Blog Tour: Heiress Seeking Perfect Husband by Maris Soule

Even though I spend hours in front of my laptop, my writing would go nowhere without the support of my writing groups. Most authors are generous enough to share their expertise with those who are less experienced, and when I first started writing, I was in awe of Maris Soule. I read several of her romances,  but somehow I missed reading Heiress Seeking Perfect Husband, originally published by Silhouette in 1996. Fortunately, Maris is re-releasing several of her romances as ebooks, and this one caught my eye. So when I heard that she needed bloggers to help her publicize it I quickly jumped on board. I asked her to explain a bit about the process of preparing books for re-release, and happily, she obliged:

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Heiress Seeking Perfect Husband is the seventh of my previously published romances that I’ve published as an e-book. I have the rights back to 22 of the 25 romances published by Harlequin, Silhouette and Bantam. Heiress was the first one I wrote for Silhouette’s new (at the time) Yours Truly line (which only lasted a few years).

Being able to put my backlist out is a thrill. While writing a romance, I always fall in love with my hero. It was sad when I sent off to New York, but then he would come back, wrapped up in a paperback. I’d find him in bookstores and markets. But then, alas, thirty to forty-five days later, he was gone…off to the graveyard of stripped books, used book stores, and garage sales. (I was never sure if it was good or not to find one of my books at a garage sale. At least the book lived on…for a while.)

The major problem I’ve found with reissuing my backlist is I write contemporary romances. At least they were contemporary when I wrote them. Heiress Seeking Perfect Husband was published in 1997. It’s difficult for me to believe, but that was twenty years ago. A few things have changed since then. Quite a few. There are a few of my early romances that I probably won’t reissue…unless I classify them as historical or rewrite them to bring them up to the twenty-first century.

I was lucky with Heiress. I didn’t need to make a lot of changes in that story. Here’s one spot where I did reword a sentence. In the paperback, it reads:

But how can one savor the beauty of words if they are spoken then gone? Faxes and E-mail are no more than bytes along the electronic highway, thrown into cyberspace, to be filed or printed with the click of a mouse.

In the e-book, it’s this:

But how can one savor the beauty of words if they are spoken then gone? Texts and E-mail are no more than bytes along the electronic highway, thrown into cyberspace, to be filed or printed with the click of a mouse.

As I said, not much of a change.

There was one scene in which I couldn’t change what I had, not without a rewrite. Here’s what appears in both the paperback and the e-book.

Clint knew she’d seen him in the kitchen. His timing couldn’t have been worse. It was a good thing he wasn’t planning on going into detective work. Creating security systems was a lot easier than discretely keeping an eye on a person. The way Shannon kept watching the door to the kitchen, he knew she wasn’t aware that he’d moved to the hallway near the telephone and bathrooms.

I don’t know of many restaurants that still have pay phones on the wall near their bathrooms, but having him pull out his cell phone wouldn’t have created the same image.

I also love having control over the covers of my ebooks. Although many of the covers on my romances were great, I never felt the one for Heiress Seeking Perfect Husband did it justice.

Here’s the paperback cover:

And here’s the e-book cover.

Which one do you prefer?

From September 4^th to the 9^th, HEIRESS SEEKING PERFECT HUSBAND is on sale for .99 cents. Go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and take a peek inside, see what you think of Clint and Shannon Also, if you sign up for my newsletter, your name will be placed in a drawing for a $10 gift card.

Have a great day.

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Patty's thoughts: I enjoyed this story about a child-bride who married a millionaire and was widowed soon after. Her fairy-tale life is kept intact partially through the efforts of her chauffeur, Clint Dawson, who does much more than drive his employer around. Shannon is getting bored with the life she's expected to lead and wants to start making her own way, but Clint is determined to protect her from from anything that could harm her - including himself.


Heiress Seeking Perfect Husband

$0.99 for a Limited Time

by Maris Soule

Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Smashwords

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publication Date: October 11, 2016

Page Length: 182

Shannon Powell thinks the interview is over when she mentions that her late husband never wrote her love letters. She isn’t prepared for a headline that says, “Heiress Wants Love Letters.” When the letters start arriving, she decides to answer a few…to even meet some of the men.

Clint Dawson isn’t sure what to do. His title is chauffeur, but Shannon’s late husband actually hired Clint to be her bodyguard. She’s said she doesn’t need a bodyguard and has threatened to fire him if that’s his job, which means he must keep Shannon from seeing him as he follows her on her dates. What’s worse, Clint ends up writing letters for one of the would-be suitors. It’s Cyrano de Bergerac all over again as Clint writes the words he’d love to tell her in person, if he only felt worthy.

Follow Along

Monday, September 4th

M.J. Schiller, Romance Author - Guest Post

Books, Dreams, Life - Spotlight

Tuesday, September 5th

Authors' Cafe - Spotlight

Wednesday, September 6th

Creative Hodgepodge - Book Review & Guest Post

Thursday, September 7th

Diane Burton: adventure & romance - Guest Post

Serious Whimsy with Jolana Malkston - Spotlight

Friday, September 8th

Melissa Keir - Spotlight

Loren E. Pryce - Spotlight

Saturday, September 9th

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About Maris Soule

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I love living in a small, rural town

My first twelve years were spent growing up in Walnut Creek, California (when Walnut Creek was still a small town), and I have childhood memories of catching pollywogs in the creek that ran by us, of being able to pick ripe peaches from the trees on our two acres (also almonds, pears, English walnuts, apricots, and more); and sitting in my “thinking” tree making up stories. When I married my husband, I was going to U.C. Santa Barbara, but two years later we decided to move to Michigan. It was supposed to be a short-term move (just a couple years, my husband said). I won’t tell you how many years we’ve now lived in Michigan, but we now have grown children and teenage granddaughters. I haven’t regretted the move. Michigan is a beautiful state, and for 27 years we lived in the rural community of Climax. What a perfect location for a romance writer, and what a neat place to plot a mystery with a lot of suspense. (Yes, there are some similarities between the real Climax and my imaginary Zenith in The Crows, As the Crow Flies, and Eat Crow and Die, but the events and people in those books are definitely fictional.)
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