Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to a time to thrill. This is episode 22, featuring author Deanna Roy. So, well, let me say this. So it's featuring author Deanna Roy, who also writes as Annie Winters, romantic suspense, Abbey Tyler, sweet romance, and her super popular current pen name, JJ Knight, who writes romantic comedy. So I met. We'll talk. We talk about this in the podcast. But I met Deanna. Oh, my God. She told me three or four years ago in Houston.
I'm sure I mentioned on the podcast some authors and I get together. We usually went to beach House, sometimes in California. That year was in Texas. And we talk about writing, marketing. It's both business and pleasure. But it's great, great being in a beach house with women. Over a long weekend, I usually think we stay two or three nights. We talk about work, and we day drink and hang out. Not gonna lie. There's day drinking. A margarita, by the way, at 10:00 a.m. is not always unwanted. So I met Deanna at this particular weekend that author Marina Maddox and author Maggie mar put together.
And I just realized they're both. Their names are. Mm. I don't know how I did not notice that until just this moment. So one of the things that's great about Deanna, and you'll hear this in the interview, is that she is very focused on two books with messages that are very specific and being successful in finding ways to have success, different subgenres of romance. It is one of the most fascinating talks. It's been a great, great knowing her over the last few years. She's super generous with her time and with help. And any questions that you have about advertising, marketing, because her finger is always on the pulse of what's going on.
It has been spectacular knowing her. And I think you'll enjoy the interview because I'm gonna be honest, I don't know if I know somebody else who has such focus, such drive, and such determination when it comes to this writing and publishing business, but she is laser focused and in achieving her goals, and then she'll talk about it like, she's like, I'm going to achieve my goals. And then we at least I get to watch and have a front seat to her achieving her goals. And it's sort of like magic, like watching something magical happen. And I can't wait to sort of share that with you.
She has a lot of traits I wish I had, and it's sort of amazing to be able to count someone who is that focused and that dedicated as a friend. So without further ado, here is Deanna Roy.
Hi, and welcome to a time to thrill. This is your host, Amy Austin. This month I have the utter joy of interviewing Deanna Roy. Say hi, Deanna. Hello, Deanna, I met. Oh, God, I'm always so bad at this. Maybe four or five years ago, there's the year that we came. Can't talk about. So maybe four or five years ago. I think I met you in Texas at. No, California. Oh, my God. Whatever. I met you a few years ago.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: It was in Texas at a lovely beach house. Yes.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Oh, were you not in one of the California.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: I have not gone to one of the California retreats.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Okay, sorry. So they, in my head, they're all together and you're okay, so I met you in Texas. This makes it so much easier. And then we shared a house because that's always a great way to meet people.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: I met so many people that weekend and it was amazing.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: It is. So can I. Okay, let's start with this. You have many pen names, but how many books total do you have? My answer, I believe the answer is like 56. But I may be wrong.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: That is exactly right. 56. I win.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Sorry.
I win. For once. I never quite get it right and I always make a mistake. I'm so proud of myself. So you. How long have you been publishing?
[00:04:35] Speaker B: I put up the very first book, and this is prior to, really the ebook revolution in 2009, which was a balloon craft book for children that I did with my daughters. It was just like a test run. Like, how does this indie thing work? I didn't get serious about publishing ebooks and full length novels until 2011.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: So can I ask you a question? Because honestly, what? Well, maybe you're not. Okay, you're not me. What gave you the guts gumption to do that at such an early time? Because I had had a lot of books, I can say paper books about sort of self publishing and that, or publishing yourself or starting a small publishing company, probably maybe in the mid nineties, but I never had the wherewithal to actually do it. So what made you do it in a landscape that was not yet receptive to that?
