How not to make my romance book a total cliche?

Um, how much real life romance have you experienced? If you are filtering through a very few (and it sounds like atrocious) romance novels, then anything you write will be a feeble copy of that.

Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie is a great example of a fairytale that manages to be fresh and modern. There's a bet, there are "three sisters" and "three brothers" and there's not one but two Evil Mothers and a "princess" who is getting married to the wrong man.

One big problem I see is that you've defined the negative. It's very easy to not do something. What you need to do now is list all the things you love in a romance novel, and do those. The combination (if you are referencing many different sources) will be something new and fresh, one would hope.

You have a prince. Royalty is itself a cliche of romance novels. The younger Windsors must be sick of tabloid reporters badgering them and their friends and servants about their romances and marriages.

Harlequin publishes at least one royal romance a month in at least one of their categories. (A billionaire is just a republican prince, with more power than any constitutional monarch. A sheikh is an Arab prince, and they've been romance heroes long before the silent movies.) Sometimes the prince is a billionaire CEO of his own company. So, check the bookstores and your library's romance fiction shelves to see what's been written.

Since access to royals means bypassing their security, you will need imagination to create a "cute meet" between prince and commoner.

Any poor royals, deposed and exiled, working as janitors?

Write something that is not cliched then. It is impossible to come up with a formula or or a step by step guidebook for things like this. You are just going to have to think of original ideas. That is no help as an answer, I realize but there simply are no answers to "How do I write...." questions or at least none that can be given in the format pf Y!As.

Every story has been told, but it's the author who is different. If you want your story to be different, then only you can make it unique. Draw from the things in your life that are personal to you. Maybe the prince has a bizzare fetish to clockwork pieces and he meets the girl in the hometown pocket watch store. Something like that.

If you're the one who's going to be authoring this book that one day might come into existence, I'd say that it becoming a best-seller is less likely than silent films making a comeback.

Try taking a real-life situation that makes us uncomfortable and then figure out how to use it to your advantage. For example - have your characters meet each other for the first time at a funeral. Or maybe the character is struggling with a new job and the other character is the only co-worker who is nice, so they hit it off. Basically, just use REAL LIFE to inspire your story!

Hmm! Lotsa stories about true love! Dreamers