Tag Archives: Romantic Novelists’ Association

DAZZLING DIAMOND YEAR OF ROMANCE

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We are more than delighted to announce that Frost magazine will play a part in the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Diamond Anniversary celebrations in 2020. On the last Wednesday of every month we’ll be running articles about the RNA’s year, written by their fabulous authors, which we’re sure will be fascinating insights into the world of this incredible organisation.

 

The Romantic Novelists’ Association was started in 1960 by a group of six romance writers amongst them Catherine Cookson, Barbara Cartland and Rosamunde Pilcher and today we have over one thousand members. Our focus has always been to raise the prestige of romantic fiction, and to encourage romantic authorship. 2020 is our Diamond Anniversary year and we are marking this celebration with a year packed full of events.

  • Alison May (MLR photo)

    We’re launching new bursaries to encourage writers from underrepresented groups to join the RNA

  • In February we’re launching the inaugural Romance Reading Month
  • We’ll be hosting and promoting romantic fiction events with literary festivals and universities – starting on 15th February when we’ll be in Manchester http://www.manchesterwritingschool.co.uk/events/the-love-writing-manchester-series-launch-event-with-special-guest-author-d
  • On 4th June there will be a virtual romance festival where we will be live streaming a series of events from a prestigious London location before our 60th birthday party in the evening
  • And we’ll also be asking what is the nation’s favourite romantic novel of the last 60 years

And that’s on top of the events and activities the RNA undertakes every year. We have our New Writers’ Scheme that allows 300 unpublished authors to join the RNA and get a critique on their novel in progress. We also organise and present the annual Romantic Novel Awards, and also our Industry Award which celebrate publishers, agents, booksellers and bloggers who champion romantic fiction. We host a conference for romantic authors and industry professionals every year, and present the Joan Hessayon Award to a debut author who has ‘graduated’ from the New Writers’ Scheme. We also publish a quarterly magazine for our members and have a network of local chapter groups across the UK and Ireland.

Bella Osborne

All of that takes planning and organisation, and the RNA, like many arts and literary organisations, is run by volunteers from amongst our own members. The planning for the 60th Anniversary, for example, started in 2017 when Bella Osborne joined the RNA’s management board as Special Projects Officer for the Diamond Anniversary. Since then Bella has recruited a team of volunteers to work with her developing guidance for members on approaching literary festivals, organising events, and planning for Romance Reading Month.

We’re hoping to make 2020 an especially exciting and romantic fiction-filled year, but it’s going to be incredibly busy as well. So it’s incredibly exciting to be teaming up with Frost Magazine to bring you an insight behind the scenes into a very special year in the life of the RNA.

Please follow the hashtag #RNA60 for the latest events and get involved during 2020.

 

Alison May & Bella Osborne

 

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: LORNA COOK ON THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING BUDDIES

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I love this post, it sums up everything I have found to be true of the writing community. After reading and loving The Forgotten Village, I was lucky enough to meet Lorna at the Joan Hessayon Award this year, which she deservedly won. She was an absolute joy – funny, friendly and unassuming – and I cannot wait for her next book. 

 

When I started writing my debut novel, The Forgotten Village, I had zero writing buddies. Not one. I had just had my second child and we were going through that odd stage together where she slept most of the day (and not at all at night!). It left me slightly frazzled, very jaded and I was left to my own devices while my hubby went out to work and I took maternity leave. I joined lots of little groups with my tiny newborn but I sorely missed colleagues. And that joy of real human interaction that has nothing to do with nappy-chat was hard to find.

Don’t get me wrong – I did not go through the equal amounts of pain and joy of writing a novel so I could make chums. That was the happy by-product of this crazy and often misunderstood realm of fiction writing. And it is misunderstood. When I very quietly, very cagily, tell people I write novels it is only because someone has asked me directly ‘So, Lorna, what do you do for a living?’

And then begin the questions about how much I earn and if I am the next JK Rowling. Every single time. Praise be for The Romantic Novelists’ Association. I’m not sure I’d be quite as sane (manic laugh) as I am now without the RNA and the wonderful friends I’ve found there who just get it.  I joined the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme in 2017 and no one ever made me feel as if I ‘wasn’t quite one of them’, because I was unpublished. I had found likeminded souls, who knew the pain and pleasure of being a novelist. Most of them were also unpublished like me and we’ve had many an hour of gossiping about industry one-to-ones at the RNA conference, about disastrous critiques from independent editors and the sheer joy of meeting new people.

