Clare Connelly turns up the heat!

This is Episode 9 of Write with Love.

Today we turn up the heat with Clare Connelly, indie and traditionally published author of steamy romance, who only takes 2 weeks to write a first draft!
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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            G’day, I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today I’m talking to hybrid author Clare Connelly. Welcome to the show, Clare.

Clare Connelly:             Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:            No worries. You’re a very busy lady these days, aren’t you?

Clare Connelly:             I am. I am very busy, but in the best possible way.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Can you just tell us a little bit about your journey to publication?

Clare Connelly:             Sure. I have been writing since forever. I wrote my first full manuscript at 15 and submitted it to Mills & Boon, which is who I’ve always wanted to write for and who I’ve always loved reading. It was rejected, but I continued to write. I wrote a lot of blogs, even when I was in high school when the internet had just become a thing, which makes me sound very old, but it was this great opportunity to write about what you wanted and put it out there, and I loved it, and then we lived overseas, and I continued to write even when I was working full-time, but it wasn’t until I was home with my two little guys that I really wrote again in earnest with the hopes of turning it into a career, and when I say that, they didn’t feel like realistic hopes. It felt like a very, very faraway maybe sort of thing.

Clare Connelly:             Again, I started submitting to Mills & Boon, and had a few rejections from them, which were very disheartening, but the fact that it took six months to get your rejection letter, I was already another book down the track by the time I got it, so I was invested in something else and it wasn’t horrifying as it might otherwise have been. At some point, when my daughter was nearly a year old and I was about to go, or thinking about going back to work and to a job that I really loved, my sister and my husband said to me, “Oh, you know, you really should self-publish,” and again, that was in 2014, where self-publishing had been around for a while, but it was maybe at its zenith, I would say, and I self-published. I did it, and I really didn’t think it through because I just knew that I’d written this book, so I was very … Initially I used an Amazon cover creator and an Amazon image. We were single income with two kids, and this was my hobby, so I didn’t wanna put any money into it because it felt almost like a vanity project, and so I did nothing. I didn’t even have a Facebook page for the first three months.

Clare Connelly:             I did nothing to prelaunch myself, I just published, and then the thing with Amazon is you can track. You would know this, but to any of your listeners who don’t, you can actually track your sales pretty much in realtime, so you just can refresh that graph all day long, and you can see little blips going, and about 10 minutes after it went live, I sold my first book, and I was watching Law & Order SVU and I kept watching little dots go, and it was … You know, I wasn’t selling huge amounts, but within that first week I was probably selling 20 to 30 copies a day, which to me was mind-blowing because I’d written it with no expectation of that, and yeah, so that launched me into an indie career, which was incredible and fulfilling, but I continued to submit to Mills & Boon because that was my long-held dream.

Clare Connelly:             It was in 2016 at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference here in Adelaide, where I live. It was right around the corner from my house. I wasn’t actually a member of RWA at the time, but I signed up so I could go to the conference, and I pitched to Jo Grant, because I knew who Jo Grant was, and I thought, “Right, the opportunity … ” Oh, for anyone not listening, I think her title is something … I think she’s Executive Head of Acquisitions, or Head of Editorial UK, or something huge, and she used to work as a Presents editor, I think for lots of great Harlequin Presents writers. Anyway, I pitched to her, and six weeks later I had a two book contract with Mills & Boon. Yay.

Sarah Williams:            Oh my gosh, and of course it was at the Adelaide conference that I first met you, at the newbies dinner.

Clare Connelly:             Right.

Sarah Williams:            So yeah, your career, you have gone traditional now, you’ve got your deal with Harlequin, and I’ve gone the other way, but that’s exciting.

Clare Connelly:             I have, and because as I say, writing for Mills & Boon has always been my dream. Seriously for more than half my life it’s been what I’ve wanted, and I would have to say it’s one of those rare, beautiful occasions where the dream has excelled my expectations. It’s been everything I’d hoped and so much more. It’s been utterly an incredible experience in every way, but I’m still … I’ve got my toe in my indie stuff. I’ve slowed down how many indie books I can release in a year, but I’m still very keen to keep connecting with those readers of mine who have been with me from the beginning and who read digital only, and yeah, and [inaudible 00:05:04] is a big thing, too.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. With Harlequin, you’re doing the Dare line, isn’t it? So that’s the, quote, “steamy” or “erotic” side. Do you wanna tell us some more about that?

