Three imprints. Three winners. Three future romance stars.
Digital first imprints HarperImpulse, Avon Maze & Carina UK are joining forces to bring exciting new talent to the romance world! The three lucky winners of our We Heart New Talent competition will win a publishing contract with us!
The competition comprises of three romance categories –
Avon Maze: Comedies
Carina UK: Weepies
HarperImpulse: Seasonal
All you need to do is pick the category you think will best suit your book! One winner will be picked for each category and the prize will be a publishing contract with the corresponding imprint.
To enter please send a synopsis, three chapters of your novel and your contact information to either romance@harpercollins.co.uk for HarperImpulse & Maze or carinauksubs@hqnuk.co.uk for Carina with the subject line ‘We Heart New Talent’ BEFORE midnight BST 1st March 2015.
Need help making the decision? Well find out a little bit more about the categories below…
Welcome to Carina UK. We love authors. We love books and we can’t wait to read your story!
As a boutique imprint of a much larger publisher, we regularly hit the digital bestseller charts – all around the world, finding your fans wherever they may be! Our passionate team are dedicated to working with authors to build up your author brands, delivering the most competitive digital cover and implementing innovative and bespoke marketing campaigns. Our goal is simple – to make your book the success it deserves to be.
‘Weepies’… A word we associate with soppy romances that have us all reaching for the tissues…but during this Romance Festival we want to redefine ‘weepies’! It’s not just about getting your readers to have tears streaming down their faces, dripping onto their eReaders, it’s about having the reader so involved with your characters and your plot that they can’t help but get emotionally hooked on your story. We are looking for a story that will have our hearts thumping and our fingers tensed over the next page button desperate to know what will happen next. A story full of characters we cannot stop talking (raving!) about. This can come in the form of a novel about family, love and heart or a sweeping romance between two people – as with love there are no strict rules… So here we go, let’s write outside the lines and redefine this word – claim it back as our own!
Maze is the brand new, innovative digital-first imprint from Avon books. For the past seven years, Avon has been the market-leader in commercial fiction, with bestselling authors including Mhairi McFarlane, Miranda Dickinson, Julia Williams, and Claudia Carroll amongst many others.
More recently, they have seen stand-out success with their ebooks, and this lead to the formation of Maze in September 2014. Whilst it may only be a young imprint, Maze has already seen standout success with Catherine Ferguson’s runaway Christmas bestseller, Humbugs and Heartstrings.
Maze publishes a wide range of fiction but right now we’re on the lookout for anything that will make us laugh. We’re looking for fresh, fun and memorable stories that will warm our hearts and make us smile in equal measure. So if you think that you’ve got what it takes to be the next fabulous author on Maze’s list then get in touch. We can’t wait to hear from you!
Winner of the Festival of Romance’s Publisher Innovation Award & the hosts of the UK’s first online Romance Festival, since it’s launch in May 2013 HarperImpulse has led the trends of digital publishing and hit the bestseller charts, including Christmas #1 this year with Debbie Johnson’s Cold Feet at Christmas!
Publishing an exciting new range of romance fiction brought to you from the women’s fiction team at HarperCollins, we’re leading the way in being digital first and print second with every novel we publish also going into print. Our aim is to break new talent from debut authors and import the hottest trends from the US, bringing you the very best in romance and commercial women’s fiction. Whether that is through short reads for your mobile phone or epic sagas that span the generations we want to proudly publish romance fiction that gets everybody talking. And everyone is talking about HarperImpulse!
Yes yes yes… when you say the word seasonal you immediately think of Christmas. And we love the festive season just as much as the next cotton-headed ninny-muggins. December comes round (well, September, let’s be honest) and we can’t get enough of eggnog lattes, mince pies, the warming aroma of mulled wine and all the glitz and glamour of party season. It’s also a time for being with your family and friends, remembering and being thankful for what you have… who didn’t cry at that Sainsbury’s advert last year?! And there’s nothing more romantic than a secret kiss beneath twinkling fairy lights as the snow falls softly all around… Christmas really lends itself to romance, doesn’t it?!
BUT seasonal can mean other times of the year too…
Yes we are also looking for seasonal stories besides Christmas. So all the OTHER holidays too. Mother’s Day. Halloween. Easter. Kwanza. Hanukkah. Galentine’s Day (see Parks & Rec if you don’t know the reference). Not to mention all those gorgeously summery beach reads.
If you have a beautiful, unique, intriguing love story set at a particular time of the year then we would love to read it. HarperImpulse is looking for seasonal stories and we want yours!
romance festival 