Romance Writers Weekly – Getting down to business.

Welcome to the romance Writers Weekly blog hop, where every week a great group of romance writers answer questions and accept challenges. Diverse in what we write, we are unified in the quest to bring you, the romance reader, a very happy ever after.

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If you’re starting your blog hop here, or just hopping over from Leslie Hachtel’s blog welcome.

Today’s topic comes from Leslie as well – If you’re published, how is the business different than what you expected? If you’re planning to publish, what are your expectations?

Wow, a really loaded question. I grew up with the idea “Write a book. Make money.” It was also a time when writing and editing a book was harder than today (Typewriters/paper copies) and there were fewer people who even finished a book, much less got it published. The same elements that made it easier for me to enter the industry also opened the floodgates for other authors. Now we are awash in authors and books, and there’s good and bad in that.

Things have changed dramatically. There used to be an old adage: All money flows toward the author. It meant you wrote your book, sat back, and the money rolled (or trickled) in while you concentrated on the next book. Publicity was all handled by the publisher, and there was no such thing as social media. Good times for the few who made it.

To gt there you had to get past the “gatekeepers.” Agents and editors with full power to decide what books the public got to read.

Now with self publishing, smaller publishers with lower bars of admittance, and even the big guns having to shift gears and pander to the new winds of publishing, we see more authors jumping in daily, and more competition for the tight dollars consumers pay for reading material.

Truthfully, I’ve given up on the “Make money.” part of the deal. If it happens, it happens. I’m focusing on just writing the next book.

You might ask then why do it at all? I know I do almost every day. And the short answer is, the stories don’t stop coming just because I’m not making any money. My book babies, however ill received, still get to see the light of day, and if someday one of them breaks out of the pack, well, great.

I still have a lot to learn, and many, many more stories to write, so I keep plugging away.

So, what does Brenda Margriet have to say about our industry? Find out as the Romance Writers Weekly blog hop continues at: http://www.brendamargriet.com/blog

 

Click to check out Brenda’s wonderful new novel, When Time Falls Still