Romy Sommer

Today is release day for Waking up in Vegas ! And as you're reading this I'm sitting beside the road somewhere watching a Toyota TV advert being filmed. Hopefully I'm warm, comfortable and not too exhausted from an early morning start. So what are you still doing here? Have you gone off and bought my book yet? Oh, okay. If you've already bought your copy, then you're allowed to stay a little longer and read on... Waking up in Vegas started with a dream. Not a metaphorical dream but a literal one. I woke up one morning and thought “now that would make a great story”. I wrote the first draft three years ago, in 30 days during the mad month of November. I submitted it to a publisher only to receive a personalised rejection that said the opening just wasn’t innovative enough. So I set the story aside, wrote a bunch of other stuff, learned the craft, and then one day late last year, as I was driving home from work, singing at the top of my lungs to Katy Per...

Since this is the week in which Harper Impulse launches, I thought I'd bring you a couple of posts on my journey so far with this brand new imprint. Next week I'll give some glimpses into the inspiration, characters and setting for Waking up in Vegas , and once the exhiliration of release day is over I'll be back with normal scheduled programming (just in case you're looking for my Behind the Scenes in the movies posts). * * * There has been a great deal said recently, by some of the most respected names in self-publishing, about how publishers are a dying breed. The most commonly cited reasons for the death of traditional publishing is that the big publishing houses don’t listen to their readers and that they are unable to turn on a dime. The Big 6 publishers (now Big 5, but since I’m South African, that just makes me giggle as I wonder which publisher is the elephant!) have been likened to the Titanic, too large and unwieldy to avoid collision with the ...