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Well, I had been like many writers trying to get an agent and getting novels published since about 2006. So I was several years into that whole process, that frustrating process. But what changed things was actually sort of a sideline project I had done in 2008 or so. I wanted to create a book for moms who had lost their babies. And it was a baby book, but it was just for them. So it didn't have first mile, first step and those types of milestones in it, it was, it spread out the pregnancy part of the baby journey so that they could do a baby book. And I had presented this to lots of publishers, and no one had taken it, but I had a website at the time that had a million hits a month.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: I knew I could sell this book, right? So I went into the journey of starting my own little small publishing company to create that book. So I actually had the publishing company set up, and I actually produced that book. We were selling that book through distribution. That was really difficult at the time. So when the moment came, and it was around that time when there were conversations around a couple really heavy hitting authors who had decided to give up six figure advances to self publish, that there was a conversation that started on my birthday that year, and I said, by God, I'm going to take this other book that I had written was a novel about miscarriage. So same subject matter, same ability to sell to these women. And I thought, I'm going to publish it instead of continuing to try to find an agent. And I knew the book was pretty good. Agents had said, I love this. We just don't see it sitting on the shelves. We don't know where it goes. And I'm like, I know exactly where it goes. And it goes into the hands, for me, direct selling to these women, and I've done it ever since.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Wow. I. Can I just tell you that that is so amazing, because I did, I had all of these same thoughts. I just never had the ability to make the leap. I'm actually thinking about it now. I have not thought about it in years. I went and bought all these books because I would always buy books on a topic, you know, that you know you're going to do research on. And they sat on the shelf, and I just didn't have leaks. So I went back to what I used to do, which was essay writing and feature writing, because that I could sell. It took me a long time to sell a book to a publisher, but feature writing and essay writing, I could sell easily.
How did it feel doing that? Did you, was it, I don't know, like a huge growth moment or a huge moment where you sort of felt, okay, now I've taken this big leap, and look what the result is.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Well, it was an amazing thing to have your life in your own hands again instead of getting rejection. You really only saw the positive aspects, right? Oh, I sold three books today. Oh, I sold five books today. Because the only negative you really have is, oh, I spent this much and I'm still trying to pay that back.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: And if it takes a long time, that can kind of feel like a negative. But overall, I mean, you're just selling books. No one's telling you no. And because I had sort of this bubble around this subject matter where people weren't really giving me one star reviews, I wasn't even getting that negative aspect to it. I mean, since then, I've gotten a million one star reviews.
But that, that particular project, both the baby book and the novel that I wrote around the subject have. Have had a bit of a bubble around them. And that book, you know, it's been out for ten years now, actually. I'm probably coming up or probably just past the anniversary of it.
It's made like a lot of money. I mean, it's made more than I would ever have received for in advance. It didn't, doesn't tell a lot, and its ranking is never good. But because this is a subject that happens over and over again over time, self publishing was exactly the right choice. Because had I gotten a deal like I had hoped, and I had sold it to a traditional publisher, it would have had a three or four month shelf life, and then it would gone into backlist and obscurity. But because I self publish it, it's always right there for people to purchase, and it comes up pretty high on searches for that subject matter. And I'm so grateful that I got to go that direction.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: No, it's perennial. That was the thing. That was the truth. I mean, shelf life is short. Short and hard to get. But being able to have something that's perennial, that you can control, is great because there are perennial books that publishers have, but there are very few. And being one of those is not easy.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Precisely. And honestly, to be able to have both of these books up over the course of ten years, for them to always be a resource, has been probably the best thing for my publishing career, because that was the heart of why I do what I do now. I write romance, I might write more commercial works, but the heart of why I wanted to be a writer and get certain stories out was that, and I feel like I accomplished that pretty early in my career because of self publishing.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: That's amazing. That's amazing to have to be able to get to that point in the beginning, because a lot of us, it takes us a long time to get to that point. So after that. Okay, so my perception of you is that you have a meandering publishing journey. But what did you do after that.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: So I went ahead and continued to write books for agents because I had written a middle grade book, and I could quickly saw that the self publishing space was not ideal for children's books. And so I continued that. And when I kept hitting up wall with it, I said, you know what? This is ridiculous. So the second book that I published was a book for middle grade, nine to twelve year old readers. It actually did not do so well on Amazon, but over in Barnes and Noble, there was some equality of space at that time around 2012, where traditionally published books for kids. And this brand new spate of children's books by independently published authors had the same place at the table. So I was actually able, with what I knew about marketing already, to get up there into the top 100 spaces on Barnes and Noble because they had a more equitable place at that moment in history. So I felt very successful. It wasn't a lot of sales that it took, though, and I actually became pretty jaded pretty quick about self publishing as part of a full time job. At that time, I was still a photographer, still taking clients, still had very seasonal, heavy workloads. But I felt myself inching closer to that life that I had dreamed of since I first wrote a book when I was six years old, that I could do this as my full time job. And as I moved through this meandering journey, the reason it meandered is I was always looking for what is the project that will resonate with me but can also support me as a full time job.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: And did you think in the early days that that was going to be traditional publishing?
