Embrace Love Letter

The first ever Embrace Books newsletter has now gone out to subscribers. If it hasn't arrived, and you definitely subscribed, please check your spam boxes before emailing me. Thanks!

If it has arrived and you've read it, please do let me know what you think or make suggestions. We're probably going with a different design next month, so that's going to change. But content-wise, if there's something you'd like to see in the newsletter, please let me know.

You can subscribe to the newsletter here. 

This month, I commissioned C.L. Kerr, a NWS RNA member writing under a pen-name, to create our first Love Letter.

She came up with a wartime letter from 'Tom' to his 'darling Iris', written in September 1943. The letter was so poignant, I knew immediately it was the one to launch the section. You can also read it here.

Love Letters can be contemporary, historical or paranormal. They're unpaid, but an excellent way for new and developing writers to raise their profiles.

If you'd like to have a crack at writing one for a future newsletter, please keep it under 200 words and submit it to me as a Word doc. at jane @ embracebooks.co.uk

For Romance After Dark ...

There's a renewed call for submissions to our scorching hot After Dark romance line, over on the Embrace Books website.

Do please hop over there and leave a comment, make your mark on our brand-new website, and hopefully start preparing a submission to Embrace Books.

Fabulous new website for Embrace Books

Just when I was getting comfortable here on blogspot, it seems we have a new address.

Check out the brand-new website, just starting to take shape at embracebooks.co.uk, and marvel at its total gorgeousness!

I shall be developing some of the posts there in the weeks to come, which may include repeating a few important posts from this site. Bear with me though, there'll be plenty of new material coming soon to Embrace Books, especially once we're out of the holiday month.

The first-ever Embrace Love Letter will also be coming your way around August 21st, packed with exciting news, photographs, tips on writing romance, and even some short fiction to get you in the mood.

If you haven't signed up to receive the newsletter, please click at the top of the side-bar.

"Storm's Heart" by Rachel Lyndhurst

I can now announce that we have a title for Rachel Lyndhurst's excellent debut with Embrace, which is the unforgettable Storm's Heart.

Many thanks to those who have signed up to receive our monthly Embrace Love Letter, which is due to be sent out around the middle of August. If you haven't yet signed up for a copy of our newsletter, there is a link at the top of the sidebar which will take you to the appropriate form.

We shall be on holiday for the rest of the month, but will check in occasionally to read messages. So if you send your ms and don't immediately receive an acknowledgement, please wait at least two weeks before querying.

After Dark

We're particularly keen to receive submissions for After Dark.

Most of our submissions to date have been for the Red Velvet line, which is 'sexy, sophisticated romance'. But it would be good to see some deeply-felt mss for the hotter After Dark romances too. We're looking for steamy erotic romance for this line, in all categories and from either a heterosexual or gay perspective, with quality writing as paramount.

A potentially successful manuscript for After Dark might prompt some or all of the following descriptions:

Spicy
Provocative
Erotic
Intriguing
Explicit
Risk-taking
Unusually plotted or themed
Written with great character

First Acquisitions for Embrace Books

To repeat what I wrote this morning on the Salt website, I am absolutely delighted to announce that we have now acquired our first three titles for Embrace!

Authors Rachel Lyndhurst, Judy Jarvie and Sally Clements all join us for our initial line-up of romance titles, due to launch early 2011.

A law graduate and mother of two whose interests include antiques and gardening, this will be Rachel Lyndhurst‘s first published novel, a sophisticated contemporary romance as yet untitled. Her brand-new writing blog is here.

Scottish-based Judy Jarvie has a professional background in PR and has been writing romance since 2002. Two previous novels were published by US publisher Moonlit Romance, and her novel Taking the Leap was short-listed for the RNA New Writers’ Scheme Award. Her lively novel for Embrace is entitled Nanny Behaving Badly. You can follow her blog at Judy Jarvie's Jottings.

Sally Clements is a published romance and mystery author living and working in County Kildare, Ireland. She has published numerous short stories and a novel, Catch Me A Catch, with The Wild Rose Press. She comes to Embrace with a suspenseful contemporary romance entitled Bound To Love. Her writing blog is Love and Chocolate.

All three acquisitions are for the Red Velvet line, and we’re thrilled to have Rachel, Judy and Sally launching with us at Embrace.

Please note, we're still actively seeking proposals for unpublished novels, novellas and even short fiction.

So if you're a writer and would love to become involved in the new British romance phenomenon that is Embrace, please follow our Submission Guidelines.

The Cover Factory

Shop Girl Diaries: Emily Benet (Salt Publishing)

Just a quick link to the brand-new website of the company which designs covers for Salt and which will probably be in charge of providing Embrace Book authors with their covers too.

