Today we’re very pleased to be hosting the wonderful Victoria Connelly! Her first novel to be released in the US, A Weekend With Mr Darcy, is the first novel in a trilogy about Jane Austen addicts and, if I do say so myself, it’s a wonderful read. Here, Victoria tells us what the differences are between the US edition of the novel and the UK edition! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of A Weekend With Mr Darcy which was released this weekend!

I’m very excited because I’m about to be published in the US for the first time with my novel, A Weekend with Mr Darcy. It’s all happened so quickly too. In 2009, I was signed up for a three-book deal for my trilogy about Jane Austen addicts before I’d even completed the first book! The UK deal came pretty soon after the US one but, interestingly, although my agent pitched it as a trilogy, the UK only made an offer for two books and the third book in the series is likely to be published in the US before it is available in the UK.

It’s been interesting seeing the differences between my UK and US publisher. So far, the US has taken the first two books and pretty much left them as they were published in the UK but I did notice a lot of grammatical changes in the final stage of edits. When I first got the edits, I got quite a surprise - it was a bit like getting an essay back from your teacher at school all covered in red pen. Their attention to detail really impressed me and I’ve never had things like the ‘active voice’ or ‘pronouns’ pointed out to me in my writing before. I have learned so much from my US edits!

Here are some examples of things that have been queried or changed. I’m addicted to ‘qualifiers’ in my work, frequently using words like ‘rather’ as in ‘she had a rather pretty dress’ but my editor calls this ‘unnecessary verbiage’ and deletes them. It rather hurts! My reference to ‘mint humbugs’ was also queried by my US editor, and they didn’t like it when I wrote things like ‘he sighed inwardly’. ‘Inwardly’ was redundant, they told me and was a particular pet hate of theirs.

But the great thing about editing is that the writer can query things too and one word that sneaked into my manuscript after the first US edit was ‘gotten’. I strongly objected to it especially as they had my Oxford doctor of literature using the word! So it was deleted along with all the references to ‘inwardly’ and any ‘mint humbugs’ that were hanging around.

The second book in my Austen trilogy is coming being published in the US in January 2012. I originally called it The Illustrated Darcy but nobody but me seemed to like that so we changed it to Dreaming of Mr Darcy for a while. However, my UK publisher had a change of heart and decided against the Darcy theme and we came up with the new title, The Perfect Hero. But the US wanted to keep the Darcy title and so it’s remained Dreaming of Mr Darcy. It feels funny having two titles for the same book and I only hope it doesn’t confuse my readers.

Another thing that was different between the two editions were my Jane Austen references. My UK editor cut a lot of these in The Perfect Hero which I felt a bit disappointed about but I left them all in for the US version and nothing has been cut. So, if you’re a real Austen fan and don’t mind Austen overload, read the US version!

There was also a huge difference between the UK and US covers. The US covers feel very fresh and modern with crisp photos of the heroines with illustrated locations in the background. In contrast, the UK covers are sweet and romantic with their cartoony illustrations. I love both and I’ll be really interesting to hear what readers think.

Thanks so much Victoria!

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