Please Welcome Guest Blogger and Fellow Author, LAINEY BAINCROFT!!!!

Hey, All! Thanks to Jenny for hosting me on her terrific blog. She and I share two of the same publishers (Amira Press and The Wild Rose Press) so I think it’s pretty cool we can share some promo ops as well. Promoting is tough, and I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get sick of regurgitating the same blurbs and excerpts every time I hit the web. For the record, I grow weary of reading them, too. Often I visit blogs and forums not only to learn of new releases but also to learn a little about the author behind the book and their process. So that’s what I plan to blah…’er, blog about today.

My name is Lainey Bancroft and I have a fiction addiction.

Oops, sorry. Wrong meeting.

I am Lainey Bancroft, and after a dozen book sales of various lengths over the last two years, I think I am finally branding myself as the author of humorous contemporary romance, but I am forever on the lookout to further entrench that brand.

In my research travels (which is a fancy description for surfing the web as a form of procrastination) I tripped across the survey site Measure Up Place http://www.measureupplace.com/ where I found some interesting stats. The one that caught my eye today is WHAT WOMEN WANT IN A MAN.

No, I’m not man shopping. I’ve been with the same man two decades now, and it took me so long to housebreak him I’m not sure I’d have the patience or energy to train a new one. But, hey, as a romance author—particularly one who pens contemporary romance—I figure it’s pretty important to understand just what contemporary women are looking for in a mate.

According to the survey, these are the top five traits:
1. Good Judgments.
2. Intelligence.
3. Faithful.
4. Affectionate.
5. Financially Responsible.

Hmm. Great list. If you happened to be in the market for a mate and found a guy with all those qualities, you’d slap the Husband Material label on his butt in no time flat.
So this is the perfect contemporary romance hero, right?

Wrong! Take away # 5 and you’ve got the description for a freaking golden retriever! Don’t get me wrong. Who doesn’t love a golden retriever? Hell, I even sleep with mine. (In a completely normal, he keeps my feet warm kind of way, of course.)

But write a romance with a Golden Man-triever as the hero? Snore. Ho-hum. I don’t think so.
For one thing, if you’ve got a smart, sensible, loyal, gentle, dude who pays all his bills on time, where do you go for conflict?

For another, I’m not at all convinced romance readers want to read about the sort of guy they want to marry. Over the years, I have fallen hard for some badass boys who did devious and deceitful things between the covers—of a book. If my man were ever as manipulative and Machiavellian as some of these fictional heroes, he’d be best to hide the sharp objects and Crazy Glue. (Hey, he knows what I mean and that’s what matters )

The trick for an author is to create a hero who is flawed enough to make a reader’s heart flutter, but also redeemable enough that he deserves to win the girl in the end.

When you part the pages of a new story, are you looking for a lifetime of love, or to enjoy a three hundred-page affair with a man you probably wouldn’t go near in real life?

For me, it depends on my mood. And for the record, if I’d answered the survey, I wouldn’t have gone along with #5. Financially responsible is all good but a little boring. Ultimately, my fantasy man is so filthy-freaking-rich he doesn’t have to be responsible. Just like the hero in my new release from Absolute XPress!

Cole has pots of money. But not for any of the reasons my heroine Maggie suspects!

http://www.absolute-x-press.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=50&osCsid=9504e7fb05b8af6d9d6d5b772d46aa8a