Birthdays and Bachelors by Elle Rush

Gloria only joked to her friends that she needed a boyfriend for her 30th birthday--but they made it happen, or at least set her up with some bachelors. Now she has more dates than she knows what to do with. Between her high school sweetheart, the billionaire, the town bad boy (there's a less polite word for him, but this is a sweet romance here!), PLUS the bonus new-in-town doctor, she's got more dates than she knows what to do with.

The new-in-town doctor, Daniel, is determined to win Gloria's heart. But with all this competition, how can he stand out? He's accidentally witnessed all of her dates be disasters, so he's gotta pull out all the stops to show her he's worth the risk.

This is such a great premise, and so much fun! It’s part of Elle Rush’s Holiday Beach series, in which each book is a novella based around a holiday. Birthdays and Bachelors is available now!

First Impressions of You by Gabriela Graciosa Guedes

Pride and Prejudice fans, get ready!

It's release day for Gabriela Graciosa Guedes’s P&P retelling, First Impressions of You!

Luiza is a struggling plus-size actress from Brazil who's desperate to stay in the US and make her dreams come true. She needs a job that will sponsor her for a visa, and the theme park she's been working at has a well-respected theater division that has sponsored visas in the past.

Against all odds, she gets the job, but she has to work with brooding Winter Davis, former child star and current snob, who seems to think the theater work--and everyone around him--is beneath him.

Their on-stage battles and explosive chemistry infuriate and intrigue Luiza. But even when she comes to understand him better, she can't let him stand in the way of her dreams for her future.

Tons of steam and banter in this modern take on P&P--it's available on Amazon and KU now!

Would you spend $35K to publish your book?

So, would you spend $35K to indie-publish your book? 

Listen, I know the answer to that question already.

But someone DID, and I nearly keeled over when I heard about it.

Here’s the video that breaks down how exactly this woman spent $35K (projected to eventually be more) on getting her book independently published.

My DMs exploded when I posted this on my Instagram a while back, so I thought it was worth talking about here.

So, let me say upfront, if you’ve published a book before and are thinking “but I didn’t spend that much!” or you’ve never published a book and are thinking “I don’t WANT to spend that much,” you should not be worrying—this is not a typical amount to spend on producing a book.

Chelsea has a much bigger platform than most debut writers start with—she has a built-in audience, albeit in a totally different field, but one that wants to support her, so she could aim high and know that her people are there for her. (I do wonder if this messed up her also-bought algorithm on Amazon, though, if her audience is not typically romance readers—the also-boughts are determined by what the people buying her book read, and you want those recommendations to be in the same genre so that they come up when people are looking for similar books.)

She also clearly has a lot of money to spend up front, which most new (or even established) romance writers don’t. It is normal to NOT spend $35K on a book—I would wager that most writers are putting in maybe a thousand or two TOTAL, and that’s still a lot of money to put into an investment that you might not recoup, especially for a debut book. But it’s an investment in future you and your ability to continue to write and get better and get more visibility that you hope will pay off in the future.

There are lots of things that she says in here that I agree with, specifically around genre fiction not getting its flowers—and its money—when it does keep the lights on in publishing, and her very healthy understanding of criticism, confidence, and fear.

Dos and Don’ts to Take Away from This Video

I agree with her spending the bulk of her money on editing and promotion. (I’m not sure what category her cover art ended up, but I’d also spend money on that.) Obviously, as an editor, I’m going to tell you to spend your money on editing, but OMG, $10K??? Like, I think I’m a great editor, but I’ve never approached anywhere near charging $10K for one book. All my romance editor friends were similarly befuddled. (There is something to say here one day about how romance as a genre devalues itself in so many ways, including how much money writers spend on producing their books and on pricing their books—a post for another time). If someone is trying to get you to pay that for a romance edit, something weird is going on there.

Do spend the money on getting your book into the hands of people who will talk about it. Organic discovery is great, but it’s incredibly hard when there are so many books vying for attention. You don’t have to necessarily send out physical copies if that’s not something you can afford, but you can send out eARCs to book influencers and on NetGalley or other ARC distribution platforms as a way to get your book out there.

