Want to write for Love Inspired? Elizabeth Mazer is here on SOLD to tell you about an exciting new initiative the Love Inspired teams are running – From Blurb to Book!
When people ask me the best part of my job, my answer is always the same. There’s nothing I love more than making “the call,” and telling an author that I want to buy her book. And fortunately for me, I work on the Love Inspired program where we’ve established the trend of an annual contest to find and acquire new authors for our three lines (Love Inspired, Love Inspired Suspense, and Love Inspired Historical).
If you write sweet-not-sexy love stories from a Christian worldview and you have an idea for a warm and fuzzy contemporary romance (Love Inspired), a fast-paced contemporary romantic suspense (Love Inspired Suspense), or a sweeping historical romance (Love Inspired Historical) then we want to hear it—maybe even buy it! And there’s never been a better time to share it with us than now, when we’re kicking off our 2015 Pitch Contest— From Blurb to Book: Pitch, Write & Sell Your Book in 5 Months.
The first stage is easy: just pull together a 100-word pitch that describes the plot of your story and send us that, along with the first page of your manuscript. (Instructions on how to submit, along with deadline information and a link to the formatting guidelines can be found here: https://community.harlequin.com/showthread.php/2658-Announcing!!-From-Blurb-to-Book) If we’re interested in what we see, we’ll ask for more—the synopsis and the first three chapters of your book. Still got us hooked? You’ll get a full manuscript request. And not just that! Our editorial team will be working with you all along the way. In fact, we’ve already started!
Check out our forum threads here https://community.harlequin.com/forumdisplay.php/105-From-Blurb-to-Book and you’ll see that we’re on the boards every day answering questions, offering advice, and giving encouragement to the entrants. We’ve already put up posts detailing how to target your story for each of the three lines, and how to knock it out of the park with your pitch paragraph and first page. More posts will be forthcoming giving advice on writing your synopsis/proposal and your full manuscript. We’re eager to find new authors, which means we’re fully committed to helping you write the best story possible for us. Want proof? Visit our “success stories” thread (https://community.harlequin.com/showthread.php/2661-Success-Stories) where we list all 25 authors we’ve bought through pitch contests since 2012. Plenty of them are on the boards too, talking about their experiences and cheering on the entrants. They want to help you become the next author for the Love Inspired program and so do we!
But you’ll have to act fast. The deadline for entering the contest is Friday, April 3. We need your entry in our mailbox by 5:00 PM, EST in order to qualify. So don’t wait, enter now! And maybe the next time I get to make “the call,” it’ll be to you!