BERNE — Jayne Fresina of Berne has had a total of 15 historical romance novels published to date, and all of them since 2011. All are available online, and six are available in print.

She has been writing for about a decade, always while holding down other jobs. But in July Fresina, who is a native of York, England, plans to leave the part-time job she has held for 10 years, and begin to write full-time.

She told The Enterprise recently that she hopes that the royalties she receives will be comparable to the income from a full-time job. She added a caveat: “I will need to keep writing.”

She already has two new books in the series coming out soon, one this September and another in January. “And I’m hoping to write some others in the meantime,” she said.

According to statistics from the website of the Romance Writers of America, the total annual sales value of romance novels stood in 2013 at $1.08 billion. And romance novels held a 13-percent share of all of the adult fiction sold.

Fresina came to Berne in 1988 with her husband, whom she first met in England, when he was stationed there with the Air Force.

She started out penning horror stories, but was unable to find a publisher. The first agent she worked with suggested that she try her hand at romance novels — a genre that Fresina had enjoyed reading since she was a teenager — and so she did. Again, that agent was unable to help her publish.

Next, Fresina began looking into e-publishers and managed eventually to get her foot in the door by finding one that would take her on. That first book was the e-book, “Last Rake Standing.” Getting to that point “took a lot of perseverance,” she said.

From there, one of the print publishers that she had previously contacted became interested, and in fact got in touch with her. That publisher, SourceBooks, then signed her on for a three-book — print and digital — contract. That was the Sydney Dovetail series, which is still available digitally and in bookstores. “So around that time everything started happening for me — finally!”

She has also published one full-length work of literary fiction, “Souls Dryft,” in 2013.

Fresina said that, “if I really push myself,” it takes her about two months to write a book. Usually the storyline comes to her first, and then the characters. Often, then she will need to go back and do some research.

For instance, she said, for a book about a main character who was a boxer, she needed to check into details about boxing in the Regency era, including the customs surrounding bare-knuckle boxing and even details about “what people would look like, how much they would weigh.”

Another book, “Miss Molly Robbins Designs a Seduction,” featured a main character who was a dressmaker, so Fresina needed to research the fashions of the period. This character was also a lady’s maid who had built her own business as a dressmaker, so “I had a lot of research to do on that score.”            

She added, “A lot of research is never actually used, but it brews in the back of my mind and might come out in another book later.”

Asked if publishers have a lot of control over the storyline, she said that it depends on the publisher. “There are publishers,” she said, “that are very involved in the content, they will tell you, ‘Show me your first draft,’ and then say, ‘I don’t like this character,’ or, ‘You should bring in more of this or more of that.’”

However, Fresina made a move with her most recent book, “True Story” (The Deverells Book One), to a new publishing company called Twisted E-Publishing, which was started by a writer friend of hers. Now she has more freedom than ever.

“I’m pretty much free to put in what I want to put in. Sometimes I wonder, ‘Am I doing the wrong thing? Do I know what I’m doing?’ It’s a little scary, but at the same time I feel like I have more confidence in myself. And in the reviews that have come out, of this first book in the new series, readers are really appreciating the fact that I know what I’m doing with the story,” Fresina said.

Fresina’s contract is better at the new company too.

Twisted E-Publishing is primarily a digital publisher, so, when a customer wants a print copy, the company produces it on demand through Amazon’s CreateSpace (“hence the higher cost of a print version”), Fresina explained. She said that most customers these days tend to buy e-books rather than print copies.

According to statistics from the Romance Writers of America, e-books account for a hefty chunk — 39 percent — of the romance novels sold.

With past publishers, Fresina said, she sometimes managed to bend rules slightly — for instance, not having the hero and heroine meet as early on, and not providing as many sex scenes throughout the book, as publishers usually like.             

With regard to the sex scenes — ubiquitous in this genre, and often an interesting blend of the demure and the graphic — Fresina said that she tries to be “just basic” in her word choice. “Sometimes, with a sex scene in a book, it can be a little funny,” she said. “I try to just make it realistic so that, if somebody’s going to laugh at it, at least they won’t laugh too hard.”           

She added that she would never include a very detailed sex scene. “It wouldn’t fit my characters. I like to leave them a little bit of dignity and privacy at the end of the day, so that not everybody knows everything about them, they have a little bit of themselves.”

Fresina said that she enjoyed working with Sourcebooks but that, when working with a smaller company, with fewer people involved in putting the book together — as she is now with Twisted E-Publishing — writers can generally have more say.

She noted, too, that e-book publishers can be much faster than traditional publishers at getting books out. “Readers seem to be expecting that now. Can’t say that I blame them, because, when you’re enjoying a series, you don’t want to wait over a year for the next installment.”