Clare Connelly:             Yeah. Look, they are. They’re super steamy, very sexy, but they are first and foremost Mills & Boon romances, so they are a love story, and I say that to everyone, that yes, they’re quite hot, but they’re not erotica, they’re romance erotica, and there is a distinction there. You can come into these books expecting everything you love about Mills & Boon, so that beautiful, escapist romance, high fantasy, tension, angst, well-written, tightly-edited, with a happily ever after, but just a lot more sexiness, and graphic sexiness, and a few swear words, too, which is quite … that’s a real 21st century reader thing, but as long as it’s true to real life I think that readers are quite enjoying that.

Sarah Williams:            Absolutely, and it’s all contemporary, isn’t it? You don’t do anything historical?

Clare Connelly:             I’m planning in the historical, because never say never, but no, I’d say at the moment my published work is category contemporary romance.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Fantastic. So you’re still writing a little bit for indie publishing, you’re still doing a little bit on your own. Is that different from the things you submit to Harlequin?

Clare Connelly:             Probably they’re very similar. Because of the way it all worked for me, I was really writing the kinds of books that I was hoping to submit and get published with Harlequin as an indie, so I did go a little bit off the reservation, but not hugely. So no, I’d say there’s a lot of overlap, and it’s interesting to me, now that I’m with Mills & Boon, I realize that a lot of my readers from the early days are your diehard Boonies who love their Mills & Boons, and they obviously read and my books and recognized that they’re quite similar in the premise and the promise, and so they’d come across to me as an indie, which is really lovely. But there is, of course, there’s a different process to it, and yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. You still design your own covers for your indie published?

Clare Connelly:             [inaudible 00:07:27], and I love that. I was a real computer girl in school. I taught myself HTML, I do my own website. I love to do all that stuff, and yeah, it’s a real pleasure to me to switch off my writing brain and switch on my graphics brain, and it’s something that I can do when my husband and I are watching a movie. We find at the moment, you know what it’s like when you’ve got young kids, we both tend to work after dinner because that’s just the way we have to shape our work days at the moment, so he’ll be doing his stuff and I’ll be beside him doing my stuff, and it’s, you know, but there is something romantic in that. It’s everyday romantic, because at least we’re together and we’re chatting and we’re sharing a laugh about stuff, but I can’t write, obviously, while the TV’s on, or edit while the TV’s on, but I can do my covers, so I do like to tinker with them, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, and you’ve been with your husband for quite a long time, haven’t you, since 17 or something?

Clare Connelly:             Yeah. I was 18 and two weeks, I think, when we met, so it was a long time ago. More than half my life, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Oh, so you’ve got your own central love story, which feeds into your writing. That’s lovely.

Clare Connelly:             Yeah, he’s my real-life beau, and it’s nice because we have been together such a long time and we’ve had all the fun, and traveled the world, and done all the stuff, and we’ve sort of grown up together, whereas I know a lot of people who get together quite young can grow apart, and that’s fine too because you have your relationship experience, and move on and find someone else, but no, we’re very happy, and yeah, he’s lovely.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. For your Harlequin, that’s obviously Harlequin would promote your books quite well, I guess, for you. Where are you finding most of your sales are coming from? Are they international, or based in Australia?

Clare Connelly:             It’s all different. Some markets are leaning more toward e-books, some are more toward print books, and I think the great thing about category romance is that there does tend to be this range of sales where you get four books that come out within a month will generally sell a certain amount, and that’s just the way it is. They get their location in shopfronts, they’re quite prominent. They’ve started in some Walmarts putting them near the register, selected titles, which is obviously an incredible place to be, like where magazines are, so that if you’re there and you can just pick one up. America is probably a big market for Mills & Boons, but then so is the UK, so is Australia, it’s all relative, and Mills & Boon actually sells every four seconds around the world.

Sarah Williams:            Wow.

Clare Connelly:             So they’re a huge behemoth of publishing.

Sarah Williams:            They are. They’ve been around for such a long time, they’re kind of that tried and tested model now, aren’t they? They’re doing something right.

