After Sundown (40 page)

“The Making of AFTER SUNDOWN: The Story Behind the Story”

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SPOILER ALERT

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Dear Reader,

I always love those “Behind the Scenes” bonus features on DVDs. I enjoy learning what inspired the stories, characters, and settings of my favorite movies. I love getting a peek at how the costumes were made, how the sets were built, and what changes were made in the editing room. When I first set out on this digital publishing adventure, I knew I wanted to include a “Behind the Scenes” bonus feature in each of my ebooks.

But I realize that some people dislike “Behind the Scenes” features. For them, hearing the nuts-and-bolts of the creative process ruins their enjoyment of the story. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s enjoyment of my books, so if you’re someone who typically skips “Making of” features on DVDs, it’s probably best to skip this section.

Also, if you haven’t finished the whole book yet, you’ll want to finish before returning to this page. I’m about to give you an inside peek at the creative decisions that went into writing this story—so plot twists may be revealed and characters’ secrets spilled.

So... if you’ve skipped ahead to this feature, please click back and finish the book. I totally understand the skipping-ahead impulse, because I’m a chronic skipper-aheader myself. But really, now is the best time to skip back. Before you see any spoilers.

When you’re all done, return to this page. I’ll be waiting right here for you.

Ready? Here we go.

Inspirations

If you’ve read the “Making of...” features in my other books, you already know that I get most of my inspiration from movies. I can usually cite not only the movie, but the specific scenes that inspired a particular book.

After Sundown
is the lone exception: This book was inspired by a song.

I’m a fan of country music, especially “story songs” that tell about the tribulations of some gal with a broken heart or a feller with a hard-luck life. Reba McIntyre’s hit single “Fancy,” from her 1990 album “Rumor Has It,” is a story song about a mother who needs money to feed her poor family—so she buys her teenage daughter a pretty dress and sells her into a life of ill repute.

Um, no, it’s not exactly a happy, peppy, pop song. I don’t think Katy Perry will be doing a remake of it anytime soon, LOL. But wow, what intriguing characters.

The song ends with the daughter moving into fancy digs “uptown” with her new gentleman friend. And my question was, “But what happened to her after that?”

That question became the inspiration for
After Sundown
. I’ve always loved westerns—especially movies like “Unforgiven” with morally complex characters—and had always wanted to write one. Plus, my Uncle Dale, a WWII veteran, had been insisting for years that I should “quit writing all that mushy stuff” and write a good, rowdy western. The kind with saloon brawls and shoot-outs. You know, the good stuff.

As I began my research, I had no trouble choosing a setting. I intended this to be Book 1 of a long series, so I wanted to pick a place that I would enjoy hanging out in for quite a while. I think Colorado, especially the Rocky Mountains, is one of the most romantic places in the U.S., so that became the setting for my first American-set historical romance.

The town of Eminence exists only in my imagination, but I created it based on research into real-life Colorado mining towns such as Cripple Creek, Leadville, Central City, and Creede. I had read novels set in boom towns, and some set in ghost towns, but what interested me was the in-between time: after the boom but before the bust. Who would stay in a town during that time—and why? What determined whether the place dwindled and became a ghost town, or made a comeback and boomed again?

Some mining towns did fade away and become deserted, while others experienced a renewal and developed into established cities that still exist today. I wanted to see how that might play out over the course of several books.

I’ve always thought of writing as a process of discovering characters: figuring out who people are, finding out why they make the choices they make, revealing their souls. The Colorado silver-mining boom seemed like a rich time and place to explore all those questions.

Soundtrack

In addition to Reba’s “Fancy,” my soundtrack for
After Sundown
includes Annie Lenox’s “The Gift,” which is Lucas and Annie’s love theme, and Faith Hill’s “This Kiss.”

I immerse myself in movie soundtracks while writing, and I listened to lots of westerns (natch) while writing and revising this book: the “Wyatt Earp” soundtrack (especially the track “The Wedding”), “Dances with Wolves,” and “Silverado.”

