Lyrical Press Submission Calls

Lyrical Press editor Nerine Dorman has put out a submission call for Bad Boys Rockers and Soulful Sirens on her blog.

Lyrical Press also has the following submission call on its website:

SPECIAL CALLS
Dystopian Erotica: Submission Details 
Upper Young Adult and New Adult Romance: Submission Details

Lyrical Press is actively acquiring all genres of erotic romance, romance, and works containing romantic elements only.

• Romance / erotic romance / romantic elements genres considered: BDSM, Fantasy, Historical, Horror, Humor, Mystery, Paranormal, Science Fiction, Steampunk, Upper Young Adult, New Adult, Urban Fantasy
• Required word count: 20,000 - 100,000 words.
• A current and professional website, along with an active online presence, are expected of all Lyrical Press authors.

The full submission details for Lyrical Press can be found here. 

The Yellow Room Spring Short Story Competition

The Yellow Room Short Story Competition closes on 31st March 2012.
Email entries only this time.

You can pay online via Paypal or send a cheque to cover the entry fee. Open to men and women writers! http://www.theyellowroom-magazine.co.uk/www.theyellowroom-magazine.co.uk/Competitions.html

FOR SHORT STORIES OF UP TO 2,500 WORDS

Closing date: 31st March 2012

1st Prize - £80
2nd Prize - £45
3rd Prize - £20

The winning story will be published in The Yellow Room Magazine.

Entry Fee: £4 (or £10 for 3 stories)
Facilities are available on the website for online payments.

All entries should emailed to: jo.derrick@ntlworld.com

CONDITIONS OF ENTRY
1. Entries should be no more than 2,500 words, in any style or genre, on any theme.
2. Entries should be the original, unpublished work of the author including unpaid publication in competition anthologies, internet or small press), and should not have won a prize in any previous competitions.
3. Entries should be in English, typed, double-spaced.
4. All entries must be emailed as an attachment in WORD.
5. Closing date is 31st March 2012
6. The author’s name should not appear on the manuscript, only the title.
7. Send a title page with name, address, email address and telephone number of author with word count as a separate Word document or in the body of the email.
8. Entrants may submit as many entries as they wish, as long as each is covered by the correct entry fee.
9. Entry fees can be paid for by cheque made payable to J. M. Derrick, 1 Blake Close, Bilton, Rugby CV22 7LJ, if entrants prefer not to use the online payment method.
10. A list of results will appear on the website or on the blog. www.theyellowroomeditor.blogspot.com) as soon as they are available (before June 2012).
11. Please DO NOT send entries by post.

Entries which fail to conform to any of these requirements will be disqualified and entry fees will not be returned.

All prize winners will be notified before June 1st, 2012.

Copyright remains with the authors; but permission will be requested to include the winning entries in the The Yellow Room Magazine.

You can find out more about The Yellow Room on their website.

Write Romance for Adams Media

Adams Media Romance Guidelines

A new direct-to-ebook romance imprint is launching soon!  Adams Media is open to romance submissions in five popular subgenres: romantic suspense, contemporary, paranormal, historical, and erotic romance. 

Within those subgenres, editors are pretty flexible about what happens. It's romance, so there must be a happily-ever-after, but this publisher is open to how your characters get there.

"You won't come up against preconceived ideas about what can or can't happen in romance or what kind of characters you can or can't have," says Jennifer Lawler, editor. "Our only rule is everyone has to be a consenting adult. Other than that, we're looking for smart, savvy heroines, fresh voices, and new takes on old favorite themes."

The publisher is looking for full-length novels, and while they prefer to work on the shorter end of the spectrum (50,000 words, give or take), they are not going to rule you out because you go shorter or longer.

If you have a finished novel for submission, please just drop editor Jennifer Lawler a line at editorcrimson@gmail.com with a brief description of your work (no attachments)

Update to our Contest page

Please note that the Contest page on our website has been updated to include formatting requirements for all entries. Please check them out, and make sure you are familiar with the Ts and Cs, as entries that do not follow the guidelines will unfortunately be disqualified.

For the dedicated followers of Harlequin / Mills & Boon

Harlequin have announced an editor chat and fast track for their Romance line. This is the line available here in South Africa as Mills & Boon Cherish with some cross-over with Mills & Boon Riva.

You can read more about the Romance line and the fast track here.

The online chat will take place on Wednesday 14th March at 10am UK time which is midday (12pm) SA time. If you have any questions for the editors, please join in the chat if you can.
This is the link where the chats usually happen.

Harlequin also ran a chat with the Desire editors last week. You can read the transcript of the chat here.

Elinor Glyn - the 'It' Girl of '20s romance writing

A handsome young Englishman enters his sedate Swiss hotel room only to find an exotic Balkan queen stretched out on a tiger skin with a lush red rose clamped between her teeth, just waiting to seduce him into a marriage of convenience.

The scene, from Elinor Glyn’s 1908 book Three Weeks, scandalised Edwardian readers and cemented her notorious legacy as a trash novelist. With titles like Glorious Flames and The Flirt and the Flapper, Glyn’s more than 40 novels exerted a huge influence on romantic and erotic fiction of the time and helped boost her career as screenwriter and director in silent era Hollywood.

She coined the popular expression ‘It’, that elusive and alluring quality of absolute sex appeal. ‘It can be a quality of the mind or a physical attraction,’ she said and these beguiling properties were bestowed on ‘20s actress Clara Bow, forever remembered as the ultimate It Girl in a movie of the same name. Hollywood gossip has Glyn reportedly teaching Rudolph Valentino how to kiss while he filmed Beyond the Rocks with Gloria Swanson, a movie based on her 1906 novel.

She was born Elinor Sutherland on 17 October 1864 in Jersey on the Channel Islands, but her family moved to Canada when she was a baby. She was brought up by her grandmother, of Anglo-Irish aristocracy, who instilled in her a sense of style and upper-class breeding. With her green eyes and flame-coloured hair, Glyn could easily have been a character in one of her own scandalous books.  After her marriage to wealthy but spendthrift landowner Clayton Glyn hit the rocks, she took to having affairs with various English aristocrats. In fact, Three Weeks was rumoured to be inspired by her affair with Lord Alastair Innes Ker.

She died in London on 23 September 1943. In 2002, Johanna Lumley played the novelist in the film The Cat’s Meow, as a guest on tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s yacht the night Thomas Ince died. Her career as a novelist is now largely forgotten and, reading her books out of historical context, her prose seems positively tame. However, Elinor Glyn pioneered mass-market women’s fiction in the early 20^th century and she was one of the first female directors in early Tinseltown. 

Elinor Glyn is just one iconic romance novelist of our times. Which author has most influenced your career as a writer?