Been Awhile....

  So I've been working diligently on getting three books done, still haven't gotten to writing a "Romance" but I'm thinking eventually I will get to that point.  So anyways, this is just a short and sweet entry and back to work I go...

First Thing First

     OK, so my friend Anjel (whom I will refer to frequently, under her true name ^_^) and I spent about two hours simply researching Harlequin releases at Barnes and Nobles on Thursday night - despite the ice and snow.  Our objective was to see what a major chain store would stock and sell on the actual shelves for this particular publisher.  We discovered a few things while doing this, 1- The books have an expiration date for stocking (later when doing a web search we discovered that Harlequin publishes so many books that they have to do this).  Two, the number of genres available were outstanding, covering most interest groups (of course B&N did not carry all genres but the hottest ones were there.)  Three, after purchasing some books we discovered more about how a book is to be written (the eharlequin website goes into in depth detail about what they are looking for).
     So, to make a long story short, we are excited and coming up with our own ideas for stories that will fit in the specified fields laid out by Harlequin (at the moment we are working on Nocturne Novels since they are hot, new and Harlequin has opened up this field to new writers trying to publish).  It's basically a novella setting, 70,000 - 75,000 words, dealing with paranormal entities (vampires, shape shifters, werewolves, etc.)
     I am excited to see where we and the other authors in our group end up when all is said and done.  More to come soon <3

The Start of A Journey in Writing

     OK, so technically I am not starting from fresh as an author, I actually have written about 15 novels, published four with more on the way.  However, my new adventure is going to be writing short novels simply to make money.  Myself, along with a group of fellow writers, have decided it would be amusing to write for Harlequin, something none of us have done before.  The idea being to write to make money on short novels or novellas.  The super novels and series we are all writing are fun but extremely time consuming and the market is not doing as well as it once had.  Harlequin, however, because of the frugal prices of their novels, are still doing just fine.  Each of us are picking unique names just for this adventure and we are interested to see how it will work.
     At the moment, since we are foregoing agents, we can only write as 'new' authors and the categories we can submit to are very limited, however, we are going into this to make money and nothing else.  There is no pride issue on getting credited work, since the Harlequin books do not stay on shelves long, as rotations are done to publish as many books as possible.  Each book accepted still gets an author a nice pre-sale royalty check and royalties after that, with the understanding that you do give up rights to your book as an author, in other words, you make money but the book belongs to Harlequin.  Some books will only submit as ebooks, not many.  Others are published in soft cover format and after a period of time will end up on Kindle and possibly other ebook formats as well.
     I think it sounds like a fun adventure and am willing to invite anyone interested along the ride, to join the online version of this group that is forming.  Here we can share all of our ups and downs and give each other advice and support.... and hopefully make good money!!!!