful.
And my husband got me a computer which would connect to the internet, which opened up a whole new world of research for me.
It was just after I'd signed up for an evening class at a local college in fiction writing that I first heard of the RNA,(Romantic Novelists Association) and its New Writer's Scheme. My tutor was giving me good marks for my assignments, but I was still getting standard rejection letters from Mills & Boon, and I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. Why wasn't I getting anything published?
For a fee, I discovered, the New Writer's Scheme would read a manuscript, and actually send back a report about the quality of my writing.
So, I decided that when my next rejection letter came through, I would send the manuscript off to the New Writer's Scheme so someone would tell me where I was going wrong.
However, that submission didn't get rejected. Instead, I got a very nice letter asking to read the full manuscript, and then, many months later, a request for very minor revisions. Before I knew it, I'd got the call with the offer of a publishing contract.
It had only taken me 10 years.
My first book, His Cinderella Bride, came out the following autumn. By this time not only my daughter, but also my son had both graduated from university.
But I'd got a new career.
U for Unique selling point
About once a month I've been sharing a very personal view of what it is like to be a writer. And dealing with themes in alphabetical order. This month, I've reached U...which I've decided should stand for Unique.
When I started out as a writer I didn't want to have to do any marketing of myself. In fact, that was one of the reasons I wanted to write for Harlequin Mills & Boon. I thought I would just be sort of absorbed under the umbrella and become part of their brand. I thought I could just concentrate on writing my stories, and my publisher would do all the publicity for me. And to a large extent, they do.
But I write in what is a very crowded market. There seem to be dozens and dozens of other writers producing the same sort of book I do - Regency Romance. And with the rise of self-publishing, the marketplace has become even more competitive. Why should anyone want to pick up my book and read it, when there are so many others on offer? What is going to keep a reader remembering my books, and coming back for more?
According to marketing gurus, what I need to do is offer a Unique Selling Point. Something that will make me stand out from the crowd.
Fortunately for me, Mills & Boon have been brilliant about helping me develop my "brand". When I first started writing for them, they had a reader panel, made up of fans of specific lines, who would send in a questionnaire about what they liked (or didn't) about each month's books, in return for being entered into a draw for free books. This was a great piece of market research which I couldn't possibly have undertaken myself. And eventually my editor contacted me with the news that what readers liked about my books was the humour. One or two people had already told me that they had giggled when reading certain sections of my stories, so when she asked me if I would mind concentrating on that, rather than on what she termed "my dark side" (which made me feel as if I was perilously close to joining forces with Darth Vader) I agreed.
Because every writer needs to fulfil reader expectation. If you pick up a Dick Francis, you expect the hero to be an unassuming chap who thwarts the bad guys within a setting which is something to do with horses. If you read a Dean Koontz, you expect there to be something a bit spooky going on in the background of the thriller. Even I could see, that within the Harlequin Historical line, some writers tended to create "bad girls", those of the demi-monde, who maybe turn to crime to survive. Others are known for getting in a lot of historical detail. Others write extremely tortured heroes, or go for unusual settings.
I'd already had an Amazon review from a reader who was disappointed that the heroine of the book she'd just read by me hadn't been a virgin. And when I looked back at previous books, I saw that this was something else I'd done without really thinking about it. I'd made my heroines virgins, and my readers had come to expect that from me.
So, thanks to the market research done by my publisher, and a disgruntled Amazon reviewer, I'd discovered what readers wanted from my writing, and I started going all out to provide it. It wasn't any hardship...just a slight adjustment to the way I went about thinking up my plots. I can never resist deflating a pompous character, or inviting someone to share in a joke with me, and I'd already been doing that in my stories without really noticing I was doing it.
But then my publishers did a series of webinars on marketing and branding. By this time even I could see it wasn't enough to simply write the best story I could. We've all moved into an era where we have to have an online presence. Which, they said, should be consistent across all platforms. Which meant thinking up a tagline which expressed what we stood for.
Ulp! As if it wasn't enough learning how to write, and write to a deadline and a wordcount, now I had to promote myself too?
