What I learned rewriting six romances
And how readers are finding books now
Last summer I embarked on what turned out to be a much bigger project than I expected.
I wanted to see if I could wring a few new sales out of some romance novels I wrote back in the 2010s—the Love on series. I had fond memories of them and assumed I could do a quick revision: freshen the language, update a few details, and lean a little harder into the romance tropes.
My mistake.
While the books were solid, they needed far more work to meet current reader expectations. I completely rewrote two of them and performed major surgery on two more. What I realized—very clearly—is that back then I didn’t really understand the romance market at all.
I was writing stories about young gay men finding career success and romance on South Beach.
Note the order of those words.
There was plenty of romance, but not in the way today’s romance readers want it centered and foregrounded. Fixing that meant rethinking structure, pacing, emotional beats. Basically everything.
Once the revisions were done, each book still needed a full production checklist: updated copyright pages, added customer reviews, a brief reader summary at the front, a series summary at the back, updated author notes, new tables of contents, new covers, revised descriptions, and new keywords.
That’s a lot of work for one book. I had to do it six times.
I’m now gradually uploading the revised series to Amazon, where the books will be enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, where many romance “whale” readers do most of their reading.
While all of that was going on, I stumbled into another project.
I started paying close attention to how readers are actually finding books now—and it’s changing fast. Instead of typing keyword strings into Amazon search, more readers are asking full questions using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, then following the links they’re given. Even Google now provides AI-generated summaries instead of simple lists of results.
If you’ve tried searching Amazon lately—even by author name or title—you’ve seen how cluttered the results are with sponsored listings.
So the question for authors becomes: how do we make sure our books surface in these new kinds of searches?
I spent months learning how this works, and yesterday I shared what I’ve learned in a presentation at the Boca Raton Library. For those who couldn’t attend, or who wanted more depth, I’ve packaged the material into a 70-page PDF, along with worksheets for both self-published and traditionally published authors, plus an audit sheet you can use to see whether your titles, descriptions, and online presence align with the kinds of questions readers are actually asking.
If you’re an author, reply to this email and I’ll send you a free copy of the audit sheet. It’s a practical tool on its own and gives you a clear preview of the full package.
If you want to see what the whole product looks like you can find it at Gumroad:
One more quick note: the four-book Angus Green FBI thrillers set is currently on sale for 99 cents, reduced from $6.99. You can order from Amazon or your favorite retailer if you like, but I’ll only get 33 cents from each sale. If you order from Curios, I’ll get the whole 99 cents. Not a big deal, but in today’s economy every penny matters. (Well, except for the US Mint.) (BTW I’ve sold 480 copies of this set so far at that BARGAIN price!)
Weather permitting, I’m traveling to Austin, Texas on Thursday for the Novel Marketing Conference. I’m hoping to come home with even more ideas to test. I’ll keep you posted.
Remember, if you’d like to get a Valentine’s postcard from Joanna and me with a link to a free download of the ebook of Death at the Dog Park, enter your name and address here: https://forms.gle/jYCMFAHRaxE7kXes9
I am very grateful that the body of Sgt. Rai Gvili was returned to his family. His was the last of the hostages in Gaza. I hope that the peace process can move forward.
(A balcony on the Aston Aloha Surf Waikiki, where I worked on those page proofs.)
I am also saddened by the death of Don Weise, who was my editor briefly at Alyson Books. He was a strong force in gay publishing, and I was fortunate to know and work with him. Back in the day, editors sent printed page proofs to authors to correct errors and add or subtract information.
We had to be very careful not to change the pagination because that was already set in Adobe InDesign. Don FedExed me those proofs when I was in Honolulu doing research in 2009 before attending Left Coast Crime on the big island, and I sat out on my hotel balcony reading and marking up those pages. (Instead of wandering around absorbing the aloha atmosphere!)
With love and gratitude,
Neil
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