Although, I plan to continue with my contemporary romances in the Romances with an Edge series, I ,also, like to write about what I am doing that I think might help those wanting to be writers. Putting out a book is much more than writing it. There is also how it will be seen, which means titles, covers and blurbs. Amazon and most other sites do not allow a change of titles or even series names. There are other options and that's what happened last week that did not involve contemporary books.
Ranch Boss and I looked at the cover for Embracing the Dream, which has had other titles, but never will again due to a better title, after it had been pulled and brought back (losing all prior reviews as did all the Arizona historical romances, Winds of Change series). The cover image did fit the book, as in a woman with a dream of a man, but seemed flat. We created a new one, using no AI, but do have some useful tools to do it. (I might write a blog on how creating your own cover works). We then improved the blurb for those who go to the book in Amazon.
It's hard sometimes to come up with a way to alert readers to what they might like about a book, especially when it's a complex romance (which most of mine are). I do not write a story that just tells of one relationship, the lovers. It will be at the center, but I really like the secondary characters, some of whom, as happened with Embracing the Dream, were in earlier books, and become hero and heroine in another story. It also can happen that such character end up secondary in future books if they fit the stories.
For helping readers find books with subjects they like, there are lists of tropes. They also help a writer look either at the story they have written or for some create a story that might be more popular with readers. Tropes are those issues that have proven popular in other books. I looked through the lists for this book and found two that did fit, first was Forbidden love. His family is Yaqui, a family she really liked and who liked her. But this was a difficult time for the Yaquis in Tucson as there had been a war raging in Mexico between their tribe and those in Mexico who wanted their lands. The violent altercations made those in Tucson leery of the tribal members who had come there.
As for another forbidden part of her hopes, he had been married when she first realized her feelings, then even when later his wife left him, with their son, for another man, her parents were not happy with her dream as she was younger, by a lot. Age gap trope. They wanted her to grow up more and encouraged her to go back East to university, which she did. In the meantime, to help his younger brother, who tried to join the Rough Riders for the Spanish American War, he joined and was accepted while his younger brother was not.
When they both return to Tucson, after very different experiences, the book begins. I won't say more about it here. If you want the rest, click on the link below for my website in the series Winds of Change and that title, Embracing the Dream. Actually, because we changed the cover after the website was created, it has that other cover. When you click to see more, you will see the current cover, and it'll take you to the book on Amazon for the blurb and a free sample to read the beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment