...if, of course, there is even such a word as ‘best-sellerdom’. Which there isn’t.

The back story: Our lovely daughter, Rachel, writes on occasion and has a real gift for creating sarcastically-skewed fiction that is hilarious. We wish we were as funny. But, not interested in the dogfight known as publication, she only writes when the urge strikes. Most often, she writes fan fiction and she’s built a small but steady readership.

Months and months ago, she decided to try something new. Just for the fun of it, she thought bury her sense of humor and aim for the heart of romance fans everywhere – still in her wheelhouse, still in fanfic – just to see what would happen.  Then she hit ‘publish’.

Her readership swelled by more than a factor of ten. While her other pieces found a half-hundred viewers, this piece went into the four digits. Even today, it’s her most popular work. “I found out I could please an audience if I  wanted,” she says, “which is interesting but not as interesting as writing the stuff I like.” So she went back to doing her own brand of fiction but not before we asked her to tell us how she’d done what she did.  She shared with us so we can share with you...but she’ll want that ten percent commish once the sale is final. (She's kidding. We think.)

These, then, are Rachel’s Rules and Regs of Writing a Successful Romance:

Heroine: Pretty, but not stunning.  Average height and build, thin but not anorexic.  Not rich, but not poor.  Intelligent, but not a genius, and witty... but not to the point where it overshadows the hero’s wittiness.  Has been in a series of so-so relationships, possibly just got out of one.  Not really looking for a guy.

Hero: Eye-meltingly gorgeous.  Intelligent, charming, seductive.  Tall, maybe 6’2.  Broad shoulders, well-defined arms and abs.  While he’s quite muscular and fit, you will never hear or see him doing anything to keep his physique this trim – he is just naturally hot.  Independently wealthy.  Maybe he invested wisely in stocks years ago or he set up a very successful business that he sold for a lot of money, something like that.  His eyes MUST be piercing, and usually blue or green, while his hair is dark, thick and full.  His skin is flawless, as are his teeth.  He is an impeccable dresser.  He’s self-assured to the point of cocky, but not obnoxiously so.  He will never brag about how rich he is or how smart and good looking he is... but it is obvious that he is well aware of these things.  He is also well traveled and knowledgeable about the world.  He is dangerous, a bad boy, tough, but with a soft romantic side that comes out occasionally.  He’s not afraid to stand up and fight for what is right or the woman he loves (awwwww).

Their relationship: She is the resister, he is the pursuer.  Always.  I mean, rule number freakin’ one, practically.  She finds him irresistably gorgeous as does anyone with a pulse, but his dangerous side and his cocky nature leaves her resistant to his charms.  Still, when they cross paths (which will be frequently, but not in a “I want to wear your skin as a suit” kinda way), she can’t help but be wildly turned on by him, although she denies it to his face (as he will bring up her obvious attraction to him, and she will deny it – strongly at first, and then as her resolve fades the protest will become weaker and weaker until it finally breaks and they share a passionate kiss, which she will pull away from and later say was a mistake, but the real hot action is soon to follow).  What will finally wear her down is when he saves her.  Because there will be something dangerous, life-threatening most often, that will be shortly down the horizon threatening our heroine.  She CANNOT save herself in this situation, she must be saved by the dashing hero.  This is not the big danger that will serve as a climax to the story, but it will be the danger that sets the ball rolling to her taking her panties off for Mr. Amazing.

The sex: The beginning of the story is all about foreplay.  He wants her, he pursues her, he knows that he will have her.  She resists, although she secretly wants him to throw her down and rip her clothing off.  So at the start, there has to be a ton of sexual tension.  Brushes against the skin, moments where they look at each other with lust and then she forces herself to look away, etc.  Then they will kiss, after he saves her from danger X.  She will be so turned on and it will be the best kiss ever, but she will rip herself away and leave, conflicted by her emotions.  Eventually when they meet up again, it will progress to more... you know what I mean, the dirty-dirty.  The sex will be incredibly hot.  He will be a patient, experienced lover, and the first time they have sex, it will be love-making, and it will be mind-blowing.  He is strong and competent, but not nast-ay.  She will melt in his arms and become a puddle of orgasmic goo.  Basically, our hero is a giver in the sack and expects little in return, other than that our heroine love every second of it.  Ba-bam!

