Pic: @mrs_moa_book_hub I spent two days this last weekend at the Romance Writers of New Zealand conference, 'Kiss and Tell,' and had a marvellous, marvellous time. It was five years since the last conference I went to in Wellington. Five years!! This time I missed the Friday workshop but was there for Day One and Day Two. So here is a bit of a round up on just a couple of talks. Speaker T.L. Swan (Tee). I'd never heard of Tee before but the woman is quite something. Massive seller, who also started up her own publishing company over in Australia. Main points I learnt from her talks: Keep changing covers and blurbs if you need to. She changed covers on one of her series literally dozens of times before they started selling. Nothing had changed about the books at all but just the covers. You don't give up, you just keep pushing, pushing, pushing until you find your readers. Interestingly, she doesn't read romance fiction at all. I remember ages ago, another top selle...
THESE MAGIC MOMENTS is now WIDE so you can buy it from Kobo, Apple, Barnes and Noble, and more, as well as Amazon. There's a bit of a story behind this book. Back in the Covid years, I really wanted something 'old school' to read, just a simple romance, a true comfort read. I bought a few, including an omnibus of Betty Neels romances and by the time I'd finished I thought, I want to have a go at this style of story. Write something that is just a sweet, heartwarming, feel-good read. So I wrote it, I self published it under a new name "Maddie Summers" in case it bombed and everyone hated it. Fortunately everyone did not hate it, lol, and I ended up writing two more stories set in Bluebell Road. The good news I've already written a third of the fourth one and the plan is to publish it in time for Christmas this year!