Writing for Harlequin Mills & Boon

Abcynthia

Thanks for all your messages guys! I think I'm maybe going to give the short story one a go! Lots of writing to be done now lol I'm going to make it slightly related to what I''m writing now. Thanks again guys as I would never have seen that!
I'll keep up with what you are all up to.

mumto2monkeys_2

Caz - given the publisher only asks for your first 3 chapters and a plot summary, will you send off after you've written the first 3, or would you rather write the whole novel first? Thanks in advance, and glad it's going well.

Good luck with writing to everyone else too. I'm yet to storm the charity shops for M&B in order to get my romantic groove on!!

ajbisgr8

My future sister in law was recently an editor at HMB, although she's left now. I'll see if she's got any tips and post them here.

roger196

What is your business strategy. Is it to be published by well known firm and get minimal royalties as an unknown. Or can you set up your novel as a blog which, if liked, can get you well known. Once known, you are then in a position to command a reasonable figure. There is also vanity publishing whereby you pay a printer to publish your book. With a decent computer printer, you could also print your own. You could then sell it / give it away in your locality in return for honest feedback. Who is your target audience.
Who is reviewing your work. Is it someone who will tell you the truth about its quality ( this paragraph is rubbish) or someone who will say its wonderful regardless.
Worth looking at the biographies of literary agents to see how they work.

cazmanian_minx

Abcynthia - yay! Good luck with it!

Mumto2 - I'm writing the whole thing first, simply because I'm not confident I can finish a whole novel (as the many half-finished attempts littering my hard-drive attest to!). Plus I'm targetting a line based in the New York office and they require a query letter and synopsis, rather than 3 chapters.

ajbisgr8 - that would be fabulous, thank you.

roger - my strategy is to write the best book I possibly can and try to get taken on by Harlequin Mills & Boon. They might not pay the highest royalty percentage in the business, but in terms of being able to shift millions of books a year, no other company comes close. And if it's good enough for Tess Gerritsen (who's written for Intrigue in its early years) it's good enough for me If/when I want to write a stand-alone title, I imagine it'll be a lot easier to get an agent with "author of X titles for Harlequin Intrigue with worldwide sales of xxx,xxx copies" on my CV. But I'd be over the moon to sell to Intrigue to start with!

Caz

ZoeGirl_3

Have written some myself, am going to have another hit tonight and will let you know how i get on! )

Sounds like you are doing very well!! :T

Whatagain

This sounds like fun and I love to write, may I join in please?

Maybe we could have a mini-nanowrimo style comp between us where we all try and write a minimum amount a day. Sometimes just getting the words down is helpful and we can refine them later.

Modesty Firestorm
(I'm trying out new psydonyms - sp)

vlabla

Hi,
This looks very interesting.
I have a site with book reviews. I can open a separate page on the site for you guys and you can either write a diary how you progress or post excerpts and visitors will be able to comment and help you improve certain parts if you have doubts.

If this is an interesting proposal for some of you please PM me.

HopeAndDriftWood

I'd love to get published, but I lose motivation fast. I might give this a go, though! I write quite a lot and have been published in magazines/short story books, but never my own book...I was going to self publish a few years ago, but decided against it. I'm gonna read through the site now...

Thanks for motivating me

cazmanian_minx

Yup, please join in, the more the merrier :beer::beer::beer:

Cracked the 5k barrier this evening, or 1/12th of the way there. I've identified a problem in that my opening 3 chapters aren't going to be fast-paced enough and really need to be condensed down to one, but for now I'm just going to concentrate on getting to the end - if it's all written I can fix it, if I go back and start fiddling with stuff, there's a very real chance it'll be ABANDON BOOK!!!!! once again

Caz