Catherine Robertson on the long road to becoming a bona fide romance writer.
I went to my first Romance Writers of New Zealand conference in August 2008. The focus was on how to win a contract with the handful of international romance publishers, like Harlequin and Avon. Writers talked about how they’d felt receiving The Call, the “yes” from one of those publishers. In August 2008, The Call was everything. Then in November, Amazon released the Kindle.
Fast forward to the RWNZ conference 2022. I attended workshops on deciphering Amazon’s ad dashboard and creating TikTok videos. There was talk of Publisher Rocket and Draft2Digital and BookBub and MailerLite and Book Funnel and Street Teams and whether to go KU or wide, and there was no real point in me listening to any of it because I hadn’t put a single romance novel out in the world. I’d spent years taking a lot of notes, but I was straight up a lurker.
How come? Because I wanted to make an impression in New Zealand, and romance writers don’t care about New Zealand. Their readership is overseas. Because I wanted to keep writing funny books and comedy romances have only recently become wildly popular. Because if you want any chance of success, you have to know SO GODDAMN MUCH! About what kind of romance you’re writing, the reader expectations for its tone, heat levels* and tropes**. About how to connect with those readers, via newsletters, ads on Amazon and Facebook, blog hops and every flavour of social media. About how to test and measure your sales performance, tweaking metadata, cover art, back matter and ad content. About translations and audiobooks and whether to sell direct through your website. About writing to market and author collaboratives and should you do it all yourself or sign with a publisher so they can get your books into the big retailers, like Walmart. I’m a pretty capable, intelligent person, but I swear I have not felt so much at sea since sixth form maths. Which I failed.
In the end, I wrote a romance novel because I was asked to. A US editor at yet another RWNZ conference invited me to submit ideas to her. I felt special but later learned that she’d asked a bunch of us. I sent her an outline for a contemporary small town rom-com series, and she asked for the first few chapters, which she summarily rejected. I felt bad but turns out she rejected everyone else, too. Possibly because her expectations were, being charitable, less than clear. She asked me to come up with Virgin River by Robyn Carr but funny, crossed with the style of a popular writer whose books feature men with gigantic cocks. Reader, I did my best.
Yet in that terrible freakish mutant was a germ of something I liked. I felt the idea was sound and that if I wrote it my way, it could be all right. I started afresh and sent a new, full draft off to my agent. Then, telling myself that if she had no luck, I could surely learn how to self-publish, I wrote a sequel. It took a while, but she sold both of them and a third that I’d outlined to One More Chapter, the digital-first arm of Harper Collins UK.
Think of digital-first like being self-published, except that someone else pays for the editing, cover art and the bulk of the marketing. In my case, Corkscrew You and You’re So Vine are now available worldwide as e-books to Kindle Unlimited subscribers and on the main Amazon platform. The print-on-demand paperback versions will be up soon. If my books sell well online, One More Chapter may consider producing print copies for bookshops. Print copies are only available here in New Zealand shops because Harper Collins NZ decided to do that for me, which was an extremely nice surprise.
My job is to supplement the marketing efforts and make connections of my own with readers. So far, I’ve done fuck all, though in my defence I’ve been overseas. Word is that the most effective marketing isn’t done around launch time but two-to-three months later. Hope that’s true. On the upside, fortuitous holiday timing meant I got invited to the massive annual Harper Collins UK author party at the V&A. I wore heels for the first time in decades and that was the wrong decision. Cocktails were amazing, though.
I’ve had seven novels published in New Zealand, but this has been a brand-new experience for me. Here’s some of what’s been different:
My publisher put advance reading copies on NetGalley. I made the mistake of logging in and found the nine circles of hell. Yes, there were lovely reviews but who cares about those? Good news is I’m not alone in getting savaged; it’s got so toxic that publishers are questioning whether to use it at all. And research shows that reviews don’t tend to affect sales; it’s sales that prompt reviews. These are crumbs of comfort, and I will cleave to them.
Bookstagrammers. I already followed a couple but have now discovered there’s zillions of them. They all seem super nice so far. I should probably also be on TikTok. I will never be on TikTok.
I can now legitimately call myself a romance writer. Still figuring out how to inhabit this world, which for years I’ve only viewed from the outside. Compared to others, I’m such an amateur, way behind, running to catch up. At the Harper Collins author party, I met Emily E.K. Murdoch. She’s published 80 Regency romances. She’s aged, maybe, 35? Many of them are novellas, she told me, like that should make me feel better. I have two books under my belt, and the third, Kiss My Glass (so proud of that title) out in February. That will do me for now.
*A guide to the chili pepper rating system. My books are rate four chilis – good thing my mother is dead.
**Tropes are popular plot devices, such as “enemies to lovers”, “second chance”, “fake relationship”, etc.
Corkscrew You and You’re So Vine by Catherine Robertson ($27, available in print in New Zealand with Harper Collins NZ) can be purchased from Unity Books.