The action: Basically, there are two dangers: little, and big.  Little danger will set the scene so she will fall for our hero, and the reader will get to see his bravery and willingness to put his life on the line for his lady love.  The second danger is the danger that threatens our heroines life in a big way, and will serve as a big plot point to the book (other than the romance).  Our hero will stop at nothing to save her; maybe their meeting was not accidental, and he was sent to save her life for some unknown reason.  At any rate, this big bad will be fought off quite successfully by our hero, who will be devastatingly brave and self-sacrificing and will nearly die while saving her life.  She will be so concerned and crushed at the thought of losing him that she will realise, finally, that she loves him!  Flowers and sparkly puppies, yay!  And he loves her, too.  Big danger defeated, they ride off into the sunset, him making some witty comment and her blissfully happy with her rich, handsome genius.  Game, set, match. 

Now, where’s that royalty check?

_ ...asked Bill S., rather famously, before adding, “That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet” and we can’t disagree. Still, if the flower were to be given a different name, no matter the glorious scent, we think 1-800-Flowers would object. After all, what young lover wants to give his girl a bouquet of fartbriars on Valentine’s Day?

Names and titles are on our mind today because we just received an e-mail from a fellow saying he was buying The Atheist’s Daughter because of its cover, the reviews – and its title. This is the first and only time anyone has said they’re more interested in our book because of its name. Most often, we hear about the people who won’t buy the book because of its moniker.

Because of the e-mail, we went to our own bookshelf, in search of books we’d bought largely or solely because of their titles. In the line of volumes that seem religious based on name alone, there’s God is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself, which we wanted on our bookshelf just because of the name. We don’t own (but did read, once upon a time) Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and we’re tempted to pick up Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned (a YA satire, which proudly pronounces, "Are You There, Satan? It’s Me, Madison").

Of our own titles, we love Daughter, After Things Went Bad, and Frankenstein, P.I.
 
We like Bill Shakespeare’s Next Big Mistake and Wicked Games.
 
We wish we’d been a little more inventive with Something Wicked (since SO MANY other people used the title or a close variation of the same) and, if we had to do it all over again, we might have done something different with Aly’s Luck. The title doesn’t really tell you anything about the novel or its story. As of this moment, used copies are going for a penny plus shipping.

On the other hand? Renée is completing a new cover that will reflect the novel’s contents very nicely and we’ve recently received some good news about our science fiction opus. We'll share much in the days to come. Meanwhile, if you want to enjoy a few minutes with a bunch of famous book titles, you could do worse than to pick up Now All We Need is a Title: Famous Book Titles and How They Got That Way. As of this moment, used copies are going for a penny plus shipping.

...or so our son, Matthew, tells us. He recently went to Cambodia to visit marvelous jungle temples and see the sad beauty of the Killing Fields. He took hundreds of photos and these are a couple of 'em.
 
During his vacation, he tried to avoid drinking the water (a suggestion he offers to everyone currently planning a stopover in Cambodia) but he happily munched on the foods he was offered. He's an adventuresome guy. Among his nibbles? Water bugs, tarantula legs and fried cockroaches. He does not recommend the water bug.

 
As it happens, one of our future projects includes a steamy romance set (partially) in modern day Cambodia. We haven't seen too many romances set in Third World countries -- poverty and hunger take the edge off of sensual embrace -- but a fresh setting is always interesting to readers. Plus, we think we've got a spin to the tale that will allow love to bloom even if our heroine is sipping bottled H 2 0.
 
While we were happy to get a little color for our story from someone who's actually traveled to the place, and we were fascinated to discover that bowls of crunchy insects are served on purpose to restaurant guests, neither one of us thought this was the kind of detail to add to our romance. As Renée said, "Lips that touch cockroach will never touch mine"...and Harrell realized he has yet another secret to keep from her.
 
