Romance = power?

Let me float my theory that romance is all about power.

I feel like that seems like a very cynical thing for a romance editor to say, but I promise it’s not quite as bad as it sounds!

More specifically, I think romance is about power and parity and balance. (Is that making it a little bit better?) And this should work for any relationship, whether it’s straight or queer, or if it’s a couple or more than two people.

Power isn’t about physical strength or money or social capital, but really about one person having a stronger position over another at different points in the story. And what happens in romance novels is that the main characters are constantly jockeying for position over the other and eventually coming to balance each other out so that they share the same amount of power and one isn’t dominating the other. 

If you’ve been around me for even just a little while, you’ll know my favourite book of all time is Pride and Prejudice (#basicbitch, but zero shame about that), one of the foundational texts for romance. Darcy and Elizabeth are perhaps not matched in socio-economic power (and also in terms of gender, because patriarchy, which I’ll come back to), but they are matched in terms of wit and the power they have within their initially combative relationship. Every interaction is one-upping each other each time to prove their power, until the end where they finally figure things out and their power dynamic evens out. The internal power dynamic eventually comes to parity, and that’s where the HEA happens.

P&P is the blueprint for this, but all romances are playing out this dynamic, no matter if there’s also an external power dynamic between the characters—for example, in a rivals-to-lovers workplace romance where they’re gunning for the same job. This dynamic usually evens itself out or is removed entirely in order to bring the partnership into parity again. 

And as always in romance, the strength and stakes of the story are actually in the internal conflict, which is where the power struggle is, whether it’s in terms of wanting more communication or more vulnerability or deeper understanding of each other. The romance itself happens when the more powerful one in the relationship (whoever it is at a particular point in the story, because it’s almost always going to switch off throughout) is willing to surrender some of their power to the other(s) to balance it out.

Because we live in a patriarchal world, we already know that men inevitably have more power than women in this structure. In a hetero pairing, then, the man definitely has to realize (consciously or unconsciously) that the world is unfair to his partner and work to give over some of his power to her or even things out externally. (Obviously, it’s better if he can make it so that it’s better for all women, rather than just his, but sometimes he’s constrained by other power structures beyond him.)

So, as an author, your job is to make sure that your MCs are constantly jockeying for power in their relationship (this is basically conflict) and then bringing them together so that they’re sharing equal amounts of power in terms of their personal dynamic.

Honestly, every romance novel I can think of plays this theory out. Am I wrong? Am I too cynical? Do you agree? Disagree? 

Sex, Lies and Sensibility by Nikki Payne

Nora is not having a good year. She’s just discovered that she and her sister Yanne are her late father’s secret family, all they got left in the will was a barely habitable house in MAINE of all places, and oh yeah, her sex tape just went viral. With no options at home, she and Yanne head to Maine with hopes of fixing the place up and making it a viable inn before they run out of money.

Bear has a habit of taking on more responsibility than he can handle, and the weight of his Abenaki community rests on his shoulders. If his tourism business fails, the community fails too—and it’s not looking good for business right now, especially since the abandoned house they use as a home base is suddenly un-abandoned by a beautiful woman and her sister. But maybe if they work together, all of them can succeed—or maybe it’ll bring all of them down?

This is a modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility, and in Nikki’s capable hands, it’s fresh and funny and sexy. It’s out everywhere today!

(I’m not the editor on this one—just worked with Nikki on an early version of the story. But I’m always happy to hype her up!)

With This Witch by Isla Winter

Petra thought she’d have ages before she’d have to take over the role of Premier Witch, the leader of the witches in her small community where supernaturals and humans live together, but a family emergency means she’ll have to step up sooner. The Premier Witch, though, traditionally has to be married, and Petra thought she’d have ages for that as well. But if she can’t find a spouse in 30 days, the supernatural council will give the Premier Witch title to her family’s long-held enemy.

Her friend Lachlan, the demon representative on the council, who has secretly been pining for her for years, offers to fake-marry her for the good of the council (sure, babe). Petra, of course, thinks they’re just friends and doesn’t want to ruin anything, even though her new husband is hot and sweet and has HORNS, you guys.

