I most definitely didn’t follow the market-when I first started writing Ransome’s Honor, I had just heard at the 2005 ACFW conference that historicals were dead, dead, dead, dead and NO ONE was acquiring them (they were all looking for chick lit that year, and I wasn’t writing that, either). I write both contemporary and historical because I’ve had ideas for both contemporary and historical novels, and I’m published in both contemporary and historical because I had both acquired by publishers. Why do I write both contemporary and historical? Was I following the market and choosing what was selling? This question came up once again over the weekend on a romance writers’ e-mail list of which I’m a member, and I thought I’d share some of my answer with y’all.

So I get asked quite often how I was able to not only write both contemporary and historical but get published in both right from the start of my career as a published author. It’s better that way, we’re told, because it’ll be easier to pitch ourselves to publishers as a single type of writer (a contemporary romance novelist, a historical romance novelist). She should write Amish or romantic suspense. The general wisdom in the romance end of the publishing industry is that an unproven (i.e., unpublished or debut) author should focus on writing just one thing: she should write either contemporary romance or historical romance.

The Champion by Carla Capshaw