Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

By Cheryl Brooks This will be my last post on the Casablanca Authors blog for a while, perhaps forever. My Sourcebooks editor passed on my current work in progress, although she says she still wants to publish me again. All I need to do is write another Cat Star book. I'll probably do that eventually, and although fans of the series might be pleased, people change. Authors change. Unfortunately, many readers don't want their favorite authors to take a new direction. For that reason (and others), authors keep churning out the same type of books. Eventually, writing becomes a chore, and they end up spitting out the same story with different characters. Maybe not even different characters. Maybe only the names have been changed. I never wanted to be pegged as someone who did that. To that end, I wrote a paranormal romantic suspense trilogy that is unlike anything I've ever written before. My Sourcebooks editor said it was difficult to pitch because the plot was too comp...

by Cheryl Brooks Must Love Cowboys was released last month, and now that the promotional period is over, I'm pleased to report that sales were good enough to hit #54 of the Bookscan top 100 (a Nielsen rating determined by point of sale numbers), so I'm happy with that, even if the Amazon rankings weren't so hot. Part of that is due to the fact that rather than having to order the book online, it was actually available in stores like Walmart and Meijer. How it wound up there is anyone's guess because only one of my previous books ( The Cat Star Chronicles: Virgin ) ever appeared on any physical bookshelves aside from the romance sections in Barnes & Noble or Borders. I've often said that one of my goals in the publishing biz is to have a book show up in drugstores and groceries because only the big names with guaranteed sales are ever sold there. Granted, they're probably discounted into royalty oblivion, but the exposure is huge, particularly sinc...

by Cheryl Brooks A full thirteen months after the first book in the series, Cowboy Heaven , was released, Must Love Cowboys is finally here! It has undergone title, genre, and format changes to get this far, but, overall, I'm very pleased with the results. I hope my readers will feel the same. And so, without further adieu... SO MANY COWBOYS... Shy computer specialist, dog lover, and amateur chef Tina Hayes has a thing for firefighters, but when she travels to the Circle Bar K ranch on family business, the ranch’s cowboys have no trouble persuading her to stay on as their cook. Especially not when she learns that brooding Wyatt McCabe—a man who makes her heart gallop like no one else can—is also a former firefighter. HOW DOES SHE KNOW HE’S THE ONE? Wyatt’s sizzling embraces leave Tina breathless. But being surrounded by a passel of smokin’ hot ranch hands can be complicated. With so many cowboys courting Tina all at once, Wyatt must prove to Tina that she belongs...

by Cheryl Brooks I went out with my camera on Easter Sunday to take a few pictures of one of the prettiest displays of flowering trees in my back yard in recent years. In the foreground is a tulip magnolia, which is a purple, later-blooming variety than the pink ones that get really big, but also tend to get blasted by a late freeze. On the right is my only surviving nectarine tree. No matter how much I spray it,  the fruit always rots, but the blossoms are gorgeous! I picked a few flowers for the table for our Easter dinner and took a picture of them before bringing them inside. This next picture represents my 2016 springtime success story. For the past two years, the weeping cherry that I planted about 25 years ago has been suffering from a fungal infection that causes brown spots on the leaves in late summer, after which the leaves turn yellow and fall prematurely. Needless to say, when springtime rolled around, I hardly saw any blooms at all. Summer before...

by Cheryl Brooks If my readers think I'm not writing anymore, who could blame them? My last book came out in March of last year, and my next release isn't until this coming April. That's more than a year between books, which can spell a death knell for a writer's career. These days, if an author doesn't put out something every three or four months, they disappear from the average reader's radar. Facebook helps to maintain visibility, but nothing works quite like a new book. There are several reasons for my disappearance, the first being the fact that the second book in my Cowboy Heaven series, Must Love Cowboys, had to be revised and relaunched as a "sexy contemporary" rather than an "erotic romance." It didn't take me very long to make the revisions, but in the publishing game, a single delay results in a bump to the next season. It's finally available for preorder, though, and will release April 5th!   Amazon Barnes ...