Julia Kelly's Blog, page 23

A Sneak Peek at The Governess Was Wicked

Today I’m sharing a sneak peek at The Governess Was Wicked which comes out in just one week on September 12! Here’s a look at the back of book blurb:

Elizabeth Porter is quite happy with her position as the governess for two sneaky-yet-sweet girls when she notices that they have a penchant for falling ill and needing the doctor. As the visits from the dashing and handsome Doctor Edward Fellows become more frequent, Elizabeth quickly sees through the lovesick girls’ ruse. Yet even Elizabeth can’t help but notice Edward’s bewitching bedside manner even as she tries to convince herself that someone of her station would not make a suitable wife for a doctor. But one little kiss won’t hurt…

And here we go!

“Any woman would be lucky to call you her husband,” she said quietly.

“Miss Porter . . .”

She looked up to find a smolder in his eyes that contrasted with the tightness in his jaw, as though he was holding himself back from doing something he knew he shouldn’t.

“Yes?” she asked, wishing that he’d just once act without thinking and not let another one of these long, fraught, lingering moments go by.

“You hardly know me.”“I know that you’re a gentleman who has done nothing but treat me with respect.”

“Except that sometimes I don’t want to play the gentleman,” he said, his voice taking on a gruff quality she’d never heard before. “Sometimes I think about doing things I shouldn’t.”

His words hung in the air, warming her blood and quickening her breath. It was deliciously wrong. It didn’t help that it would take just a half step for him to tower over her, her unbound breasts brushing his chest through her nightclothes.

She was so tired of stuffing herself into a little box and closing the lid. Everyone thought they saw Elizabeth Porter, but all they saw was the careful mask she’d adopted to survive. Somehow Dr. Fellows and all of his noble intentions had weakened her defenses. She wanted to let him in, to connect with him. After nine solitary years, she suddenly couldn’t control the impulse any longer.

“You should turn around and walk out of this kitchen,” he said quietly. “Go back upstairs and forget all about this, Miss Porter. A lady like you shouldn’t be compromised.”

A lady? Perhaps once she’d thought of herself as such, but no longer. Ladies were like Mrs. Norton—delicate, finicky things who spent their time making and receiving calls and planning what to wear at the next in an endless string of balls and suppers. Elizabeth was the unfortunate daughter of a reckless army captain and a mother who died in childbirth. A woman forced into taking a position. She had no claim on the word. Not anymore.

“I’m not a lady, I’m a governess.”

“You’re more of a lady than anyone I know,” he said, fierceness lacing his words. “I admire you, Miss Porter. You’re intelligent and beautiful in a way I would never be able to put into words, and I fear you’ve bewitched me.”

They were just words—a collection of letters strung together to form the simplest sentences—but to Elizabeth they were everything. Before she knew what she was doing, her hands were in the doctor’s hair, and her lips were on his. He froze, but overcame his apparent shock quickly, for his mouth slid over hers, angling to drink in her kiss.

The Governess Was Wicked is still available as a 99c preorder from all major ebook retailers:

Amazon | Amazon UK | iBooks | Kobo | B&N

Grab 4 Romances for 99c Before They Go Away Forever!

All good things come to an end, and so do anthologies.

My very first book, One Week in Wyoming, is on sale until 9/7 for just 99c because my fellow authors and I have decided it’s time to retire the ebook.

Amazon| iBooks | B&N | Kobo

Moving forward you’ll be able to buy the individual version of my novella Seduction in the Snow and the three other books. However, One Week in Wyoming was a set of interconnected stories which means characters from one book popped up in the others (think Love Actually). If you want the full experience of reading this sexy wintery anthology, you’ve really got to read them all together!

Just a quick note, the paperback edition of One Week in Wyoming will continue to be available Amazon and CreateSpace.

5 Historical Fiction Favorites

I’ve been reading a lot recently, but because I’m in the middle of both historical and contemporary romance projects most of it hasn’t been romance. During times like this, one genre I lean on heavily is historical fiction. I get the same transported-to-another-era effect that historical romance gives me, but the focus of the books is different enough that I don’t worry about getting sidetracked while writing my own work.

Here are five of my favorite works of historical fiction and why you should give the a shot:

[image error]Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles

I have a thing for books about single women living in New York City from the 1920s to the 1950s. I can’t exactly explain it, but something about them draws me in every time. Rules of Civility  is one of the best examples about this. It follows Katey after she and her friend meet a handsome banker in a bar on New Years Eve, and that’s about all I’m going to tell you because it’s worth discovering for yourself why it’s one of a handful of books I recommend every time someone is looking for something to read.

