Q&A With Katherine Grant 

Katherine Grant is the award-winning author of historical romance that takes place in the Regency Era. Some of her many novels are The Baron Without Blame, The Viscount Without Virtue, The Governess Without Guilt, The Charmer Without Cause, Three Nights With Her Husband, & Letters To Her Love. I have the pleasure of doing this Q&A with Katherine today!

Q: Katherine, out of all the genres you chose to write about, what is it about historical romance that made it tick for you?

A: Historical romance is a great intersection of my natural interests and market opportunity. As a reader, I have always loved both historical fiction and romance, so when I discovered the historical romance genre, I immediately became obsessed. Those were always the books I looked forward to reading, and I even arranged a stay-at-home weekend for myself binge reading Mary Balogh’s backlist with tea and jam cookies. 

As a writer, I got to a point where I really wanted to take control of my publishing journey instead of waiting years for an agent and publisher. Romance readers are hungry and open-minded, so it made sense to try writing a historical romance novel. In many ways, it felt like returning to my roots. The very first novel I ever attempted to write was in the fifth grade about my Revolutionary War ancestors, and in high school I wrote several romance-heavy novels that were set in vague historical settings. So it was very joyful to write my debut novel, The Ideal Countess, and I decided to stick with the genre!

Q: Would you like to talk about your upcoming release The Sailor Without A Sweetheart & where did the idea for that novel come from?

A: The Sailor Without a Sweetheart is a Persuasion-inspired Regency romance about a naval captain who returns to Portsmouth to discover the woman who rejected him years ago is still unmarried. 

This is book 4 in my series, The Prestons. The Prestons are a radical Regency family who have turned their country estate into a commune where nothing is imported from the colonial economy, everyone shares the profits, and anyone who needs safe haven is welcome. Each installment of the Prestons explores a different aspect of what it means to live life by these strong principles. 

I knew as soon as I started mapping out the series that Nate would be a naval officer and that this would be a Persuasion-inspired story. In part, this is because Persuasion is my favorite of Jane Austen’s novels!

With Nate’s story, I wanted to explore what it would be like to fight slavery in the Regency period—which is a decade or so before slavery was abolished in Britain and even farther off from when chattel slavery was ended in the Western world. As a naval captain, Nate has been policing the Slave Coast. However, bureaucracy has really stacked the odds against these efforts, and in 1820, the fight hardly seems worth fighting.

That’s where Persuasion comes in again because the trope of “second chance romance” also asks the question of: what is worth fighting for? So I played with this in the story to explore the romance and also to ask metaphorically: how do we decide what seemingly-insurmountable challenges we choose to fight?

Q: What makes your historical romances unique from other authors who write in that genre?

A: Readers love historical romances because in many ways you know what you are going to get: a story that is centered on the romance between two (or more) people that will end optimistically. 

My spin on this formula usually also includes:

• A cinnamon roll hero. I love to write both main characters as complex individuals who are trying their very best to live up to their full potential, and somehow this usually ends up in the hero being a “cinnamon roll” (who is in touch with his feelings) as opposed to an “alpha hero” (who works very hard not to acknowledge his feelings).

• Realism. I do a lot of research and try to put in little details to really build my Regency Britain as the complicated, not-always-glamorous world that it was. This means I include mentions of how they went to the bathroom at balls as well as engage with the “isms” that characters would have faced back in the day!

• Asking big questions. My favorite books across any genre are the ones that entertain me while challenging me to question the values by which I live my life. In my novels, there is usually a question about how to live life that the characters must answer, in addition to who they will live it with. 

Q: Is it too early to ask, or can you talk about any more upcoming releases and works in progress that you are currently writing right now?

A: I’m currently working on the next two installments of The Prestons! The Countess Without Conviction is a novella that picks up the story of Ellen and Max (the couple from Book 1, The Viscount Without Virtue) to see what happens to their marriage when Max inherits his title. That will be coming out in the summer of 2024.

After that will be The Miss Without a Mister, Caroline Preston and Eddie Chow’s forbidden love story!

Q: How long does it take for you to write a novel and what is the research process like while researching and writing historical romance? 

A: My full novels tend to be about 70,000 words, and it takes me about four months to write a first draft and an additional 2-3 months to finish revisions. For historical romance, that is slow!

My research process is different for each novel. Since I write in the Regency period exclusively, at this point, I have a lot of base knowledge about the period. I generally know what kind of clothes people wore, what they ate, how they traveled, and that sort of thing, so I do light research after the first draft to make sure I get those life details right.

Sometimes, I need to do in-depth research for a specific plot point. For example, The Charmer Without a Cause is about an Irish revolutionary, so I needed to get up to speed on Irish history as well as dive into what revolutionary groups were active in the 1810s. Mostly, I try to do that type of research before I start drafting so that I have as much world-building information as possible going into the story. 

And then sometimes, I go on research rabbit holes that don’t really make it into the story! For The Sailor Without a Sweetheart, I spent months reading up on the British Prevention Squadron that patrolled the Slave Coast to fight the slave trade. I know a lot about it, but most of that information did not make it into the manuscript!

Since I love research so much, I’ve started sharing it with my email subscribers in monthly “deep dives.” So over the next few months, my newsletter fans will be learning all about that Prevention Squadron. (If you love history, too, you can sign up for my deep dives at http://eepurl.com/gHXpGH)