Welcome to the series, Sunday Sessions, where you’ll get to meet authors from around the world, writing in different genres, sharing their writing tips, marketing adventures and much more.

Please welcome, Heidi Rice.

1 – Tell us a bit about yourself?

I’ve always been a romance junkie and a film buff. I’d worked for 20 years as a film journalist in London (my home town) when I decided to try and write a novel. That was about ten years ago. Two years, lots of discarded manuscripts and a rejection letter later, I finally got published by Harlequin Mills and Boon in 2007! Since then I’ve written 18 novels, novellas and short stories for Harlequin, Entangled and recently Tule Publishing, sold over a million copies of my books worldwide, become a USA Today bestseller and picked up two RITA nominations. And I love it! It’s hard work – much harder than film reviewing btw – but it’s also super rewarding… Plus I get to search through pictures of Jamie Dornan on Pinterest and call it research!

2 – What inspired you to write Tempting the Knight?

My good friend and former fellow Harlequin KISS author Amy Andrews, who I had worked with before on a continuity for KISS, got in touch and said would I be interested in doing a series of linked books that would be modern takes on classic fairy tales… Then we thought of setting the series in New York (a city where my husband was born and where we got married and which I absolutely adore)… Then I began to think of Rapunzel and the whole ‘rescue from the Ivory Tower’ theme and I had the idea to do her as a runaway supermodel (with famously long blonde hair) who gets reluctantly ‘rescued’ from her metaphorical ivory tower by a hard-working legal aid attorney after getting caught midnight swimming on Manhattan Beach… I stayed on a Brooklyn house barge that summer, which also inspired the setting when my attorney takes my runaway supermodel back to stay at his place for the Labor Day Weekend to avoid the press…

3 – How did you start writing for Harlequin/Mills & Boon?

I was originally pitching to Silhouette Special Edition, but when my second completed manuscript went through the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s New Writers Scheme in the UK, the reader loved it and suggested sending it to an editor at M&B in the UK who were starting a new line linked to Modern/Presents. She loved it too, but wanted me to cut it by 30k words! I did and then she offered me a two-book contract. Bingo!

4 – What sort of research did you do before you started writing?

Not a lot, I tend to do research as and when I need to and I generally prefer to contact experts rather than just research stuff on the internet if I can. For example I had an idea for a story once – which became Surf Sea and a Sexy Stranger – where the opening scene has a female lifeguard saving a guy from drowning on a windswept beach in Cornwall. I had been to Cornwall that summer and seen some lifeguards in action so wrote the scene originally from what I had observed. But when I finished the story, I contacted a female lifeguard thru the RNLA’s website and she very kindly offered to read the scene and check it for authenticity… I find that’s the most efficient way to do things if I can, because otherwise I get totally bogged down in research and don’t write!

5 – What do you love/hate most about writing or being a writer?

I love it when the words are flowing and my characters are talking to me and letting me inside their heads… I hate it when the words are not flowing and my characters are being uncommunicative! Which is quite often, unfortunately.

6 – What is your typical writing day like?

I tend to prat about on the internet for about an hour after breakfast, checking emails, doing Twitter or FB or Instagram posts and any promo (like this questionnaire!)… Then I try to sit down and write til lunch. After lunch I’ll write some more and if I’m not on a screaming deadline or completely in the zone I do try and go to the gym around 4 for a dose on the cross trainer (but that’s not every day!). But TBH I don’t often have typical days, sometimes I’ll get sidetracked, some days I might be working in my other job at a UK magazine where I freelance occasionally, others I’ll still be plugging away at 8pm, which is probably why I can write anything from 10-4000 words a day..

7 – What are you currently reading?

I’ve just finished the second book in Sarah Morgan’s new Puffin Island trilogy which I enjoyed immensely, I love bad boy heroes and she does them really well, plus the Maine island setting is to die for. I’m about to start Festive in Death, one of JD Robb’s Roarke and Eve Dallas books that I recently discovered I somehow managed to miss…

8 – If you were having a dinner party and could invite five people, living or dead, who would you invite and why?

My Dad, because I miss him and I have so much to tell him about the two grandsons he never got to meet.
Jamie Dornan, because he could just smolder decoratively in the corner and inspire me!
Pierce Brosnan, because I used to have a massive crush on him, but now think he is just a really good bloke (and him and my Dad would probably get on like a house of fire because they’re both liberal-minded Irish lads who made good)
Susan Elizabeth Phillips, because I adore her books and she’s sharp and funny and always been full of fabulous advice the two times I’ve seen her lecture at the RWA conference.
Diana Gabaldon, because I am an Outlander-aholic and I would just like to worship her for creating Jamie Fraser.

