Beth Henderson

Author's Web site:
www.RomanceAndMystery.com

Link to Author's Products: www.mmpubs.com/catalog/henderson-beth-m-77.html

About the Author

Beth Henderson has been published by seven different publishers and is the author of 25 published books in hardcover, paperback, and e-book formats. Her books have sold over 600,000 copies worldwide, and been translated in twelve languages. Among these titles were tales of romantic-suspense, historical romance, contemporary romantic comedy, and young adult romantic comedy based on the "Saved By The Bell" television series. She holds a bachelors in History from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a masters in Composition and Rhetoric from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Currently she is working on historical romances set in the American West, romantic comedies, romantic suspense ideas, and a couple short stories.

Head to www.a-writersgroup.com to read a short story, "And Jeeves Could Do No Wrong", she wrote to introduce other readers to one of her favorite authors, P.G. Wodehouse.

Detailed Bio...

It was back in the Dark Ages – you know, before all the technology jumps into personal computers and the Internet – that Beth Henderson first put quill to parchment.

Okay, it wasn’t quite that dark an era. She did have an electric typewriter, past employment as a data entry clerk, as a traffic director (scheduler of commercials) at a couple of radio stations, one rock and one country, and had spent time writing commercials for the airwaves and cutting and pasting up display ads for a small want ads newspaper and for J.C. Penney. She also had an undernourished desire to write novels. She simply hadn’t thought up a long enough story to qualify as novel length.

Inspiration came with unemployment. Six months without a paycheck requires a place to escape from worries, and she chose to plunge mentally into the Gold Rush era between job interviews. By the time a new position materialized, so had the first version of Bird of Paradise.

Note that this is the first version.

But that puts us slightly ahead of our story. Beth sent this child of her imagination winging its way to an editor’s desk and then settled in to wait. Fortunately the wait wasn’t long. Unfortunately the manuscript came winging its way back to her.

However, it did so with a personal letter rather than a generic rejection slip. The editor said she liked the story and Beth’s writing style, but there were places that needed fine tuning -- lots of places that needed fine tuning -- and she pointed the most major of these out specifically. The final line said she’d like to see the manuscript again if Beth chose to rewrite it.

With a carrot like that, you bet she did.

Two years went by before the story was set to go again. It was longer, more involved. But it wasn’t on the mark yet. The helpful editor had moved to a new publishing house, and, when approached, she responded favorably to the new version of Bird of Paradise.

Then send another encouraging and helpful letter of rejection.

Let’s skip ahead in time. Ten years, in fact. A full decade of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting the same book. But it was also time spent writing a romantic-suspense tale (Nikrova’s Passion), and a contemporary romance set in a haunted house (Arden’s Touch). All three manuscripts had been out making the rounds and collecting rejection slips, which nearly always resulted in rewrites based on editors’ comments, although no publishing contracts had materialized. As Spring came to a close in 1989, Beth decided to send the trio out one last time. This time, if they came back without an offer, she swore she’d retire all three and start from scratch on something new.

After all, you can only rework the same manuscripts so many times before you are 1) out of new ideas, or 2) sick to death of the story and characters. Beth had reached the first threshold and was fast approaching the second.

Late that summer two miracles happened. At least they felt like miracles. A literary agent told her that Bird of Paradise was the best historical romance she’d read in a long time and wanted to take Beth on as a client. With the ink barely dry on their agreement, an editor from a small publishing house called to say she’d like to buy Nikrova’s Passion, and did Beth have anything else she was working on that might be available? Of course she did! Arden’s Touch.

By December the agent had sold Bird of Paradise to Leisure Books, which, strangely enough, had turned it down the year before. They optioned the spin-off tale, retitling it Paradise In His Arms. Both of these books were written using Elizabeth Daniels as the author's name.

Beth went from having a growing stack of rejection slips to selling four books within a few months.

The agent was instrumental in landing Beth a three book contract to write three books for Berkley, although these were written as Lisa Dane. Beth also wrote another romantic suspense, Queen's Cache, for that first publisher, and a romantic comedy for Zebra Books.

As fairytale as this all seems, the road hasn’t always been as smooth as it was at that magical point in time. Within three years, nine different titles were published through four different publishing houses, a divorce loomed in Beth’s personal life, she finished a long delayed bachelor’s degree in history, and resigned her position as full time stepmother to two now teenaged boys, all of which exacted a toll on her imagination.

Perseverance prevailed though and while sales to publishers seesawed over the years, more tales were published, until in 2008 she can count twenty-five titles with her name on them sold by bookstores around the world.

It’s been a diversified career, one that added young adult romantic comedy to the tally in the 1990s with seven young adult romantic comedies based on the characters from the "classic" Saved By The Bell television show. That contract meant that Beth now had written under four different names, and when Silhouette and Harlequin Historicals began releasing her titles the tally went to seven different publishing houses she's worked with. The Harlequin/Silhouette deals lead to her books being translated into twelve other languages for readers in over twenty countries worldwide.

She added a masters in English Composition and Rhetoric along the way, but given the time, opportunity, and the spark of an idea, prefers to lose herself in researching an historical period – her specialty centered in the 19th century American West. But because she doesn’t read just one kind of book for enjoyment, she doesn’t write just one type of book either. Currently she has new historical romances in the works, but also contemporary romantic comedies, and romantic-suspense tales.

Beth added a new "hat" when she began reissuing long out-of-print titles under the 3 Media Press banner. Some of the tales, like the new version of Nikrova's Passion, have additions and some rewrite from the original version. It's been fun revisiting the characters and enjoying story lines--particularly as she admits in doing so she realizes she's forgotten some of the episodes and twists and turns of the plots. "It's nearly like reading a story someone else has written."

She has no intention of resting on past laurels though and only wishes there were more time in the day to lose herself in creating new stories, new adventures, and falling in love with a new hero. "That," she claims, "is the real carrot to keep me at the keyboard. Romance hasn't exactly worked out well for me in real life. But, boy, in the pages of a book, it's a whole different story."