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Monthly Archives: January 2011

Backlist titles – The invisible Disruption

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I have turned in my revisions for My Dangerous Pleasure (Book 4 of my My Immortals series) and am now FREE, FREE AT LAST for a while and can totally concentrate on The Next Historical, which is shaping up to be awesome. I am hoping I get to keep my malfunctioning door hardware scene.

Other Historical Book News

I have my rights back for two of my historicals, Lord Ruin and The Spare, and hope to be hearing something on another in about three months. My exciting news is that I am in the process of getting new cover art for Lord Ruin and hope to have that available in digital formats and POD by the end of this month or early February.

Publishers Not Leveraging Backlist

It’s always been interesting to me that publishers and other industry professionals like to point out that Publishers make quite a lot of money on backlist titles. But they’re always talking about Books We’ve Heard Of. Makes sense, since many of these titles sell a lot. To Kill a Mockingbird, anyone?

But there’s a hidden backlist that publishers have not been taking advantage of, and that’s the vast pool of genre fiction. For the purposes of this post, let’s limit the discussion to Romance. There are out of print (OOP) titles that consistently show up on lists of reader favorite, years after they were first published. The only way to get these OOP books are to find them used (if you haven’t saved your copy) or find a pirated version.

Invisible Demand for Out Of Print Books

There is a pent up demand for a lot of OOP Romance titles but it’s largely invisible to publishers because the titles were mass market and intended to have a short life and, to my knowledge, publishers aren’t tracking demand for used books– which is (almost) the only way to get your hands on these OOP titles.

The reality is that publishers were wrong about the short shelf life. This might be true for certain titles or certain authors — the book or writing is mediocre, let’s say. (and this is true of literary fiction, too.) The reality is that there are genre authors who are talented, amazing writers and their stories are worth re-reading. I bet Amazon has the data that proves this, and I bet that data would be very interesting to see. I bet that data shows there are certain OOP titles that are in demand.

I believe Publishers have missed a revenue stream with genre fiction. Popular OOP titles are sitting there, entirely unmonitized except for used book dealers. Digital publishing has created a whole new way to monitize that wide pool, but publishers are in a difficult situation now because 1) they’re blind to the demand and 2) the current system isn’t suited to the digital reality. (And that’s a whole other post!) They’re also not looking at authors with backlist as potential partners in a different publishing scheme, again, a whole other post.

Meanwhile, savvy authors are moving faster.

Until recently, there was nothing authors could do to satisfy continuing demand for their OOP backlist, other than hope readers could find used copies. There wasn’t much point in asking for a rights reversion, because, what would you do with the rights if you had them?

The Kindle changed everything.

Now authors can do something with backlist titles that publishers allow to languish. Now there’s a very good reason for authors to get rights reversions for OOP titles. Those books can now be reintroduced into the author’s stream of commerce, whether as a book that can be purchased or offered free as a way to seed front list sales. Or both.

If publishers were more agile and wired into their authors, maybe they would be thinking of ways to help send that stream of commerce their way. Right now, Amazon is doing that instead. From what I’m seeing and hearing from other authors, there’s another disruption on the way, and that’s the reintroduction of OOP backlist into what is a frontlist-like commerce stream.

I’m looking forward to the Future

I can’t wait for the time when I can sit around yakking about great romances from the past and if a title being discussed intrigues me, being able to pull out my iPhone or eReader and get my hands on that book within seconds. I can’t wait to read a book I love and be able to get my hands on ALL of that author’s backlist within seconds.

What do you think?

Opine in the comments.

Posted in Former Riskies | Tagged , , | 9 Replies

Regency Demons?

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My Immortal Assassin

Book 3 of my My Immortals paranormal series is out! Quick, go buy it from one of the links on my website! (Because you can pick your favorite bookseller. I don’t do any affiliate link stuff because it’s one more thing to fail to keep track of.)

Believe it or not, I have a Regency link to this book which is that I modeled my hero on a Regency Romance hero, kind of like Mr. Darcy. He’s all about decorum and awesome clothes, and the heroine is all — not that stuff. So, it’s a little like Mr. Darcy meets Buffy, if Mr. Darcy was a demon and didn’t know about Elizabeth yet.

Revenge. It’s all Grayson Spencer wants. Christophe dit Menart, a human with dark magical powers, destroyed the life she loved. She wants the pleasure of killing him, no matter the cost to her. If not for Durian, a dangerously sexy demon fiend charged with keeping Christophe alive, she would have succeeded, too. Now, she’s certain all hope is gone. But he has a plan and an offer she can’t resist…

Durian has spent his life as a trained and sanctioned assassin. His duty: to enforce the laws against demons harming humans. He’s always prided himself on staying out of the fray, carrying out his orders and honoring his fealty to his warlord, but never getting attached. Never until Grayson, a spunky and determined woman clearly gifted with magic herself. He convinces her to swear fealty to him so he can protect her and teach her to use her magic to taste the revenge she so desperately wants.