Clare Connelly:             Well, I found this really interesting, and I think I’ve got these facts right. In the lead-up to World War II, they were general publishers. They published everything, and then with the advent of World War II, paper costs became so expensive they could only publish what was financially viable for them, and that was romance. They knew that in especially … and I was reflecting on this yesterday, that particularly when there are bad things happening in the world, people turn to good things like romance, things that make them feel good, that are escapist, and that aren’t gonna bog you down in too much grief or heartache, and that are gonna promise you that nice, uplifting feeling at the end. I found that fascinating, that their roots was actually more generalist, but that they, for financial reasons, moved into romance, and they just are the leading romance publisher in the world now.

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic. I think even for us who are indies, there is certainly something to learn from their model, and to see what they’re doing, and they’ve been around for a while. I don’t think they’ll be going anywhere, given, like you said, they are selling so well, and so many people do love the romance.

Clare Connelly:             Right, and I think as well the great thing about Mills & Boon is that they capture … within Mills & Boon there is so many different subgenres, so you’ve got your Love Inspired, and your nocturne, and you’ve got your Presents and your Cherish, and so you’ve got, if you wanna read a romance where the couple aren’t intimate together at all, they’ve got a line for that. If you wanna read one where they’re intimate but you don’t see it, there’s a line for that. Intimate and you do see that, that’s what I write for with Mills & Boon Sexy, or Harlequin Presents, and then for the really, really 21st century sort of reading habits there’s now Dare, which I think Mills & Boon has shown again and again that they’re really good at keeping up with reader tastes, and I think that the Dare line does that very well.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic, and I know you’re a very fast writer, so tell us how many books are you getting out a year and what’s your word count like?

Clare Connelly:             Sure. Yeah. Well, I am a fast writer, and I didn’t used to be, so I suppose you could say I’ve trained myself to be fast, and it’s something I’ve actually toyed with the idea of doing just for pleasure is writing a blog about this or doing some kind of thing, because I do think that everybody can learn to be faster, not that I think it’s the only way to write, but if you want to be faster, I think that there are things you can do. I write a thousand words in 20 minutes, so I know that I can do 3,000 words in an hour block, and that’s consistent for me, but in order to do that I have to get myself into the right head space, so I make sure that I’ve read up to where I’m at, so I’ll read the last thousand words of my story before I sit down to work. That used to be if I was at the gym in the morning, I would have it on the treadmill, so the last 20 minutes I’d sort of spend just quickly reading through, so that by the time I sat down at my computer there wasn’t any time wasted getting back into my character’s mindset, so I could literally go.

Clare Connelly:             I also find that reading my book right before I go to bed, so I always email a copy to my kindle, and I’ll read for 10 minutes before I fall asleep so that … I have no scientific basis for this, but I feel like it percolates in my mind all night, so that when I wake up in the morning, quite often I’ll try to write before the kids get up, and I’m ready to go. I’m itching to go. It’s like my brain has just been in stasis overnight and I’m locked and loaded for words the next morning. My writing speed has probably come out of the fact that at the time when I first started doing really well as an indie, my daughter was one and a half and my son was maybe three, and it was very hard to get writing time, and so I knew that I had to make every minute at the keyboard count. Now I write for Presents and Dare, so two different Mills & Boon lines, and also my indie books, so yeah, it’s a consistent output for me throughout the year.

Sarah Williams:            Wow. How long does it take you to finish writing a category, do you think?

Clare Connelly:             Yeah. I should say as well that I prefer to write fast, but when I write fast that’s how I feel I write better, so I feel I write a more page-turning book if I write really quickly. It’s not easy, and when I’m in a book I’m a nightmare because it’s all I wanna do. I wake up and I write, and then I juggle through the day, and then I write at night, and I pretty much … My husband will come to bed at midnight and be like, “I thought you went to bed three hours ago,” and I sort of sneaked off just to do some writing. But sort of one to two weeks, but with that being said, there’s a lot of plotting that goes in before that, and a lot of editing that happens after, but the actual just get it on paper, first draft, which can often be quite different-looking to how to book ends up, I like to get it out as fast as I can.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Do you use Scrivener, or Microsoft Word, or is there something you use?