[00:12:16] Speaker B: I learned pretty quick that it was not, because I had, you know, back when I was. I was. I'm always very community oriented. So back when I was trying to get an agent, I was going to the conferences, I was making friends. We were, you know, editing each other's books, reading each other's query letters. And I. A lot of my friends got ahead of me. They got agents, they got publishing deals. And I saw how quickly they were realizing, oh, no, I still have to be a school teacher, or, oh, no, I still have to work this other job that I have. So I knew. I knew that that was not going to be a thing. Even if they weren't telling us how much they were making or what their advances were. I could tell by the way they were having to live their lives that it wasn't going to make it easily. Now, people obviously do, but I saw how rare that was, and I thought, I'm more likely to be the rule than the exception. So let's go with sticking to the rule and figuring out what I can do to inch toward that goal. And traditional publishing wasn't going to be it.
So, yeah, I started playing around with genre. I wrote romantic suspense. I wrote sports romance. What I learned very quickly with my first romance is I didn't know how to write a romance. And this was surprising to me. Amy, I've been reading romance since I was, like, ten years old. I have all the Joanna Lindsay and Kathleen Woodwiss and Nora Roberts and Susan Elizabeth Phillips. All of those. I had just shelves and shelves of those. And in fact, in my twenties and thirties, I had been, I actually, very early, I think, in 98, put up a romance review website back when we were using geocities.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Oh, I remember, yes.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Oh, geez.
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: I had a geocities like space for romance reviews. I had hundreds and hundreds. I had read so many romances, I thought, for sure, I can knock one of these out.
Spoiler. I could not knock one of those out.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Wait, so what do you think the disconnect was? Because, look, I was just thinking about this. I was driving. I'm sorry. And in all the way, I was just driving, and I was thinking, I had read so many romances, probably thousands by the time I sat down to write one. But when I sat down to write one, it was so hard, and it was unexpectedly hard, and I couldn't figure out what the disconnect was like. I read stories. I've read a lot of these stories. Why is it so hard to write this story?
[00:14:29] Speaker B: I think it comes down to that. There are reader expectations in romance that are internally, we understand them as we go through the story as a reader. But to create that expectation and to fulfill it actually takes some skill. It actually takes some study. So my first romance, which is still up there, was Stella and Dane, and it was basically a romance based on some characters from my previous novel, which was women's fiction. But basically what I was still writing was women's fiction. Even though it had a happily ever after at the end, the tone, the pace, the. The pinch points in the story, they were not aligning with what romance readers were looking for. So the books were not getting very far. Like, my current fan base would buy them and they would love them because they were women's fiction, like my other one. Right. But then it was not translating into romance space.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: So I had. I wrote 13 books before I finally figured out what I was doing. Wow.
Yeah.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: It took years. Like, I was just driving. I was thinking, well, I'm not going to get those years back, obviously. But it. It was just amazing to me how long it took to figure that out because I did do the same thing. So I had read. I read a lot of romance when I was growing up, but I also read a lot of women's fiction, and I like both. And a lot of the authors from back then would make that transition. So they would write, like, category romance for Harlequin. Then they would write, you know, longer books, and then they would move over to women's fiction. This is all print and traditional. So I was like, oh, I see a career going that way. But what I didn't have was the grip on the romance.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: Me neither, honestly. It wasn't until another romance author who had already done her heavy duty study sat down with me and we went sort of beat by beat through the draft of my book and figured out where I was going wrong. And I will admit that every single point that I had to change was painful because it rubbed up against what I had been doing as sort of a literary writer, moving into, to commercial, now having to take the step into genre. But now, I mean, it's everything. I love it. Those pinch points that were hard at the beginning are, they're what I live for in my stories now.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: So how did you make. Okay, well, the transition. Well, for me, it was painful, and I may not have made it successfully. So what, how did you make the transition? How did you.