 

[image error]The Pursuit of Happiness, by Douglas Kennedy

The Pursuit of Happiness isn’t that Will Smith movie you’re thinking of. Instead it’s a coming of age story that follows a young woman’s move to New York City in the fall of 1945 (see, I told you I have a thing for these books). The book describes Sara’s romantic involvements and career through several decades of her life, but mostly it’s about her growing into herself as a woman. I adore it (and not only because I would love to own Sara’s Upper West Side apartment).

 

[image error]Katherine, by Anya Seton

My mother gave me my copy of Katherine for Christmas a few years ago, and I gobbled it up in a couple sittings. Katherine Swynford was the married mistress of John of Gaunt and their love affair endures war, plague, and political machinations. It’s one of those books I read with a family tree bookmarked on my phone because of the complexities of the relationships and shifts in power, and it’s a wonderful way to sink into another era.

[image error]Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

Although I had to read these as they were released and waited years between between them, I think the deserve to be talked about as a unit. The books follow the rise of Thomas Cromwell at Henry VIII’s court, particularly during the dissolution of the king’s marriage from Catherine of Aragon, the establishment of the Church of England, and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. The language is exquisite and the ever-shifting relationships between characters are fascinating.

[image error]

Now it’s your turn. I want to hear what your favorite works of historical fiction are and what I should read next!

Also don’t forget to preorder my upcoming release The Governess Was Wicked for just 99c. It comes out on Sept. 12 and will be here before you know it!

Score 14 Free Steamy Contemporary Romances From Some of Your Favorite Authors!

Books are great, but FREE books are even better.

I’m giving away my Hawaii-set contemporary romance, The Wedding Week, but don’t worry if you’ve already got it! I’m just one of 14 contemporary romance authors giving away from 14 different books for free!

Here’s what you do to get your free books:

From now until Sept. 1 you can click on any of the titles below.
You’ll be taken to the title’s Instafreebie giveaway page. There you enter your email and select the type of file you want (.mobi for Kindle readers and .epub for everyone else).
Your book will be emailed to you along with easy instructions for getting it onto you eReader of choice.
Get reading! You’ve got lots of free books to enjoy!

Click on the title for a link to download for free:

The Wedding Week by Julia Kelly

Tease by Alexis Anne

Protecting His Heart by Dana Volney

Personal Geography by Tamsen Parker

Sass by Laramie Briscoe

Anywhere with You by Heatherly Bell

Tease by Tracy Reed

Dissident by Cecilia London

King Takes Queen by Monica Corwin

Stockholm Diaries, Caroline by Rebecca Hunter

Welcome to Cypress Corners by JoMarie DeGioia

Last Call by Jen Doyle

Wrecked (Studs in Spurs) by Cat Johnson

A Good Game by D. D. Shaw

Making Great Romance Novel Covers

Today I’m taking a moment away from getting ready for the release of The Governess Was Wicked (Sept. 12!) to brag about one of my very talented friends.

In addition to writing romance, Alexandra Haughton has a business called Romanced by the Cover which provides beautiful custom and premade book covers to authors.

Last week, Alexandra wrote up a fantastic article for The Verbs about working with a cover designer to get a design that best reflects your book. In the article she broke down several different genres and created covers that reflected those genres’ demands. The coolest part is that she used my name and author brand for historical romance and mocked up four covers for a book I hadn’t even dreamed up yet called Undressing the Duke.

The covers are pretty incredible. Alexandra did a wonderful job of not only finding stock photos (a frustrating challenge in historical romance because you’ve got to get the frocks right), but also matching the tone and look of the cover to the title. I’m also really fond of some of the fonts she picked, so much so that I actually asked Alexandra to use them when she made the cover for my Wattpad free read The Lady Always Wins.

You can check out all of the Undressing the Duke covers as well as covers for Alexis Anne (erotic romance), Lindsay Emory (cozy mystery), and Mary Chris Escobar (women’s fiction) by clicking here. And be sure to check out Romanced by the Cover for more cover art as well as Alexandra’s latest release, The Last Plus One.

Women and the Victorian-Era Tennis Dress

Tennis, anyone?

It seems ridiculous to us today to look at fashion plates from the Victorian era and realize that some of those huge, voluminous dresses with full bustles and flounces were meant to be tennis dresses. In the modern era, tennis players look like this:

via GIPHY

So how do you get to Serena’s nearly complete domination of the women’s game for the last decade in a totally functional tennis dress (or skirt and top) from these ladies?

“Tennis-Costumes.” 1889. Courtesy of The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

 

During the Victorian era an increasing number of women picked up a wooden racket and hit the courts (in full-length gowns of course). Women of the upper and middle classes began to take an interest in sport — croquet in the 1860s, tennis in the 1870s and 1880s, and the daring sport of cycling in the 1890s, according to Catroina M. Parratt in her article “Atheltic ‘Womanhood:’ Exploring Sources for Female Sport in Victorian and Edwardian England.”

The growing popularity of sport among women came about during a time of hyper-masculinity among Victorian men.* But it was also a time when women’s education reformers were pushing for healthful — although moderate — exercise for girls. They argued that girls could also learn lessons on the field much as boys did while playing cricket and rugby.

However, Parratt argues that womanhood and athletics were not necessarily compatible, and so sporting women had to find a way to reconcile those two things by “project[ing] an image of moderation and becoming femininity.” While women who supported Victorian dress reform might have tried to argue that shorter skirts and bloomers would have been more rational uniforms for playing tennis, feminine modesty won out. Reformers couldn’t rock the boat too much by putting girls in functional athletic clothing, so instead women continued to swathed themselves in the hyper-feminine dresses of the era while playing sport. As Parratt puts it, the sporting woman’s experience was “at one and the same time, a liberating and constraining one.”

“Lawn-Tennis Gowns, Swiss Belt, Yoke Jersey.” 1888. Courtesy of The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

 

“Toilette De Tennis.” 1895. Courtesy of The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

“Woman And Girl With Tennis Rackets.” 1895. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

 

*The Victorians were remarkably preoccupied by masculinity, especially in relation to the empire. There’s a ton of scholarship that’s been done on this topic, particularly about male education and masculinity, that’s worth tracking down if you’re interested.

Baking Bread and the Art of Nostalgia

I’ve been feeling rather nostalgic lately. I’m not entirely sure why but I think it has something to do with all of the extra work I’ve been doing in the run up to the release of the Governess series in September.

In times of high stress, I find myself turning to the familiar. I read books I’ve read before and watch movies that I’ve seen so many times I could recite the lines back (I’m looking at you Ten Things I Hate About You and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility). I also cook comfort foods that are really familiar like my mother’s beef stew and roast chicken or my father’s ground beef/tomato/rice casserole dish that has never had a name but kept him fed through grad school.

I suppose that’s why it makes sense that around the end of July I’ve started baking bread.

Cinnamon raisin bread. Someone’s been watching The Great British Bakeoff and getting all nostalgic about her childhood… #baking #bread #greatbritishbakeoff

A photo posted by Julia Kelly (@juliakellywrites) on Jul 31, 2016 at 4:37pm PDT

My father is the baker in the family, and he’s wonderful at it. I remember waking up on Sunday mornings to find him in the kitchen of the little Altadena bungalow we once lived in, his hands covered in flour as he kneaded bread dough. To a small child, bread dough was magical. All you had to do was leave it alone in its ceramic bowl and it would turn turn puffy and warm under its plastic wrap.

My favorite time of the weekend, however, was Sunday nights when Dad would head up the oven with its heavy pizza stone and bake the loaves he shaped earlier that day. The whole house would fill with the most delicious, yeasty bread smell, and if I was really lucky he’d let me cut off the heel. The bread was so warm that it would melt the butter I’d slathered on right into the crumb.

Now I live in New York. Fairway Market makes wonderful breads that are priced reasonably-ish (for New York City), but recently I’ve found myself missing the scent of bread in the house. I wanted the real thing, and I wanted to do it myself. I’ve baked bread before (especially when I was dirt poor and paying $4 or $5 for a loaf was way out of my budget), so I pulled out my laptop, looked up a bread recipe, and got baking.

After this weekend I’ve got a sourdough starter bubbling away in my fridge and a loaf of sourdough sandwich bread and sourdough boule on my cutting board. The results are good but I’m looking to improve, including getting a crisper crust on my boule.

Freshly baked with a brand-new sourdough starter! #bread #sourdough #baking

A photo posted by Julia Kelly (@juliakellywrites) on Aug 7, 2016 at 6:47am PDT

I also pulled out my phone, called Dad, and got some advice from a man who has been doing this for more than two decades. We talked about why he started baking bread (what was available around where we lived at the time wasn’t very good) and how maybe he’ll start baking regularly again (I’d like to think this is all inspired by my good influence).

If you want to try your hand at baking too, this is a good place to start because it doesn’t require the learning how to knead bread:

Late-to-the-Party No-Knead Bread from Big Girls, Small Kitchen

If you’re a little more advanced, I gave a Martha Stewart cinnamon raisin bread recipe similar to this one a go last weekend. I wasn’t completely happy with this bread and I find her recipes to be a little inconsistent so I’m on the hunt for a better one:

Cinnamon Raisin Bread from Martha Stewart

And this is what I made this weekend with my sourdough starter:

Beginner Sourdough Sandwich Loaf from The Kitchn

If you want more like this from Julia, sign up for her newsletter. She sends one out once a month and whenever there are big updates about new releases, cover reveals, and exclusive content that only her newsletter subscribers can get access to!

PHOTOS: A Walk-Through ‘Manus x Machina’ from The Met’s Costume Institute

Last weekend I spent the day at the Metropolitian Museum of Art’s “Manus x Machina” exhibit from the Costume Institute.

The exhibit, which focuses on the marriage of machine produced fabrics and effects with handworking in couture and high fashion — is grouped into themes like lace and sequins rather than being ordered chronologically. That means you’ll see a wedding dress from 1870 next to a dress from 2015 which makes it easy to see silhouettes and styles reflected over and over in the garments even as eras changed.

There’s nothing like seeing an exhibit like this in person, but if you can’t  make it to New York City, here’s a walk-through of some of the dresses.

If you want to see more dresses from “Manus x Machina,” you can check out the exhibit album in my Facebook group, Really Old Frocks, which celebrates historical fashion in all its forms.

What I Learned at RWA 2016

It’s been just over a week since I came back from the Romance Writers of America National Conference. That means I’ve had some time to process, and I have some takeaways to share.

I’m not going to be wrapping up RWA. There are other people who do that much better than me (and if you read Lindsay Emory’s wrap-up you’ll get a pretty good idea of what my conference was like right down to the half-naked man posing on a bar because we spent a lot of time together). Instead, I’m going to share a few things that I took away from RWA both as a writer.

I Need a Business Plan

Here’s how I feel about business plans:

 

via GIPHY

Clearly there are many things I’d rather do than write one including but not limited to walking over hot coals, being audited by the IRS, and eating pickles (ugh, can’t stand the things). However, after years of putting it off I’ve come to realize that it’s time for me to suck it up and act like the pro I think of myself as.

I’m still working my way through a formal business plan (hey, they take time to write and research), but I’ve done two things in the week since I’ve been back home from the conference. One was fill out Mel Jolly’s 2016 Game Plan Template. She breaks down professional, personal, and financial objectives for the year and then asks you to list the actionable steps you’re going to take to actually make your goals happen.

While it’s scary sometimes to write down concrete things that we want, it’s also really powerful. It helps focus what you’re doing and helps you bring everything you do professionally back to one question: “Is what I’m doing helping me meet my objectives?”

The other exercise — which was a lot more enjoyable because I got to shamelessly dream big — was Ally Carter’s lists from her blog post “A Letter to Baby Author Me (Circa 2004).” She advises writers to jot down five things that would make you really happy in your career, five “best case scenario” things that could happen in your writing career, and five of your wildest dreams. I did that, and now I’ve got the document living in my cloud storage so that I can pull it out once a year and check on my progress.

You Need an Author Branding Plan

One of the big, scary objectives on my 2016 Game Plan was “Create an author branding plan.” What I’m looking to do is develop a consistent look and feel for all of my social media and web platforms — including this website and blog — that reflects what readers will find in both my historical and contemporary books.

It’s harder than you’d think to narrow down the themes that run through your books and your online persona, but Alisha Rai and Courtney Milan gave a great workshop at RWA about starting to narrow down your brand. If you’re an author who attended and bought the conference recordings, their workshop was called “It’s All About the Audience: How to Find Readers and Build and Keep Your Audience.”

