Best products from r/romanceauthors

Very, very soon. Readers won't wait around these days - they are so impatient, to the detriment of a lot of good plots and books, frankly - and the Amazon LookInside will slay you if your first paragraph doesn't grab them by the (lady)balls.

However, there are some "cheats" available:

• start your book with a preview of a sexy scene, eg in Italics, acting as your front matter. Just as many books have in their inside covers, but put at underneath Chapter 1 (I did this with Tempting Her Teacher)
  
• have the book start with the heroine fantasising about a sexy guy (who may merely look like the hero when she meets him, or it may be that's she's seen the hero from a distance and is fantasising about a future encounter - DON'T have fantasy man blond and hero dark. There needs to be a link - romance readers adore the idea of predestination or "fate")
  
• if you're doing a "reunion romance" - never my cup of tea, but some readers (regretful divorcées?) adore them, you can start with a memory or dream of the relationship before it originally soured, or of their very first memory back then
  
• actual flashback. It works a little differently to the "preview" section as it's more integrated into the chapter and book flow, and you won't be repeating it verbatim later on
  

I love http://www.bryndonovan.com/ I have Master Lists For Writers out on KU at the moment and I'm going to buy it in print.



• lists of phrases for describing facial expressions, body language, gestures, physical appearance, and emotions • 175 master plot ideas, including romance, high-stakes, family, and workplace stories • lists of words for writing action scenes and love scenes • inspiration for figuring out character traits and quirks, backstories, occupations, motivations, and goals • lists for describing settings and writing dialogue • lists of good character names for contemporary stories...plus medieval England, Regency England, Wild West, and WWII settings • and more!

You could PM your name to me, if you want. (Hover over my name, click "Send Message"). We'll just move to private messages instead.

If you want to see how a great email funnel setup looks, I'd pick up and read Reader Magnets, by Nick Stephenson. He's got tons of info, and that's how I structured my setup.

Also, yes, signing up for the competition's newsletters is a great way to see what's working. That should give you a good idea of how they're structured, how much info is included, how often they send emails, and so on.

I think this comes down to marketing more than anything. "Romance reader" is such a wide category that you can probably find an audience for anything so it's a case of making sure the right audience is finding your book. So you need to focus on how you present it, look at other authors writing books similar to yours and see what covers they use, how their blurbs read. For example, look at the branding of The Avery Shaw Experiment (YA contemp rom) and it's contemporaries (no reason for choosing Avery Shaw, I just read it recently and it sounds like yours is a similar type book?).

As yours is a YA romance I don't think finding the right audience is going to be that much of a problem. My personal expectations for YA romance are that there's not going to be much sex in the genre (admittedly I don't read a lot of YA rom, but that's my perception for what it's worth). Hope that helps!

I feel like this group is a little kinder than some, but I hope I'm not wrong! Eeek. Okay...here goes.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MXXVQKM

New historical romance on pre-release. Check it out wherehttps://www.amazon.com/I-Will-Follow-Eternity-Beyond-ebook/dp/B01N57P10B/