Without, well, in my case, without copious amounts of wine and then laying on the bed crying. How did you make that transition from that, those books that didn't resonate in that way to books that resonate very well in that way.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: I had to unlearn a few things. Like a lot of us, I was in critique groups that were, by and large, a little too heterogeneous. They had, you know, science fiction authors, fantasy authors, historical writers. So we were all in the same group, and we were basically line editing each other's works. So I was. I had been taught through this critique group to do things that don't work well with books you want to read a little more quickly.
I was trying to resonate. I was trying to be beautiful. I was trying to be memorable. And in some ways, I was getting in the way of the story for romance. With all these techniques that I had been told, I basically had to unlearn them all. I had to pick up my pace. I had to not sit there and describe the entire room. I had to note, try to have a setting that had some sort of meaning, you know, or theme to it, I needed to stick to. Here's our story. And one of the big things that helped me were learning romance structure, like romancing the beat by Gwen Hayes. There's quite a few of them out there. I really internalized those structures, and eventually, somewhere around 2017, I created sort of my own romantic structure that I can now hang all my romances on. And it saves me every time my book feels like it's going awry. I'm like, I just go back like, oh, you didn't do this part of the structure, and that's why you're stuck. And I get it in there and then I can zip through to the end.
[00:18:46] Speaker A: Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. It's just so interesting because there's no. Well, maybe there is a road to get from a to b, but I don't know the road because what you're describing is a thing that many writers I know did. I did it here. I was like, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to join a writing group. And I drove down to this college called Otis. I don't even know where it is, somewhere like south of LA. And. But I was in a group with literary writers and, you know, Sci-Fi writers and fantasy and all of this, like just a big group of writers, as if all story were the same. And I do believe there's some inherent things about story structure, but genre writing is very, very different.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I completely agree.
You really have to study it with intention and not just assume that because you read it, you're going to internalize it.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: Yes, that's the thing. And also, one of the things at least I found for a lot of romance writers is that we read pretty broadly. So we may have internalized story structure, but not genre structure.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: That absolutely makes sense to me.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: So what? So you. Okay, so you have written, I know you have clean romance, romantic comedy, romantic suspense, and probably some fourth thing. I don't know. But what.
Okay, when you started, where did you go first and why did you start there?
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Well, the very first romance was linked to a women's fiction that I had read. And I don't know why I thought that would work, but for some reason that made sense in my head, but because they were, it was basically a prequel of sorts. I was kind of hemmed in by my story that pushed it even deeper into women's fiction. So I quickly cut that off. I said, you know, I need to start over. I need to create a new series, just take some risks. And the problem was the marketing, because I knew I wasn't really selling well enough to take a big leap about writing, maybe just for the fun of it, as opposed to with this big, heavy message I had. I wanted some help, and I. In the end, the very first series that I wrote is pure romance, new adult was all the rage. And because it was such a huge trend and people were just killing it in new adult, I knew that was the space I wanted to write my next book. I still had, you know, that affirmation aside, that I wanted to write about things that matter to me. So I went ahead and inserted the baby loss storyline into this new adult romance without realizing that I was creating something almost completely new that no one had ever told. A story about two teenagers in high school who get pregnant and their baby dies. And what does that do to them over the course of their new adult life when they're trying to become adults in the world in college? And how will they. How will that discolor, you know, the way they perceive new relationships.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: So while I think everything I just said to you sounds like women's fiction all the way, I had help. And every time I kind of veered too heavily into, oh, no, whoa. They pulled me back and said, okay, let's let them have sex in the library.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: Okay, sorry. Yes.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: And that was. That was the great thing about what became the Forever series, and that became my first hit book. And because I had several books under my belt, 13, I knew I had everything else in place. I had the website, I had the mailing list. I kind of knew a little bit about advertising. I knew about social media and how to work, you know, making sure that you're visible. So everything just kind of came together. But I will say probably the most important thing, all those other things had to be in place. But the most important thing when I released forever innocent was that I had made author friends in my genre.
So when things began to go south, like, it did really, really well for a couple of days, and then it started dropping off completely. I could go to them and say, what do I do? What do I do? And we were all able to start this network. Like, well, I'm gonna talk about your book on my Facebook page, or, oh, I'm gonna send out a newsletter with your book. And that is, I think, makes a lot of the difference.
