Guest Author: Carole Mortimer

My latest series for Escape Publishing was the “Royal Affairs series”, and my next guest actually has a link to royalty! Carole Mortimer received an award from Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for her “outstanding service to literature”. I was thrilled to hear about this accolade being awarded to a romance author and Carole was, of course, a worthy recipient.

A USA Today Bestselling Author, with many #1 Best sellers on Amazon as well, Carole Mortimer’s career as a published author began in 1978 when she had her first release for Harlequin Mills & Boon.

I was very pleased to meet Carole when she came to Australia as a guest at the RWA conference in Freemantle in 2013. In 2014 I met up with her again in New Orleans at the RT Convention where she received an RT Pioneer of Romance Award. I can’t put a figure on the number of books she’s written, and the list of awards she’s won is considerable.

I first discovered the contemporary romance stories Carole wrote for the Presents/Modern line in the early 80’s  but had no idea until several years ago that she also wrote historical romance for Harlequin, so my TBR pile suddenly swelled as I started acquiring whatever books I could from her historical romance backlist! These days Carole is a very successful Indie published author, having released a number of series (The Dragon Hearts Series, Regency Sinners Series, Regency Unlaced...to name a few!).





I am delighted to be able to welcome Carole Mortimer as my guest author today for the quick author quizzing, but I’m a bit disappointed I promised her I’d limit my number of questions to five because I have so many questions to ask her!

Hi Carole and welcome!

You’ve told me how much you’re loving being an exclusively Indie published author. As a hybrid author, I know I enjoy being able to ‘control’ my release dates and being able to choose the covers of my Indie published books. What is it about Indie publishing that you enjoy so much?

Everything! LOL I can literally put a book up for pre-order beginning of June, write the book, have the cover designed, have it edited/copyedited and published by the end of July. I absolutely love being in charge of everything, from the choice and design of cover, my editor, the storyline/series.
Don’t get me wrong, Indie Publishing isn’t for the faint-hearted, it’s very hard work. Luckily I like a challenge, and at the end of 2014 I decided it was time for a change of direction in my writing career. As I said, Indie Publishing is very hard work—but I’m not afraid of that either, and having made the choice to go Indie Published I threw my whole heart and soul into it.                                                                       

Luckily it has paid off, both artistically and financially, and since the first book in November 2014 I have now written 42 Indie Published books. It was an enormous learning curve at first, but I have the help of two of my sons, Josh and Matthew. Josh still does my monthly newsletter and picks up any slack on promos for the books etc, Matthew is exclusively my formatter. Although that might change soon, because Josh has now written a YA book!   

That's a huge number of books for that time frame. Wow! Good luck to Josh, too, with his YA book.

I’d love to hear about your latest release and whether it posed any particular challenges to write.

My latest release, on June 22nd, is A Regency Duo, with the multi- talented Angelique Armae. I love her books and was so thrilled to meet her two years ago. We immediately got on and decided to publish a Regency duo together. The duo is 2 Regency novellas, both of them the 1st book in a new series for both of us. The main problem, the only problem really, is that Angelique lives in the US and I live in the UK, which can sometimes cause problems if we need to ‘talk’ on email. But as we’re both people who stay up late at night too, that didn’t happen too often.   
 

What’s next for you as an author?

I am currently working on 3 different series. Wicked Sinners – Regency. Dragon Hearts –paranormal. Regency Lovers – Regency. Wicked Sinner (Regency Sinners 7) comes out in July, with the last book in the series, Wicked Christmas (Regency Sinners 8) out in October – which incidentally will be my 240th book (198 for HMB and 42 of my own Indie Publications). GARRETT (Dragon Hearts 6) will be out in August 2018, and there are another two books to publish in this series. The third series is Regency Lovers, the 1st book, INDECENT (Regency Lovers 1) is in A Regency Duo with Angelique Armae, out this month, the second book, OBSESSION (Regency Lovers 2), is available for pre-order with a Release date of September 14th, 2018. After Dragon Hearts series I will be writing a contemporary Romantic Suspense series, title Steele Protectors, alongside the Regency Lovers series.      

When I found out you’d wanted to be a nurse and that a back injury early in your training prevented you from pursuing that career, I was a little surprised that you’ve stuck to contemporary and historical romances and never ventured into the Mills & Boon medical line. Did you ever toy with the idea of writing medical romances?

A one word answer – never!

Okay....Lol!!
I’ve only written two medieval romances to date and have more contemporary romance titles, but I have to confess I am really loving all the historical research and the challenge of getting the details correct in the medieval romance writing. Do you lean more towards one sub-genre than the other, and if so what makes that particular genre more appealing?

I love writing Regency, paranormal, and contemporary romantic suspense equally. I like to publish 2 series at the same time, and alternate the months the books in the series are published. I think this keeps the writing fresh, for me as well as the readers.

