I read a helpful book on this subject recently: "Write to Market" by Chris Fox. It is not specific to the romance genre, but it IS pretty specific to Amazon, explaining their ranking system, how to research, etc. etc.
If you have a KU subscription, you can borrow it and read it for free.
https://www.amazon.com/Write-Market-Deliver-Faster-Smarter-ebook/dp/B01AX23B4Q
Try some kind of system for building outlines. Here is one, and really the article details the whole thing. His book on Amazon is just an expaned treatmetn including a worked example. And ther are others like Take of Your Pants.
Looking at a tool like the Snowflake Method might help you hone in on a more concrete plot. You can also find the book on Amazon.
Romance is actually very simple. All romance novels follow a similar formula. To write effective romance, you need to understand two things: romantic story arc, and how to write emotion and conflict.
I’m going to point you to two resources I recommend to all my romance writer clients:
First is a book called Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes (a fellow romance editor). It costs less than $6 on Amazon and you can read it cover to cover in less than an hour. RTB will explain the formula for romantic story arc. Once you understand that, you can just plug your chosen setting, characters, etc. into the formula.
The second is Writing With Emotion, Tension, and Conflict: by Cheryl St. John (a romance writer). This book will teach you how to take your emotional conflict to the next level to really gut-punch your readers right in the feels.
Now go wrench some hearts, little fledgling romance writer. You got this. 👊🏼
Rachel Aaron/Rachel Bach. She writes several thousand words per day and, since 2010, has written thirteen novels and other various works.
I don’t mind but you should work on writing one as it will help with you writing ability.
You might also check out Snowflake Method it gave me lots of good strategies for writing.
Good luck
Here are a few things to examine:
1) Are you marketing the books? Do you have a reader magnet/free book? Do you do book promotions with other authors on Bookfunnel or Prolific Works to get subscribers for a newsletter? Do you have a newsletter that you use to market to an audience of subscribers? Do you do newsletter swaps with other authors in your genre? Do you schedule promotions? What is your book pricing? Have you tried releasing at 99 cents?
2) If you are doing all of number 1, have you had beta readers look at your books to give you feedback?
3) Are your books written to market? I suggest reading this book if you haven't already on how to research what sells. https://www.amazon.com/Write-Market-Deliver-Faster-Smarter-ebook/dp/B01AX23B4Q
Have you read Romancing the Beat? It's very helpful and shows the different stages of the romance. Usually both the hero and the heroine have a problem with love that has kept them from finding anyone. The first 0-15% of the book is set-up for the normal world and everything changes at the inciting incident. You can still have the meet-cute in the set-up but you are showing their normal world. Does that make sense? Here is the book. https://www.amazon.com/Romancing-Beat-Structure-Romance-Kissing-ebook/dp/B01DSJSURY
If you're having issues with getting the story together, I highly recommend Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker. I've struggled with getting cohesive, engaging stories out for ages, and I really think this is the book that made things click for me. If you're finding yourself staring at your drafts feeling like something's missing, or it's dragging, or there's a problem you just can't put your finger on, this book might help with it. I bought a physical copy to highlight in, but a digital copy does just ad well.
I am not affiliated with Ms Hawker in any way, I'm just really hype. This book has noticably improved my writing just in the like, week that I've had it. Even just my short fanfics have increased in quality now that I have some frames to show me wtf to do.
Also, hmu when you finally publish! I would fucking LOVE to read your story— or stories if it becomes a series!
Can you think of any profession in which purposely avoiding the best in the field is a good idea?
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Studying other successes in your field is a very good way to improve.
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You might also want to read "Write To Market" by Chris Fox.
>I also noticed the show scripts are written by an all-woman team.
The showrunner responsible for the first two seasons of the Netflix adaptation (Chris Van Dusen) is male. He is the creator and primary writer for the first two seasons of the show. Jess Brownell will be leading the next two seasons.
Men can write about, and for, women just fine -- there are a lot of male romance authors out there writing under female or genderless pseudonyms because doing so is part of their marketing approach (they sell better). The reverse is also true, women can write men in a way that is completely believable.
Writing is a business as much as it is a craft. It's important for writers to know who they are marketing to, and to write for expectations of that audience. That means market research. That means writing in the correct voice. Hitting the correct beats (romance readers can be ruthless if this particular need isn't met, hence popular primers like this).
If skilled writing feels gendered, then there's a decent chance that it's meant to -- because that's what sells the best to the audience it is intended for.
