The Official Essex Sisters Companion Guide by Jody Gayle with Eloisa James Read Free Book Online Page A

belt and a shirt on him. Well, that was better, but if you look closely at the cover, you’ll see that his head now looks rather small in comparison to his billowing pirate shirt.
    Never mind: we can’t be too fussy, right? There were no belts in the 1800s, but at least it’s clear he’s not naked. But my agent still had a problem with it. She felt that the model’s bent head, together with the title suggesting that he was “tamed,” gave the book an air of being a male/male romance with a BDSM subtext.

    At that point, the artist added that two floatingfemale hands coming over his shoulders. Better—but the right hand, in particular, seemed large in relation to his head. So the painting went back yet another time (I can just imagine the painter’s frustration at this point), and a large red jewel was added to her finger, signaling that she was female.
    My dear friend Teresa Medeiros gave me a quote for the front; the marketing department wrote “cover copy” for the back, which I then edited, and the novel was finally ready for the printers. The Taming of the Duke was published at the end of March 2007.
    When a book first gets to bookstores (because in 2007, there were few electronic books), no one knows how it’s doing until sales numbers start coming in from bookstores and distributors like Target. Here’s a note sent on April 3, 2007, from HarperCollins’s national account manager. The subject line says “Wal-Mart Bestseller.”
    Huge week of on-sale for TAMING OF THE DUKE —Eloisa James beat out a top selling suspense novelist on the top 10 list— TAMING was #7.
    Yay! He is not talking about a best-seller list, per se—the kind that gets published in the newspaper—but about an internal sales list for book distributors and Wal-Mart.
    A week or so after that, the actual best-seller lists come out. There are three that count: the New York Times best-seller list, USA Today best-seller list, and Publisher’s Weekly best-seller list. The first news I got was that The Taming of the Duke had hit number ten on PW ’s list, the highest I’d ever been on that list. Then I knew that the otherlists were likely going to be good as well. And they were: The Taming of the Duke stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks!
    What comes next in the life of a book are reviews and letters from readers. The reviews for Taming were very positive; Romantic Times BOOK club nominated it for Historical Romance of the Year.
    After that, more slowly, e-mail begin to pour in from around the world, as the book was translated into more and more languages (my books appear in twenty-five foreign languages, not counting special British and Australian editions).
    While most fans loved The Taming of the Duke —and a sizable percentage still say it’s their favorite of the Essex series—I also started getting mail from unhappy readers. I try to write everyone back, no matter how critical, unless they are aggressively impolite.
    Some readers pore over the novels with a fine-tooth comb. As an academic, I always find those letters particularly interesting. For example, a reader named Elizabeth wrote me about a conversation Darlington has with Griselda: “One never knows, of course, when the earth’s magnetic poles will change their position and turn this country into a sandy wasteland . . . I learned very little in school, but I do remember that.” Apparently, I was way off, and the possibility of geomagnetism polarity reversals was discovered well after 1818—in the 1950s, in fact!
    Cherie wrote from England to point out a far more embarrassing error: Lucius describes a portrait of three “children of a roundhead cavalier.” Well, the Roundheads and the Cavaliers were on opposite sides during the English Civil War. What’s more, that war took place between 1642 and 1651, so the children would definitely not be wearing“the height of Elizabethan finery,” as they are described, because Queen Elizabeth died in