I joined the RNA’s Chelmsford Chapter and was made to feel instantly welcome. I try to make it to all the lunches, which are once a month so I can share in dramas and pain, excitement and what everyone is working on at the mo. It’s brilliant. I always come away motivated. As a result of the Chelmsford Chapter, a few of us have formed a breakaway writing group called … wait for it, ‘Write Club’. You think we’d be better at puns than this – what with being writers, but there it is.  And once a month we meet and share in the ups and downs, as well as helping each other with our current WIPs.

I owe so much of my sanity to the RNA and the friends I’ve found there. Honestly, I don’t know where I’d be without it.

 

LORNA COOK lives by the coast with her husband, daughters and a Staffy named Socks.  She is the 2019 winner of the RNA’s Joan Hessayon Award for her debut novel The Forgotten Village, which sold 150,000 copies and reached Number 1 in the Kindle Chart. Her second novel, The Forbidden Promise, is out in spring 2020. A former journalist and publicist, she owns more cookery books than one woman should and barely gets time to cook.

@LornaCookWriter (Facebook) @LornaCookAuthor (Twitter) @LornaCookAuthor (Instagram)  http://www.lornacookauthor.com

A PUBLISHER’S YEAR: OCTOBER – AWARDS, ASSOCIATIONS AND AUDIOBOOKS

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Hello and welcome to the next Sapere Books instalment! Lots of exciting things have happened over the past few months. In August I worked with Simon and Schuster’s Sara-Jade Virtue to judge the RNA’s annual Joan Hessayon Award for New Writers. The books we read were all very different and very worthy nominees, but luckily we were unanimous with our winner: The Lost Village by Lorna Cook.

September also saw the whole Sapere Books team attend the Independent Publishers Guild Autumn Conference. The IPG has a wealth of resources for publishers and arranged fantastic talks for the conference. One area it has led us to mull over is audiobook publishing. We have come to the conclusion that it is too expensive for us to experiment with at the moment, but we will certainly be pitching all of our books to audio publishers both in the UK and the US to try and secure publishing deals. We did actually get approached by Tantor Media last month, and we have sold the audio rights to them for the first three books in J C Briggs Charles Dickens Investigations series, which is exciting!

At the beginning of this month we hosted one of our semi-annual author meet-ups. It is lovely to spend some time with our authors face to face, and to encourage all our authors to get to know one another. Everyone is spread out all over the country, and not all of them belong to genre-specific groups like the RNA and CWA, so it feels good to have informal catch ups to discuss industry news, writing projects – and life in general!

Last week the team attended the Crime Writers’ Association Gala Dinner, which happens every year to reveal the winners of their prestigious Dagger Awards. We are the current sponsor of their Historical Dagger, which had already been whittled down to six fantastic books, but I have to say S G MacLean was a very worthy winner for her third Seeker novel, Destroying Angel.

We also have some exciting company news to share. If you have been following these blog posts, you will know that we had been actively looking to sign up some historical nautical fiction. Well, I can know officially announce that we have signed Justin Fox, represented by the Aoife Lennon-Ritchie to our list. Justin is working on a series of novels set in the second world war around the South African Cape, and we hope to publish the first one next year.

As always, we’ve been busy publishing lots of fantastic books. New series we have launched include the Inspector James Given series by Charlie Garratt – traditional English murder mysteries set in the lead up to the Second World War; the DI Jemima Huxley series by Gaynor Torrance – a troubled female detective struggling to stay sane while solving complex murder cases; and the DS Hunter Kerr Investigations by Michael Fowler – a crime team solving serial killer cases in Yorkshire. We’ve also launched two psychological thrillers by Gillian Jackson – ABDUCTION and SNATCHED – which are receiving fantastic reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

We also focussed on publishing more ‘backlist’ titles. We recently signed up Dorothy Mack’s Regency romance backlist, which were first published in the 1980s/90s. The first one, THE SUBSTITUTE BRIDE is selling particularly well at the moment. And we have just starting reissuing Alan Williams’ historical thrillers, with his Cold War espionage novel, GENTLEMAN TRAITOR, out this month.

Amy

 

SISTER SCRIBES: KITTY WILSON IN PRAISE OF CRITIQUES

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I’ve recently returned from the Romantic Novelists Association (RNA) conference where I briefly had to speak to the NWS members. It was terrifying (terrifying!) but did make me think it was worth sharing details of the scheme that helped me, alongside many others, become published.

