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Archive for the ‘Historicals’ Category

Brave New World

Aug 24th, 10 / 8 Comments

Welcome to my first adventure into author-driven digital publishing.

As so many authors have done – and many more undoubtedly will do – I’ve decided to self-publish some backlist works of mine for which I have the rights. This first one is only available on Amazon for Kindle, although I’d be happy to add other formats – it’s a non-exclusive agreement there.

First up is my novella, “The Ballad of Rosamunde” by Claire Delacroix. This is linked to my Jewels of Kinfairlie trilogy. (Scroll down – the link is to the entire Library of my backlist.) This novella was published in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF IRISH ROMANCE earlier this year, but I kept the digital rights. That worked out well – my story had to be edited down because of space constraints in the printed book, which is always disappointing but tends to be a reality in print. I had a bit of a lightbulb moment at the National conference, when someone pointed out to me that such space constraints don’t apply in the digital realm.

This version of “The Ballad of Rosamunde” available from Amazon is unabridged. You get the whole enchilada, just the way I wanted to tell it.

Of course, I’m having a peek through my files and my reverted rights to see what else I can make available to you this way. (And what I can add content back into! LOL!)

(A note here to published authors who have had rights revert. It’s amazing how many mistakes are made in this area. I’ve found digital versions released by publishers of books for which the rights have reverted – this means they have no right to continue to sell the digital version. In many cases, these digital versions weren’t even created until the rights had reverted. If you are a published author with rights reverted, have a good look to ensure that these kinds of mistakes haven’t been made. If they have, a simple note from your agent will solve it.)

Creating a Kindle edition is pretty easy, although the pages aren’t as pretty as I’d like. That’s because the Kindle formats in HTML which doesn’t allow as much control as traditional typesetting. OTOH, it gives the reader more control, in terms of resizing text, etc. Win some, lose some!

As for pricing, I’m currently working with 99 cents for a short, $1.99 for a novella (10,000 to 25,000 words), and $3.99 for a reprinted full book. Let me know what you think about pricing. I’ll have to see how the sales volume goes, particularly if I post a full new book – the editorial cost on a full new book would be about $1000 out of pocket, so I might need to sell those new titles for more. It’s all a bit of an adventure at this point, so everything is still in flux.

Here’s the permalink to the Kindle edition of Rosamunde’s story.

Here we go, into that brave new world!

Historicals, Publishing

A Medieval Experiment

Jul 2nd, 10 / 4 Comments

This is kind of interesting – in France, they’re building a medieval castle, using only medieval materials and techniques. The site is called Guédelon.

Here’s the link.

Note that there is a nice video on the home page, but once it launched, I couldn’t find a close button on the video window. Once you play it (if you play it), choose another tab from the menu bar to make it go away.

Enjoy!

Historicals

Westerns

May 3rd, 10 / 0 Comments

There’s a new movie out called Gunless, starring Paul Gross. (He played the Mountie in Due South.) The notion is that Gross’s character, the Montana Kid, is on the run from the law, and he runs to Canada (or the territories that will ultimately become Canada). Of course, the law comes after him, but one of the things the movie explores is how different western Canada was from the American West, right from the get-go. The usual tropes found in westerns just don’t work – the culture was that different.

Once upon a time, I wanted to write a series of historical romances set in the Canadian West. I’d been out to Calgary and visited museums and historical sites, and was intrigued by the way that the Canadian West challenged my expectations. Our ideas about the settling of the west are shaped by the American experience – because that’s what we see in movies and read most often in books. But the Canadian west was quite different – the forebears of the RCMP (the Northwest Mounted Police) were a big part of the move west, as was the development of the railroad. So, the whole thing occurred much later, and settlers followed either the police/military or the railroad. This is in marked contrast to the American example, in which intrepid individuals headed west and the law, railroad and accoutrements of state followed them, arriving later. This perks through to attitudes – American settlers were markedly self-sufficient (because they had to be) while their Canadian counterparts tended not to be so independent. There were lots of other differences too, differences all the more interesting because we don’t necessarily expect them.

When I first learned all this in Calgary, I thought it would be a lot of fun to explore those differences in a romance novel. I thought, actually, that it might make for a western romance that was “fresh” in New York terms. My editor disagreed – she thought that those differences (and the fact that the anticipated western tropes would be absent) would make the series or book unmarketable. Ultimately all of those partials and proposals ended up in the shredder, but the contrast still interests me.

And so, I’m pretty intrigued by the concept of this movie. Has anyone seen it yet?

Historicals, Reading/Watching

Rosamunde is Available

Jan 27th, 10 / 0 Comments

That sounds funny, doesn’t it?

But the fact remains that the MAMMOTH BOOK OF IRISH ROMANCE is available for sale, and within that anthology is my short story “The Ballad of Rosamunde”, which tells of Rosamunde’s escape from Faerie (where I shamelessly abandoned her in THE ROSE RED BRIDE) and her H.E.A.

I haven’t seen the book or the final version of the story yet. (It was edited again after I saw it, to fit the allotted space, which is always a bit worrisome.) I like the story, though, and was happy to have the chance to let all of you know about Rosamunde’s H.E.A. Finally. No more leaving characters trapped in Faerie for me!

Here’s a link to the previously posted cover art and buy-it-now links.

Historicals, Promoting

Mammoth Book of Irish Romance

Oct 29th, 09 / 4 Comments

Well, here’s the cover for the MAMMOTH BOOK OF IRISH ROMANCE. This is the antho that comes out in January, and includes “The Ballad of Rosamunde” which is the story of Rosamunde’s escape from the realm of Faerie and includes her H.E.A.

Lookee: