Today we have author Ashley March sharing a fun post with us. She’s got it all covered, so there’s no real other introduction for me to make. 🙂

5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Read My New Book

The truth is, we’ve all seen this type of blog post done by romance authors before. It’s the reverse psychology gimmick turned cute to try to convince you that you really DO want to buy and read my new book. I would hope you wouldn’t I would stoop to such a level. But if I were REALLY trying to trick you into buying my new Victorian historical, Romancing the Countess, I would at least attempt to butter you up first before playing the gimmick card.

I might show you cute pictures of my daughters to make you feel sympathetic toward me. Like these.

You might want to buy my book afterward, if not because they’re so darn cute, then because you feel bad for me when the baby wakes up in the middle of the night and the toddler starts getting up at the ungodly hour of four o’clock each morning. You might think that reading Romancing the Countess would make me happy. And you’d be right. 😉

Or, you might be like my fellow author Tiffany Reisz and be frightened of children. If that’s the case, then I would offer you a picture of Richard Armitage because, if you’ve seen BBC’s North and South, you’ve already got the hots for him and you’d be forever grateful to me for perking up your day with RA.

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And if you haven’t seen North and South, then I would probably try to gain your favor instead by showing you a picture of Gerard Butler (yes, I’m a historical romance writer with novels set in England. I have a thing for British guys, and you should, too).

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Once I buttered you up with the proposed pictures, THEN I would roll out the gimmick, such as the following five reasons why you shouldn’t read my new book, Romancing the Countess:

5) You only like to read romances where the hero and heroine fall instantly in love or lust. Romances where the hero and heroine instead fall in love gradually over the course of the novel and build a deep and lasting relationship just aren’t your thing.

4) If a romance novel features a hero and/or heroine who’s had a spouse in the past, then you only like it when the hero and/or heroine didn’t like their spouse. Or the previous spouse was abusive. Or it turns out that the hero and/or heroine thought they loved their spouses but then realize later on that they were just in lust. If that’s true, then you don’t want to read Romancing the Countess, because both the hero and the heroine truly did love their spouses.

3) You think death is too serious a topic for a romance novel. Well, Romancing the Countess is about an earl and his best friend’s wife who are drawn together after their spouses—who were having an affair—died in a carriage accident. Yup, they died. The book has death in it. Of course, it also has love and some really hot sexual tension, but if the topic of death—and yes, adultery, too—bothers you, then you might want to skip over this book.

2) You don’t like getting emotionally connected to the hero and heroine. You don’t like angsty books. You don’t like that feeling of your chest compressing so tightly that your heart physically HURTS for the hero and heroine because it makes you uncomfortable. And when you get uncomfortable, you reach for the antacids. And a lot of antacids taken over a short period of time can get expensive. Well, maybe not that expensive, but please be warned that if you do decide to read Romancing the Countess, there’s a possibility that you might hurt for the hero and heroine. And there’s even a possibility that you might cry.

1) And the number one reason? Well, to be honest I could give you probably twenty more reasons for why you shouldn’t buy this book if I were going to pull such a gimmick. But instead I’m going to give you the one that I know would keep me from buying Romancing the Countess. When you have a mountain of books in your TBR pile, it’s difficult to take a chance on a new author, and yes, this is only my second romance novel. Even more than that, who’s ever heard of a widow and widower getting together after the deaths of their cheating spouses? It’s just not done—it doesn’t fit into any single romance trope I can think of. So if you don’t like taking chances on fairly new authors and you also don’t like trying out romances that have never been done before, then this book definitely isn’t one you want to read.

Now, if I were to continue such a gimmick and try to actually get you to read Romancing the Countess, I would tell you that you can read the first chapter excerpt on my website here and see if it intrigues or disgusts you: www.ashleymarch.com/romancing-the-countess.

But instead, because I’ve still retained quite a bit of dignity after changing countless dirty diapers over the past two years, I’m not going to pull this gimmick. Instead, I’m going to tell you about something I started earlier this week on my website. It’s a fun new reader-interactive experiment where readers get to help me write a novella. Over the next 10 weeks, you can vote for how you want each chapter to develop, and then get to read the chapter based upon your vote the following week. At the end of the experiment (which hopefully you’ll will find as much fun as I believe it will be!), I plan to edit the novella and self-publish it. The idea behind this is for it to act as a preface to a new project of mine I plan to start in 2012 called Romance with Heart.

So even if you don’t read Romancing the Countess because you don’t want to be immersed in a terrific love story 😉 I hope you’ll still join me for my reader-interactive novella experiment.

And now I’d love to hear what you really do think! Is there anything mentioned above that would make you not want to buy a similar romance novel? What hot buttons do you have that would make you absolutely refuse to buy a certain book?

One random commenter will win a copy of Romancing the Countess (open internationally)! Which I hope you truly do enjoy. Also, find out how to win the Romancing the Countess Book Tour Grand Prize of 50+ romance novels by visiting www.ashleymarch.com! 

*Ashley had me [sadly] remove the images of Richard Armitage, and Gerard Butler, because she discovered she was hotlinking them, and had no other ones. Anyone else, feel free to step up here. 😉