No Return…and Why I Decided to Repackage It
Before I go any further, No Return is free on February 4th, 2012. Go forth and download.
Okay, now that we have that out of the way, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the book and why it’s now a part of my catalogue, as it had actually been out and about on Lulu, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble for some time before that. When I wrote No Return, I had just come out of a major writing slump. Huge. We’re talking almost seven years where I hardly did any writing. Yes, you read that correctly - seven years. And the thing that brought me out of it (horrible as the movie turned out to be) was the film version of Phantom of the Opera. In poking around and trying to get advance information on the film, I found out about something I’d never heard of before: fanfiction. (Okay, so I’m a late bloomer.) More specifically, I discovered Phantom of the Opera fanfiction…and I got the idea for a contemporary retelling of the story.
I’m not going to go into the whole fanfiction debate here (you can look up my “fanfiction” tag if you want to see more thoughts on the subject). However, POTO is in the public domain. I honestly don’t see a huge difference between writing Phantom spinoffs and writing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, to be perfectly honest. No Return had a very good response from the POTO fanfic community, and then I got the idea of publishing it on Lulu, which was about the only game in town back then when it came to do-it-yourself print-on-demand publishing. Then Amazon’s KDP came along, and I digitized it and put it there, and also on B&N’s PubIt service. The whole time it sold steadily, not in huge numbers, but enough that I earned back my initial investment in the ISBN and other associated costs many times over.
Time moved along, and I was definitely out of my writing slump. In fact, I started writing in earnest, both fanfiction and original fiction. My contemporary romance, Fringe Benefits, was published by Pink Petal Books, and my next two books as well, before I made the decision to go indie. More followed. I was starting to build a decent backlist. But it always bothered me that No Return, which I’d published under a different name, couldn’t be connected with my other books. I asked for the opinions of other indie writers on the Kindleboards as to whether they thought it would be kosher for me to update and re-edit the book, give it a new cover, and then republish it with the Christine Pope name. Everyone thought that sounded like a great idea, so here we are.
In many ways, I think No Return is my most lushly romantic book, for a variety of reasons. Part of that is just the bones of the story itself - a man so completely obsessed with a woman that he’s willing to kidnap her in a mad attempt to make her fall in love with him. In real life, of course, this little scenario wouldn’t play out quite so nicely. But this is a fantasy, a trope that some people seem to really enjoy. Not everyone, of course, and I’m fine with that. There are lots of tropes out there that I’m not all that into (sports romances, anyone?). Coming back to it after I’d been working in other genres allowed me to tighten the writing a little bit, and smooth out a few of the bumps. The story is still basically the same, but I think people who’ve read the earlier version will find enough changed to make the experience new and fresh.
And hey, you can’t beat free. Go on and check it out for yourself.
Originally published at Christine Pope | Author Site. Please leave any comments there.