When you’re all done, return to this page. I’ll be waiting right here for you.
Ready? Here we go.
Inspirations
If you’ve read the “Making of...” features in my other books, you already know that I get most of my inspiration from movies. I can usually cite not only the movie, but the specific scenes that inspired a particular book.
After Sundown is the lone exception: This book was inspired by a song.
I’m a fan of country music, especially “story songs” that tell about the tribulations of some gal with a broken heart or a feller with a hard-luck life. Reba McIntyre’s hit single “Fancy,” from her 1990 album “Rumor Has It,” is a story song about a mother who needs money to feed her poor family—so she buys her teenage daughter a pretty dress and sells her into a life of ill repute.
Um, no, it’s not exactly a happy, peppy, pop song. I don’t think Katy Perry will be doing a remake of it anytime soon, LOL. But wow, what intriguing characters.
The song ends with the daughter moving into fancy digs “uptown” with her new gentleman friend. And my question was, “But what happened to her after that?”
That question became the inspiration for After Sundown. I’ve always loved westerns—especially movies like “Unforgiven” with morally complex characters—and had always wanted to write one. Plus, my Uncle Dale, a WWII veteran, had been insisting for years that I should “quit writing all that mushy stuff” and write a good, rowdy western. The kind with saloon brawls and shoot-outs. You know, the good stuff.
As I began my research, I had no trouble choosing a setting. I intended this to be Book 1 of a long series, so I wanted to pick a place that I would enjoy hanging out in for quite a while. I think Colorado, especially the Rocky Mountains, is one of the most romantic places in the U.S., so that became the setting for my first American-set historical romance.
The town of Eminence exists only in my imagination, but I created it based on research into real-life Colorado mining towns such as Cripple Creek, Leadville, Central City, and Creede. I had read novels set in boom towns, and some set in ghost towns, but what interested me was the in-between time: after the boom but before the bust. Who would stay in a town during that time—and why? What determined whether the place dwindled and became a ghost town, or made a comeback and boomed again?
Some mining towns did fade away and become deserted, while others experienced a renewal and developed into established cities that still exist today. I wanted to see how that might play out over the course of several books.
I’ve always thought of writing as a process of discovering characters: figuring out who people are, finding out why they make the choices they make, revealing their souls. The Colorado silver-mining boom seemed like a rich time and place to explore all those questions.
Soundtrack
In addition to Reba’s “Fancy,” my soundtrack for After Sundown includes Annie Lenox’s “The Gift,” which is Lucas and Annie’s love theme, and Faith Hill’s “This Kiss.”
I immerse myself in movie soundtracks while writing, and I listened to lots of westerns (natch) while writing and revising this book: the “Wyatt Earp” soundtrack (especially the track “The Wedding”), “Dances with Wolves,” and “Silverado.”
The waltz that plays when Lucas and Annie dance in chapter sixteen is “Ashokan Farewell,” made famous by Ken Burns’ 1990 PBS documentary series “The Civil War.”
The Title
Ah, the fights I used to have with my New York publishers over titles. As I’ve mentioned in previous “Making of...” features, every time I mailed a book proposal to New York, I made sure to have a list of ten or twelve backup titles on hand—because the publisher almost always insisted on changing my title.
Back in the 1990s, romance publishers usually demanded titles that were overtly sexy. Which suited me fine, because I write intense, emotional, sexy books. My working title on this one was McKenna’s Woman, and my list of backups included McKenna’s Mistress, The Mistress, Prisoner of My Desire and Sweet Hostage. I was confident that one of those would be the final title.
I never expected to get smacked upside the head by the “chick lit” craze.
In 1998, while I was writing this book, Bridget Jones and “Sex and the City” took Manhattan. Suddenly publishers didn’t want intense and emotional anymore. They wanted comedies. Fluffy! Slapstick! Fun! They didn’t just want light books, they wanted “lite” books. Covers based on cartoons were suddenly all the rage, and every romance novel had to have one—regardless of whether it suited the story or not.
When a hot trend hits publishing, New York editors approach it with all the caution and intelligence of lemmings flinging themselves off a cliff.
Ever wonder why so many of today’s sexy historical romances have silly titles inspired by children’s books and movies? This is why. Trend. Lemmings.
But I digress. Back in 1998, editors went dancing through their Manhattan offices slapping “cartoon” titles and covers on every romance novel that wasn’t tied down. So when my editor saw my list of titles for my deeply emotional, intense book, she rejected all of them. She wanted something light. Better yet, something “lite!”
“Like a fairytale!” she said with great excitement.
“This is not a fairytale book,” I told her.
“You know, like that Drew Barrymore movie!” she said. “‘Ever After!’”
“This is not a fairytale book,” I told her.
As usual, no one on the other end of the phone was listening to what I was saying. At a New York publishing house, the author is generally viewed—and treated, and paid—as the least important person in the publishing process.
So my Dell editor decided to give my deeply emotional, intense book a “lite,” fairytale title: Into the Sunset.
