In the cleaning out the anteroom to the garage, Farm boss came across two boxes of romance novels which I hadn't seen for years, barely remembered I had ever bought, have no idea why they were there or for how many years. That led to sorting them. These are books from late 1980s into 1990s when I was reading a lot of this to try and get a feel for what the romance genre required.
Which means, I've been scanning through a LOT of books all at once, all from authors who were popular then but some don't still have books out there while a few do. I am keeping a few and more will be set up to hopefully sell as boxes maybe on eBay. That was what I was going to do with others I'd gone through over a year ago and have yet to try to sell. It takes photographing their covers and offering them in groups of say 20. No bookstore will take books from that far back unless they are by authors who are still publishing (learned that years ago when I thought I could read the books and resell them when done).
Anyway it's been interesting to see an affirmation of what I had written before-- the plots get circulated and recirculated. Yes, readers of romances today do want fresh approaches (but not too fresh). The plots are used again and again by new writers. I do not think original plots are particularly desired which is a bit of a bummer if you like to write original stories.
What I have wondered, as I've been skimming through them, is do my plots fit any of these categories? I do feel they are hybrids between a true romance and say a Mary Alice Monroe. Is there a market for that?
It was interesting to see some of the names of writers that don't appear to still be selling books and yet had published over 40. They were doing something right in terms of drawing readers. Can I fit any of that while still telling my own story? That's my issue to think about for now.
Between fence problems involving the sheep, the fox wars (more on that continuing saga for my Saturday blog on Rainy Day Thoughts), trying to learn how to do discussion videos, watching our granddaughter run in an end of the season meet, I've been sorting, sorting and re-sorting and my house is a mess-- full of boxes of this or that. The farmhouse doesn't have enough storage space or maybe it has too much!
On creating my own videos, I updated my YouTube site (actually they said do it now or they'd be doing it soon) as they suggested offering a less than one minute video to explain what my channel there is about-- creating and nature. I also spent more time (when emotionally I had the energy) working on what it will take to do one for a specific book keeping the video to around 2 minutes.
What I am beginning to think is I won't be able to interest people to check these out unless I come up with something more to intrigue which might mean combining scenery (if we ever get dried out up here) or even images from the books. I am not remotely sure how to do any of that and this gets old fast trying to figure it out especially since I am still not sure it'll sell my 'hybrid' romances.
Anyway here's the video I did for my book Desert Inferno. I am thinking the book videos should start with the location, the setting, the motivation behind the story, and have limited about the plots and characters as that's all available at Amazon. The video is really about interesting someone enough to look at the sample and the blurb.
The photo at the top is a teaser regarding the chronicles of us and the fox family-- come back Saturday to Rainy Day Thoughts for more.