Family, legacy, politics, small town, friends to lovers, witches and demons and vampires (and more), oh my! With This Witch is out today!

Call of the Sea by Emily B. Rose

Princess Kenna has one dream: adventure on the ocean to find out if mermaids are real. But her parents won’t let her anywhere near the water, AND for the good of her kingdom, she has to get married, dooming her to a boring life on land. To make matters worse, suitors from around her kingdom have been sent to the castle so she can choose one of them as her husband, but she has no desire to marry someone who only wants to be king.

There is one man, though, who seems like an attractive option, but he mysteriously disappears before she can choose him. She chases after him on a boat, and wouldn’t you know it, they end up getting shipwrecked on an island together. There, Kenna learns about herself and about a truth long hidden, and tries to figure out how she can do her duty to her people while also being true to her own desires.

Big Little Mermaid/Moana/Brave vibes and fat/demisexual/ADHD rep in this NA fantasy! It’s out today, and there is also a GORGEOUS exclusive hardcover edition from ERRA Books that you can preorder!

An Accidental Proposal by Melanie Rachel

This is a Pride and Prejudice variation in which Darcy doesn’t quite get the chance to put his foot in his mouth when proposing to Elizabeth for the first time (oops, spoiler for a 211-year-old book) because someone ELSE barges in and accidentally proposes (not to Elizabeth).

But as Darcy and Elizabeth sort out the implications of this other proposal between their friends, they get to know each other better, and both of them start to understand where they’ve gone wrong with each other in the past. But will they fall back into their old patterns before Darcy can propose properly this time?

Melanie always writes unique and banter-y Austen variations, and this one is no exception. An Accidental Proposal is out on Amazon and KU now!

What you need to make a great author website

If one of your plans this year was to make an author website (or get your current author website in shape), today’s newsletter is for you!

Why do you need an author website? You need a place that holds all the information that your readers would want to know. Social media sites are often used as replacements for author websites, but you don’t own your Facebook page or your TikTok handle, and if any of those platforms go under or get hacked, you can lose access to those sites and to your readers. And those platforms are designed for specific purposes (i.e. to be social) rather than to transmit information. One central place that you can direct readers to and that you own will make your life so much easier.

If your goal is just to get your site up and running, I’m going to cover the tech basics and the pages you’ll need for your site here, and keep it super simple so you can quickly get it online. Then I’ll get into ways that you can make the content really pop so that readers can get the most out of your site.

Tech basics

If this is the part that’s making you not want to even put a website together, fair. I get it. The term “tech basics” scares me too. So let’s break it down step by step.

First, you should get your own domain name, e.g. authorname.com. Make it super easy for people to find you on the internet, rather than having to type an unnecessarily long website address with dots and backslashes. And this will also get you your own email address with your domain name (e.g. author@authorname.com), rather than just a gmail address (not required, but looks a bit more professional). You do have to pay for a domain, but I think it’s a necessary cost of doing business as an author.

You do NOT need to hire someone to design you a whole custom website right now, especially if you’re just starting out. That’s expensive and fancy, and you can make a website on your own without spending much money. We’re going to keep everything super simple at the moment, and then you can build up to higher levels of fanciness later if you want to. So get a website builder like Squarespace, Wix, or WordPress (I use Squarespace), and they will walk you through the process of putting a site together.

If you want to get a logo and brand colours and fonts, go for it, but if this is not your thing (it is so not mine), just keep things black and white with a pop of colour, and choose a easy-to-read font for the bulk of the writing on the site. For your logo, you can choose another font just for your author name. We want to keep this readable and easy to use. If you want to use photos, use your own or choose royalty-free ones from sites like Unsplash or Canva.

What do you actually need to include on your author website?

A bio: Just a short paragraph about who you are, what you write, and maybe some fun little tidbits about your life. I also suggest including a picture, but totally understand if you’d rather be faceless (an illustration/cartoon also works). A bio helps readers relate to you, get to know you, and get on your side so that you can make a connection with them and not just be the writer behind the curtain.