If you thought our book covers would be same-old, same-old, think again!

The Cover Factory

Their website is still under construction, as is our own lovely Embrace Books website, so do please check back again soon to find new developments.

Emily Benet's Shop Girl Diaries is a recently published example of their work.

Full Steam Ahead!

Just to let folks know, we are almost ready to announce our first acceptances at Embrace Books. Such exciting news!

I took a few days off to work on my own writing last week, and will be away again from Thursday for four days, for anyone trying to contact me. But in my absence the team has been working hard. The first contracts should go out to our new Embrace authors this week, so I will soon be in a position to reveal our download royalty terms - amidst other developments!

If all this steamy excitement has tempted to submit to Embrace, please find our submission guidelines in the right-hand sidebar.

We are currently looking for sexy, sophisticated romance (Red Velvet) or hot romance and erotica (After Dark) in novels, novellas and also now Steamy Shorts - details coming soon!

Does 'Formula Romance' Exist?

Someone asked on a previous blog post whether we are looking for formulaic, 'same-old-same-old' category romance at Embrace Books, and since my answer is quite complicated, I thought it might be a nice idea to turn it into a separate blog post.

First off, I don't believe in formulas. That is, I don't believe they exist in fiction, though I know many do. Particularly journalists searching for a good headline or those who look down on popular fiction as being formulaic and therefore not worth their time.

There is no magic formula or guideline sheet handed out to romance authors at the start of their bodice-ripping careers - as an apparently intelligent woman insisted recently, talking to me about the evils of romance, though she admitted to never having actually read one herself.

No, what I believe in is 'story'. Romance is one kind of story, and it has a simple plot: girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy again. If that's a formula, it's no more a formula than a crime novel: a crime is committed, an investigation is launched, the criminal is caught. Or any type of popular fiction that follows a common theme or structural framework.

Within the idea of 'romance' there are many different varieties of approach to story-telling. Writers can manipulate the setting, period, characters or writing style to differentiate their stories from their peers in the same tradition. But all romances must follow the same basic plot of girl meets boy. If your story doesn't do this, it may be excellent in all manner of ways - but it will not be a romance.

The real question may be, am I looking for very tightly conceived and executed category romance within a strict set of guidelines prohibiting various types of hero, heroine, setting, plot variations, and sexual antics?

The answer to that is no.

I am looking for freestyle romances within the stated word lengths - not romantic fiction, or fiction with romance in it, please note, but bona fide romances where the love story is the key focus of the plot - and if it contains something unusual, as long as it's still a romance, then I'm very much open to new twists and turns on the road to love.

Perhaps giving me some examples of what constitutes a 'different' approach to category would help me be more specific. I'd be happy to field queries below on the topic of what fits Embrace and what doesn't.

Though, in general, my reputation in editing is as an innovator and a rule-breaker. So try me!

Good News Coming

I'm delighted to say we may have good news coming soon from Embrace Books. Among our first batch of full manuscript submissions, we've found some rather wonderful love stories and are currently working with a few authors on revisions - with a view to acquiring their work for Embrace.

Watch this blog for further updates!

Yet more submissions have been flagged up as promising, and full manuscripts are to be requested. Those authors should hear from us within the next ten days. If you haven't heard yet, never fear. There are quite a few partials still in the inbox. But we're getting through them fast.

No manuscripts that fit the line have been rejected without an editorial appraisal of the work. 

If you'd like to submit your romance manuscript to Embrace - and we'd certainly love to have it! -  a clickable link to our Submission Guidelines is in the sidebar of this blog.

The email address for both submissions, queries and general correspondence is jane AT saltpublishing DOT com

Who is this Jane Holland anyway?

It occurred to me that some people reading the Embrace blog might not know who is actually behind it. So here's a quick summary of who I am.

My name is Jane Holland and I'm the editor of Embrace Books. I've been in publishing since 1995 and in an editorial position with Salt Publishing, who own Embrace, since 2008. My first post with Salt was editor-in-chief of their arts and literary magazine, Horizon Review.

I'm also a professional writer. I have published seven novels, including mainstream commercial fiction, five collections of poetry, and countless articles and reviews for national newspapers, magazines, literary journals and ezines.

I am currently writing a straight Tudor historical, and my literary agent is Luigi Bonomi of LBA. 

My connection with romance dates from an early age. My mother was the late, great Charlotte Lamb, who published over 150 romances, romantic historicals and romantic suspense novels, under that name and various others. I grew up scribbling my toddler pictures on the backs of her Mills & Boon galley proofs, and graduated to reading her books - and those of her peers - by the time I was an adolescent. My elder sister Sarah was also a romance novelist. The social circles we moved in included writers, editors and agents, and I even managed to get myself invited on her huge US tour for Harlequin in the early eighties.