The community is, I think it's critical to success. Sure. Can you be a lone wolf and do it? Absolutely.
But I would say that many points in my journey. Without the community of writers around me, I would not not have succeeded, at least on that book.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: So you're what we call in LA an overnight sensation, which means you've been working at it for, like, you know, 510 years. And, like, now look, he's an overnight sensation. What year was it that that book, the Forever series, came out?
[00:23:23] Speaker B: That was the end of 2013. And as soon as I realized I had a hit, I knew that I had to write a sequel. I had no intentions of writing a sequel. It was supposed to be a standalone book. But everybody was like, all my friends were like, write another book right now as fast as you can. And I was like, okay. And that was really what did it. It became a six book series.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: But that was brilliant advice because one of the things that was going on at the beginning, we talked about this. I can't, I think it was Tessa dare who was like, I think she said to me at some point in 2013, 2014, she's like, you have to make it a series. She's like, you got a bunch of things going on here, but you have to make it a series. And so I took a book that I got back from a publisher that I had never had any expectation of going anywhere that became like a five book series. But that advice is sort of priceless. But I don't know. It wasn't, it wasn't. For all the things we know about marketing, that wasn't the first thought.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: And so what? So you got that advice. It's actually great advice to have gotten at a very, very good time because 2013 was a good time for that. And so in the new adult space, what pen name were you writing under?
[00:24:33] Speaker B: That was my real name because, again, my real name books always are about issues that personally affected me. So the forever series was about baby loss. It was a core story that I wanted to tell, and I had several friends that we could incorporate. And in fact, I wound up circling back to that original women's fiction because I couldn't leave it alone. Right. And the third book in the series, I had them meet because it made sense because they were in the baby lost space and she was a traveling speaker. She meets her and then I could bring her in for another book. I couldn't write six full length books about the same couple.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: I've seen people do it, so I don't know.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: Well, you know, I tried it. I did actually try to. After I finished the Forever series, I was like, that was really hard because I kept, I only had three people. And I felt like I moved on to JJ Knight that year, and we were being very successful with exactly what you just said. We were writing entire series with the same couple. So I had uncaged love series, then I did the fight for her series, same couple all the way through. They were cliffhanger serials, which were all the rage in 2014.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:46] Speaker B: So when I came to, when was I going to write again as Deanna? And I knew I was going to write about the adoption space, I thought, oh, that'll be fine, except that I didn't want to write cliffhangers anymore, and that seemed to have been a mistake. That series, while, is absolutely on par with my other books, because I was writing about the same couple for five books. I just. I think I didn't have quite enough material for my story to do that.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: Okay. And so is that. So you're saying that's when the JJ Knight was born. What made you want to reinvent yourself with a different pen name as opposed to riding the horse of the original name? Because we talk. I mean, we, as authors, spend a lot of time talking about pen name management, branding, changing, staying the same, staying in a lane, changing lanes. And that's a pretty big leap to make. When you were successful at what you were doing, not 99% consistency, but you were really successful at that space. And so changing. What would prompted that?
[00:26:42] Speaker B: It comes back to this idea that I wanted all the books that had my real name on it to be about my own personal experiences, and I had run out of things to write about. So I really wanted to kind of. I wanted to write the cliffhanger serials. I didn't want to write those as Deanna. I felt like that was going to be a fad. And I think, yeah, it was. It's true for the time, especially those particular ones that were, like, very short, 25 to 30,000 words. We were releasing them weekly.
[00:27:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: Which is insane. So insane. I wouldn't do that again. But I wanted also, I just wanted to see, at the time, I was being asked to teach classes and things, and everybody's like, well, you're Deanna, of course, your books. I'm like, you say that I'm going to start over. And so JJ Knight was. JJ Knight was actually an experiment to see if a hermit author who had no social media footprint, who did not talk to fans, could be successful. So, JJ, when. When she was created, she had a Facebook page that was only posted to when she had a book out.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Right?
[00:27:49] Speaker B: There was no Twitter on Facebook. You could not message JJ. That was turned off. We had a good reach page to put all of her books on, but messaging was turned off, and we did not friend anybody. We did create a mailing list generated through Facebook ads that you would get the first serial by JJ by signing up for the email list. And that blew up really quick, because Facebook ads were quite effective at the time, and we proved the point. I mean, JJ Knight was an outrageous success. Just unbelievable how well she did. She was, of course, wide, because KU came only later that year.
