Half of Romance readers are over fifty, yet few Romance novels reflect their vivid lives and experience.*Write & Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance* is your roadmap to craft and share a vibrant late-life love story.Build an enticing story that meets genre and reader expectations.Master proven editing techniques to polish your final product. Learn how to choose the best publishing pathway to success for your novel.Finally, build and execute a marketing and publicity plan tailored to your strengths.Your adventures as a late-life Romance author begin here.
Why (and How) to Write and Publish Seasoned Romance
This book is for you, whether you've written ten books or zero, whether you are a Romance fan or a Romance skeptic, whether you are thirty or eighty. It's a soup-to-nuts guide to write, publish, and market a Romance novel with vivid older characters. But before we get to how to do it, let's talk about...
Why You Should Write Seasoned Romance
Back in the day, I could not wait to retire from my technical writing career to write every sexy, vibrant story I had in my head. Then I read an article in the New York Times Book Review section by a Romance writer in her fifties giving advice to her sister writers. Her message in a nutshell:
If you want to get published, create characters in their twenties.
Was the publishing industry that ageist? Had the demands of career and parenting made me miss the boat? No way would I let that happen. Right then and there I decided to push back by writing sexy characters my own age.
The good news is that traditional publishers have been through a sea change in recent years. indie publishing is eating their lunch, partly because more diverse voices are represented- including the voices of older women. Meanwhile the number of people over sixty keeps growing, and older women read a lot. We make up almost half of the enormous market for Romance novels. And many of us want to read about the love lives of people our age, not our children's ages.