I asked if we could change it to After Sundown. Same idea, just less... silly. I liked the idea of giving the series a “night” theme. Each book could have a night-related title: sundown, evening, midnight, dawn...
My editor said no, because After Sundown wouldn’t make anyone think of a Drew Barrymore movie.
When I started working on this new edition, the first thing I did was send Dell’s title to the trash bin. I actually had a twinge of hesitation, just for a moment, because the paperback edition of Into the Sunset has 21 reviews on it at Amazon—and a solid 5-star rating. A 5-star rating is pretty darned helpful in selling ebooks. If I changed the title, I would lose that. The new Kindle edition would be published with no reviews, no stars at all.
I decided to take the chance. It was worth it to shed that lightweight title forever.
The Cover
You’ll find photos of the original paperback cover and the new digital covers on my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/AuthorShellyThacker
Dell’s cover for the 1999 paperback edition was pink. Bright pink. Cotton-candy pink. If you’ve read the “Making of...” feature in Run Wild, you know just how much I love pink. Um, yeah. But Dell just had to have a shiny pink cover to go with their “fairytale” title.
The cover was also a “step-back,” with a sexy clinch on the inside (the best part of the whole package) and three separate colors of foil on the front: silver, gold, and of course, pink. Foil is expensive—and using multiple colors of foil is crazy expensive, because the cover has to be run through the press separately for each color. It’s like printing a cover three times instead of once.
That triple-foiled, step-back, pink confection was, without question, the most expensive cover of my entire career. When your publisher gives you a Very Very Expensive Cover, it can be a very good thing.
But in this case, it turned out to be a very bad thing. More on that later.
For this new ebook edition, I once again called on the talented Kim Killion to create the cover I had always wanted but never got from New York. And Kim really went above and beyond on this one: She did the photo shoot for me while attending author Lori Foster's fan convention
in Ohio this summer.
Kim knew that model Billy Freda would be there, and she persuaded author Renee Vincent to portray my heroine. The three of them snuck outside for a few minutes and did my photo shoot—right on the lawn of the conference center. Kim took the photo herself, and when she got back to her studio, she erased the building and added the gorgeous Rocky Mountain scenery behind the couple.
The CreateSpace paperback edition looks especially gorgeous, with the sundown colors wrapping all the way around the spine and back of the book.
Thank you, Kim, Billy, and Renee! I love this cover so much more than the Dell version.
Trivia
Are you a fellow Pinterest addict? I’ve created inspiration boards for each of my books. Visit my Lawless Nights series board at http://pinterest.com/shellythacker/lawless-nights-series/ to see pix of hot western hunks, cool Colorado scenery, and some of the people and things you might see in Eminence in the 1870s.
Challenges
This book has always been a personal favorite of mine, and it broke my heart when Dell bungled so badly when they published the first edition in 1999. And “bungled” is the most polite word I can use. A more accurate description would involve two words, the first being “cluster.”
For years after I vanished from the publishing world in 2000, readers would e-mail me to ask what had happened and why I had quit writing.
The truth is, I never quit writing. I just quit publishing.
Or, more accurately, publishing quit me.
When readers asked those questions, I would explain that I needed a break from the stress of publishing (which was true) and had decided to take an extended maternity leave (which was also true).
But I never revealed the real truth about what happened. Only my writing friends knew the full story.
I’m revealing it here for the first time.
Around the time I was half finished writing this book, a major international conglomerate bought Dell and decided to merge it with one of their other publishing units, Bantam. We were all supposed to become one big, happy BantamDell family.
The people at the top mumbled the usual assurances: No employees would get fired, no authors would get cut, operations would continue smoothly, business as usual.
Only none of that turned out to be true. Ex-Dell author Marsha Canham wrote a post describing the “bloodbath” in detail on her blog.
For me, the impact began when Dell decided to juggle Into the Sunset in their publishing schedule, moving it up from an August release date to a May release date.
The reason had absolutely nothing to do with me. It involved two other authors: a high-level Bantam author (let’s call her Susie Superstar) and a top-selling Dell author (we’ll call her Bonnie Bestseller).
Susie and Bonnie both had books scheduled for May—and their covers looked identical. Same image, same colors, you couldn’t tell the books apart. When editors realized that the May Bantam release and the May Dell release looked like the same book, everyone in the big, happy BantamDell family panicked. Those matching covers would create confusion in the marketplace—and confusion in the marketplace can be disastrous for sales.
Remember that last point: confusion in the marketplace can be disastrous for sales. We’ll be coming back to that later.
Anyway, the sales and careers of two big authors were at risk, and publishers will do anything—anything—to protect their big authors. Even if it means sacrificing their little ones.
Susie Superstar’s Bantam release was the company’s top priority—her being a superstar—so they decided to push Bonnie Bestseller’s book from May to August, allowing three months of breathing space between the similar covers.
Which left Dell with a hole in May.
Which they decided to fill with my book.
Even though it meant shaving several weeks off my deadline and forcing me to turn the manuscript in two months early.