Books: Tell readers about your work by including blurbs for all the books you have out (it can be the back cover blurb copy/pasted there, that’s fine). Most importantly, make sure you have buy links directly to the bookseller of their choice. Use universal links for Amazon so that you can easily send them to their own country’s Amazon. As a Canadian, I find it so frustrating  when only American Amazon links are included, and if I’m feeling lukewarm about the book, it may stop me from seeking it out on Canadian Amazon (yes, I am that lazy sometimes). Don’t give readers a chance to talk themselves out of buying the book! The blurb should sell them on it, and then you need to give them the clearest path to go buy it.

Contact info: Sure, this might open you up to awkward fan interactions or unwanted criticism or pressure (“when’s the next book coming out?!”), but it also gives grateful readers the opportunity to tell you how much they loved your book and what it means to them, which: worth it. Also include your social media links so that readers can follow you and stay up-to-date with what’s going on with your work.

Newsletter link: Make sure you include multiple places on your site where readers can sign up for your newsletter. I’ve talked at length before about why newsletters are SO important, and if starting or reviving your newsletter is one of your goals for this year, I would say that the newsletter is perhaps even more important than the website. It took me a year or two before I started a newsletter, and I still regret that I didn’t do it sooner.

You can add more pages to your website, but these ones above are the absolute musts. If you want to have a page about events you’re going to or press you’ve done, or if you have a blog, you can include them as well. (If you don’t want to blog, you don’t need to, promise.)

How to make your website work for you

Here are a few tricks to help your readers find what they need on your site and understand you better.

We want readers to connect with you on an emotional level, so inject some personality into your site. Have a tagline that explains what you and your books are about (check out other writers’ sites to see the little one-liners they use to give readers a sense of who they are). What kind of romance do you write? What themes do you explore in your work? What kind of experience do you provide for the reader? What kind of tone/voice do you use—are you funny, angsty, wry? This will help set readers’ expectations so they know what they’re getting from you.

If you’ve written a lot of books already, give your readers good entry points into your oeuvre. What’s the best place for them to start? If they love X trope, guide them to specific titles. What’s the ideal reading order for your books and/or series? If they’re on your site, they’re already interested in you, so get them invested in your work and reading it!

Going back to that newsletter: tell readers why they want to get on your list. Usually you include a free lead magnet with your newsletter—most often it’s a story of some sort, whether it’s full-length or a novella or a deleted scene, a prequel or sequel to one of your previous books, or a standalone, or it could also be something book-related but not a story, like colouring pages, a game, etc. Whatever it is, make sure you tell the reader why they want that lead magnet and/or why they want to get on your newsletter list. Does the magnet provide deeper insight into the story that they’ve already read and loved? If you can’t convince the reader why they NEED this lead magnet, then maybe it’s time for a new one. (Change them out frequently—at least once a year.)

Or maybe it’s your newsletter itself that's the draw, in which case you’ll want to highlight what’s special about it. Do you do giveaways and sneak peeks? Do you spill the tea about what’s going on in your world? Do you write fanfic about your own characters and what they’re doing? Again, convince them that it's the best thing for them if they get on your list.

Finally: keep your site updated! Make sure all your information is current, especially if you have a book that’s just released—it shouldn’t say “coming soon” on your site anymore.

I hope this has convinced you to get working on or updating your author website. It’s such a valuable resource that’s often neglected, and it can really help you drive sales if you’re using it well.

Fast publishing is here—but are we fooling ourselves in thinking that it's new?

I don’t know about you, but it seems like quality in everything is tanking these days. (God, I feel so old in saying that—“back in my day,” etc. etc.). Granted, I’m not shopping at high-end places most of the time, but things that used to be decent are either more cheaply made (clothes), sneakily smaller (food packaging), or built to fall apart quickly (electronics).

So how do books fit into this? Or do they?

Buckle in, because we’re talking about fast publishing today!