Fortunately, I'd recently had a revisions letter from an editor, saying that my current manuscript (at that point) lacked the "trademark Annie Burrows sparkle".
Aha! That was it - that was what I wanted to offer readers, and what readers seemed to want from me - some sparkle. So my tagline became "Sparkling Regency Romance". Now a reader has a clue what they are going to find within the covers of one of my books. Though I do aim for total historical accuracy, which demands a lot of research and double-checking, not a great deal of that actually makes it to the pages. In the end, what I offer my readers is a light-hearted, fun sort of read.
That is my Unique Selling Point - the sparkle.
What is yours?
When I started out as a writer I didn't want to have to do any marketing of myself. In fact, that was one of the reasons I wanted to write for Harlequin Mills & Boon. I thought I would just be sort of absorbed under the umbrella and become part of their brand. I thought I could just concentrate on writing my stories, and my publisher would do all the publicity for me. And to a large extent, they do.
But I write in what is a very crowded market. There seem to be dozens and dozens of other writers producing the same sort of book I do - Regency Romance. And with the rise of self-publishing, the marketplace has become even more competitive. Why should anyone want to pick up my book and read it, when there are so many others on offer? What is going to keep a reader remembering my books, and coming back for more?
According to marketing gurus, what I need to do is offer a Unique Selling Point. Something that will make me stand out from the crowd.
Fortunately for me, Mills & Boon have been brilliant about helping me develop my "brand". When I first started writing for them, they had a reader panel, made up of fans of specific lines, who would send in a questionnaire about what they liked (or didn't) about each month's books, in return for being entered into a draw for free books. This was a great piece of market research which I couldn't possibly have undertaken myself. And eventually my editor contacted me with the news that what readers liked about my books was the humour. One or two people had already told me that they had giggled when reading certain sections of my stories, so when she asked me if I would mind concentrating on that, rather than on what she termed "my dark side" (which made me feel as if I was perilously close to joining forces with Darth Vader) I agreed.
Because every writer needs to fulfil reader expectation. If you pick up a Dick Francis, you expect the hero to be an unassuming chap who thwarts the bad guys within a setting which is something to do with horses. If you read a Dean Koontz, you expect there to be something a bit spooky going on in the background of the thriller. Even I could see, that within the Harlequin Historical line, some writers tended to create "bad girls", those of the demi-monde, who maybe turn to crime to survive. Others are known for getting in a lot of historical detail. Others write extremely tortured heroes, or go for unusual settings.
I'd already had an Amazon review from a reader who was disappointed that the heroine of the book she'd just read by me hadn't been a virgin. And when I looked back at previous books, I saw that this was something else I'd done without really thinking about it. I'd made my heroines virgins, and my readers had come to expect that from me.
So, thanks to the market research done by my publisher, and a disgruntled Amazon reviewer, I'd discovered what readers wanted from my writing, and I started going all out to provide it. It wasn't any hardship...just a slight adjustment to the way I went about thinking up my plots. I can never resist deflating a pompous character, or inviting someone to share in a joke with me, and I'd already been doing that in my stories without really noticing I was doing it.
But then my publishers did a series of webinars on marketing and branding. By this time even I could see it wasn't enough to simply write the best story I could. We've all moved into an era where we have to have an online presence. Which, they said, should be consistent across all platforms. Which meant thinking up a tagline which expressed what we stood for.
Ulp! As if it wasn't enough learning how to write, and write to a deadline and a wordcount, now I had to promote myself too?
Fortunately, I'd recently had a revisions letter from an editor, saying that my current manuscript (at that point) lacked the "trademark Annie Burrows sparkle".
Aha! That was it - that was what I wanted to offer readers, and what readers seemed to want from me - some sparkle. So my tagline became "Sparkling Regency Romance". Now a reader has a clue what they are going to find within the covers of one of my books. Though I do aim for total historical accuracy, which demands a lot of research and double-checking, not a great deal of that actually makes it to the pages. In the end, what I offer my readers is a light-hearted, fun sort of read.
That is my Unique Selling Point - the sparkle.
What is yours?