9 – What’s your view on social media marketing for authors?

Hmm, well I love chatting on Facebook, posting pics of my holiday travels on Instagram, Tweeting indiscriminately about my likes and dislikes, etc, and I do get involved with doing some social media marketing on Facebook pages set up specifically for the purpose, but ultimately I don’t like using my social media presence to directly sell books. Social media is essentially supposed to be a sociable experience, so if me being sociable and being part of the conversation makes people interested in me enough to go check out what I write great. And if I’ve got a new release out, or am doing something people might be interested in I flag it up, but I think any direct marketing on social media doesn’t sell books, it just annoys people, especially if you do too much of it… Better to spend the time just writing good books really, because let’s face it Social Media can be a total timesuck.

10 – Do you have any marketing tips for new authors?

Write the best book you can and try to write them quickly. I’m thinking of getting a newsletter cos I’ve been told that’s good… But I don’t have one yet!

11 – If your book was turned into a film, who would you like to play your main characters?

I do Pinterest boards for all my books now… So I have spent many hours considering this exact question in considerable depth (ie trawling the internet to cast my books!). Tempting the Knight had Jamie Dornan as my hero, Irish-American legal aid attorney Ty Sullivan, and Kiera Knightley as my British-educated supermodel heroine Zelda Madison… The fact that they were once a couple in real life didn’t hurt at all… For more visual stimulation on that, check out the board here… https://www.pinterest.com/hlric/fairy-tales-of-new-york-tempting-the-knight/

12 – Do you ever get writer’s block? How do you overcome it?

I get writer’s bleurgh… as in I have times when I know what I’m writing is complete garbage and it can make me very dispirited and not want to go on… But the solution is always to just keep on writing, or if it’s really bad, I’ll take a short break and then try and figure out where I went wrong… Then keep writing. But sometimes I have to keep on writing, even when I know what I’m writing is crap.

13 – Where is your favourite place to write? Why?

In my study, in silence, where I have a minimal number of distractions… I am very easily distracted!

14 – How did you go about getting your books in physical bookstores?

I sold to Harlequin and they printed them for me and distributed them…

15 – Can you tell us a little bit about your current project?

I’m currently writing my second longer book – the first is due out in February next year, and is about a British celebrity chef, her sexy ex and their trip to an extreme couples retreat in Tennessee. This book is set in Wiltshire in the South West of England, about a woman grew up on an alternative-lifestyle commune in the 1990s with her Mum and is being forced to return there with her 10-year-old son in tow after her marriage to a US senator’s son fails miserably! The place has changed dramatically but unfortunately for her, the guy she had a teenage fling with is still there, and is now running the place, and he’s no more pleased to see her than she is to see him!

Please share your social media links:
Website: www.heidi-rice.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/4FairyTalesofNewYork/
Twitter: @HeidiRomRice
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Heidi-Rice/e/B002AU1JIK
Instagram: https://instagram.com/heidiromrice/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/hlric/

Tempting the Knight by Heidi Rice
Book 2 of The Fairy Tales of New York series

Once upon a time, poor little rich girl Zelda Madison wanted someone to love her, until she discovered being a badass was much more fun.

Ten years after getting kicked out of convent school and torn away from her three best friends, Zelda has worked hard to clean up her act, but her wild streak has never been completely tamed and — one midnight swim on Manhattan Beach later — she’s suddenly in urgent need of a knight in shining armor…

Hard-working legal aid attorney Tyrone Sullivan is the last guy she should call. Not only does he hold a grudge when it comes to Zelda leading his little sister astray all those years ago, he’s also supremely pissed about having to rescue a runaway supermodel from a Brooklyn police station at two am. But when Ty reluctantly agrees to bust Zel out of her ivory tower and let her hide out on his house barge for a few days, she shows him the wild side he didn’t know he had.

Zel discovers there’s nothing hotter than tarnishing a good guy’s armor… Until he starts to steal her bad girl’s battered heart…

The Fairy Tales of New York series
Book 1: Pursued by the Rogue by Kelly Hunter
Book 2: Tempting the Knight by Heidi Rice
Book 3: Taming the Beast by Lucy King
Book 4: Seduced by the Baron by Amy Andrews