But the amount of money she made, the amount of books that she sold. I mean, I published 14 books that year.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Oh, wow. That's a lot.
[00:28:37] Speaker B: I remember they were short. These were serials at the end of.
[00:28:41] Speaker A: Still a lot of work. I mean, you know, there's a lot of management with that.
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Well, I had a team at that point. I had to. I had a full time assistant. We had editors, copy editors, designers, graphics people. We had everything. I say we, because I feel like it was all of us.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: Okay, so I have to ask you. What.
What gave you the okay, you're clearly a brave woman, because I know I would not do all this. What gave you the self possession to just go, I'm gonna say this. Balls to the wall with that idea. You're like, so I'm gonna create this hermit author, and we're all gonna. You know, we're all. We're gonna go all.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: Well, we actually were inspired by HM Ward. I mean, she had put out that arrangement series that year and was just killing it. So it was like, this looks like a successful space, and I felt like I sort of. Kind of understood how it worked. And I wanted, you know, honestly, in 20, that was 2014 and 2015, I did it again, and I created Annie winners again. Started. It was a secret pen name. Nobody knew who it was. And I wanted to do it a third time. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, but I. Yeah, I wanted to try it again and try to escape the really short weekly serials, because I was killing me. By the end of 2014, I was literally in the hospital. I was in the hospital.
Thankfully, my books were written. They were in a good space, and my.
Not very many people know that. My full time assistant became me online. By that time, I loved my fans. I took JJ Knight out of being a hermit. That happened because for uncaged love, it was about MMA fighters. And I remember sitting down to write that book, thinking, oh, I've read a bunch of MMA fighting books. I can do this. And I got to the very first scene where they had to train, and I'm like, what the hell are they. What are they holding? What, what. What is it called when you. So I took myself down to. I went to two or three different MMA fighter, like, gyms.
44 year old woman, right? And I go in there, and I found one wherever I. They had some classes that were taught by MMA fighters, but they were all women, right?
[00:30:51] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: So I thought, I can do this, and at least I can talk to them every once in a while, maybe throw a few questions at them. So I joined that gym, did some of the classes, and then I learned we had a substitute who was this amazing MMA fighter, so good looking, so charismatic. I was just like, oh, my God, this guy. And I came at the wrong time, and he said, oh, come on and stay with us. This is the one that the fighters work out in. Why don't you just stay, right? I mean, I was like, oh, my God.
So it was me and a bunch of, like, 22 year old men, and they were all, like, bashing the crap out of these big body sized bags. And so it was a different kind of workout, and I became sort of their, like, little mascot, and I started working out with them, and I. So I started putting on Facebook what we call the fight class updates. I told them that I had infiltrated this MMA fighter class, and it was so embarrassing. Like, we would be doing what we called Caveman throws, where you lift this big sandbag over your head and then you throw it to the ground. And I was so pathetic compared to them. I would pick it up, and I would inevitably fall over backwards and end up on the ground with the big sandbag on my head, and I couldn't lift it, and they would have to. And so almost every class, I had a story to tell, and I picked up so many fans. I mean, this is what got JJ Knight just. Just became, like, this big boulder rolling down a hill, and it just snowballed from there. In fact, it was so big at the time, and the books dealt with some domestic violence, so we started raising money. I gave them t shirts they could buy, and we raised money for rain. And all kinds of amazing things came from those fight classes, but that was the thing that worked.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: So do you think. Okay, so I have a question. Do you think it's serendipity that's the key to your success, or do you think it's just being in the right place at the right time?
[00:32:48] Speaker B: I really think, especially in that particular case, I did a lot of studying so that I had the potential to be in the right spot.
[00:32:57] Speaker A: Okay? Right.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: Because if I had never decided to actually not just research it, but go do it, I never would have met those people. And, in fact, when fight for her came out, the guy on the COVID of fight for her was one of my trainers, and he had told me a story while we were. While it was raining, and I didn't want to go to my car about how he couldn't go see his daughter because he didn't have enough money because he'd gotten injured and they didn't have insurance, and most fighters were really poor. And the whole thing. I wrote a whole nother series based on his story because it was raining. Now, is that really serendipitous, or is it because I talk to these people, and I want to know their stories, and instead of standing there and being silent while it was raining, I talked to the guy and found out your story.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: Right.