Probably everyone and their mom has read Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and its sequel Iron Flame this year. The unexpected success of Fourth Wing, released in May, sold the book out in hardcover—it was impossible to find on bookstore shelves this summer—and caused a frenzy for more. But when Iron Flame was released in early November, fans were quickly up in arms about the quality of the book, both in aesthetics and in the writing—there were misprints, pages missing, typos, and poor writing and editing alleged. (The latter two are subjective—personally, the writing doesn’t blow me away and she crams every romantasy trope and cliché in there, but I did find it propulsive as hell and I flew through it; the editing…was rushed, let’s say, and it probably didn’t have as many passes as it should have for one of the most anticipated books of the year). But this has led to the rise of discussion around “fast publishing.”

Fast publishing makes the comparison to fast fashion, where fashion trends are quickly identified, produced, and rushed to market to capitalize on them while they’re still hot, but the quality of the garments is sacrificed, and the end product is essentially disposable once the trend fizzles out or once the garment falls apart, whichever happens first. 

The pearl-clutching about fast publishing has really only come about because the intense popularity and anticipation for Iron Flame and the trad marketing machine behind it has brought the issue to the fore. (Fashion historian Abby Cox talks in this video why this comparison doesn’t actually hold.)

But the writing to market, racing to release to keep up momentum, and cutting corners in quality is nothing new. We’ve been seeing this for years in indie publishing, especially in indie romance, with rapid release schedules that have some romance writers churning out multiple books a year, sometimes employing ghostwriters to keep that breakneck pace and doing everything they can to keep readers’ attention and game the KU system to continue earning big bucks (remember when a romance writer was giving away diamonds??). This practice goes way back to pulp writers in the ’50s who had to write books fast to make a living as a writer, and even further back to Victorian dime novels (see the Abby Cox video above for more on this), but we’ve been doing it in modern indie romance for a long time.

And if you’ve been with me for a while, you know I’ve been raising the cry for many years that this system is dangerous for romance writers and for the romance industry as a whole. Rapid release is almost a necessary evil in romance if you want to make a living as a full-time indie romance writer, especially when you’re just starting out and building a backlist—but it can lead to serious author burnout and mental health issues, declining quality in the work, and less innovation in the stories (which mean they’re not as often recommended and won’t earn you as much).

A lot of the time, I think that readers don’t really care about quality—if you’ve marketed yourself well that readers know exactly what to expect from you and/or you’ve established yourself well with a solid reputation for putting out good stuff, lots of people will read whatever you write. Note that I put the marketing first, because frankly that’s what will get you in front of the most people and get them to buy. But that’s the short game. If you want longevity as a romance writer, you need to be able to continually build on your craft and produce quality work to keep those readers long-term without them dropping off.

So what do we do when we’re being forced to rush but still want produce quality work?

We are seriously torn between capitalism and what actually makes sense for us on an individual level—you want to make money (especially in this economy), but you also have to prioritize your mental health and creativity and your own standards. I know you don’t want to put out crap—these books have your name on it! So you really have to take this at your own pace. If you can put out three to four books a year, great—I literally sell Series Architecture based on this premise (but full transparency, this is just a marketing tactic; if you can’t do three books a year, I’m absolutely not going to force you to!)—but I want you to put out books you can be proud of and that readers will want to read AND recommend. And listen, I read a ton, and there are very few books that are actually memorable to me because lots of romances are following a formula (which is totally fine!) but not doing anything interesting with it. The ones that stick out are the ones that do something innovative, i.e. an unexpected twist, an unusual setting, etc.

It's very, very easy to stint on quality, especially right now when we’re in a cost-of-living crisis and don’t want to spend money, and when it seems like the fast pace at which romance readers consume makes quality inconsequential. But I can’t tell you how many romance books I’ve read lately (mostly indie, but also trad) that I think “this could’ve used a good line edit.” And I think most books benefit from a developmental edit as well—there are very few that I’ve seen that have been in good enough shape to go straight to a line edit. You need quality from the writing to the editing to put out a great book.

And you need an actual person to edit, not an AI. I’m on the record as very anti-AI for lots of reasons, particularly generative AI for creative pursuits. I don’t use Grammarly or ProWritingAid, both of which I believe have an AI component to them—if generative AI is made up of the patterns that the AI is fed and people more often than not are making the same mistake, the AI takes that aggregate as normal enough to be considered right, making the mistake acceptable to its checks.