The NWS is a New Writers Scheme run by the RNA and encourages unpublished writers to join local meetings and make friends with the more experienced. It’s how I began to meet other authors, including the Sister Scribes, and as we are always saying writers need writer friends – I should tattoo this on my forehead and be done, I say it so often – and joining the RNA is a great way to meet them.

More than that, and why I initially joined, is its critique scheme. For the price of membership (considerably less than you’d pay for an assessment anywhere else) you are entitled to a critique of your full manuscript (partials are accepted if you haven’t got as far as writing The End yet).

It was the first opportunity I had to have my writing read by someone who knew the industry inside out (i.e. not my mother and close friends) and who could be completely honest about what they thought – the reader remains anonymous so they can be truthful without worrying that you’re going to launch at them at the Winter Party and either cover them in kisses or rip their eyes out whilst spitting ‘so, you didn’t like my heroine?’

The critique is usually divided into areas like plot, pace, voice, dialogue so you can see immediately which are your areas of strength and which ones need work. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written a zillion books, every writer needs a little help and an objective eye (otherwise we wouldn’t need editors), so if you expect a critique that says ‘oh my goodness, this is the best thing ever written in the history of the world’ then you may be bound for disappointment. If you want someone to gently point out what needs work to make your book even better then you’re in luck.

Being me, I found it really hard initially to hear the positive, whereas the things I needed to work on seared into my soul, fluttering under my eyelids as I’d try to sleep. It was at this point I decided to colour code my critique – if you have read my other posts you know I need no excuse to break out the felt-tips – and then I could see there was easily as much green (yay, this was great) as there was orange (this needs work).

What I didn’t know was how this technique would feed into my edits when I was eventually published and I use the orange and green method for these. So not only did joining the RNA get me friends and recommend friendly publishers and agents, it taught me how to react to suggestions about my work in a positive way, which meant that when my structural edits arrive, my meltdowns don’t last too long…or at least only as long as it takes me to unzip my pencil case. Thus not only did it improve my writing pre-publication, it also gave me tools which I have used habitually since becoming published.

So, if you are writing and as yet unpublished and if your manuscript has a romantic element then I cannot recommend the RNA’s New Writers Scheme enough. I’m going to pop a link below and hope to see you at a meeting soon. Good luck on your path to publication.

All love, Kitty x

 

https://romanticnovelistsassociation.org/membership/#link_tab-1517250016637-2-10

 

SISTER SCRIBES: JANE CABLE ON BOOK BIRTHDAYS

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My latest book, Another You, was published at the end of last month. Actually, it was re-issued, but the experience was so different this time, it’s hardly felt as though it was ever out there before.

With its previous publisher, it slipped into the world unnoticed. I was given no prior warning then suddenly, there it was on Amazon. For a few days I told no-one, then somebody noticed and the cat was out of the bag. The week before Christmas. Not great timing for what is essentially a summer book.

Of course I had a certain trepidation signing with another publisher after that, but I could already see from the outside looking in that things would be different with Sapere. There was proper editing, for a start, and although the story is the same it is tighter, neater, with their input. And although last time the cover was good, this time it is knockout. When I saw the image of the soldier walking away, head bent, I cried. Because whoever had briefed the designer totally got the story.

Next there was a decent pre-order period with a boost of advertising and a mailer to kick it off. The result was it rocketed up the Amazon charts and although things have calmed down a little now I know the book is selling. And its presence on Netgalley has been skilfully used to generate reviews from trusted readers, which has not only raised Another You’s profile but has also given me a rich vein of content for social media.

With the pre-orders having gone so well I didn’t expect too much from publication day itself, but I was knocked out by the support I received on social media, especially from members of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. They are a generous hearted bunch and I seemed to spend much of the day saying thank you, which was only right. There was considerable support from my buddies at Chindi Authors too.

The day before some lovely flowers had arrived from my Sister Scribes and they were looking glorious in their vase in the sunshine. There was also a parcel, which contained a gorgeous embroidered notebook and pencil case, in colours that toned beautifully with my book cover. Next an email popped into my inbox with a voucher for a spa day at the marvellous Scarlet on my beloved north Cornwall coast. To say I was overwhelmed is a bit of an understatement.