They didn’t think that should be a problem.
It was some of the worst stress I’ve ever endured in my career—made worse by the fact that I was being forced to do this entirely to protect the sales of two other authors. My agent encouraged me to “be a team player” and just buckle down and do it. Dell would be grateful, she said, and show their appreciation in our upcoming contract negotiation.
So I wrote literally day and night, finishing three months’ worth of work in one month. By the end, my editor was sending chunks of the book to production while I was still writing the rest. I wrote the last two chapters and Epilogue in a matter of hours and faxed them to New York, so that my editor could get the book off to the printer on time.
In publishing parlance, this is known as “crash publishing.” It happens more often than you know.
Unfortunately, because Dell was “crash publishing” my book for that May slot, they wouldn’t have time to do any marketing at all. No advance review copies to major media, no special placement in bookstores, none of the promotion they had promised when they bought the book.
As my agent explained when she informed me of this, Dell didn’t really have any money left to spend on Into the Sunset anyway—because they had blown the budget on that Very Very Expensive Cover.
But she was confident that they would make it up to me with a big push on my next book. After all, we were about to start contract negotiations for the next three books in this series.
And the good news, she said, was that Dell was giving Into the Sunset a big print run (“ambitious,” she called it). It was the first book of a new series, and they didn’t want it to go out of print too soon.
Unfortunately, in the middle of all this crash-publishing craziness, someone neglected to tell the sales department that my book had been moved up to May.
So they never told the booksellers.
And the booksellers all ordered Bonnie Bestseller’s book instead.
Remember when we said confusion in the marketplace can be disastrous for sales? That turned out to be true. Not for Susie Superstar or Bonnie Bestseller, but for me.
The major chains didn’t know that Into the Sunset existed. It didn’t appear in their computers, in the publisher’s catalogue, or even on the Dell website. Bonnie Bestseller’s book was listed everywhere as the May romance from Dell.
So when Into the Sunset arrived in their stores, the clerks at the big chains did one of two things. Some left it sitting in the shipping box in the back room. Because they hadn’t ordered it and didn’t know what to do with it.
Others promptly shipped it back for a refund.
Authors who work with traditional New York publishing houses live and die by something called “sell-through” numbers. Your sell-through is a percentage that compares the number of books sold to the number of books printed. The ideal, of course, is to get as close to 100% as possible. Anything under 50% is considered a poor performance.
The buyers at the big chain bookstores—the powerful people responsible for ordering upcoming releases—see the sell-through number for your most recent book right next to your name in their computers. And there’s no little asterisk next to that number that says, “Oh, wait, the publisher screwed up royally! This was not the author’s fault!”
All they see is your name. And that number.
So, what happens when a publisher gives a book an ambitious print run, and a Very Very Expensive Cover, and no marketing support... and forgets to tell booksellers about it?
The sell-through numbers are so small they need to be viewed with a microscope.
Back when I was a starry-eyed, newbie author, my agent warned me that when things go well, publishers take all of the credit—and when things go wrong, publishers take none of the blame.
That certainly proved to be the case here. Into the Sunset was a failure of epic proportions. And my publisher placed the blame squarely on my shoulders. The reason for the book’s poor performance, they insisted, was that I wrote a bad book. I mean, just look at the way I dashed off those last chapters and faxed them
in? They expected their authors to take much more care in their work than that.
When it was all over, the Bantam author I had fallen on my sword to protect, Susie Superstar, prospered. She probably never knew any of this even happened. (She’s actually one of my all-time favorite writers, and none of this—none of it—was her fault.) Her book came out as scheduled in May, sold well, and her career continued without so much as a hiccup.
The publisher had successfully protected their superstar.
My fellow Dell author, Bonnie Bestseller, also prospered. The only thing better than getting one good sales push from your publisher is getting two good sales pushes back-to-back. The sales department had already given Bonnie a big push as the May release, and after the scheduling mix-up came to light, they gave her another big push for August. They wanted to make sure that all the confusion wouldn’t damage her sales. And it didn’t. Her book sold well, she hit the New York Times bestseller list a book or two later, and BantamDell soon began publishing her in hardcover.
The publisher had successfully protected their big author.
And me? For me, the confusion in the marketplace proved deadly. “Bad sell-through” is a fatal illness in New York publishing, and there’s no way to recover from it. My career was finished. No publisher in Manhattan would touch me with a fifty-foot pole.
Including Dell. My agent had delayed the contract negotiations for the rest of my Lawless Nights series because she was so confident that Into the Sunset would be a spectacular success.
Instead, Dell dumped me. “We can’t offer her another contract,” they told my agent. “Just look at these terrible sell-through numbers.”
A few months and several rejections later, I did what every author does in this situation: I fired my agent.
Because, yeah, that would work.
The new agent I hired collected more rejections for me. All of them along the lines of, “Ewwww, look at those sell-through numbers, get this submission off my desk before the author stinks up my office,” and “I heard she faxed in the ending of her last book? I’m not working with a hack like that.”
After Sundown Page 39