Lush green lawns curve around Nazareth University’s oldest building, a romantic English Tudor Gothic-style building once the Motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph. In the 1920s, a small group of resourceful Catholic nuns founded a women-only college in Rochester. The school later moved onto a sprawling 215 acres in Pittsford, opened its doors to all genders, and expanded well beyond its earliest dreams. By 2003, the college was sold, the sisters had moved away, and the Motherhouse was renamed the Golisano Academic Center.
A section of its fourth floor still retains the chaste austerity of the sisters’ small beige bedrooms, though replaced by English Department offices. Except that in one, shared by two adjunct lecturers, the atmosphere is more steamy than celibate.
Meet Amy Gamet and Norah Pritchard. English professors by day, but by night and during semesters off, at home, with candles lit (or not), the two women write wildly popular romance novels filled with spicy sex, handsome heroes, and feisty twenty-first century heroines.
On campus, Gamet teaches creative writing and pop fiction. Off campus, Gamet is described by Goodreads as a “USA Today bestselling author of romantic suspense and contemporary romance . . . best known for her Hero Force series, where military romance meets thrilling action and intrigue.”
Yes, that gorgeous, truncated male body on the cover of Gamet’s romance novel is packing a six pack as well as a very big gun.
In 2005, Gamet, wife to Brian, and mother to Adam, Julia, and Owen, was teaching math in an Irondequoit school, but she wanted to be at home.
“I read a pregnancy magazine in the library, and it was a really bad article,” Gamet says.
“I thought, ‘somebody got paid for this,’ so I started freelancing.” Three queries later, Gamet won the golden ticket—Parents Magazine wanted her—until the editor left and the story was killed.
One year at the Novelists, Inc. writing conference, she listened to wildly successful self-published authors. “The room was packed. I realized [the authors] didn’t say anything I didn’t know already. So, I wondered, ‘what are they doing to make seven figures?’”
As for topics and structure, she’d been reading romance novels for years. Now how to write one? When ready to submit her very first romance novel to big name Harlequin Publishing company, her mathematical acumen made her reconsider. Add together the cost of a proofreader, the Vellum self-publishing software program, and learning graphic design for creating book covers, and self-publishing becomes the most profitable option. Write, format, and upload to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kindle Unlimited and voila.
Gamet’s first three-book series, Love on the Lake, with its Finger Lakes setting “wasn’t a big seller,” but she kept on writing.
Her mother proofread Meant for Her, the first of her four-book series Love and Danger, which includes romantic ingredients but without the steam.
“I kept thinking, ‘people are going to read this!’” remembers Gamet. “A year or two later I got to talking with my father at a Christmas party, and he joked how ‘erotic authors make a lot of money.’ I thought, ‘I’m done filtering myself.”
Filters off, Gamet continued to knock out novels but now with “open door” sex scenes. Now, more than a decade later, she’s published twenty-two titles.
Despite a heart for romance, Gamet took a practical approach to “marketability” of her novels. “I’m about making a living,” she says.
What sold? Steamy military romances.
“I read some books, watched some movies, read other authors, and I started winging it.”
Her fans devoured her Hero Force book series, which later spun off into a six-book series, Shattered Seals (as in Navy Seals).
Gamet admits she’s not “a fan of the covers” of some of her military romances, although her husband uses them as a running joke. “He asks everyone who comes over, when they see the cover of a new book, “Don’t I look pretty good?”
“It’s important that your cover looks like everyone else’s,” Gamet explains. She knew the importance of repeating certain romance storylines for readers.
“Take Six Flags. You see a certain roller coaster, and you think ‘I love rides like that.’ They [the readers] want to go on that ride again and again.”
Moving forward, Gamet wanted international markets and had the series translated into German (especially popular), French, Italian, and Russian.
“My translator said the character’s names didn’t sound Russian. Petrovich? I don’t know,” Gamet shrugs. “I changed them.”
She hired a narrator for audiobooks, but most recently said she realized that AI could easily translate and narrate future books.
Gamet recently said goodbye to military romances and started on a thriller whose heroine investigates strange disappearances in US national parks. She’s already planning a tax-deductible research trip to Maine’s Acadia National Park.
Gamet’s office mate and former Rush-Henrietta English high school teacher Norah Pritchard has a similar storyline. The Pittsford native, married to Tom and mother to Jackson, James, and Isla, left teaching when her third child was born. She credits her mother for her love of romance novels.
“My mother was a voracious reader of mass market romance novels, especially Katherine Woodwiss’s bodice rippers. I began reading them, and I always knew I was going to write.”
Before spicy romances, Pritchard kept the heat in the kitchen. First she wrote food blogs, and during the COVID-19 pandemic she wrote a full-length book, Dinnertime: Fast and Fresh Family Meals for Every Night of the Week, which was published by Freemont Press in 2021.
Afterward, a “burned out” Pritchard says, “I couldn’t think of any recipe without crying.”
Suddenly her neighborhood provided inspiration, and she began to write the Northfield series of romance novels. This time she would self-publish.
“I’m a one-person business. I love being in control of all my covers, my branding, my publishing schedule,” Pritchard says. “I write in Scrivener, format in Vellum, and export to Amazon and B&N Press as publisher of Willowcrest Lane Publishing.”
“Marketing is huge. I use social media—Instagram, TikTok,” Pritchard adds. “I’m super confident in my branding steamy, small-town romances.”
Unlike Gamet who designs her own covers, Pritchard uses “real couples” in engagement photos along with some professional models.
Her first romance novel in the Northfield series, The Other Side of Forever, introduced the Hart sisters, “strong, independent women who are searching for something else and finding love along the way.”
There is no bodice ripping in Pritchard’s small town. If a bodice comes off, a Hart sister is doing her own unbuttoning.
Pritchard explains that there is a “the spectrum of sensuality” expected in romantic novels that spread out in “different levels from clean and sweet all the way to erotic.”
Pritchard once teased out a reader’s response to a sex scene from her husband.
“I made him read an excerpt out loud, and he got bright red,” says Pritchard. She was quick to add that her husband is “the model for every romance hero I write. He’s so my equal. He’s so supportive.”
But while Pritchard’s world contains expected romantic themes, she says she’s more interested in writing about the relationships between women and what women are truly interested in: “equality, education, work/life balance, and family dynamics.”
“I think romance novels are inherently feminist. They explore equality, and women have agency. Romance novels have a stigma attached to them that’s offensive,” argues Pritchard. “What’s wrong with the soft skills of empathy and compassion and love? It’s changed from the bodice ripper. Romantic novels today reflect our time as women.”
Both Gamet and Pritchard share as voracious an appetite to write as their readers do to read their novels. As Gamet heads out to Maine, Pritchard is plotting out new fictional characters—“a family of brothers” in the Adirondacks. As for research, Pritchard says she’ll query her husband and other men she knows with the question: “Is that something a guy would think?” While she may not have all the answers, what she does know is that her new romantic universe will include, as all the others do, an obligatory, if not more modern, “happy ever after or happy for now.”
Romantic moment
A New York Times front-page story on July 7, 2024, gushes that romance writing is having a moment. No longer “looked down upon as frothy and unserious ‘chick-lit’” by US independent bookstores, publishers now scout for self-published romance writers and “six of the top ten best-selling fiction authors in the United States this year are romance writers.” Because readers are looking for it, over the last two years, bookstores dedicated to romance writing increased from two to twenty.
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