Clare Connelly:             I’m a Word girl. I see the appeal for Scrivener, and I’ve got friends who use it, but for what I write, which is very linear, I tend to think Word works fine for me. But I’m also … I’m a product of, you know, I wrote the first probably 20 of my books on a computer that my husband bought for $80 second-hand from his office. I’m very much a, “Well, this is what I’ve got, so this is how it works.” It took me years just to beef up my systems and get a proper backup happening.

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic. Obviously we said about Romance Writers of Australia, how we both met at that, so did you sign up and join?

Clare Connelly:             Well, I did, and it’s one of those things where now I say it’s a do as I say, not as I did, because I didn’t join the RWA, and I can’t complain because I still managed to do what I did, but I can see now how amazing it would have been to have this support beforehand, so yeah, it’s an amazing organization. I don’t know, seven, 800 members? It’s quite big. I know there’s about 700 in our Facebook group, but there’s lots of support for wherever you’re at in your career, and it’s very nice too that the people who have been around forever, and really successful, New York Times best-selling or USA Today take the time to come back and mentor and give the benefit of their experience to newer authors, so it’s a really lovely community to be a part of, that’s for sure.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, it is. Will you be going to the conference this year in Sydney?

Clare Connelly:             I will be going to the conference this year. I’m really looking forward to it, and one of the reasons that I’m so keen … I’m keen to go for a heap of reasons, but Kathleen Scheibling who is the executive editor of the Dare line, is coming, and I’ve never met her, and seeing as she has to cast the final eye over all my books I thought, “Oh, that’ll be nice.”

Sarah Williams:            At least you don’t have to pitch to her, though.

Clare Connelly:             That’s right.

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic.

Clare Connelly:             [inaudible 00:17:44] pitch for fun.

Sarah Williams:            You could. What have you got coming out next?

Clare Connelly:             The book that’s out at the moment is my Mills & Boon Dare, which is called Off Limits, and that’s a February title, so in stores now. I have Her Wedding Night Surrender, which is a Mills & Boon Presents, or Sexy, which is out in April, and then I have another Mills & Boon Dare in May, which is called Burn Me Once, and in the meantime I’ve got Bedding his Innocent Mistress, which is an indie book of mine which actually comes out on the 6th of March, my wedding anniversary, as it happens.

Sarah Williams:            Congratulations.

Clare Connelly:             Thank you.

Sarah Williams:            You’ve got lots of things going there, and if anyone’s …

Clare Connelly:             Yes, I’m in a release bottleneck at the moment, which is really nice, and then I sort of look toward the end of year. I go, “Hm, what’s coming out then?” But I know there are things there, too.

Sarah Williams:            It seems like you’ve got several that you’re working on at the same time, and obviously if you can put them out that often then people won’t have to wait, and we know how voracious romance readers are, so you’ve got that method down, right?

Clare Connelly:             Well, that’s right, and the thing I love as well about Mills & Boon is the books that are coming out now are books I wrote a long time ago, really, in the scheme of things, or it feels like that, so the lead time is very different, and it’s nice to know that I’ve got most of the books that will come out for the rest of this year are either written or in editorial, so I’m through the writing for that. Now I’m concentrated on what I’m writing next year.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Oh, wow. That’s incredible. You’re such an inspiration to us, Clare. I’m gonna take all that back now and think, “Okay, I’ve gotta get my writing speed up.” That’s brilliant.

Clare Connelly:             [inaudible 00:19:38]. As I said, everyone’s different, so I’ve got really good friends who are a thousand words a day. It’s consistency. A thousand words a day is more than a book in a year.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, and you’ve obviously got all the stories there. You’re not lacking for any story ideas.

Clare Connelly:             No, I’m not. I’ve got a big notebook full of quick thoughts as they come to me, and my phone is jammed with notes full of ideas, and then I just … It’s about drawing them out, as you would know, and making sure the plot will go through the whole book, and writing it.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you. Where can we find you online?

Clare Connelly:             I have a website, which is clareconnelly.com, so C-L-A-R-E, Connelly with two ns and two ls, or I’m available on all the social media with @clarewriteslove.

Sarah Williams:            Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on the show today.

Clare Connelly:             Thanks, Sarah. Lovely to talk to you.