Celebration #4 ~ 3rd Book Published ~ 3 Hours after the 1st Book

 3rd Book Published / 3rd in the Hearts in Hazard series

I thought I knew what rapid-release was. 3 in 1 Day. Nope, that's not rapid-release.

 The folder for this novel is called "Rafe and Maggie".

A Game of Hearts

Two hearts shadowed by their past; will a marriage of convenience brighten their future?

Two hearts crossed by circumstance; an unsuitable connection develops between them.

Deal in the Unexpected ~ a courtesan and two rakes, all out for mischief … and murder, bloody and foul. 

Available in ebook and paperback.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016XI57KA

https://books2read.com/u/m2Znx7

Trailer https://youtu.be/rht6hMctbGI

The first three books started with different covers. You can see one original cover on the back cover of the paperback wrap above. I wanted to change the covers to reflect the dash of romance in each of those books. 

Since the mystery is the stronger element, I have always wondered if I should have kept those original covers. Ah, well.

Here's a look at all 3 original covers.

    

3^rd Novel published, 2^nd Manuscript Written.

When I penned Game of Hearts and called it in the computer folder “Rafe and Maggie”, I didn’t know that I was writing a series.

I was also still submitting books to traditional publishers.

Game of Secrets, called Smuggler’s Price at the time of the writing of “Rafe and Maggie”, was being rejected by publishers and agents alike. The rejection letters were nice ones: we love the characters, we love the story BUT. And that’s a big BUT.

The most common of the rejection reasons was that the story wasn’t sexy enough and the “market demands sexy historicals”. Direct quotation. Well, my story had no sex on the page. Actually, it didn’t have any sex scenes. Some heated kissing, but nothing more. I was NOT going to add what I didn’t want to read.

When “Rafe and Maggie” started heading out to publishers, I originally called it Crossed Hearts. It received the same nice rejection letters: we love these characters and the story, BUT. An additional rejection reason was the murder that becomes a primary element in the last third of the novel, a murder that is gradually set up from page one but doesn’t enter the story until around the 60% mark.

Publishers and agents did not like the way I fused romance and mystery. Some told me that they “only publish romance” or “only publish mystery”. Others told me that they would accept the fusion of romance with mystery but the murder had to occur in the first chapter. And publishers demanded sex on the page.

Nope and nope.

Having the murder in the first chapter ~ well, I could see that, but it makes the murderer became a larger figure in the novel and removes a lot of the tension between characters (major and minor) or demands that the tension occur for the wrong reason. Reworking that murder and the dynamic tensions would add about 20,000 to 25,000 words to a novel that was already over the max length that mystery publishers wanted and create too long of a romance novel for a debut author.

See, we writers have to consider all of these things.

By the time all of these nice rejection letters were coming in, I was well into my third manuscript, A Game of Spies. I had already figured out that I was writing a loose series. I considering how to change the titles of Smuggler’s Price and Crossed Hearts. I also decided that, since my books did not fit the mass market, readers would still exist for the kinds of books that I wanted to read: mystery with a dash of romance, no sex on the page, no gory scenes of murder.

This was all in 2013. I had “met” the Kindle for Christmas 2012, a gift to myself, and gradually realized that indie authors existed on the platform ~ and existed successfully.

I could SELF-PUBLISH. I would be an INDIE!

I was ecstatic.

I withdrew Smuggler’s Price and Crossed Hearts from submission. I knew that I would need a cover designer. I thought finding a cover designer would be easy and formatting the manuscripts would be hard.

Dangerous thinking on my part. Formatting was easy. It took eighteen months to find a cover designer!

18 months!

I filled the time at the end of 2013, all through 2014, and into 2015 by finishing A Game of Spies and working on a fantasy manuscript that I had decided would be the self-publishing test. Oh, and working at the soul-sucking, creativity-draining job that paid the bills.

Eventually, I found Deranged Doctor Design, and they’ve done every cover for me since (except for a misstep with The Dark Lord, a misstep that they have now fixed. Come back October 29 to discover what that misstep was.).