But would we read a Harlequin where the heroine slurps down spider appendages before enjoying a hot roll in the hay? Oh, yes, we would.

...and the reason that's interesting is this: We rarely receive any kind of fan mail.
 
Which isn't to say we don't hear from you and you on occasion. Happily, we do. It's just that, most often, the communication isn't a glowing note of love and appreciation. It's more along the lines of one friend writing to another, offering fresh insights about writing or suggestions to improve sales or the odd expression of curiosity as to why Renée painted herself with an eyeball in her mouth. Every now and again, we hear from a Fencken.
 
But fan letters? Not so much.
 
This particular reader had discovered Something Wicked, had enjoyed it, and took the time to find our website, read several of our posts, and use The Contact Thing (above) to write us. She wanted to know if SW would ever have a sequel. Because she, personally, wanted to read it tomorrow.
 
Her kind comments made us think about Kristine Kathryn Rusch and one of KKR's recent blog posts. She wrote a spank-your-hands piece on self-publishing (here), saying, "You indie writers treat your readers as badly as traditional publishers do. And you do it in the exact same way. You deny your readers the next book."
 
Our next book in the Anne Lippens/Something Wicked series, by the way? Something Evil.
 
Then she said, "Here’s what readers expect: They expect writers to publish one book, then two books, then three books. They expect several books from their favorite writers." Later still, "Is it hard? Of course it’s hard. In the beginning, no writer has a fan base. Writers earn their fan base, one reader and one book at a time. Fans come back. Writers—and traditional publishers—need to remember that."
 
KKR's actual post goes on for pages and it's worth the read. It certainly made an impact on us. This morning, we e-mailed and promised our reader that, yes, there would be a sequel to SW...but, first, we had to complete our sequel to The Atheist's Daughter ('cause, y'know, our other fan asked about that particular novel first).
 
And then, the fates willing? Frankenstein P.I. vs Dracula, M.D. Not the cover above, not by a long shot. The good craftsmen and women of Fiverr.com have provided us with several winners but this particular image isn't one of our favorites. We're on a roll, baby!

...but, it turns out, we should have been trying a little harder.
 
In January, we wrote just under 18,000 words, with a rewrite or two, and we were quite pleased with that particular number. We don't have anything to show you, not yet, but the words are there and things are coming together. (Don't bother checking for a new title at Amazon or Smashwords or any of the usual suspects. We're not done yet.)

It turns out, we shouldn't have felt so good about ourselves. According to our indie guru, Dean Wesley Smith, we truly are slackers. In his post of a year ago (here) (and, yeah, we're slow readers, too), he talks about writing speed and what it means to someone's career.
 
For example, DWS says it takes him an hour to write 1,000 words. At 1,000 words a day, working five days a week, your average novelist can pump out three novels a year. Sadly, we're not your average novelists.
 
On a good day, we manage 500 words in a three hour period. Then the next day, we rewrite those words, lose about 50 of 'em, and we've totaled 450 words for our total output. Oh, and three hours is about all we've got before the mind rebels and we're done.
 
So, yeah, January was a successful month for us, since we saw an average daily number of 580 words for those 31 days. Until we came across our mentor's post (the Magic Bakery, hidden inside The Store Thing, is his idea), we thought we were smokin'.
 
And, then, no longer quite so pleased with ourselves, we did another edit. Our 18,000 words slimmed themselves still further. For January, we knocked out 15,000 turns. So far, the first week of February, we've plotted our next effort. Total word count: Zipadee Zero.
 
If you read the beginning of Dean's post, you'll see this sentence: "The slow writers in this new world of publishing are going to have trouble." He means it. DWS clearly believes that volume is key to an indie writer's career.
 
We're doomed.

...but, wow, was it a struggle. The process started months and months ago but today, huzzah, we can claim success. Our novel, Something Wicked, is finally available at our local library.
 
The town's library is a lovely place and we know most of the staff by sight (to their regret, they know us, too). When SW came out in a paperback edition, we donated a copy for the library's collection. We thought this would be quick and easy process. Boy, were we wrong.
 
