Latest Updates: June Edition

It’s been a hot minute, hasn’t it?

But never fear, I’ve been busy.

For one thing, today is the day Loving Ashe leaves Wattpad’s Paid Stories program. I also got the full audio performance rights to both Loving Ashe AND Loving Riley which is a huge deal for me. Loving Ashe was the first audiobook I ever released, read by the amazing Tracy Marks.

And what can I say about Loving Riley? I searched high and low for the right voice for Ashe and I found it in Martin John Hopkins.

Ashe and Riley are probably my most favorite couple, written back when I wrote what I called literary fiction or women’s fiction. Before I was called a romance author and suddenly found myself needing to follow the beats.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the beats expected in a romance novel. I knew them long before I learned about them.

But there’s something about letting your characters tell you what they’re made of and this year has been my journey to going back to that. Hence the long long delay in finishing Undaunted. Sure, it’s under 40k words and back in the day, I’d have that done in 2 weeks, but I also want to give you my best work, one that has the very things that made me look forward to writing every single day.

With the rights to both audiobooks all mine, it means I can finally sell them directly to my readers and you can find them on my AuthorDirect page here: https://shop.authors-direct.com/collections/liz-durano

Speaking of the series, one of the questions I get these days is, whatever happened to Gareth? 

If you’ve read the Celebrity series, you probably already know it was originally designed to be a series. But since I wrote it on Wattpad, it was originally written as a serial, one that would keep going without the constraints of it being a book, at least, not yet. And that’s what I’d like for Gareth’s story simply because it’s not just Gareth’s story. It goes back in time and forward, just the way I wrote my stories. And because of that, “trilogy” doesn’t work for the series anymore.

Gareth’s story is still happening but now there’s this platform called Vella by Kindle. And that’s what I’m mulling over – do I post my chapters there or post them where the story started? Or do I write the story quietly on my own and publish when ready?

While I love Wattpad as a platform, I also know life is all about changes. And so I just might end up posting the next book on Vella until it’s completed, take it down to publish it as an ebook, per Vella’s terms. Oh, and I would be posting it here for paying Patreons as well.

But… I’m still thinking about it.

What do you think?