The waltz that plays when Lucas and Annie dance in chapter sixteen is “Ashokan Farewell,” made famous by Ken Burns’ 1990 PBS documentary series “The Civil War.”

The Title

Ah, the fights I used to have with my New York publishers over titles. As I’ve mentioned in previous “Making of...” features, every time I mailed a book proposal to New York, I made sure to have a list of ten or twelve backup titles on hand—because the publisher almost always insisted on changing my title.

Back in the 1990s, romance publishers usually demanded titles that were overtly sexy. Which suited me fine, because I write intense, emotional, sexy books. My working title on this one was
McKenna’s Woman
, and my list of backups included
McKenna’s Mistress
,
The Mistress
,
Prisoner of My Desire
and
Sweet Hostage
. I was confident that one of those would be the final title.

I never expected to get smacked upside the head by the “chick lit” craze.

In 1998, while I was writing this book, Bridget Jones and “Sex and the City” took Manhattan. Suddenly publishers didn’t want intense and emotional anymore. They wanted comedies. Fluffy! Slapstick! Fun! They didn’t just want light books, they wanted “lite” books. Covers based on cartoons were suddenly all the rage, and every romance novel had to have one—regardless of whether it suited the story or not.

When a hot trend hits publishing, New York editors approach it with all the caution and intelligence of lemmings flinging themselves off a cliff.

Ever wonder why so many of today’s sexy historical romances have silly titles inspired by children’s books and movies? This is why. Trend. Lemmings.

But I digress. Back in 1998, editors went dancing through their Manhattan offices slapping “cartoon” titles and covers on every romance novel that wasn’t tied down. So when my editor saw my list of titles for my deeply emotional, intense book, she rejected all of them. She wanted something light. Better yet, something “lite!”

“Like a fairytale!” she said with great excitement.

“This is not a fairytale book,” I told her.

“You know, like that Drew Barrymore movie!” she said. “‘Ever After!’”

“This is not a fairytale book,” I told her.

As usual, no one on the other end of the phone was listening to what I was saying. At a New York publishing house, the author is generally viewed—and treated, and paid—as the least important person in the publishing process.

So my Dell editor decided to give my deeply emotional, intense book a “lite,” fairytale title:
Into the Sunset
.

I asked if we could change it to
After Sundown
. Same idea, just less... silly. I liked the idea of giving the series a “night” theme. Each book could have a night-related title: sundown, evening, midnight, dawn...

My editor said no, because
After Sundown
wouldn’t make anyone think of a Drew Barrymore movie.

When I started working on this new edition, the first thing I did was send Dell’s title to the trash bin. I actually had a twinge of hesitation, just for a moment, because the paperback edition of
Into the Sunset
has 21 reviews on it at Amazon—and a solid 5-star rating. A 5-star rating is pretty darned helpful in selling ebooks. If I changed the title, I would lose that. The new Kindle edition would be published with no reviews, no stars at all.

I decided to take the chance. It was worth it to shed that lightweight title forever.

The Cover

You’ll find photos of the original paperback cover and the new digital covers on my Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/AuthorShellyThacker

Dell’s cover for the 1999 paperback edition was pink. Bright pink. Cotton-candy pink. If you’ve read the “Making of...” feature in
Run Wild
, you know just how much I love pink. Um, yeah. But Dell just had to have a shiny pink cover to go with their “fairytale” title.

The cover was also a “step-back,” with a sexy clinch on the inside (the best part of the whole package) and three separate colors of foil on the front: silver, gold, and of course, pink. Foil is expensive—and using multiple colors of foil is crazy expensive, because the cover has to be run through the press separately for each color. It’s like printing a cover three times instead of once.

That triple-foiled, step-back, pink confection was, without question, the most expensive cover of my entire career. When your publisher gives you a Very Very Expensive Cover, it can be a very good thing.

But in this case, it turned out to be a very bad thing. More on that later.