The day became even stranger, when no doubt prompted by all this activity my husband downloaded the book. To put this into context, he has never before read anything I’ve written outside the world of cricket journalism. To be fair, he’d been talking about downloading Another You for a while, but there wasn’t any point if he had no intention of reading it. This time, he says he will, but I have to say I’ve seen no moves to do so yet.

Then, just when I thought all the fuss was over, the doorbell rang again and a bottle of champagne turned up – again, courtesy of my Sister Scribes. These amazing, amazing, women. I am truly humbled to have them as my friends.

The point is – they get it. They’re writers too, so they know how publication day should feel. They know it should be special enough to mark the fruition of what is months, and sometimes years, of work. Every book needs a proper birthday, and this is one I will never forget.

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: ALISON KNIGHT & JENNY KANE ON CREATIVE CONFIDENCE

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I’m so pleased to be able to welcome two fabulous writers to Frost today.  Alison and Jenny have come on to tell us all about their latest venture  Imagine, a creative writing business that encourages new writers to have confidence in their work. With a huge (and I mean huge) breadth of experience and wisdom, they are two of the nicest women you could ever hope to meet. 

 

Writing is a solitary occupation so it’s good to have a permanent cheerleader to help you through the bad days and celebrate the good days (and friends and relatives don’t count because they tell you what you want to hear). We’re really lucky because when we met at a Romantic Novelists’ Association meeting, we hit it off immediately and have since become business partners.

Imagine Creative Writing Workshops was born amid much laughter and copious quantities of mint tea and black coffee. For the past two years we’ve been teaching courses and workshops in Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Wales and London and have gathered together over one hundred regular students aged from six to one hundred and four!

Our aim is not just to teach people to write but to give them the confidence to write. So many talented people don’t follow their dream of being a writer just because they lack confidence. For us, there’s a certain magical quality in seeing our students develop their skills and produce work they can be proud of. It’s a privilege to be able to watch new writers go from their first writing exercise to completing the first draft of their novel.

The highlight of our year is our residential writing retreat every October at the splendid Northmoor House, a Victorian manor with lots of original features on the edge of Exmoor. There, everyone has the time and space to write with our support and the camaraderie of other writers as well as excellent food and visiting guest speakers.

Between the two of us we write nine different genres, including historical crime, contemporary fiction, YA adventures, family drama and romance. To avoid confusion (or is it to confuse ourselves?) we use five different pen names! We like to think that our broad range helps us to help our students.

When it comes to our own writing it’s nice to be able to depend upon each other for honest opinions, beta reading, and a firm kick up the backside as and when is necessary. We haven’t come to blows yet and are looking forward to the continuing Imagine adventure.

 

Alison’s Bio

I’ve always enjoyed writing and in my forties decided I wanted to learn more about the craft. I studied at Bath Spa University and Oxford Brookes University, achieving a first class degree and an MA in Creative Writing. I’ve been teaching for four years now and have had three books published – two contemporary romances and a YA time-travel adventure. I’ve two further books completed – a second YA book and a family drama set in 1960s London – and I’m currently working on more contemporary romances. I also work as a freelance editor. I live in Somerset, within sight of Glastonbury Tor.

Jenny’s Bio
Lucky enough to be a Costa writer in residence, I spend my days in Devon within easy reach of coffee, writing contemporary fiction, romance, and children’s picture books. I also write medieval mystery novels and audio scripts for ITV as Jennifer Ash. Occasionally I masquerade as award winning erotica writer, Kay Jaybee. Over the past 14 years I’ve accumulated over 200 publications, including 21 novels. I’m published by Accent Press, LittwitzPress, Mammoth, Penguin, and Spiteful Puppet.

Imagine: www.imaginecreativewriting.co.uk

 

 

A PUBLISHER’S YEAR: APRIL – AWARDS, AGENTS, SERIES

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We have been very busy at Sapere Books in March and April. At the beginning of March, Catherine Isaacs was announced as the winner of the Romantic Novelists’ Association Popular Fiction Award, which we sponsored, for her absolutely brilliant novel, YOU ME EVERYTHING. We were thrilled to be involved with the award and we have agreed to sponsor it for at least two more years.

A week later we were at London Book Fair, catching up with all of the literary agents we currently work with and meeting with plenty of new ones to discuss what we are looking for. I can’t reveal the outcomes just yet, but we mentioned that we were looking for nautical fiction to one agent and she told us she has an author who has planned a 20-book series of naval thrillers! She is currently discussing the offer with the author, so fingers crossed we will be announcing our first nautical fiction writer very soon!

