Showing posts with label Retro books by Sheila Claydon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Retro books by Sheila Claydon. Show all posts

Friday, December 20, 2024

The books I forgot I'd written...by Sheila Claydon


                                                     
 
                                                                                        

Find my books here



                              
Golden Girl, my first book, was published in the 1983, and because things were very different then the money I earned was enough for me to fly my family to Munich in Germany to stay with very dear friends. My husband had flown before on business, but for me and my two children it was another first. We had a brilliant time in Munich and then in Salzburg in Austria, something we all remember to this day, often reminiscing about the highlights when we get together. 

After that I sold three more books, The Hollywood Collection, Empty Hearts and Bouquet of Thorns. Then things began to change. An editor who was working with me suddenly left the publishing house and her replacement didn't like my next manuscript. Too much story apparently and not enough romantic action! Once I read a couple of the books she was pushing I realised I didn't stand a chance. Not with that publishing house anyway. And worse still, I was never going to be able to write that stuff, so I put away my typewriter (yes it was a typewriter in those days) and found a proper job that brought in a regular wage. It was a sort of needs must with two growing children.

Fast forward twenty-five years and it was a different world. Not only had I retired but digital books were now a thing. And suddenly all the stars aligned in my favour because that publishing house went out of business (all those books with no stories!!) so the copyright reverted to me. I approached a digital publisher with some trepidation because it was a long time since I'd written anything other than annual reports, newsletters and company reports and I didn't know if my stories stood a chance. The news was good though and those four books were soon back on the market, this time in digital print. That gave me the confidence to start again, and that's when I found Books We Love. 

Many digital and print books later, the copyright of those original books again reverted to me as another publishing house bit the dust. Too busy writing for the hugely successful Books We Love and treasuring the support that all its authors get, I ignored them for a long while. Then one day I had an epiphany. Would Books We Love republish them? Jude was more than helpful, dismissing my concerns that they were written so long ago that much of the content would seem out of date. So now they are re-published yet again, but this time as Retro romances, and with the year they are set in clearly marked at the start of the first chapter. I had to re-edit them of course, but with much nicer covers they have now been part of my Books We Love stable for several years. They are also published under my own name, not the pseudonym I used before. 

And this brings me to a whole new situation. We have just had our loft cleared, no longer having any use for the myriad belongings that have been clogging it up for years, and not wishing to leave it for someone else to deal with when we get too old to cope. The only things left are the Christmas decorations, suitcases, photos and a stack of long forgotten manuscripts. Amazed they were still there, I started reading them, and yes, they still have a lot of story, but the romance is there too. I haven't decided what to do yet because I know they will need editing, but I'm tempted. Will Books We Love be interested? Will I be able to update them or will they have to be published under a retro label again? I haven't had the thinking time to start something new for quite a while now, so is this recent discovery what I need to get me writing again? Time will tell. In the meantime I'm enjoying revisiting my past.









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