Or anything. Yeah.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Right. So, ultimately, what happened is we hired him to be the model and paid him enough money to get him a plane ticket to go see his daughter.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: That's amazing. That is amazing. So, okay, so, JJ, so here we go. Your boulder rolling downhill, and things are going well, and then you pivot.
Why? Because, okay, you. You. You make. You do a lot of successful pivots. I know a lot of people who pivot, and it doesn't go well, but you do successful pivots. So what possessed you to leave your rolling boulder and do something, again, different?
[00:34:20] Speaker B: Well, I got really sick. You know, I ended up in the hospital, and I felt like, ooh, something about this pen name and this success and this trying to publish weekly serials, which we were doing, like, every two weeks by then, is too much for me. But the main reason I pivoted is nothing to do with that. The reason that I went self publishing and wanted to try to be successful is because we were wanting to adopt, and adopting was $30,000. And when I first started with those first books, I didn't have that kind of excess to do that. But when forever innocent hit, well, then I had the money. But then it's like the success bug hits, right?
[00:34:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: So I'm doing these books simultaneously. We are going to adoption classes, trying to get our, you know, agency up, trying to get all. It's a process. Let me tell you. It's a process. So, at the end of that year, that was when we got licensed to adopt. So it was really a personal pivot. I could not maintain that kind of schedule, and take on a newborn or whatever it was we were going to get. So 2015, the next year, which is when I would have continued my JJ Knight career, I put her to bed because I could not continue to write cliffhanger serials at that pace. Yeah, it was. I walked away.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: That is so hard, because, well, okay, maybe you don't have this. One of the things that authors we talk about is that. I don't call it guilt, but the feeling. So fans are like, I mean, people email you. These readers will email you when it. What's next? What's next? When is it coming? It's nothing for preorder. What's next? What's next? What's next? How did you deal with that? Because once you get such a fervent fan base or a fervent sort of group of readers, what they're waiting for is what's next.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Well, what I did, actually, that year was very intentional. I put a lot of thought into it. Remember, JJ Knight was a secret pen name. Nobody knew that JJ Knight was me.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: And I made a Christmas card that year, and we were just about to launch Annie Winters. Annie Winters was a series that my husband and I were writing together with the idea that I could write slowly, methodically, with him helping me. He's also a writer, my husband, and that we could do this while we. This would be what my career looked like while we went through this process of adoption.
[00:36:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:42] Speaker B: So I had my Deanna Roy fans sign up for a Christmas letter from me that year, the Christmas 2014, going into 2020. And then I had my JJ Knight fans fill out a Google form saying, I would like a Christmas card from JJ Knight. And of course, we were at the same time starting to pitch the new pen name, that would be the slower, gentler pen name, and got them to do Christmas cards as well. And then I took all those three lists, I combined them, took out the duplicates, which were pretty substantial, more than you would think for being a secret pen name. And then we sent them Christmas cards in the mail announcing that all these people were the same person that we were going to adopt in 2015. And we got everybody on board. Like, all the fans went on board. They were. They were on the journey with me. They knew that we were going to adopt. They knew that my career was going to look a little different. And I didn't get any of those messages. None.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Okay. So that. But that. Okay, okay. You're exceedingly clever, because that is such a good idea, rather than back ending it, but being upfront and so then Annie winners was born, and how. So what was it like writing again in a different space?
[00:37:53] Speaker B: So the idea of Annie was that we could. We were looking at what was happening in, like, cozy mystery, and how you could take a set of really brilliant characters and make them kind of infinitely, forever write a series with them.
[00:38:07] Speaker A: Right?
[00:38:07] Speaker B: So we created this world, my husband and I. He liked to do the car crashes. I liked to do the love scenes. It was a really great pairing. We were able to split the work, and we had an amazing time. We did audio simultaneously with all those, and we felt like, this is the career that is going to stand the test of time.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: Right?
[00:38:28] Speaker B: And that's. That pen name did really well. It did not do quite as well as JJ, I think, because we're in the romantic suspense space, whereas we'd been in kind of the new adult, kind of edgier space before. But it was good enough. It made perfectly acceptable money. Good money.