Also, AI can’t tell you why the errors it flags as errors are wrong—any good editor worth their salt should be able to give you a reason why they made any change they did. AI also misses on the art of editing because it's not a human that understands human nuances. Following a style guide to be technically correct is fine, but if AI put commas exactly where they’re supposed to go in a frantically paced sex scene, but it would slow down the action that way, and the cadence of the scene would be off. As an editor, I’ll run Word’s spelling and grammar check once because the squiggly lines bug me (and I usually reject most of their suggestions because it misunderstands the context), but I’m mostly relying on my trusty Chicago style guide and my own knowledge of language to edit.

All this to say:

• Fast publishing ain’t new, and indie’s been doing this for quite a long time.

• It actually sucks that we’re still doing this and running great romance talent into the ground by encouraging an unsustainable pace of production.

• Prioritize your own mental health and creativity first and go at your own pace—if it means you can’t go full-time writer sooner, that’s okay!

• Quality is ultimately going to be what you’ll fall back on, so it’s worth paying for, whether it’s in editing or in education and training to build your craft.

So what do you think of fast publishing? How else can we manage the capitalist hellscape that is modern publishing? Truly, I think about this so much, and I would love to hear your thoughts!

This post first appeared in my monthly newsletter. If you want to get these posts first, you can subscribe and get my free romance tropes workbook! Sign up here!

An Old Acquaintance by Cat Andrews

Surprise! A brand-new release dropping from Cat Andrews just in time for Christmas!

This is a Pride and Prejudice-inspired modern second chance romance, where our Darcy is a musician trying to make it big and he meets Elizabeth at a Christmas frat party when they’re at college in the ‘80s. Except we start with them separated in the ‘90s.

We see the Christmases when he makes a disastrous first impression to their happier holidays together and then how things fracture and the awkward post-breakup run-ins in holidays following. So can they make it back together at a future holiday season?

As always with Cat’s stories, this gets deep into emotions and angst, plus the chemistry and heat that she brings to every book. An Old Acquaintance is available now on Amazon and KU!

Hold Fast by Eliza MacArthur

It’s release day for Eliza MacArthur’s Hold Fast, and can we have some commotion for the old-schoolness of this cover??

Una has just ended a handfast marriage with a terrible man she is desperate to be free of. A gifted healer, she takes off to the neighbouring/rival clan when she saves the laird’s brother and finds safety and purpose there. After suffering a year of abuse in her marriage (check the CWs!), she wants nothing to do with men.

Meanwhile, the laird, Ewan, is deeply impressed with Una’s competence and her determination. He’s got his own issues, though, and has promised himself to never marry.

As much as both of them are scarred from their pasts, they’re still drawn to each other, and when they’re forced to handfast each other, they have to work through their trauma together and separately so they can stand against an old foe. But that trauma isn’t quickly healed by love or sex—so how much will their trauma get in their way and potentially tear them apart?

If you love old-school historical Highlander romance but want a more modern sensibility behind it, you HAVE to check this out! Hold Fast is on KU and Amazon now!

Freelance Fiance at Mistletoe Inn

Only in romcoms do you get a crazy inheritance clause, and this one is no exception!

Addison is desperate to fulfill her dream of owning her family’s cozy inn in North Dakota, but the deal is that family tradition says she’s gotta be married by the age of 25. She’s hoping she can rope her high school boyfriend into it, but oops, he just eloped. But there is the cute guy she met at the airport...

Said cute guy is Teddy, who’s a freelancer stranded in ND. He jumps in to save Addison, and suddenly become a freelance fiance, whisked off to the Mistletoe Inn, surrounded by family for the first time in his life, and fake-engaged to a pretty stranger.

They have to play engaged until Addison’s 25th birthday on Christmas, but will Addison’s nosy family and Teddy’s own past catch up to their game before then? Freelance Fiancé at Mistletoe Inn by Lillian Joubert is out now!