Paper Princess by Erin Watt Find the Author: Twitter, Facebook
Published by EverAfter Platinum on April 4th 2016
Genres: Romance, Young Adult
Purchase links: Amazon
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Source: Nina Bocci
From strip clubs and truck stops to southern coast mansions and prep schools, one girl tries to stay true to herself.
These Royals will ruin you…
Ella Harper is a survivor—a pragmatic optimist. She’s spent her whole life moving from town to town with her flighty mother, struggling to make ends meet and believing that someday she’ll climb out of the gutter. After her mother’s death, Ella is truly alone.
Until Callum Royal appears, plucking Ella out of poverty and tossing her into his posh mansion among his five sons who all hate her. Each Royal boy is more magnetic than the last, but none as captivating as Reed Royal, the boy who is determined to send her back to the slums she came from.
Reed doesn’t want her. He says she doesn’t belong with the Royals.
He might be right.
Wealth. Excess. Deception. It’s like nothing Ella has ever experienced, and if she’s going to survive her time in the Royal palace, she’ll need to learn to issue her own Royal decrees.
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Making the Book YA-friendly
By Erin Watt
When we were exchanging emails about potentially writing together, the idea for The Royals was birthed by our love of teenage soap operas. Therefore, we set out to write a young adult book. But because of our past writing experiences, the story that eventually came out of us was fairly racy. So after much debate, we toned it down, reading a ton of YA books to see what would be considered appropriate and what was not.
And then…we toned it down again. And again. Until the steam factor was lower than ever. We loved our toned down version, but when we decided to self-publish, we wondered if maybe we should remove some of the heavier edits and go back to super steamy, but that didn’t read right to us.
Ultimately, we settled on the heat and tone that you see in Paper Princess. It is a racier YA, and one that we think is appropriate for 17 years and older. We know that in writing an upper YA, we have two audiences: the teens and the adults that read YA books, and we think that the tone of the story fits those two audiences.
Yes, there’s cursing and mature situations in the story. Our protagonist is a seventeen year-old ex-stripper.
But teens today are more mature than ever. We’re pushing the envelope of what stores are carrying, but we think we’re meeting teens exactly where they are today—trying to navigate difficult emotional tightropes of struggles with envy, feelings of belonging, and newfound desires.
Those themes are universal—no matter if you’re seventeen or forty-seven. Paper Princess is a coming of age story full of drama, angst, and all the greatness that youth has to offer.
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