Aspen Mountain Press Launches New Aurora Regency Imprint!

Aspen Mountain Press will launch its new Aurora Regency imprint on July 21, 2010!


Aurora Regency at Aspen Mountain Press is a line devoted to Regency romance. Traditional Regency romances, as exemplified by Georgette Heyer’s work, are first and foremost historical fiction about a very specific (and short) era. So what are we looking for? Hopefully, this will answer any questions you might have about Aurora Regency’s guidelines.

1) We expect historical accuracy. This includes language, clothing, customs, etiquette, events and places. Your book should have rich detail, the appropriate language and slang and an understanding of life in Regency England or, if set outside of England, according to the customs of the country. That includes behavior appropriate to a character’s life, position and social situation. (For example: divorce was not an option in Regency England so no new divorcées gallivanting at Almack’s in competition with the Season’s loveliest debutantes.) Historical accuracy will be a consideration in the acceptance of manuscripts and an integral part of the editing process. If your manuscript has several historical errors, you may be asked to revise and resubmit.

2) We hope for novel plotlines or exciting new twists on old themes. We are open to paranormal or Gothic themes as long as these elements do not compromise the Regency romance genre. So if your impoverished but well-born governess falls in love with the lord of the manor that’s fine. Just make it interesting.

3) We expect romance—oh, loads of it! Every kind of hero is fair game in a Regency romance and our heroines should be head over heels in love with them. But remember—this is a Regency romance. Spice is okay; jalapeno salsa is not. In an era were even the smallest infractions would lead to social ruin, well brought up young heroines were virgins on the wedding night. {However, if your Regency is about a member of the demimonde (a courtesan) and is erotic in nature, please indicate this in your query letter.} And, naturally, a HEA is the conclusion of choice.

4) Great dialogue. In the Regency romance, conversation is well-crafted and engaging. Half of the process of falling in love occurs when the hero and heroine engage in a battle of wits. Repartee is an art form; conversation is seduction. Anachronistic sayings or language are strongly discouraged.

5) Society. Society rules these characters’ lives. The Season is capitalized for a reason. As Jane Austen said in Pride and Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Society dictates that universal truth, and in a Regency romance Society is where the bridal hunt is carried out. It can be London or Bath or Brighton or even a simple country parsonage involved in county society—but society (either capitalized or not) is as big a character as any human being.

6) Fun. Above all, Regency romances are fun—both to read and to write. The more adventures your madcap heroine has, the better. Paranormal Regencies are acceptable as are the more intricate Regency murder mysteries. Even the darker side of the Regency world is fun.

So, do you think your Regency romance fits the bill? Then submit to us! The Aurora Regency line is published by Aspen Mountain Press, a royalty-paying e-publishing company. We do not charge fees for set up or charge for editing your story once it has been accepted for publication. Our contracts request rights to the contracted work, including digital and print formats as we will provide some of our titles in print later this year.

Aurora is looking for well-researched Regency romances between 35,000 and 70,000 words, although we will bend on the upper word limit if the story merits it. Please submit exactly and only the following if you wish your manuscript to receive serious consideration:

A query letter in the body of an email with:

Your legal name, pseudonym if applicable and contact email.

Working Title

Manuscript Length

General story description in two paragraphs

Writing Credentials

Include the first chapter (or first twenty pages, whichever is shorter) embedded in the body of the email. We will not open attachments. If we like what we see, we will request the rest of the manuscript. If this is a simultaneous submission, please inform us of this in your query letter. We will consider only COMPLETED manuscripts. Aspen Mountain Press does not accept proposals from writers unknown to us. Aurora Regency at Aspen Mountain Press will open for submissions on February 15, 2010. Please send all questions and submissions to AuroraRegency@gmail.com. We accept ONLY e-submissions. Initial response times are anticipated to be no longer than 2 weeks.

Dadburnit!

Okay, so I'm currently trying to compile a list of review site options for Aspen Mountain Press.  Compiling the romance/erotica list was easy.  What's NOT so easy is finding genre fiction review sites.  Oh sure--there are the big, sparkly fantasy reviewers with all the bells and whistles on their sites--like fantasy name generators...are you serious?--but many of them have some variation of the following line:

We only accept commerically published authors.

Okay, let's stop and analyze that statement.  Many of these review sites mean "We only want to review books that are published by the big fantasy houses like Dell or Tor." I'm sure their purpose is to keep self-published authors and those with vanity presses (like the one who shall not be named who is scamming my mother-in-law despite my repeated pleas for her to run as fast as she can) from swamping their inboxes with low-quality stories and badly refurbished fan fic.  Yeah. I get it. I'm down with that. I don't blame you.

But what about the small, independent publishers?  What about e-publishers?  What happens to them?

Some of the large romance review sites, like Love Romances and More or Night Owls Reviews saw the need for e-book review sites and opened their doors to a flood of submissions. That's great and vastly appreciated, but not what I'm looking for.  I'm looking for a genre specific site for fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery ebooks.

It's frustrating.

What's even MORE frustrating about it is that I'm sitting here thinking to myself, "Well,heck I'd do it if I didn't already have too much time allotted to writing/editing/worldbuilding/review submitting/moving/cat care/husband care/daughter dilemma dealing/house cleaning/house restoring/snow shoveling/cooking/sleeping/lovemaking/bathing/eating/et cetera as it is!"  Surely there's someone who'll do this, right?  Right?

Not yet. I'm moving through a humongous list of alleged genre reviewers and I still keep running into a definite 'we don't read e-books' mentality.  I'm going to keep looking.  Maybe I'll find one. I'm searching in the "L's" at the moment and it is 3:11 pm on 1/6/10.  Let's see how long it takes.

4:04 pm. -- I'm starting to think that this many bored housewives who have review blogs have lucked into a good thing.  Maybe I'll have time to review books too...just in case I had a bookshelf that was needing filled.  Good grief--some of these sites!  But, alas, even bored housewives have e-book prejudices.  The search goes on...and I'm only in the N's.

4:29 -- Well, that's a new one. Never heard of someone refusing to review e-books because of DRMs. Nah...don't need to be hardballed just to get a book reviewed.  Still looking.

4:54 -- I'm finding some sites, but ones that either don't seem appropriate (ie--adolescent run) or are too obviously in the give-me-free-books-scam. I have now noted 2--that's right TWO--sites in between the letters A and R that might be outlets for submission.

And success comes in the unlikeliest of places...and well into the S's I might add. Hurray. Someone to pester.

So why the prejudice? With the latest e-readers garnering favorable reviews and the quality of e-books going up, what's the problem? My best guess is that reviewers are inundated by self-published or vanity-published authors and, to be quite frank, there have been some e-publishers (now mostly defunct) who have been guilty to rushing not-quite-ready-for-any-time books to the e-reading public. There are some really good stories out there in e-pubbed genre fiction and not all of it is erotic!

Somehow, some way I will push my foot into the door of these sparkly bastions of reviewing. Either that or I'll create a nom de plume and start my own site.  Why not? There's no such thing as too many books, right?

Right?