Word Wenches

Rebranding AKA New Covers and Titles for Old Books

Nicola here. Today I’m talking about re-branding in the form of book covers and titles.  The reason: My publisher and I decided to give The Woman in the Lake a new cover and a new title for the UK e-book and I thought it might be interesting to explore why this happened. I hope this will appeal to readers who might wonder why books are sometimes rebranded, and to authors who may face the same dilemmas themselves. It’s a look behind the scenes – and a very honest one – into what happened with The Woman in the Lake.

TWITL as I call it, was published simultaneously in the UK and North America in March 2019. It’s my third “timeslip” novel, a term which in itself can cause problems for an author trying to interest an agent or publisher in a book. Some people haven’t heard of timeslip, others ask what the differences are between timeslip and time travel, some people call the books dual or multiple time stories… There can be some identity issues!

Of shopping centers and chocolate

Anne here. A few weeks ago I visited Sydney, and spent a few hours wandering through the Queen Victoria Building (known to Sydneysiders as the QVB.)

Situated in the heart of Sydney, it's a large ornate Victorian-era building, filled with upmarket shops and cafes and boutique stores of various kinds — and was one of the earliest "trading halls" of its kind, certainly in Australia.

Building commenced in 1893 as a government project, and, as there was a depression at the time, there was a deliberate choice to make the building grand and ornate — partly to express confidence in the future, and partly to employ large numbers of unemployed craftsmen and workers — stonemasons, plasterers, tilers, stained glass artists, metal workers and many more.

You can see from my photos how elaborate and heavily decorated it is, in the best Victorian-era fashion, with decorative tilework, intricate stone carving, elaborate plaster work, great copper domes, stained glass windows and fanciful wrought iron. It took four and a half years to construct and was opened with great ceremony in 1898 and was named The Queen Victoria Market Buildings in commemoration of her Diamond Jubilee. See the invitation to the opening and grand ball below.

An Edith Layton Christmas Collection!

By Mary Jo

Just in time for the holidays! It’s a Wonderful Regency Christmas , a collection of six Christmas stories by the late and much missed Word Wench, Edith Layton, has just been released. 

Edith wrote many and varied wonderful stories, but she had a special gift for Christmas novellas.  For the first time, these six novellas are available in one volume.  The stories have been out of print for years, so this is a special treat for Layton Lovers and else who loves a warm, romantic holiday tale.

This collection includes the following stories:

The Duke’s Progress

It’s a Wonderful Christmas

The Gingerbread Man

The Last Gift

The Amiable Miser

Dogstar

I haven’t read Dogstar yet, but since Edith was a whole-hearted dog lover, I expect something really special! 

I just reread the first story, The Duke's Progress, and it was as lovely as when I first read it on the initial release.  A lonely and depressed duke, a winsome little boy, and the perfect woman to take dashing through the snow on a sleigh!  What more can a sentimental lover of Christmas stories want?

It's available as an ebook for the first time and in paperback almost everywhere books are sold. Edith's daughter Susie Felber says fans have been asking for this for years, and she's delighted to publish the first Layton Christmas collection is here--so we readers can be delighted as well! 

Mary Jo

PS:  A surprise bonus!  Susie Felber will give an e-book of IT'S A WONDERFUL REGENCY CHRISTMAS to one person who comments between now and Sunday midnight.  Good luck!

A Royally Sweet Secret!

Andrea here, As most of you know, I love doing research. For me it’s endlessly interesting—and at times exciting, especially when I discover something new about something I’ve delved into before. (That’s truly one of the pleasures of history—the more you think you know, the more you find hidden surprises!)

And given the season, this sweet discovery is particularly fun. Chocolate and the holidays—really, how perfect is that! The royal palaces of London are some of my favorite places, and I happened to be doing some additional research on Kensington Palace and Kew Palaces for the Wrexford & Sloane mystery I’m currently writing . . .when lo and behold, a tantalizing little sidebar popped up regarding Hampton Court Palace. Given that it involved chocolate, how could I resist! So join me in enjoying this little nibble of history.

 

Susanna's TBR

Susanna here, and once again, I didn’t have anything to contribute to this month’s What We’re Reading post. That’s because I’m deep in the middle of writing a book, and I don’t read much fiction at all when I’m writing—partly because I’m so buried in nonfiction research reading I don’t have a lot of free time left, and partly because I learned long ago that, if a writer has a strongly individual storytelling voice, it will start to creep into and influence mine if I read while I’m working.

