Are your readers on the edges of their seats?

In the beginning of my career, despite the fact that I was one of those book-a-day readers for about a decade, everything about the romance genre was fresh.

Though Harlequin had always liked their authors to have “something of the same” voice, Nora Roberts used a unique “voice” for her work which opened the door for all authors to push the envelope with how they told their stories.

I could tell you the name of the first author I found who used deep point of view correctly and effectively, but I think I was a little late coming to that party and I’d embarrass myself! LOL Still, despite my lateness, deep point of view gave us another interesting shift in writing and revitalized the genre.

So did romantic suspense. And paranormal romances. And romantica…the combination of romance and erotica. It seems every four or five years the romance genre reinvents itself, drawing in new readers and consistently entertaining existing readers.

But even as it reinvents itself, it stays the same. Readers love the process of falling in love. Enhanced by danger, fueled by great sex, surrounded by glitz and glamour or told in a POV so deep the reader really is the character for the few hours she indulges in the story, the process of falling in love still enthralls us.

Why? Because love makes the world go round? LOL Maybe. But I believe it’s more because love makes life worth living. There’s also a risk involved. To love correctly, you give yourself, you risk your heart, you open yourself up to rejection, humiliation that your love might not be returned.

That risk…that suspense item in the story that could keep the lovers apart forever, that werewolf who is as much to be feared as loved, that unsolvable internal conflict…that’s what puts readers on the edges of their seats, wondering in breathless anticipation how this story will ever work itself out.

But when it does work out, when that risk is rewarded, there is no other feeling like it in the world. That’s what we all read for!

Have you ever read a book that did that for you? Put you on the edge of your seat, left you breathless with fear that this one time, this one book, the hero and heroine weren’t going to be together? And wasn’t the rush at the end of the story worth it!

 Now...authors, does your book do that?

susan meier