The HEA Cafe

After I’d written four complete historical romances and failed to get any of them published, despite good contest results,  personal rejection letters and a great deal of encouragement from my then agent, I began to feel a bit frustrated. I knew that my writing was okay, but I couldn’t control the state of the market, which was cooling on historicals, the sub-genre I loved to write.
I wanted to be published so badly that my first instinct was to chase the market. I was certain I could write something with a vampire or a werewolf in it. It couldn’t be that hard, could it? Yes, it could. I wasn’t interested enough to make the story great and I also realized that by the time I wrote the book the market might have changed again. It also occurred to me that if it did get published I might get stuck writing books I wasn’t passionate about and that was not good. So should I stick to my guns, continue to write the books I was passionate about and wait around a few years for the market to come around again? That option didn’t exactly inspire me either.

Determined to find a way out of this dilemma, I tried to look at the problem from another angle. What did I do well in my historicals that could translate into another sub-genre? I asked my agent, my critique partners and anyone who had ever read a single sentence of my work. The answers I received where all pretty similar. The main one being that my books were HOT! That was a good start. So I looked around at the other sub-genres and contemplated where I might be able to use that ability. I discounted inspirational, mysteries and suspense, vampires and shapeshifters were also out and realized there were a few left I could try.

The next step was the big one. I gave myself permission to take a year to write some different sub-genres and see what happened. I decided to write a futuristic/science fiction novel, a contemporary hot novel aimed at Blaze and a historical erotic romance. I also gave myself permission to push myself out of my comfort zone, to forget my mother and that people might end up reading all this crazy stuff and just write it as it wanted to be written. I also figured that even if I didn’t sell any of these books they would all teach me something.

That was four years ago. I sold the short erotic historical to Ellora’s Cave. The contemporary erotic to Virgin ‘Cheek’ and the futuristic/science fiction thing is currently being shopped by my new agent. Okay, this might sound a bit too good to be true, but by challenging myself, looking for my strengths and manipulating them to find a different market, I ended up being able to write my scorching historicals for Aphrodisia after all.

But the first step on that path was taking a chance and trying to meld my abilities with the current market. The second was selling a 27,000 word erotic historical written in first person to Ellora’s Cave. That gave me a publishing credit and the rest followed on from there.

So, here’s my advice, for what it’s worth If you are frustrated and defeated by the current state of the romance market and don’t want to chase trends, look inward, find your writerly strengths and see what you can do with them. You might be surprised. I certainly was