Because you really are a romance writing legend and your career has spanned four decades this year, I’m hoping you’ll indulge me with one more question and stretch this blog to six questions just this once...I admit I’m a fan of the very different and glamorous lifestyle of royalty, so can you give us a brief account of the presentation of your award by Queen Elizabeth II?

It was definitely an experience. She is so tiny in real life, even tinier than me, and I’m only 5’2” tall. She speaks briefly with everyone, and congratulates them, but nothing in depth obviously. It was an amazing experience to go to Buckingham Palace, to feel like ‘royalty’ myself. A day in my life I will never forget.

Thanks you so much Carole, for being a guest here today. It was great to ‘chat’ and I look forward to the next time we can catch up in person! Unless you have any plans to make it to Australia in the near future, I’ll might just look you up on the Isle of Man one day!

I’ll look forward to it!

You may find out more about Carole on her website:  http://carole-mortimer.com/


On July 23rd Bella Andre is joining me on the Quick Author Quizzing Blogspot ahead of her Australian appearance at the ARRA Romantic Rendez-vous. Until then, Happy Reading!

Alyssa J. Montgomery

______________________________________________________________________________


About the Blogger:
Alyssa J. Montgomery is an Australian contemporary romance author who is published by Escape Publishing (Harlequin Enterprises, Australia). She also 
writes medieval romance as Alyssa James,



 
http://www.alyssajmontgomery.com/




Comments

  1. Helen21 July 2018 at 08:22

    Fabulous interview Ladies congrats Carole on all of your stories my mother and I have read many of them :)

    Have Fun

    Helen

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Alyssa J Montgomery 21 July 2018 at 10:35

      Thanks for visiting, Helen. I have a lot of the Mills & Boon titles on my bookshelf, Carole's Indie titles are quite a bit hotter! Great as a writer to be able to diversify in writing styles/periods in history/heat levels. It's definitely not an occupation where one could easily become bored!

      Delete
  2. Rina D27 July 2018 at 23:46

    Have been reading Carole's books for years n still lovin them. They are definitely more sexy now but I can handle that. Ha!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Guest Author: Tina DeSalvo

Image
Today’s guest author’s career in journalism spanned twenty-five years, and she had a huge variety of roles—covering floods and hurricanes with national broadcasts on major national broadcasters CNN, NBC and CBS, as well as being a play by play sports announcer for basketball and football! I met Tina DeSalvo briefly at my first RT Convention in New Orleans back in 2014, but it was at a post-convention soiree in Las Vegas, hosted by Kathryn Falk, that we had a chance to chat and connect one-to-one. Tina is one of the warmest and most generous ladies you’ll ever meet. Along with Cherry Adair and Stella Barcelona, Tina set out to raise funds for the fight against breast cancer. All the profits of her first story, ‘Elli’ go to the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center, and Tina even organised a breast screening bus at the RT Reno convention. It’s lovely to have Tina as my guest on the blog today. Welcome Tina! First, would you tell us about your next release “The Fathers of Victori
Read more

Guest Author: Jane Porter

Image
My guest today is an American romance author who’ll be in Australia again very soon and is to be a guest at an Australian Romance Readers Association Romantic Rendezvous on the 16 th   of August.  Now, although she writes fiction, she shares her name with a major fictional character from Edgar Rice Burroughs series of Tarzan novels! I’m speaking, of course, about Jane Porter! Having sold her first novel to Harlequin in 2000,  Jane writes both romance novels and women’s fiction and is a NY Times and USA Today Bestselling author with over 12 million books in print, in twenty languages and in twenty-five countries! Her novel "Flirting with Forty" was made into the Lifetime movie of the same name and starred Heather Locklear, and she founded Tule Publishing in 2013.  In 2014 her novel, “Take Me, Cowboy” won a RITA Award, and this year she’s a RITA Finalist again with her story “Miracle on Chance Avenue”.  (Congratulations Jane!) She’s no stranger to Australia a
Read more

Guest Author: Madeline Hunter

Image
My guest today is a New York Times best selling author from Pennsylvania who has a Ph.D in Art History and who has taught at college level. She has a very frank article on her website titled “My First Sale” where she details her journey to securing her first contract. Like many published authors, she faced numerous rejections from various publishing houses saying that “I wrote a million words before I sold”. However, her resilience and tenacity of spirit has led to her having over 32 historical romances published in sixteen languages and with over six million books in print. I can only imagine that all those books and all those satisfying hours she’s given her readers over the years since her first book was published in June of 2000 must give her a tremendous sense of fulfilment.   But, her achievement doesn’t end there. She has also been deservedly recognised by being a seven time RITA finalist, and she has won the coveted RITA Award twice!         It is my pleasure to welcome M
Read more