Writing for Harlequin Mills & Boon

stsarina

glowgirl wrote: »

Welcome stsarina:) You say you see your writing as a viable source of income does that mean your getting paid through smashwords? or are you waiting for something else to happen? Best of luck and well done on being included in the charity anthology:T

Thank you glowgirl! Yes, with Smashwords you upload your Microsoft Word file, they convert into the different file formats for ebooks and then host it. You set the retail price, then if anyone purchases you receive (IIRC) 80% of the price paid. The rest they keep as commission, but I'm still seeing about £20 a month profit without doing any promotion at all; once I start devoting some time to that, hopefully that will rise, but for now looking after DD and fitting in 3 or 4 hours writing each day whilst I finish The Devil's Lair is leaving me with no time for anything else! They also distribute to Apple, Sony and Barnes & Noble, so it's a massive target audience out there.

Going to try to have a quiet day just editing the previous chapters today I think, make sure I haven't gone off track.

Hope the muse is being kind to everyone else!

fellwalker09

I've dried up completely -mind you -just come out of hospital after day surgery and that doesn't help. My novel is ww2 romance and starting to feel rather cheesy! Will just keep going and do masses of editing at the end. I've only recently read some Mills and Boon novels -not bad at all. Its a complete change for me but seems just the sort of thing I'm writing now. The research into the period is overwhelming also -lots to do.

glowgirl_2

stsarina wrote: »

Thank you glowgirl! Yes, with Smashwords you upload your Microsoft Word file, they convert into the different file formats for ebooks and then host it. You set the retail price, then if anyone purchases you receive (IIRC) 80% of the price paid. The rest they keep as commission, but I'm still seeing about £20 a month profit without doing any promotion at all; once I start devoting some time to that, hopefully that will rise, but for now looking after DD and fitting in 3 or 4 hours writing each day whilst I finish The Devil's Lair is leaving me with no time for anything else! They also distribute to Apple, Sony and Barnes & Noble, so it's a massive target audience out there.

Going to try to have a quiet day just editing the previous chapters today I think, make sure I haven't gone off track.

Hope the muse is being kind to everyone else!

3 or 4 hours a day is very good I think! If M&B dont like my book I might go down the self publishing route, the site you use sounds good, I'd have to have a proper look as some of my stories are quite erm....graphic but I'm trying to tone it down a bit;) but for now I'm going to focus on the M&B submission.

fellwalker - I've had my cheese moments too, I have to rewrite when that happens I feel if I cringe then my reader will too, my sil has some kind of software that keeps all your info etc together and organises you, I think there are some links further back in the thread or I could ask her if it would help - keep at it, it could be the best thing you ever did but you'll never know if you dont give it a go:)

stsarina

glowgirl wrote: »

3 or 4 hours a day is very good I think! If M&B dont like my book I might go down the self publishing route, the site you use sounds good, I'd have to have a proper look as some of my stories are quite erm....graphic but I'm trying to tone it down a bit;) but for now I'm going to focus on the M&B submission.
)

Ditto on the more graphic parts from time to time! As long as you declare that your novels contain situations only suitable for over 18's to read, then it's fine - a lot of stories published through Smashwords do tend to fall into that category, as there's just such a market for it.

fellwalker09, hope you're not feeling too poorly. The research can be so time-consuming, can't it? Re: the cheesiness aspect, the best advice I ever received was that if it feels awkward to write, then it will be awkward to read as well. I hate having to go back and chop blocks of text that I've sometimes slaved over and battled through, but if it doesn't feel right and flow with the rest of the storyline then out it comes.

Hannah

glowgirl_2

Hi everyone:) Hows everyone progressing? Anything exciting to report?

LuckyLucy11

My book is well underway now, it took me ages to come up with a viable story line but now I've got one and have been writing solidly since, when not doing that I'm usually reading for inspiration, dialogue tips, description etc.

I originally intended this story to be for Mills & Boon but it encompasses more than a budding relationship/passionate sex because it involves a woman choosing between three men. It still could work for Mills & Boon if I cut out lawyers, her well-intentioned/interfering grandmother, sex & the city style lunches with her girlfriends, her Greek tragedy upbringing etc, prostitutes who ruin loyal men's reputations, reuniting with a childhood sweetheart etc.

