Novelspot Gazette

Since this is my first post here at Novelspot I thought I would start by telling everyone a bit about Black Velvet Seductions and my role with the company.

First of all, I’m Laurie Sanders the CEO and founder of Black Velvet Seductions. I also act as editor in chief and have my fingers in marketing and promotion. The chances are good that if you contact Black Velvet Seductions it is me you will talk to as I handle about 99% of the emails and about 99% of the phone calls we receive.

Black Velvet Seductions got its start back in the winter of 2005 when it made its way into my mind as a vague concept. I was nearing completion of my own erotic romance His Perfect Submissive at the time. In looking around at the publishers that were available then, I didn’t see a good match for the book I had written. I thought that Ellora’s Cave and Whiskey Creek Press were both close, but His Perfect Submissive didn’t follow all of the conventions that other erotic romances published by those companies followed.

For one thing, the heroine had a deeper backstory than most of the characters in books published by Ellora’s Cave and Whiskey Creek Press. Because of my character’s backstory it didn’t make sense that she would embrace dominance and submission with the same enthusiasm as her sisters at other erotic publishers and it didn’t fit that the sex scenes would begin within the first few pages and continue frequently thereafter as many of the erotic publishers expected.

What I’d really written was the kind of book I had wanted to read through many years of reading series romances. The book started out like many series romance books…with a forced marriage that the heroine wasn’t pleased about. But from there, it diverged from the books of the time, because the characters, at least the hero, was more sexually diverse than most heores in the traditional, series romances published at the time. My book included dominance and submission, BDSM, spanking, and similar subjects which series romance publishers weren’t touching at that time.

Though His Perfect Submissive was the reason I initially dreamt up the notion of launching Black Velvet Seductions, when we began accepting manuscripts and publishing books in December of 2005 the editing, promotion and other tasks took most of my time. Hence, His Perfect Submissive, though it was only a couple of chapters away from completion took a back seat to other tasks and other books for a long time. I am happy to announce that it will finally be published this February.

In December of 2005 we published our first book, Fool Me Once by Jessica Joy. Fool Me Once is a romantic suspense about a woman who awakes after a car accident with no memory, except for the disjointed images of a murder scene which haunt her.

Fool Me Once has been very well reviewed, but one of my favorite reviews for it says, “There are books out there that make me so glad I decided to schedule regular reading time into my work week. Jessica Joy’s Fool Me Once is one of those books!” The review is from Cheryl at The Book Connection Blog http://thebookconnectionccm.blogspot.com/2007/07/foole-me-once-by-jessica-joy-book.html and it sums up exactly the feeling that we would like all our books to leave with our readers. Since the first book we’ve published a number of books in a number of different sub-genres. We are perhaps most well known for erotic romances like Toy’s Story: Acquisition of a Sex Toy by Robert Cloud and Bound by Fate by Lee Rush but we also publish sensuous romances and sweet romances. Books like Ayn Amorelli’s Contract Bride and Sherry James’ Studs for Hire series are sensuous romances. They appeal to the same general readership that enjoys the spicier series romances. Like all Sensuous Journeys titles Contract Bride and the Studs for Hire series do not include BDSM, dominance and submission, or other fetish elements.