Case in point: way, way back in the day, when we were on our honeymoon (which was actually also a research trip for my novel Season of Storms only he didn’t entirely know about that), my husband brought along a copy of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to read on the train. I wasn’t actively writing the novel then, but I did have my ever-present notebook with me, in which I jot down things that I observe and lines of dialogue and bits of scenes. I started thumbing through the Steinbeck, too.

What We're Reading for November

Howdy folks. Joanna here.
Hope all those who celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday had a good one.

It's been a good month for reading, it being fall weather and brisk enough that the dog doesn't beg for a walk so much.

 

Andrea brings us a YA and a biography:

It was a strange reading month. I started and didn’t finish a couple of books, which is very rare for me. But they just didn’t catch my fancy. However, having enjoyed the Ron Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton so much, I snatched up Washington: A Life,  his bio on George Washington, when it recently appeared on BookBub. (It won the Pulitzer Prize some years back) I’m only about a quarter of the way through it, but am really enjoying it.

 

Chernow has a wonderful knack of making his subjects come so alive. Washington’s early life is fascinating, and he comes across as a very different character from the solemn, stately president that the history books present. We see a full range of his humanity—he was a man of passions and pragmatism—and really paints a viid portrait of his many nuances. I’m very much looking forward to glomming through the rest of it in next little while.

I love Leigh Bardugo’s YAs, so I was also eagerly waiting the release of her first adult novel, Ninth House. I glommed through it, but have to confess that it wasn’t an easy read. The plotting and character development were ragged in places, and it was VERY dark and gritty—enough so, that I paused in a few places wondering whether I could continue. It didn’t have the strong band of misfit friends that she created so beautifully in the YAs, so the relationship of protagonists seemed a little disjointed.

 

BUT, as as the blurb says, it’s a tale of power, privilege, dark magic, and murder set among the Ivy League elite . . . and glimmers of Bardugo’s magical writing flickered enough in places, that I stuck with it. And as the backstory of the main character—a deeply damaged freshman young woman who suddenly finds herself trying to keep evil magic from running amuck when her senior mentor disappears—is slowly revealed, the story really begins to come together, and the bonding begins to work.

 

It’s a challenging read, so be forewarned. But I ended up liking in spite of the problems I found. It’s clearly the start of the series, and I’m hooked enough on the characters and the quest that I’ll definitely get the second book. (In the last chapter of this book, she and her friends have discovered that her mentor isn't dead, but has been swallowed by a demon . . . so the last line of this book is hard to resist. “So, who’s ready to go to Hell?”

 

Nicola offers us a fine mix:

I’ve been mixing romance and crime in my reading this month. I started with My Sister the Serial Killer, which was recommended here last month. The title in itself is enough to rouse the curiosity! It’s about Korede, whose gorgeous sister Ayoola is the serial killer of the title. Korede has been covering up for and tidying up after Ayoola for years but she’s about to reach breaking point when her sister takes a shine to the man Korede is in love with… A lot of the reviews describe this book as hilarious.

I didn’t actually find it very funny because it was pretty dark, but I did find it compulsive and the writing was very, very good. I always feel it’s hard to say I enjoyed a book like this because I found it disturbing but it was a very interesting reading experience.

Next up was The Word is Murder by Antony Horowitz. I really enjoyed the last book of his I read, The Magpie Murders, and this was just as good. It’s a modern take on the old-fashioned murder mystery, full of red herrings, misdirection, a fascinating cast of characters and a maverick detective.

Romance was provided by a timeslip novel by Melinda Hammond, called Casting Samson. Linda is an award-winning author of Regency romance (she also writes under the name Sarah Mallory) but I’ve read and enjoyed her timeslip writing before (Moonshadows) so I was really looking forward to Casting Samson.

The two time periods are contemporary and the era of the Crusades and the Knights Templar, which was a fascinating and unusual period of history to read about. The historical and modern days sections were woven together beautifully and there were two very satisfying love stories in the contemporary story. There was also a hilarious scene at a village fete which had me laughing aloud. Anyone who enjoys romances set in English villages should like this – it has a lovely and vivid cast of characters, three very attractive heroes, history and mystery! Casting Samson was previously published by HQ Digital and Melinda will be republishing it very soon – watch this space! In the meantime, here’s the link to Moonshadows.