March saw the release of Alexandra Walsh’s debut thriller, THE CATHERINE HOWARD CONSPIRACY, which has been racing up the charts, as well as the fourth book in Graham Brack’s Josef Slonsky series – FIELD OF DEATH – which readers have completely fallen in love with. April also saw the release of new titles in two more of our most popular series: The Lady Fan Mysteries by Elizabeth Bailey and The Charles Dickens Investigations Series by J C Briggs.

We are preparing lots of fantastic titles for release over the summer, and we have realised that we do not have as many contemporary romantic fiction titles as we do crime and thriller, so we are about to start scouting for romance authors who are writing heart-warming British-set romances, which have the potential to become three or more book series – in the style of Debbie Johnson’s ‘Comfort Food Café’ series and Hannah Ellis’s ‘Hope Cove’ series.

Our most exciting news for April is that we have just officially offered someone our Editorial Assistant job and she accepted! I can’t give any more details just yet, but in next month’s blog post I will be able to introduce her properly!

Amy Durant

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: RACHEL BRIMBLE ON WRITING ABOUT STRONG WOMEN

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I first met Rachel when I tentatively joined a new chapter of the Romantic Novelists Association in anticipation of a house move, Rachel could not have been more welcoming and instantly made me feel at home. She manages to combine this open and friendly manner with a dedication to her career that makes her one of the most prolific authors I know.  

 

I’ve always wanted to write, but it wasn’t until my youngest daughter started school full-time that I started to pursue my dream of becoming a published novelist. That was in 2005 and my first book was published in 2007. I was ecstatic!

This book had been through the New Writers’ Scheme which is an amazing opportunity for a full manuscript to be critiqued by a published member of the Romantic Novelists Association. The RNA is an amazing group of female novelists (and a few men!) who support, encourage and applaud romance writers throughout the UK. It is a true honour to be a part of such a wonderful organisation and has almost certainly provided the push needed over and over again when I’ve felt I couldn’t continue to write.

Just recently, I handed in my twenty-third full-length novel to my current publisher (Aria Fiction). I have always loved drawing inspiration from real-life progressive and inspirational women, and this is reflected in the types of heroines I like to portray in my books.

As I write romance, these women ultimately end up falling in love, but it is their journey of self-discovery and empowerment that drives me to write and ensure my characters succeed. The love aspect is merely a much-welcomed added extra!

I write mainstream contemporary romance, romantic suspense and historical romance. My latest series is set in the fictional Pennington’s Department Store in Bath, England. Influenced by my love of the TV series Mr Selfridge and The Paradise, I was inspired to write a series that focused on the women’s issues of the early 20th century.

Once I’d decided on the theme of ‘female empowerment’, there was no stopping my fingers at the keyboard. I am passionate about self-growth, belief and achievement and to write about women determined to make a societal change appeals to me in every way. Book 1 in the series (The Mistress of Pennington’s) is about women striving to make their mark in business amid an extremely male-dominated world, book 2 and my latest release (A Rebel At Pennington’s) is about women’s suffrage and book 3 (hopefully released in the Autumn) is about the stigma surrounding divorce at the time.

As you can no doubt imagine, the research I undertook to uncover the required characterisation and inspiration to create these female protagonists led me to learn about some truly phenomenal women. Discoveries that will stay with me forever. There are so names we are familiar with – famous suffragettes, women aviators, doctors and scientists who all excelled and made their mark at the turn of the century, but there were also many women who remain unknown to us. Or at least, they were to me.

It is these women that inspire my work and the heroines I want to spend months and months with as I pen a 100,000 word novel about their evolving lives. The Edwardian period was a time of great change for women and it’s exciting to be a part of that. I love bringing historic women’s issues to the foreground of my novels and hopefully inspiring a woman in her own life today.

I could not write without women from the past, the present and undoubtedly, the future.

Here’s to the strong women who have gone before us and who continue to walk with us today!

 

Rachel Brimble lives in a small market town near Bath with her husband, two daughters and mad chocolate Labrador, Tyler. When she’s not writing, she likes to read, knit and walk the beautiful English countryside. Author of over 20 romance novels, Rachel hopes to sign a new contract for a contemporary romance trilogy in the not too distant future.

Website: https://rachelbrimble.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachelbrimbleauthor/?hl=en

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rachelbrimbleauthor/

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