They’re soon bound together in a forbidden desire–a dangerous passion that calls into question Durian’s oath of loyalty to his warlord. When he refuses to return her to Christophe, his disobedience threatens to inflame the tumultuous war between demons and the magekind. Can they–and their love–survive?

Read Chapter 1.

Reviews

Romantic Times 4 1/2 stars
The lines in the war between Magekind and Fiends continue to blur in the next installment of Jewel’s exhilarating My Immortal series. The protagonists in this drama have both suffered terribly, giving them a common ground and enemy. Jewel provides her fans with a terrific tale that has action aplenty and drama to spare. Great stuff!
Jill M. Smith

Alternative Worlds
Fast-paced from the moment Gray and Durian meet on the streets of San Francisco
Read Full Review

Publisher’s Weekly
Jewel’s third paranormal (after 2009’s My Forbidden Desire) is an exciting return to a world of demons and mages.

BookPage – Romance of the Month – Top Pick!
Dark, edgy and laced with thrilling desire, My Immortal Assassin will set readers’ hearts racing.
Christie Ridgway

Book Reading Gals
Carolyn Jewel is a master storyteller. The world that she has created is in this reviewers humble opinion one of the best in the paranormal and romance genre. The conflict between the fiends and the mages is a perfect combination. The hero and heroine are a perfect complement to each other.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Thanks for sharing the excitement with me!

Posted in Former Riskies | Tagged , , , | 10 Replies

Can we Reconstruct the Social Past?

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I had an interesting conversation recently regarding present-day misconceptions about the past. In this conversation we floated the idea that historical romance had created its own, essentially false, depiction of life during the Regency. We talked about whether or not these inaccurate ideas were so deeply embedded that an accurate depiction of them could be roundly denounced.

There is a difference between history and historical fiction. In the case of the former, the point, one hopes, in writing about history, is to be accurate. Fiction serves a different role. Fiction, at some level, has to recognize the ways in which, say, a Regency Romance, privileges the needs of modern readers over historical accuracy.

What I constantly find odd, however, is that way in which we sometimes talk about the past as if those people were a different species. There is, I think, a speed at which evolution progresses — over millions of years, punctuated by the odd catastrophe that challenges the very survival of a species, and the speed at which social culture evolves. Millennia vs. a few years.

The human sex drive is an evolutionary survival tactic and our bodies have evolved to make procreation likelier than not. The way human cultures deal with that fact seem to be fairly fluid. I think historical researchers sometimes conflate cultural sexual norms with the human sexual drive.

In the West, we have this notion of sexual repression that comes to us from the Victorian age — women weren’t supposed to like sex, everyone was all uptight and people, particularly women, who appeared to embrace their sexual nature were punished. We could talk all day about the ways in which Western cultures have attempted to control and repress human sexuality. There is plenty of evidence of that.

However, no amount of social repression negates the fact that sex feels good. Our bodies are hard wired for sexual desire and to experience sexual pleasure. Repression is bound to fail. It cannot help but fail. We exist today because it did, in fact, fail.

My point, after all that, is that this trope of the innocent, unsexual female who has no curiosity or drive to engage in sex (and I do mean the act) seems to me to be fundamentally false. Of course there were people who refrained from sex until marriage, but there simply had to be a lot of people who didn’t. The idea that women didn’t have any non-social way to control their fertility also seems suspect to me.

The Heyer-esque innocent, however compelling she is on the written page, with an almost complete denial of female sexual agency sometimes bothers me and is, I think, more a representation of Heyer’s social millieu than the actual Regenecy — In other words, she wrote about a world as her culture norms imagined it ought to have been. Lydia in Pride and Prejudice is an example of that tension.

So, after all these ill-formed thoughts, what do you think about the accuracy of Regency Romance and do you care?

Posted in Former Riskies, Regency | Tagged | 5 Replies

Finding the Story

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It’s been a tough week for me at the Riskies. First I had to stave off the claims of canine ancestry — folks, this is not the blog where I talk about werewolves for crying out loud. Unless they’re hot Regency werewolves and that’s not what today’s post is about. Everyone else got cool ancestors and I get . . . a dog? Then Risky Janet implied in a comment that I’m not housebroken. Well, if no one Googled me before inviting me to join the Riskies, whose fault is that?

I’ve been working on The Next Historical and I keep forgetting how much I love/hate the early part of novel writing. Nothing sucks yet because I haven’t written it. The future is bright and shiny. THIS book will rock! It will be easy, I know exactly what’s going to happen. Yay!

And then I start writing and my hero and heroine typically spend an inordinate amount of time pretending they’re in different novels. I have to be very careful not to write too far ahead of myself because until the hero and heroine agree to be in the same book, I’ll just have to delete those scenes.