So romance was always there, right from the start, and it was only a matter of time before my life came full circle, back to romance.

You can also read an interview with me at The Literary Project.

I'm open to submissions and queries at Embrace Books. Guidelines are clickable in the sidebar. We also have a free monthly newsletter. Please subscribe!

Paragraphing: the long and the short of it

Many of the submissions I've received so far - and do keep sending them, I love seeing new manuscripts pop up in my inbox - have what I call Paragraph Problems.

Today, in the world of romance, the page-long paragraph is a no-no. Sometimes even the half-page paragraph looks out of place. Once in a while, yes. Perhaps when some building of atmosphere is required, or some terrible internal struggle is taking place. Maybe two or three times in a chapter, a half-page of narrative will be acceptable. But not every few pages, and certainly never in the first few pages, where pace is everything.

Here are some simple suggestions for structuring the paragraph. I hesitate to call them rules, because that implies they should never be broken, and a good writer always breaks rules - and gets away with it, of course, because she's so damn good!

But if you suspect you may not be damn good, then stop when paragraphing and think: what were those suggestions again?

Bear in mind that these rules - sorry, suggestions - are aimed at writers of romance. Fleming broke the rules all the time in his Bond novels, and many other writers do too. But here we're talking about romance, short category romance, and most importantly, romance aimed at the digital market.

People read text on screen in a different way to how they read text on a printed page. And they prefer shorter paragraphs on screen, not least because a long paragraph means they have to scroll back to the top of the page - or even the page before - if they lose the thread of what was going on.  Which is easily done in a long and complex paragraph.

So ...

1. Keep your paragraphs short. Readers tend to skip long ones. They do. Honest.
2. Vary the lengths of your paragraphs. This includes all-dialogue paragraphs. A fast-paced exchange of one-liners should not continue too long or you'll give the reader whiplash and she'll forget who's speaking when. Equally, a single line of narrative - 'The car sped away, and Dawn realised she was alone on the dark pier' - will be more effective if it's not surrounded by other single or very short paragraphs. Your book is unlikely to be read aloud to anyone, so remember to think visually and vary lengths when choosing where to break your paragraphs.
3. If you have paragraphs of the DND (dialogue - narrative - dialogue) variety, aim to keep all three short. Never try DNDND. The reader will become confused, especially if two separate people are speaking in the same paragraph. I've actually seen this attempted. Not good.
4. Paragraphs are like mini-stories in themselves. They should have a beginning, a middle and an end. In my example above: 'The car sped away (beginning), and Dawn realised she was alone (middle) on the dark pier (end).' So we have action (beginning), identity, thought and circumstance (middle), and suspense or resolution (end). Suspense at the end of a paragraph is good, by the way, because it springboards the reader into the next paragraph. 
5. You should indent the first word of each paragraph, unless that paragraph starts a new section or chapter. Then it should start flush with the left-hand margin.
6. When describing action, keep paragraphs short and succinct. Use single clause sentences, and dialogue to break up the text. Ultra-short dialogue like 'Hey!' or 'Here, catch!' works best. (Try not to have characters call each other by name too often, unless it's for a reason - i.e. irony or character revelation.)
7. By contrast, when writing a romantic or intimate scene, don't have the paragraphs ultra-short if you can avoid it, apart from the odd muttered comment. Short paras interrupt the flow. Equally though, don't use this excuse to slide off into reams and reams of purple prose and flowery euphemisms. Keep descriptions of what's going on fairly lucid and accurate. I'm always miffed when I have to re-read a love scene several times in order to work out if they actually did it! We're not writing for convent girls.
8. In the last chapter, as in the first chapter, shorter paragraphs help to increase the pace and to speed us towards our natural conclusion. Here, dialogue is paramount, especially to convey vital plot information.
9. Lastly, as far as dialogue tags are concerned, if it's clear who's speaking, drop the 'she said'. But I'm not looking for a thousand cunning alternatives to 'said' either. If 'said' is all that's required, use it, and try not to throw in a 'groaned', 'lamented', 'whimpered' or 'grated' at every turn, or pepper your 'said' with adverbs like 'chillingly', 'bitingly', 'archly'. With any luck, the dialogue itself will tell us how it was said - if your character work has been done well enough.

There you have it. The Embrace Guide to Paragraphing, or everything you ever needed to know about slicing your book into digestible lumps, and more!

Now go cut some paragraphs.