 

Pat's here with a New York City story:

Elizabeth Gilbert is a fabulous writer who can draw the reader in with her effortless prose alone. The reviews of City of Girls caught  my interest with promises of New York City theater history in the 1940s. The opening chapter was a bit of a literary conceit, but I tolerated that. It gave the author the opportunity to write a chatty monologue, presumably to some woman she’d only met once, explaining how the narrator's relationship with the unknown woman’s father. That sounded promising.

I knew it wasn’t romance and the narrator wouldn’t end up with the father, but I was happy to go along for the ride—until midbook when the narcissistic shallow protagonist had yet to mention said gentleman but talked only of herself.

There were a lot of entertaining characters along the way, and I kept waiting for the story to coalesce into a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, I got lots of enchanting vignettes of 1940s New York that never went anywhere. So I skipped to the end, and the father showed up maybe forty pages from the end. I’ll leave it to you whether he was worth the effort. So if you don’t mind just going along for the ride with no destination in mind, read this for the history and the prose.

Anne returns to a favorite author and brings us someone new. Anne says:

 

I've recommended Juliet Marillier's novels before in this column, and her latest, The Harp of Kings, was a standout read for me this month. Juliet Marillier writes Celtic history with elements of fantasy and magic. In The Harp of Kings eighteen-year-old Liobhan and her brother Brocc are musicians training to join an elite warrior band. When they are recruited for a secret mission to find and retrieve an ancient harp, vital to the coronation of a king—and the stability of a kingdom—they are challenged by both men and magic. A wonderful novel, highly recommended.

 

My other recommendation is Ann Swinfen — The Bookseller's Tale. Recommended to me by a friend, this is a medieval mystery set in the Oxford of 1353. The small university town is still trying to recover from the aftermath of The Great Plague, several years before. When maker of books, bookseller and scrivener, Nicholas Elyot, finds the body of a student known to him, murdered and tossed into the river, he becomes involved in a search for answers, answers that are closely connected to the book trade.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Apart from the story, plot and characters -- all of which were intelligent and engaging -- I learned a lot about this time period and place that I hadn't known. The minute I finished The Bookseller's Tale, I bought the next in the series, The Novice's Tale and gobbled it down. I've since finished the series. Best read in order.

 

 

Mary Jo brings me cats, which is always a delight.

 

Murder at the Cat Show by Marian Babson

I've been in the mood for light reading, and when I saw a cozy mystery by Marian Babson on BookBub, I snapped it up because I read and enjoyed it years ago.  While I remember the general plot, I'd forgotten most of the details, so I enjoyed it all over again.  The story is narrated by Doug Perkins, who runs a small public relations firm with his friend Gerry Tate.  They’re hired to publicize a London cat show.  

Doug has no opinions about cats one way or the other, but he soon gets sucked into discovering celebrity working cat and their doting owners. There's a murder, Doug gets enslaved by a peremptory young Siamese, and much fun is had all around. <G>  Very enjoyable, especially if you like cats. 

A Holiday by Gaslight by Mimi Matthews

This is an enjoyable Victorian Christmas novella, a nice light bite at a busy season. As of this writing, it's 99 cents, though I don't know how long that will last.  Here's the blurb:

Sophie Appersett is quite willing to marry outside of her class to ensure the survival of her family. But the darkly handsome Mr. Edward Sharpe is no run-of-the-mill London merchant. He's grim and silent. A man of little emotion--or perhaps no emotion at all. After two months of courtship, she's ready to put an end to things.

 But severing ties with her taciturn suitor isn't as straightforward as Sophie envisioned. Her parents are outraged. And then there's Charles Darwin, Prince Albert, and that dratted gaslight. What's a girl to do except invite Mr. Sharpe to Appersett House for Christmas and give him one last chance to win her? Only this time there'll be no false formality. This time they'll get to know each other for who they really are!

 

And me, I'll round out the month of November with a paranormal.

I don't read a lot of story collections, but I picked up a couple in November, doing the mind-broadening thing.