And the writing, oh, the writing is thin and weak and there’s either not enough dialogue which means there’s way too much boring narrative or there’s too much dialogue and no details. They’re all just talking heads floating around bumping into random things.

I end up freaking out over being behind on my word count and getting hives, and looking for anything that’s more fun than writing, which, lucky me, is just about everything.

Invariably, as I’m slogging through the early bits, deleting crap, trying to find the emotional core of the two characters, I’ll write a scene where I go, ooh. That’s it. And then my hero and heroine are in the same book in that scene and I adjust everywhere else and then I get to worry more about plot.

It doesn’t matter how detailed a synopsis I wrote– and I can tell you that the synopsis for this story is long out the window but for the hero and heroine’s names– until I get the characters on the page in actual writing I don’t know what the story will be about.

In happy news, I’m about to write the doorknob scene.

But I leave you with this, Werewolf-news.com
Because Janet is right. I’m not housebroken.

Posted in Former Riskies, Writing | Tagged , | 5 Replies

Prepare for the Regency Bicentennial

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(First I gotta give a big huzzah for Colin Firth winning the SAG Awards for best actor and for The King’s Speech winning best picture. So perfect!!! Just had to get that out of my system)

On February 6, 1811, the Prince of Wales signed papers making him Regent and unknowingly marking the official beginning of a period in history that, among so many other things, has spawned an entire genre of Romance novels, of which I am proud to include my books. We at Risky Regencies celebrate the time period every day, year in and year out, but to mark this very special 200 year anniversary, I’d thought I’d share my thoughts on why we are still enthralled with such a specific, and brief, time in history.

In honor of the Regency Bicentennial, I’m giving away a copy (albeit a used copy) of J.B. Priestley’s The Prince of Pleasure to one lucky commenter (although the cover might be different than pictured here). The winner will be chosen at random tomorrow so give me your comments before 1/31/11 12 noon ET

On my first blog with the Riskies I mused about why the Regency is such a popular genre in Romance. This blog is an adaptation of that one and, I thought, a good introduction to Regency Bicentennial Week.

First of all, the Regency was a beautiful time period. The lovely Classical architecture and decor of the Georgian age became more varied and colorful, but avoided the excesses of the Victorians. The Regency was a time of great wealth, of beautiful Country houses and gardens, of lovely, elegant fashions. Gone were powdered hair, white wigs, and heavy make-up of the Georgian age. Regency women wore beautifully draping empire-waist silks and muslins, dresses that would still be considered lovely today. Men’s clothing also became more like our modern clothing, the bright-colored brocades and laces of the 1700s giving way to the simplicity, cleanliness, and perfect tailoring Beau Brummell insisted upon. Men and women rode though Hyde Park in fine carriages drawn by perfectly matched horses. The titled elite gathered in exclusive places like Almack’s and White’s. Men sported at Gentleman Jackson’s Boxing Saloon or Tattersal’s. Ladies made “morning calls” in the afternoon, and made their curtsey to the Queen in opulent gowns.

Exciting people lived during the Regency. My favorite is the truly great but imperfect Duke of Wellington, the man who defeated the Emperor Napoleon, but there is also the Prince Regent (“Prinny”), Lord Byron, Beau Brummell, Jane Austen, Caroline Lamb, Harriette Wilson (who Amanda wrote about in her April 15 blog about courtesans), and so many more fascinating people.

The Regency time period echoes our World War II era in my mind, a time of great courage, honor, and drama, and one that eventually led into great social change. The drama of the long war with Napoleon, culminating in Waterloo, a battle still discussed, written about and fictionalized today. Also occurring at this time was the War of 1812, less victorious for the British, events in India, and the humming of impending social change, the beginning of the decline of the upper classes and the growth of wealth from industry and trade, social unrest nipping at the heels of the class system.

The Regency is a transitional period between the decadence of the 18th century and the repression of the Victorian Age. As such there are elements of both, providing rich opportunities for dramatic conflict. For example, it is an age when the idea of marrying for love came to the fore, and yet, marriages of convenience still took place. Women–married women, that is–were still allowed to enjoy a sexual relationship, although more discreetly than did their Georgian mothers. Their poor Victorian daughters were not so lucky. Roles and behavior were more fluid in the Regency, less defined than the eras before or after, allowing the novelist great license to explore.

The Regency is an accessible period: Distant enough to provide an escape from every day life into a world of beauty and conflict, but familiar enough to be able to imagine ourselves living in it.

I love going into the world of Regency England every time I sit down to write. It often becomes as real to me as if I truly lived there. I aspire to bring the Regency vividly alive in my books so readers might love it as much as I do.

It is great to be among this wonderful group of authors who feel that same love of the Regency and that same desire to explore it in new, exciting, and “risky” ways.

Now, for a chance to win The Prince of Pleasure, tell us what you love about the Regency….or comment about anything, like Colin Firth and The King’s Speech!

Posted in Regency | 18 Replies