When Burbank resident Cheryl Holt sat down to write her first novel, she was a 40-year-old, stay-at-home mother looking to bring in extra income.
“I just had no clue what I was doing,” she said. “I was diving off the high dive.”
Twenty books later, Holt cracked the New York Times Best Seller list in March and has earned herself the title “Queen of Erotic Romance,” a sub-genre that takes the traditional paperback Harlequin romance novel and, well, adds more sex, she said.
But Holt, a former attorney, started out with ambitions to be a suspense novelist. When her suspense didn’t sell, she tried her hand at romance novels, sending an unsolicited manuscript to an agent.
“She told me it was the best romance she got in her slush pile in 40 years,” Holt said.
After her first novel, “The Way of the Heart,” was published, Holt began producing a steady output of writing that has become a small business for her, working 60 to 70 hours a week and putting out two or three novels per year.
“I’m like any small-business owner,” she said. “I don’t get weekends off; I don’t have holidays; I just work all the time.”
Driving that work ethic are the demands of publishers, who count on her to do the job, because if she doesn’t, they will find someone else who will, she said.
“I’m a novelist, and that’s a very unique job,” she said. “But people have this vision that I sit around and do my nails. And it’s big international business, the companies that I write for.”
And publishers expect a page-turner, which in erotic romance novels means all of her story lines have to have a sexual element, she said.
“It’s just like writing horror or comedy,” she said. “If it’s a comedy, you can’t have the first funny thing on page 70.”
Her novels are historical in nature, set in 1800s London with dukes, earls, pirates and lecherous villains.
For Holt’s readers, the novels indulge escapist fantasies.
“There’s so much going on today I’d rather go far away and see people the way they were,” said Charina Miranda, 38, from Brooklyn, N.Y., who began reading romance novels as a way to manage the grief after her father died.
Holt’s novels are rich with page-turning ingredients of raw sensuality and dramatic ups and downs, Miranda said.
“I like all that; it makes it, at the end, more gratifying,” she said. “It kind of makes the whole romance and the love story more sacred.”
Holt will sign copies of her latest book, “Double Fantasy,” at Barnes & Noble in Burbank between 3 and 5 p.m. on April 26, after appearing as a featured local celebrity in Burbank on Parade. For more information about Holt and her novels, visit www.cherylholt.com.