For this new ebook edition, I once again called on the talented Kim Killion to create the cover I had always wanted but never got from New York. And Kim really went above and beyond on this one: She did the photo shoot for me while attending author Lori Foster's fan convention in Ohio this summer.

Kim knew that model Billy Freda would be there, and she persuaded author Renee Vincent to portray my heroine. The three of them snuck outside for a few minutes and did my photo shoot—right on the lawn of the conference center. Kim took the photo herself, and when she got back to her studio, she erased the building and added the gorgeous Rocky Mountain scenery behind the couple.

The CreateSpace paperback edition looks especially gorgeous, with the sundown colors wrapping all the way around the spine and back of the book.

Thank you, Kim, Billy, and Renee! I love this cover so much more than the Dell version.

Trivia

 Are you a fellow Pinterest addict? I’ve created inspiration boards for each of my books. Visit my Lawless Nights series board at
http://pinterest.com/shellythacker/lawless-nights-series/
to see pix of hot western hunks, cool Colorado scenery, and some of the people and things you might see in Eminence in the 1870s.

Challenges

This book has always been a personal favorite of mine, and it broke my heart when Dell bungled so badly when they published the first edition in 1999. And “bungled” is the most polite word I can use. A more accurate description would involve two words, the first being “cluster.”

For years after I vanished from the publishing world in 2000, readers would e-mail me to ask what had happened and why I had quit writing.

The truth is, I never quit writing. I just quit publishing.

Or, more accurately, publishing quit me.

When readers asked those questions, I would explain that I needed a break from the stress of publishing (which was true) and had decided to take an extended maternity leave (which was also true).

But I never revealed the real truth about what happened. Only my writing friends knew the full story.

I’m revealing it here for the first time.

Around the time I was half finished writing this book, a major international conglomerate bought Dell and decided to merge it with one of their other publishing units, Bantam. We were all supposed to become one big, happy BantamDell family.

The people at the top mumbled the usual assurances: No employees would get fired, no authors would get cut, operations would continue smoothly, business as usual.

Only none of that turned out to be true. Ex-Dell author Marsha Canham wrote a post describing the “bloodbath” in detail on her blog.

For me, the impact began when Dell decided to juggle
Into the Sunset
in their publishing schedule, moving it up from an August release date to a May release date.

The reason had absolutely nothing to do with me. It involved two other authors: a high-level Bantam author (let’s call her Susie Superstar) and a top-selling Dell author (we’ll call her Bonnie Bestseller).

Susie and Bonnie both had books scheduled for May—and their covers looked identical. Same image, same colors, you couldn’t tell the books apart. When editors realized that the May Bantam release and the May Dell release looked like the same book, everyone in the big, happy BantamDell family panicked. Those matching covers would create confusion in the marketplace—and confusion in the marketplace can be disastrous for sales.

Remember that last point:
confusion in the marketplace can be disastrous for sales
. We’ll be coming back to that later.

Anyway, the sales and careers of two big authors were at risk, and publishers will do anything—
anything
—to protect their big authors. Even if it means sacrificing their little ones.

Susie Superstar’s Bantam release was the company’s top priority—her being a superstar—so they decided to push Bonnie Bestseller’s book from May to August, allowing three months of breathing space between the similar covers.

Which left Dell with a hole in May.

Which they decided to fill with my book.

Even though it meant shaving several weeks off my deadline and forcing me to turn the manuscript in two months early.

They didn’t think that should be a problem.

It was some of the worst stress I’ve ever endured in my career—made worse by the fact that I was being forced to do this entirely to protect the sales of two other authors. My agent encouraged me to “be a team player” and just buckle down and do it. Dell would be grateful, she said, and show their appreciation in our upcoming contract negotiation.

So I wrote literally day and night, finishing three months’ worth of work in one month. By the end, my editor was sending chunks of the book to production while I was still writing the rest. I wrote the last two chapters and Epilogue in a matter of hours and faxed them to New York, so that my editor could get the book off to the printer on time.