One struck me in particular. It's Small Magics by the writing team of Ilona Andrews. This is five or six stories set in the her fictive universe. You got yer magic, yer warrior women,yer  shape shifters, post-Apocalypse world, folks fighting with swords and adventure in general. They give us a couple YA stories and a couple love stories. All of them are lovely.

Can I call the stories warm and funny when they’re full of monsters and bloodshed?

Anyway, I enjoyed this lot and it might be just what you need if you don’t have time to sit down and concentrate for a long stretch.

 

So. what are you reading lately that you think other folks might like hearing about?

 

 

Drawing Writing Inspiration from Family History with Elizabeth St.John

Nicola here. Today I welcome historical author Elizabeth St.John to the Word Wenches. I first met Elizabeth at the Historical Novel Conference in Oxford a few years ago. I confess to stalking her a little (in a completely non-sinister way!) because I knew she had a family connection to Lydiard Park, the glorious 18^th century stately home in Swindon near where I live, and I was desperate to meet her and chat about Lydiard and its history. It’s been a huge pleasure to get to know Elizabeth and discover her writing. Her books are set in the 17^th century, in an intensely turbulent period of English history, and they are intricate, immersive and beautifully-written. I’ve just started reading Written In Their Stars and I am hooked. Elizabeth evokes a rich historical world that draws you in from the very start of the book. Here she is to tell us more about her writing.

Elizabeth, welcome to the Word Wench Blog! Please tell us about your personal connection to the family you are writing about.

The St.John family in The Lydiard Chronicles share a common great-grandmother with me: Margaret Beauchamp, who was also grandmother to Henry VII. The seventeenth century family thought she was a very useful ancestor to increase their standing in society, and didn’t hesitate to use their “royal connection” to further their position. Sir John St.John, the First Baronet, was particularly enthralled, and thus commissioned the Polyptych in 1615, which stands in St. Mary’s Church at Lydiard Park. It’s an extraordinary monument, full of beautiful portraits which inspired my work—plus a gorgeous family tree, complete with Margaret at the top.

The HNSA Conference

A few weeks ago I attended the HNSA Conference — (HNSA = Historical Novel Society of Australasia) in Sydney. It was quite different from Romance Writers' conferences, which tend to be mostly about the craft of writing and business and publishing. The HNSA Conference was more about ideas — issues to do with research, fine lines to walk when writing about real people's lives, research challenges across eras, truth and lies in crime fiction, historical fiction screenwriting, sources of inspiration, and much more. You can link to the full program from here.

I loved the interview with Jackie French, a wonderfully prolific Australian author, who writes for children and adults and everyone in between, and whose historical novels I recommended on Word Wenches earlier this year. I was lucky enough to meet her in the green room, and she was as warm and charming as her books. She gave a marvelous speech about the importance of writing and representing people and telling the truth, and at the end I wanted to stand up and cheer. I restrained myself and clapped really hard instead. Her website is here.

It was both refreshing and inspiring, listening to people talk about historical writing from such varied points of view. As well, so many of the speakers and panelists were natural storytellers, and were so interesting I wanted to hear more, and so of course, bought their books. I learned things about history — mostly Australian history, but also South African and NZ and other times and places — that I knew very little about.

Book Winner!

Congratulations to Maryellen, who just won an e-copy of Susan King's LAIRD OF TWILIGHT! 

Thanks for being a Word Wenches reader, Maryellen. Hope you enjoy the book! 

If you'd like a chance to win a book from one of the Word Wenches, be sure to check our blog regularly and leave comments -- we often give away books, and you never know when it might be your lucky day!  

 

The Boy Inside The Man

Susanna here.

Eight years ago, when I was writing The Firebird, I did something I’d never done in a novel before.

One of my readers, Lee Ann Ray, had written to me asking whether Robbie McMorran—an eight year old boy in The Shadowy Horses—would ever get his own story. At the time, I’d thought to myself, “But he’s only eight (or, as he would have corrected me, eight and three quarters)—too young for a book of his own.” Then I realized that he had been eight and three quarters way back when I’d written that book in the mid-1990s, which meant that in 2011 he would have been in his mid-twenties—and even older by the time I wrote a new book and it actually got published.

The more I thought about it, the more I could see how Robbie’s gift of second sight could work to bridge the past and present in the story threads that were developing for what would be The Firebird.

So I gave him a try as the modern day hero of that book.