Elizabeth Ellen Carter is an award-winning historical romance writer who pens richly detailed historical romantic adventures. A former newspaper journalist, Carter ran an award-winning PR agency for 12 years.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            G’day and welcome to Write with Love. Today I’m chatting to award-winning, historical romance writer, Elizabeth Ellen Carter. Hi Elizabeth, thanks for joining me.

Elizabeth E C:                Hello.  Thank you very much Sarah. Wonderful to be chatting with you.

Sarah Williams:             Wonderful, yeah. So, tell us about your story and how you got into this amazing career.

Elizabeth E C:                I’ve always been a writer. When I ran out of things to read when I was a kid, I started writing my own books. I started writing a girl detective story on my mother’s typewriter. When I grew a little older I realized that being a novelist probably wasn’t a first start career, so then I moved into journalism because at least they pay me to write. And it’s so funny  people  say, “Oh, you’re really good at creative writing, you should be a journalist”. And it’s sort of, in a way, creative writing is the worst quality you can have as a journalist because you’re supposed to be dealing with facts.

So, I didn’t do too well in the hard news department. I really liked features and I really liked talking to people, really exploring their motivations and going in-depth. So I did that for a number of years and in my 20’s I thought, you know, maybe I should write a novel again. And I shudder to think back about those early stories but I started reexploring my local historical. So it will be five years in October that my debut novel, Moonstone Obsession came out. And from there, I’ve got seven full length titles, the most recent one … I’ll do the big plug … Shadow of the Corsairs is book three in a series called Heart of the Corsairs and that’s set in the Mediterranean in the early 19th Century, looking at a real-life aspect of the pirates of the Barbary Coast.

Sarah Williams:             Oh fantastic. Wow. Pirates, who doesn’t love pirates.

Elizabeth E C:                [crosstalk 00:03:10]Good pirates.

Sarah Williams:             Good pirates. So tell us about that initial first book, how did you go about getting published? Did you have to do the submission processes and all those sorts of things? What did you do?

Elizabeth E C:                Well, I wasn’t sure how seriously I was going to take it because it was something to entertain myself initially. But a friend of mine, a big ex footballer, who writes jingles said, you know what, if you’ve written one of these things, you should join the Romance Writers of Australia and they had a competition for unpublished manuscripts and to my surprise, Moonstone Obsession, made the long-list and I thought, well maybe there’s actually something to this. So I started submitting. The third group that I submitted to, a small press in the United States, said yeah, we’ll take it. So it was a really sort of quick entry into the publishing and I learned a heck of a lot. I realize now that even though I was a journalist by trade, I’ve written everything from features on news stories to even writing scripts for radio and TV. There’s a real art to novel writing, which I really hadn’t considered before.

Sarah Williams:             There sure is, and that’s why organizations like Romance Writers are so fantastic teaching us the craft, and then the business side. So,