Focus Your Energy on Newsletters

Sarah Wendell and Mel Jolly did an excellent workshop on newsletters for authors. While a lot of the information was advice I’d heard before, getting it all at once in one session helped synthesize it and make things stick. One of my takeaways was consistency. It also helped to hear someone tell me that although I might feel like I’m pestering people with my newsletters once a month, these are people who’ve specifically asked to receive news.

I’m a believer in building and owning your newsletter if you’re a publishing professional because I’ve seen dramatic changes at social media sites in the last year. If you invest all your growth into sites where you don’t have direct access to readers, you’re risking losing control of your primary marketing tool. Facebook reach and page accessibility is completely dependent on what Facebook’s developers want to with the algorithm. Twitter and Instagram have also undergone changes recently. The only thing you have complete control over is your newsletter list (which you should be exporting once every three months to make sure you have all of those addresses in case your newsletter provider folds).

Sometimes Old School Is Better Than New School

I had a fantastic time signing books during the Pocket and Gallery open house at RWA. I got to meet a bunch of readers, and give away a lot of books which always makes me happy. However, I wound up with a stack of about 300 postcards left over from the signing.

Ready to sign @pocket_books #RWA16 open house!

A photo posted by Julia Kelly (@juliakellywrites) on Jul 15, 2016 at 4:03pm PDT

What I decided to do was to reach out old school. I bought a bunch of A7 envelopes, stuffed them with postcards, and mailed them to every family member, friend, romance reader, and giveaway winner I’ve ever run into. Now, as this post goes up, there should be postcards dropping into people’s mailboxes across the country as well as Canada, the U.K., Martinique, and the Netherlands.

I like old school snail mail as a marketing technique for a few reasons:

I personally love getting mail, and I suspect that it’s a nice thrill for readers to get something other than magazines, bills, and junk mail.
It’s another way you can touch readers and put your books in front of them.
It’s a reminder to people who haven’t preordered your book yet that it’s coming out.
It’s a way to make sure that all of that beautiful paper swag you have hanging around actually gets used!

I still have dozens of post cards, but I did send some along to Colleen Hoover’s Bookworm Box donation address. If you’re able to send books or swag, it’s a great program.

Lots of snail mail going out to readers this week!

A photo posted by Julia Kelly (@juliakellywrites) on Jul 19, 2016 at 8:16pm PDT

Connecting With Other Authors Is Worth the Conference Expense for Me

Probably the most important thing about going to conferences for me is getting to see the incredible, intelligent, talented women I only see once a year.

It’s hard to describe the reasons why RWA is so important to someone who isn’t a writer — not to mention not in the romance industry — because it’s such a foreign concept to most people. The best thing way I can try to explain it is that RWA and conferences like it is all about a community of readers, writers, and industry professionals who all speak the same language of books and genre coming together. I have a great group of core friends as well as many acquaintances whose friendship I value. They’re also unendingly generous and knowledgable, and it’s good for my career to hang out with them.

Finally but Most Importantly

Romance and the larger publishing industry still has a lot of growing to do in terms of welcoming and respecting authors of color, different abilities, and sexualities. I was thrilled to see two LGBTQ romances win RITAs this year — For Real: A Spires Story by Alexis Hall and Him by Serena Bowen and Elle Kennedy — but I both heard about and witnessed microaggressions and outright hostility toward some members of the community.

Everyone should feel like they have a place at RWA and in the larger industry. That starts with welcoming people into the community; supporting authors of color and LGBTQ authors who tell stories about characters of color, LGBTQ characters, and characters with different abilities; and demanding the industry value those people in the way it currently values white, het, cis gender authors and stories.

Romance can do better.

Meet Me at RWA

My apartment is a disaster right now. An unmitigated disaster. My kitchen table is covered in books, shoes, dresses, and more. The struggle is real.

But you know, what? That’s okay because I’m packing right now ahead of my trip across the country to the Romance Writers of America national conference in San Diego. Now I just have to figure out how I’m going to cram everything into one carry-on bag (I’m a determined light packer).

I’m really looking forward to RWA this year, especially because I’m going to be doing my first signing for Pocket! I will have bound copies of The Governess Was Wicked available and I would love to sign one for you!

Here are the important details:

Gallery & Pocket Signing at RWA

Friday, July 15

4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Marriott Grand Ballroom 3-4

If you’re interested in copies of Seduction in the Snow and The Wedding Week, I will also have a limited number of paperbacks with me at the conference.

So please, say hi and introduce yourself!