And obviously don’t worry about physical book tours yet. Again, Chelsea has a substantial audience already—results not typical.

I’m very confused about the $6K she spent on production. It sounds like it was mostly labour, but most people order an author copy from Amazon before publishing, and that’s it. Don’t stress too much about paper thickness and ink colour and all of that.

I’m assuming Chelsea’s cover art cost a pretty penny because it was an oil painting she commissioned. Oil painting isn’t the typical style for romance novels right now, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. But we all know we judge a book by its cover and we've all bought books because of their covers, right? So it’s worth putting a sizeable amount of budget towards a beautiful cover that’s on-trend and designed by someone who knows what romance readers are looking for in order to attract the right kind of attention.

Be realistic in your goals. Chelsea said she needed 7000 books sold to break even on her 35K, but for most debuts, that’s probably not happening. Even with her huge platform, I don’t know if she will be able to meet her admittedly ambitious goal of 100K(!) books sold. Social media and viral sensations make it look easy—but the reality behind that is that it’s often not their first book by the time they go viral so they’ve got experience and a backlist helping them along, and you don’t know the kind of money they (or their publisher if they're trad) are putting into promotion. Some of them are genuinely organic word-of-mouth via TikTok or Insta, but many are manufactured and spending thousands of dollars to get there.

Spend within your means. Indie publishing is not a get-rich-quick scheme—it takes a lot of time and money and strategy to start earning out regularly on your books. Don’t spend all your money at once, hoping you’ll be able to earn it back and put it into the next book.

Moral of the story: you do not have to spend $35K to have a successful book (and please don't!)—but it is going to require a ton of hard work, no matter how much you do end up spending. Spend that money and time and effort wisely.

What was your reaction to this video (beyond “oh HELL no”)? Let me know!

Loving Miss Tilney by Heather Moll

If you've read Northanger Abbey, you know that Eleanor Tilney is Henry's sweet sister who has a secret lover her father doesn't approve of. It's not covered in Austen's book, but Heather is taking it on here.

Eleanor and Philip are childhood sweethearts--but Philip is poor, with no prospects, and Eleanor is desperate to get out from under her tyrannical father's thumb. Her father won't let her marry Philip, so she decides that she'll have to find a husband at a house party.

But Philip is there too, and as much as he wants to help Eleanor escape her father, it's unbearable watching someone else try to court her. How do they find their way out of this impossible situation to their HEA?

Find out in Loving Miss Tilney, available now on Amazon and KU!

Against AI

I’m going to come right out and say it: I am NOT a fan of AI.

I feel like you are probably subscribed to this newsletter because you care about craft, so I am probably preaching to the choir already, but let’s get into why AI should not be part of your creative process.

Using ChatGPT or any other GPT (generative pretrained transformers) or AI to produce writing is not a creative act. It’s feeding questions and/or keywords into a machine and letting the machine make connections between those keywords to produce something that looks like what you’re asking it for. On the surface, it can look…fine. But look closer, and you’ll find it’s derivative (obviously, since it’s being pulled from already created sources) or just not quite right.

(Have you seen AI art of popular book characters? They are all over my IG Explore page. They might look lovely on first look, but then there’s something uncanny and too polished about them, and they actually have six fingers or unnatural proportions. It just feels fake to me.)

AI does not value art or creativity. We go to museums to marvel that a human hand and a human brain created the masterpiece we’re staring at; we listen to music to be moved by melodies and emotions; we read books to be transported to new worlds that come out of someone’s beautiful mind. Storytelling is part of being human.* AI doesn’t care about the process of creativity or how it makes its audience feel—but that’s the whole point of any creative endeavour.