Rachel Aaron wrote a book on writing 2k-10k words a day. Her books are pretty well-liked according to her GoodReads reviews as well, so... not automatically crap like others here are suggesting.
Maybe try dictation rather than writing? Use a phone to dictate and don't look at the screen. That's the rule. Don't look at what goes into the page. Get up and walk around the room while talking into the recorder. Act out the scenes. Have fun.
It's easier to split the writing from the editing if the input session doesn't allow any editing. So when you're writing, creating new content, don't look at the output. Dictation helps with that.
Don't look at the output for a few days. And when you do, blast each paragraph apart first. Put each sentence onto a separate line. Everything on the page is building blocks: move sentences around, combine them, make some long, make some short. But focus on crafting paragraphs.
Fool Proof Dictation https://www.amazon.com/Fool-Proof-Dictation-No-Nonsense-Effective-ebook/dp/B074M5C3SJ/
Right? omg. I just finished reading "Take Off Your Pants" and I have to say, I highly recommend it. It has helped my approach to structure and made my manuscripts much tighter from the first draft, and writing is much faster with her approach. It's not revolutionary advice, and probably similar to stuff you've seen before but for some reason they way she lays it out really works for my hardcore pantser self.
https://www.amazon.com/Take-Off-Your-Pants-Outline-ebook/dp/B00UKC0GHA
I found this book very helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Romancing-Beat-Structure-Romance-Kissing-ebook/dp/B01DSJSURY
My favorite Romance writing resource is Gwen Hays Romancing the Beat. It's a very quick read. I'd give even odds that you've already read it, but if you haven't it might be worth flipping through on your vacation. I know you enjoy writing craft books.
3 explicit sex scenes out of 40k words would be a pretty standard number of sex scenes for a romance that was not explicitly attempting to hit the Sweet-&-Clean or Christian romance markets.
Romance has to follow a particular story arc from meet cute through to Happily Ever After or Happy For Now. That's it. Everything else—the precise story arc, the amount of sex, the number of side charac ters, the presence of lack of magic, dragons or space ships—is irrelevant to whether or not your story is a romance. You could have written a book about a spacelord dragonrider bear shifter who shoots lasers out of his eyes and spends the entire book with his dick inside your heroine as he battles an army of sentient seahorses, and as long as it goes through the necessary romance beats and the romance arc is the A plot, you'd still have written a romance book.
There are a few places to find out the exact beats that are expected, but nobody lays them out quite as well as Gwen Hayes, and nothing will distill the lessons she teaches you as much as reading a LOT of books in the genre/niche you intend to write in, so you can internalise the wy the beats play out in different stories.
To anyone from Canada or anywhere that's not in the sales range, you can get book 2 (the writing prompts) kindle version for $1.32CAD or $0.00 (kindle unlimited).
>Is there a list of the top most common tropes in Romance that EVERY romance must have one of?
No, there isn't. You might be confusing tropes with beats? Like the plot points and specific events in a romance to qualify it as a romance. This book breaks down the required scenes in romance really well.
Stuff like this:
>"enemies to friends", "instant love", "fake dating" as well as the popular "portal" trope
definitely isn't required in every single romance novel. Romance is so broad, the most popular tropes are always going to shift according to market demands. It's never stagnant enough to make a definitive list.
Certain subsets of readers will always have their preferences too. Some will only read billionaires but never vampires. Some only want sweet, charming heroes, others only want mafia bosses who kidnap the heroine.
Yay! Welcome to the land of kissing books!!
Step 1: read romance.
Step 2: read more romance. (Repeat steps 1-2 many, many times)
Step 3: read Gwen Hayes' Romancing the Beat
Step 4: I found A LOT of support about writing and self-publishing from the r/eroticauthors sub. Really generous community with highly practical advice. I highly recommend digging through that sub, especially u/the_gorgon's wonderful posts like this one about research.
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Best of luck!
It's definitely different. I had to switch over to dictation due to some wrist issues (I'm actually doing it now!), and have been dialing the process in over time. What I've been doing lately is handwriting my manuscripts, then dictating them into a computer with dictation software. That doesn't sound exactly like what you're trying to do here though.
I'd recommend this book if you're looking to go straight into writing with dictation as a primary tool:
It's only four bucks, and a very practical guide on the topic. Two of the big things he talks about are planning in advance, and doing exercises to help get your brain used to this sort of writing. One of the methods is to think of the settings you be writing in in advance (including descriptions and details) and write them down on a note card. He correctly states that improvising while dictating is extremely difficult, especially if you're going for speed.
