Today I would like to welcome back to the blog author Cassandra Carr. Cassandra is currently on tour for her book Collision and has stopped by to chat. Before I give the floor to Cassandra lets get to know her a bit.
So who am I? I've been writing my whole life, but only decided to pursue writing as a career in the past couple of years. I'm lucky to have an incredibly supportive husband named Inspiration who brings home the bacon so I can stay home and fry it (and eat it all before he's able to fight through the rush hour traffic - I'm mean that way, but like I always say, don't get between a woman and her bacon).I live in Western New York with Inspiration and our young daughter, Too Cute for Words. I'm a major hockey fan, which explains why many of my heroes are hockey players. If you haven't looked at the guys playing the sport today, search for some images. You won't be disappointed.
I'm a member of the leading professional association for romance novelists, Romance Writers of America, and also serve as President of my local chapter, newsletter editor for Passionate Ink, and am a member of ESPAN. I've met so many interesting people through these organizations and highly recommend them to any aspiring writer!
As you can see, my life is pretty busy, but I try to take as much time as I can to write. And re-write. And re-write. It's a never-ending, vicious circle, and I love it!
Places to find Cassandra:
Demystifying the Series
I recently book 3 in my Buckin' Bull Riders series, Momentum, to Ellora's Cave. Already this year EC has released books 1 and 2, Impact and Collision, and will most likely release book 4, Velocity, around Thanksgiving. There will be a fifth book, tentatively titled Inertia. After that? Who knows?
Before I was published I always wondered how a series came to be. Did it depend on sales? What the author wanted to write? What the publisher was looking for at the time? Something else I couldn't even fathom?
So I thought I would demystify the process of building a series, at least from my perspective. I write two different series (besides the Buckin' Bull Riders, I also write the Buffalo Intimidators series of hockey menage books) for two different publishers, Ellora's Cave and Siren Publishing. They have somewhat different parameters around the creation of series books, but have a lot of commonalities as well.
Ellora's Cave does not put the series name on the book covers until at least the third book, whereas Siren will add it from the first book forward. Ellora's Cave does not consider your series official until you sell that third book to them. You can have a series name, etc, but it won't appear on your books or the EC website until the third book comes out. Because of this, most authors choose to never have their series title included on their book cover. Siren doesn't have similar stipulations about required numbers of books in a series.
I haven't really talked to Siren about the number of books I plan in the Buffalo Intimidators series, and honestly I'm not sure how many books I will write. That depends on what else is going on in my writing life and how my other books are selling compared to that series. If I sell to a NY publisher and then also find my sales with my other publishers are better than they are with Siren I might not write many more books in the Buffalo Intimidators. Conversely, if the books are still selling well I could potentially write lots of books in that series. After all, there are 23 men on an NHL roster! Siren seems to be happy with my sales and has not said they will discontinue my series because of poor sales, so that's good.
My EC editor, Grace Bradley, and I have discussed books 4 and 5 in that series and she gave me the thumbs up on my concepts for both. I'm a pantser, so a concept is about the best I can give her at this point. If those sell well I may do a sixth book, but I might also end at five since I want to do a spin-off series with the brothers of my book 1 heroine. Maybe EC allows their authors to do more than one series at a time, but I'd prefer to focus on one, so I want the Buckin' Bull Riders series finished before I release the first of the brothers' series.
Does this information help you understand the process a little better, at least from the point of view of these two particular publishers? I hope so! Feel free to ask questions in the comments if something doesn't make sense. I'll be popping in and out all day to answer them!
Brady is at the top of his profession. He’s living the good life, and has no idea anything is missing until the cool Leah comes along. He sees something in her that hints at an underlying fire, and sets out to prove her nickname wrong. In the midst of their steamy affair, he falls hard. Blindsided by the potent combination of Leah’s beauty and vulnerability, Brady is determined to melt “The Ice Queen’s” heart.
Places to Purchase:
Thanks for having me here today! I'll be popping in and out to answer comments, so feel free to ask questions.
ReplyDeleteCool post. Thanks for sharing, Cassandra.
ReplyDelete