(*Let me dork out for a second, because this is the one time very specific information from my forever-unfinished PhD thesis about gossip and Shakespeare is ever going to come in handy: in my research on gossip, I came across this work by an evolutionary psychologist who argued that grooming in primates was a social act that eventually evolved into language and gossip and storytelling. It’s fascinating, honestly. All this to say, storytelling is deeply coded into our DNA as homo sapiens.)

AI gets the data it uses to provide the end product from datasets collected by companies like Google and Amazon and/or from scraping the internet for writing. So this can potentially be copyrighted work or work that no one has given the AI permission to use (like fanfic, for example). It’s not plagiarizing, per se, but it’s using what other people have already thought and created (and maybe not with their specific permission) to spit out something kinda similar. There are a lot of ethical and legal concerns that make using AI particularly fraught right now.

The thing is, AI is basically averaging out all the data it has and predicting what should come next. So what it produces is going to be average. It’s not the product of the human mind noticing something fascinating and then expressing it in a way that creates surprise and delight. It’s giving you what it predicts should follow, so total middle-of-the-road.

But that’s not what you want for your writing. The books that really stand out are the ones that are doing or saying something in a way that feels new and novel. You’re not going to get from an AI. It might be perfectly serviceable prose once you get in there and edit it, but it’s not going to blow anyone away. You’re a writer, and you can do better than a machine that’s only giving you the baseline.

You could get AI to write you a whole book right now if you give it enough information. AIs aren’t sophisticated enough yet to give you 80K words all at once, so you do have to feed it ideas scene by scene. In that respect, there is a human element to the process. And people are already doing this, to give an idea to run with or to get past a block and get some momentum back.

But you can see how this system could be ripe for abuse, especially as AI continues to develop and become more sophisticated. But if you’re a writer, the whole point of writing is to get something out of your head that only youcan express—it’s not to get a machine to do that work for you. You’re not writing because writing is easy to do—if it was always easy, you probably wouldn’t bother to do it because you’d be bored! It’s the challenge, the actual brainwork that makes it something worth doing.

Why would you want to be a writer if you’re not actually writing? If it’s for fame or money, good luck—that requires a lot more work than just writing, and you’re not going to get either of those things when you’re producing work that relies on the median. A unique voice and perspective in a messy story is always going to trump a competently written story that doesn’t bring anything new to the table. You’re not going to get that voice with a GPT.

AI is a tool of late-stage capitalism. It’s much faster for companies to chuck something into a machine than to pay people a living wage to create something new and different that hasn’t been tested to know if it’ll be profitable or not. We live in an era where there are constant reboots and remakes of TV shows and movies because nostalgia sells and it’s less risky than a new piece of media that could make them millions of dollars…or could lose them millions of dollars. But then when one of these new movies/shows hits different and does something innovative, it feels so fresh and exciting.

And look, I fully believe that we’re always telling the same stories over and over again—there are just new perspectives on them as humanity continues to develop. And in romance especially, where we’re often accused of this, we just keep configuring our building-block tropes in inventive ways that make things interesting. But with AI, these stories will become tired and clichéd because they're just recycling these old ideas and not coming up with those new perspectives.

At the moment, I’m not particularly worried about AI taking over publishing or putting writers or editors out of work. (So, like, the opposite of this guy.) AI is too clunky and too unrefined right now to replace actual humans. But we’re on a precipice, I think, and I would rather not feed the beast.

AI is all around us and is practically unavoidable (Google auto-filling for you when you go to search for something? AI. Even my social media marketing service just introduced an AI that can write your posts for you, which actually feels a bit...creepy to me), but I’m committed not using AI to actually create anything—all my words in my newsletter, my posts, my work all come from my brain, not from a machine. 

If you care about craft and creativity, I hope that you as a writer can similarly commit to not using AI to create, in solidarity with other creatives whose livelihoods may be threatened by AI (for example, artists who aren’t getting paid when people can just generate a relatively realistic AI image). This also means not letting anyone else on your team use AI—for example, cover designers using AI-generated images, or VAs using AI to write posts for you).

What do you think of AI? Do you see its potential, or do you fear our robot overlords? Let me know in the comments!

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