No matter which way you go though, you'll end up having to do a lot of editing. You will 100% run into a lot of dictation errors, especially if you're doing fiction. If you can get it down though, you can write a lot faster by speaking than by typing.
Good luck!
You might be talking about writing erotic romance? Romance books have a very distinct set of "beats" they need to hit, and I'd highly recommend reading Gwen Hayes' Romancing the Beat to get a decent handle on them. Romance books can have as much or as little sex as you like and at any heat level, but you'll want to find the sort of thing you want to write on Amazon and read a few of those books to get a feel for what reader expectations will be. This applies even if you decide that you don't want to write stories that fit the romance genre and end up writing erotica novels. Find similar books and read them for patterns. If you can't find similar books to what you want to write there is a very high probability that the market for them doesn't exist.
As for the second part, yes, it can work, but you generally want the toxic relationship to be just-or-recently ended, or ending, when the story begins. Readers don't generally want to read about one of the main characters being with someone else, and the dude ending up in the dust would always be a sort of secondary bonus to the HEA/HFN and building relationship of the main couple, in a romance novel (even a filthy, smutty one). The romance arc is always the A plot. A shitty ex can work as a side plot, but my experience is that spending a great deal of story time on the emotional dynamic between one of the main characters and a side character doesn't work well.
Hope that helps!
I found http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html and https://www.amazon.com/2k-10k-Writing-Faster-Better-ebook/dp/B009NKXAWS
Part of the block I'm facing is I actually don't know what happens next in the story. I.E. I saw a few scenes and then nothing. So there isn't anything to jot down on the pads, because I don't know what happens next and everything that I'm pitching feels wrong - at least for this character.
I think this may be telling me I need to outline/storyboard what I'm doing so that I don't get lost as easily?
He wrote a book that goes into more detail. He writes a story about someone teaching the snowflake method, using the snowflake method.
A couple of other books I suggest:
Creating Character Arcs by K. M. Wellard.
Sizzling Story Outlines by D'Costa.
With the exception of my first two books (which each were written over sequential one month periods), my writing output has pretty much been even across 13 year - right around 1,500 - 2,000 words a day. The reason those first two books came out so quickly is the story had been building for her a decade, and when I decided to write it, the damn broke and I barely ate or slipped while I purged them from my brain.
That pace is more than good for most writers (and also the most common word count of those who write daily. Now that said, Rachel Aaron, is a writer who is quite talented and she wrote a book called 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. I've not read it because I have no desire to increase my writing to that pace, but, knowing her, I think there is probably some good stuff in there.
"I guess I need to figure out just how seksi-time I'm going to make my romance novels. Are erotic romances where it's at? Or should I aim for straight up romance (i.e. less graphic seksi times, less seksi times in general)?"
Romance is wide-open (er, so to speak) in terms of how sexy you make it, but there's something that many erotic authors discover when they start writing romance: romance readers have their own expectations, and it's important to meet those expectations when you write romance. Pick up a copy of -- at least -- Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes. (And there are a lot of resources about romance floating around the Net.) Romance readers are more interested in the developing relationship between well-written characters -- the chase -- than the capture: "seksi times". Doesn't mean that erotic is right out the door: you just have to make it part of the story rather than the whole story.
Update (for my own satisfaction):
Hit 3.4K on the first few scenes of a possible romance novel. I also completed a first draft of an outline using Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes, which I am sure I saw recommended somwhere here on EA and it was a massive help.
> I initially set out with a goal of 1 release per year, but I was feeling pressure to deliver more than that based on indie trends.
Libbie Hawker's book, Take Off Your Pants shaved a bit of time off my writing, even though I mentally do most of what she talks about in the book. I think it's worth reading. Even if you never want to work with an outline, by thinking about her various questions in the book, your pantsing will even improve.
I find contemporary books take me a lot less time to write than either historical or fantasyland. Even contemporary fantasyland takes about the same as just regular contemporary. So you can't compare yourself to people outside of your subgenre, either, because that often doesn't work.
At the same time, it's important to accept - as best as you can - that your progression will be slower because you aren't writing as fast as others. Some authors want to be making as much money as someone with twenty books and an established fanbase right at book 1, and get very frustrated they aren't getting this immediately. It usually doesn't work out like that, so it's all about head down and do the work as best as you can.
In Libbie Hawker's Take of your Pants this is called an Ally. She in turn based her Terminology on that used in The Anatomy of Story by John Truby. I don't know weather or not this term has seen any wider use than that.