Contact / Bio

About me

The Short Version: Under the name Kathryn Anthony, I have written two Regency Romances: An Immodest Proposal and The Clarendon Rose (the link takes you to my Amazon author page), an anthology of post-apocalyptic sf, the first novella of which is available as a free download, and will soon be releasing my fantasy novel, Konstantin’s Gifts.

For those who would like to know more: I am a writer, editor, and student. For a number of years, I wrote romance and struggled to break into the field as a published writer. I had just completed, and was shopping around my second Regency-era Historical romance, when I suffered a series of personal, non-writing-related crises. By the time I had picked myself up and started processing everything that had happened, I had come to the realisation that perhaps romance writing wasn’t for me.

The irony is that this latest novel that I had been sending around had garnered enough interest from agents (I didn’t submit to any publishers) that I suspected that if I kept sending it around, I might (with emphasis on the *might*) find someone to represent it or a publisher to print it. But I didn’t want to write romance anymore. Now, the industry is such that any agent or publisher will take a risk on a first time writer, on the assumption that as she publishes more and creates a “backlist”, she’ll start making back the advances they paid out for her early books. Given that, selling a single romance and then announcing that I wasn’t doing that anymore, would be a waste of any good agent or publisher’s time. I wasn’t interested in that.

So, I took it off the market, and uploaded it to lulu.com, so I could order a copy of it for myself, and “retire” it, so to speak (I also uploaded and ordered copies of my earlier books as well, all of which I am fond). I ordered the copy, stuck it on my shelf and forgot about it.

I wrote SF/F. The first story I wrote after making the decision to change genres, sold to an anthology–a good sign. A while later, I had a computer crash and lost my cover files for the novels I had uploaded. So I signed into lulu to grab copies from there, and found, Lo! and behold, people had been buying the books I had uploaded. How cool was that?!

That was when a friend suggested I upload the book to the Kindle store. When I had notification that the book was live–and that several copies had sold in the days since I had uploaded it–I was astonished. That’s what prompted me to upload the other books I had written. Within two weeks, I had exceeded the number of sales I had made on lulu–by a considerable number (which isn’t saying much, but is still really thrilling). I haven’t made as much in royalties yet, because the pricing scale is so different in the E-conomy. But, it’s great to see the books being downloaded and read. I was even more delighted to discover repeat customers (about 2.5 weeks after uploading, the “customers also bought” band below each Regency, and a couple of the Category romances featured each other–which meant that people enjoyed the first book enough to download others! So exciting! If any of you are reading this, btw, thank you SO much for checking my books out and for coming back for more!).

If you have comments, questions, or want to tell me your thoughts, feel free to drop me an email. I’d love to hear from you! I’m at: writer [dot] katanthony [at] gmail [dot] com.