The book came out in April of 2011. We called toward the end of the month, spoke to a staff member, and learned we'd need to provide a copy to...well, you wouldn't know her, but the librarian in charge of putting books on the shelves. Once they accept a book, it has to be cataloged, they put some kind of glossy covering on the thing, there's an entire series of steps. This was Step One.
 
We mistakenly thought it was Step One - Done, but no. Since our novel is directed toward a YA audience, it was shipped over to the librarian who specializes in teen/young adult/children books. But, since SW was donated (and didn't carry a Big Name Publisher's imprint), the librarian had to read and approve the novel as Safe for Our Children, too. However....
 
Like many of the government facilities in the nation, the local library has budgetary issues. People haven't been fired but hours were cut and fewer hours meant less time to read a donated novel that probably wasn't very good. (In our recent travels, a librarian told us she'd been trained to believe that s'pubbed = bad. We're sure she was exaggerating. There can't be an entire class devoted to the awfulness of self-published writing. Can there? You'd think you could pass such a belief along in a quick e-mail.) Now, if you love literature and your job involves reading every donated book before putting it before the public...and you've been taught, the book is gonna stink...we'd imagine you aren't all that eager to start the process. So the Youth Librarian didn't. In order to avoid reading our novel, she took a different job in the library system.
 
We're kidding. We hope. The fact is, more weeks passed and the YL didn't read our book and she did take a different job in the system. Which meant, our story now travelled over to the new Youth Librarian. Who was learning her job and had plenty on her plate without having to look at our donation. More weeks passed.

Still, we live in a small town, and there's no way to avoid a pair of your more frequent patrons forever so she did kind of a side move: She gave the novel to her 12-year old daughter to read. She told us her daughter zipped right through, which was presumably a good thing, but her daughter's approval wasn't enough. And, really, what if we'd written a terrible, mind-corrupting book full of awfulness? What would this have done to the mother-daughter relationship? She still had to read the piece herself. And time, it traveled on.

This month, we finally found our book and our pseudonym in the library system. Yay!  Eight months plus after we started everything by giving our book away. When we walked into the main building, looking for our novel...it had been checked out. Yay!
 
All in all, it was worth the wait. But if the library want a copy of The Atheist's Daughter on the shelves, they're gonna have to buy it themselves.

...but we've never actually met anyone who got rich quick. We're kinda doubtful that e-publishing is going to lead most of us into early retirement, either.
 
Yes, we know that it's never been easier to publish your own work. And, yes, we know there's a wealth of information telling people each and every step in the process. Pulling up Google and typing in "How to self-publish an ebook", we found 45,700,000 results. Within seconds, we found some excellent resources. If you, right this very moment, are about to do a little experimental publishing on your own, know there are people eager to help you on your way.
 
Know, too, that there are sharks out there, already circling your wallet and smelling money. It's easy, this self-publishing thing, but it isn't DEAD easy. You'll be tempted when someone else offers to do the heavy lifting and it will cost you if you weaken. Cash up front and, sometimes, royalties forever after.
 
This last week, we e-mailed some fresh faces on the Amazon/Kindle block to ask 'em how their novels were doing. These faces are mostly new to you, not to us. Writers can be a friendly and supportive bunch and we'd drifted across this three-set on different forums, all about to publish their stuff for the first time. We shared some of our stories, they shared some of their own, and we got an idea. We asked each of them to keep track on how long it took them to get their work ready for publication and to give us sales figures after the first three months (subtracting, if possible, the purchases made by family and friends).
 
Mostly, we wanted to know if we were doing something wrong with our novels while everyone else was getting rich. Y'see, we're absolutely ready to make some adjustments if a big bag of money awaits us just around the corner.
 
