Lots of people will be diving into NaNoWriMo in a few days, and lots more are sitting on the fence. I’ve been on that fence, it’s made of excuses!
Today, I’m going to do you a solid by taking one of those excuses away. You’re getting some Writing Prompts. And not just any Writing Prompts, but Bad Boy Romance Prompts.
(Please note that no actual romance writers were harmed in the making of these prompts.)
Prompt #1:
You are foreign. Maybe Australian! Your scammy non-fiction books aren’t selling too well, but you spot the latest trend: bad boy romance, and decided to write under a woman’s name – no, screw that, several women’s names! You eagerly stuff several books into one, artificially inflating your page count and stealing from your fellow authors. You do this across all your books – who cares anyway, they are all ghostwritten.
Prompt #2:
You’re from DC but you moved to Seattle a few years ago, where you decided that you were sick of being a failed non-fiction writer of boring books about iPhones, and have decided to dive headlong into the hot world of bad boy romance! Of course, you pretend you are a woman and write under several different names. This way you can finally unleash your inner bad boy, and use all sorts of tricks to cheat the system – especially as your day job is a data scientist. The only problem is you can’t write.
Prompt #3:
You are an English guy who has decided to spice up his life by writing under several different female names. Well, when I say writing, I mean packaging someone else’s words and passing them off as your own. The ghost is on a tight NDA anyway, so they can’t even complain about their crappy pay. Everything should be fine, right? Pretty sure no one will ever find out…
Prompt #4:
You made a name for yourself when you hit #1 in the Kindle Store and everyone is asking you how you did it – which is fun the first couple of times, but then you think, “Hey, I could make some real money out of this.” You start a $2,000 mastermind class and turn the current crop of scammy internet marketers into the next generation of bad boy romance authors.
Prompt #5:
You’re a bestselling bad boy romance author pulling in $200,000 a month but some no good kids are sniffing around your business. Amazon is breathing down your neck too, just when you have invested big in turning your ghostwritten books into German-language ghostwritten books. Then you get an idea: hey, what if I point my clickfarm at them pesky kids?
Prompt #6:
Your string of hits comes to an abrupt end when Amazon rank-strips your books, after finding out that you clickfarmed them into the charts. But it’s okay! Amazon’s fraud detection systems are way out of date, and it doesn’t make any serious effort to block you from opening a new account. So you just start a new name, like you did before. Amazon won’t even try and make the link.
Prompt #7:
Your ghostwriter quit abruptly after finding a minimum wage job which pays better, leaving you in the lurch. The book is only half done, the pre-order goes live in ten days, you have 278 newsletter swaps arranged, and have already spent $750 on gift cards for your Amazon “reviewers.” Oh noes! But don’t be alarmed, you can just take someone else’s work, file off the serial numbers, and present it as your own.
Prompt #8:
Your antennae are twitching. Something is in the air. Maybe the market is shifting, maybe you created too much competition for your own books. Maybe you have peed so much in the romance pool that it’s time to find fresh ground. So you start a marketing service, looking to harvest names and email addresses from everyone, in every genre. But some people are asking awkward questions about your past…
Prompt #9:
You are in trouble – those pesky kids figured out you pointed your clickfarm at them because their Also Boughts turned into all of the books from your bad boy circle jerk. Now those troublesome kids are onto you and have a whole army of people turning the internet upside down, finding out your real names, where you are from, and everything you have been up to.
What happens next?