M&B is strictly about the internal dialogues of a man and woman who fall in love/have a fling in an ideal setting. Either way I'll try sell it and get back to M&B how much do they pay BTW?

Anglea

Hi all

LL, I think there are links on the first post to possible earnings. That sounds like an interesting book. Is it set in England?

I've just been onto a writing site I haven't used in years. We all had our own pages on there and I had a lot of stories and poems that won prizes in contests. I can't get back into the site and even the box for getting a new password isn't working. I'll try again tomorrow.

I thought if I got back in I could take the writing offline and play around with it, see if I can do anything else with it.

When I found my page today I thought it had been hacked because there was a different user name and profile information than I had been expecting, until I realised some recent emails to me from the site had the same name so I must have changed it without remembering. I was very angry at first to think someone had stolen my writing.

Anglea

Daily Mail today (the link wouldn't paste sorry) featured a story about Mills and Boon - if you want to take a look it's on the right hand side of the site, in one of the boxes about entertainment.

The article was mainly about a study that showed that women reading romance novels were going to get unrealistic expectations in relationships.

MB books were still printed during the 2nd World War even though there were paper shortages, to keep up the morale of the women.

stsarina

Anglea wrote: »

Daily Mail today (the link wouldn't paste sorry) featured a story about Mills and Boon - if you want to take a look it's on the right hand side of the site, in one of the boxes about entertainment.

The article was mainly about a study that showed that women reading romance novels were going to get unrealistic expectations in relationships.

MB books were still printed during the 2nd World War even though there were paper shortages, to keep up the morale of the women.

I saw that article as well - for the DM, it was an interesting read, though a little unbalanced! I'll admit that I'm biased, but I see no harm in reading romance novels. I'm happily married to possibly one of the least romantic men on the planet, God bless him, and am an avid reader of the M&B genre, have been for years, ever since I found one tucked away in my Nanna's spare room.

I'd like to think that I and most of the other women who read them can be credited with enough intelligence and common sense to be able to distinguish fiction from real life and to not have unrealistic expectations. The beauty of romantic heroes is that they do exactly what we want them to, which quite frankly is the opposite of real men! And to use one of the DM's comparisons (they likened women reading romance to men watching pornography) I seriously doubt that the great majority of men who watch that sort of thing would seriously expect women to behave in that way.

And off the soapbox! 'The Devil's Lair' is up on Smashwords now, so I gave myself a rare day off yesterday. Already have the plot line for the sequel running through my head, so although I intended to focus on a few more short stories and promotion for a bit, I don't think it'll be long until I sit down to start 'Sins of the Father' in earnest.

LL, I love the sound of your story, it seems like it's really developed a life of its own! You're right in your assessment of M&B, I think - perhaps you could try placing it with another publisher, Avon Romance, maybe?

On that note, what route does everyone favour for trying to get their stories published? The three main options seem to be placing it with an agent, going directly to the publisher or self-publishing. I've got a manuscript for a historical romance sitting with a few agents at the moment, but the turn-around takes such a long time that it can be incredibly frustrating waiting for an answer. I've found self-publishing far easier than I imagined it would be, though I've stuck strictly to eBooks for now - the capital outlay to self-publish in print is far more than I can stretch to for now.

Happy Friday all!

Hannah x

Anglea

Hi Hannah

There were some strange assumptions in that DM article.

Well done on finishing another book, must be a good feeling.

As to where to send your work, years back I used to professional readers that were well known authors themselves to look over my work and give suggestions.

One man, a thriller writer, edited some chapters and advised the best publisher. They rejected my idea because they had already taken on too many books of the same genre at that time but gave me some more names to try. I am still in contact with them about 15 years later! A couple of times a year they send me some author guidelines and a booklist. Very helpful company indeed.

Another paid reader suggested I should try writing humour, as there was a gap in the market for funny stories in women's magazines. I had no idea about that.

One thing to note with publishers - some of them only publish a very small amount of new books a year so it will be very hard to be accepted.