At the end of the day, none of our new friends managed to pop their work on-line and go about their day. Each of them put multiple hours into getting the work ready for the marketplace. (One of them estimated she'd spent over six hours just trying to find the right cover artist for her mystery.) Once they went to market, none of them were interested in offering their work for free -- we know people can "sell" a bunch of free novels but the royalties suck -- and none of them wanted to offer a Dollar Store Special, either. Two of them priced their novels at $2.99 a pop, the third wanted $4.99 per purchase. All of them did decent to way-more-than-decent work.
 
In three months, total sales for all three authors were underwhelming. The sole male writer sold a single copy in that period (and feels it might fall into the 'friends and family' exclusion clause but isn't positive). Even the best-selling author in this bunch took home under forty bucks -- and her "per hour" rate for the time she'd spent wouldn't dazzle anyone. But what if the authors lived in Azerbaijan?, we hear you ask. Good try but no. Even in Azerbaijan, it's crap wages. We didn't ask about expenses to date (such as cover costs, editor charges, etc) but we assume our friends are all currently in the red.
 
At the end of the day, we learned two things. One, it's tough to build an audience in only three months; and, two, e-publishing just might be the perfect get-poor-quick scheme.

...or it is, at least, as we write this blog. We're in Sin City to celebrate the wedding of Renée's sister-by-another-mother to a really good guy. See, we told you some still existed. But, oops!, now he's gone. So please excuse us if this post is a little light on the writing biz at this time. We're busy drinking champagne and playing baccarat. Actually, it's more like sipping at apple cider while losing at penny slots but you get the idea.
 
Coming into the city, we noticed the sign on your left. It's everywhere. You'll even see versions of it in the Luxor (our hotel for this adventure), where all things sell-able are Egyptian-themed or pyramid-shaped...except for this image. Postcards, t-shirts, key rings, ash trays, and on and on...and we wondered who was the wizard behind the Las Vegas welcome.

It turns out that Betty Willis, graphic designer, is the wizard who came up with the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. Created in 1959, it's probably her most famous piece -- and she's got some pretty impressive bits in her portfolio -- but she never copyrighted the LV thing. She knew it was money but she gave the piece away as a gift to the city.
 
To the best of our knowledge, BW is still alive and kicking. We think her gesture was pretty Fabulous....

...'cause when we said we wrote werewolf porn (all those many months ago) -- and when we said we were considering adding a dollop of werewolf sex into everything we wrote (only a few weeks ago) -- we were mostly kidding.
 
Mostly. After all, Wicked Games does have a hero who turns into a werewolf. There is some bed action...handcuffs, too, if that's your particular kink...but it doesn't qualify as "porn" according to true aficionados. We know because we've been doing some research.
 
Nope, not the real cover to WG.We like it, though.
 
Last week, in almost back-to-back phone calls, we heard from a pair of family members who have been following our writing career. One suggested we write faster ah, why didn't we think of that? and the other suggested we start writing the really racy stuff. "Just check how Open Your Legs for Me is doing," she suggested. "It's only like 16 pages long and it's selling buckets. It's in Kindle's top paid 500!" We checked it out and there really is a short story called OYLFM. Hmmm, okay. But, y'see, we don't really --
 
Then, she added, "Aphrodite Hunt wrote a sequel, too, kind of, called Thighs Wide Apart. It's still super short and it has one kinda stinky review...but it's still doing so much better than, uh...."
Than our stuff. Yeah, we know.
 
Or, at least, we know now.
 
Look, when we wrote Wicked Games, we knew we were writing a romance. It had sex in it (because, in grown-up life, sex is frequently intermixed with romance) and, originally, it had a sex scene with our hero in full werewolf-y lust. Doing lusty things. Concerned about even a hint of bestiality, the editorial staff at Cobblestone Press had us pull the scene. We thought then, and we think now, that they were mistaken. If our hero had turned into a poodle, yeah, we'd have been on the same page, but Dravon turned into a handsome, horny wolf MAN. Still, the folks at CP are the hot-and-heavy professionals so we went along with their judgement.
 
At the end of the day, WG is a romance-mystery without any true werewolf sex. Human sex, yes! Creature of the night sex, no! Now, if you'll excuse us, we need to get back to our research....