Last week I shared a bit of my “origin story” of how I became a novelist. Like many writers, my story is long and winding. This week I’m picking up where I left off, so if you haven’t read that first post called “How It All Began,” please do go back and read it to catch up.
To say that Fifty Shades of Grey was a phenomenon feels like a vast understatement. In 2011, it was everywhere. I saw it while commuting on the subway. Local news stations ran segments on it, interviewing women who had spiced up their sex lives thanks to the book. Speculation about who would play Christian and Anastasia in the films ran rampant. Everyone was reading it, and it sometimes felt as though if you said you weren’t you were probably lying.
This…was not the environment to launch a historical romance career. My new agent Emily took the book she’d signed me on out on sub where it did virtually nothing. We did get a couple of nice responses to the submission saying that they liked my voice and writing, but editors just weren’t buying debut historical romance at that time.
“Historical romance was dead. Long live erotic romance so long as we can package it up like Fifty Shades,” was what the publishing industry seemed to be saying to us.
I was terrified that Emily would drop me.1 Instead she told me to go write another book. I did that, and it was awful. (It was a contemporary romance that will never see the light of day, and rightly so.) Emily was kind about my sophomore attempt, but it was clear I needed to go back to the drawing board.
I kept chipping away, trying my best to find something that I wanted to write. I wrote a contemporary romance novella about a sports agent and a sports reporter that went on to win a prize—a big boost to my ego when it needed it most.2 I wrote a brace of short contemporary romance novellas for an anthology series that three authors and I self-published, teaching me a lot about self-publishing and the discipline needed to do it.
I tried a lot of different ideas and pitches in that time, some good and some very bad, until I struck on something that seemed to stick. I was waiting for the Bx5 bus outside of the Hunts Point Avenue 6 Train stop on my way to work when I wondered if I could write a historical romance series about three friends who were all London governesses. I scribbled down the idea and, after much back and forth with Emily polishing the pitches, we went out on submission with publishers.
That series, simply known as the Governess Series, got picked up by the now-defunct Pocket Star (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) in 2015. Pocket Star published ebook-first books which meant that the chances of me realizing the dream of seeing my books on bookstore shelves were slim, and the advance on that three-book deal was tiny, but I didn’t care. I was going to be published.
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