But I did not anticipate what was going to happen to me next. And that when we adopted that, our lives were going to completely cave in. We were going to be overwhelmed 1000%, way beyond our capacity to even get through the day. And so all writing stopped 100%. There was no brain place. There was nothing we could do.
It was a very difficult year. It went on for a full year. Now, I did plan for it a little bit. My full. I'm a high strategic, for those of you do, Clifton strings, high strategic. So I knew that this could happen. So my full time assistant was still there, and we planned to box set everything I had done, and I had so many books I'd released. So for all of the end of 2015 and through 2016, we did box sets, we did book, bubs, and we kind of kept my career limping along. And, in fact, I. The income was pretty comparable, even though I only put out, I think, one book in 2016.
But that does come to a stop eventually.
One of the hard lessons I learned, that is because I was out of the groove in every way for over a year, that my career kind of came to a complete and utter halt.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: Did you find that space scary? Because that's.
For many reasons. A number of authors I know have had that happen with some kind of personal issue, any number of things, depression, mental health, or any number of things that can cause that to happen. So there's the one aspect of dealing with whatever is in your personal life, but the other aspect is that the business changes when you come back.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: Absolutely. And also the friends that you were working, you make these friends, when you start out, and some of you are successful and some of you aren't, but you're together, right? So you can always write that person and say, oh, would you, you know, join my online party? And it's no big deal that they're a multi million seller. Right. Because you grew up together, and when you take yourself out for a while, you find that people have moved on or they're having their own crisis, that that little community that you built is fragmented. And this is what I saw. So I couldn't. I couldn't find any purchase, any way to climb, and I had to start pretty much completely over. You know, 2017 was a tough year. I did release a series. Things got better. Everybody was in school. I had hours of the day.
But I had to learn ku was huge. I had to understand how Kindle Unlimited had changed the landscape there. So much had altered. I had to really, I had to start over.
When I released a book, it wasn't like it was JJ Knight or Annie Winters or Deanna Roy. It was like I was somebody new. Because even your email list will get stale over time.
[00:41:38] Speaker A: Yes. The attrition is, I don't want to say it's swift, but it's surprising. I will say that I find it surprising that readers have moved on. I mean, because the thing I love about romance readers is that they're voracious. But the other thing about romance readers is that they're voracious. So at some point, when you stop releasing as quickly or steadily whatever you were doing before, they fill that gap quite quickly and then getting them back on board when they don't necessarily remember the experience that you'd given them before, there's some difficulty with that.
[00:42:12] Speaker B: Absolutely. That's what I encountered. So a whole new set of assumptions were challenged.
The first set had been, oh, this is how books are written. You're going to do fine. And that was completely wrong. And now, oh, they're going to remember you. They're going to come right back. That was also challenged. So I spent a couple of years trying to find my new groove.
[00:42:34] Speaker A: And is that where the fourth pen name came, is this.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:42:37] Speaker A: The sweet, sweet. Thank you.
[00:42:40] Speaker B: Pen name Abby Tyler.
[00:42:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:42] Speaker B: So because I like the name Abby.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: Tyler a lot, I always like that name. I don't know.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: One thing about starting over when you have tons of experience, both good and bad, is that you know where the pitfalls are. And one of the pitfalls, I knew I needed to have a name that sounded like the type of book I was writing, it's kind of JG Knight. Another reason that I couldn't go back to her is that in the interim, while I wasn't writing, a certain type of entertainer had come to huge popularity in a space where he was being kind of suppressed on social media because of the nature of his work, and I was struggling. Even Google was mixing the two of us up.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: So I couldn't easily go back to JJ Knight. And so, yeah, be careful when you google JJ Knight.
[00:43:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember. I think I remember this.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Yeah, this was difficult. So I kind of knew I needed to start over. At that time, I had written some things. I kind of renewed my Deanna Roy obsession with, this needs to be about me. But I knew also I needed to write something to kind of get me back in that hit space, like, where am I going to have successful books again? So, at the time, sweet was very popular. I remembered back in my days, that new adult had been popular and that I had really ridden that wave. So I was like, I'm going to ride the sweet wave. So I created the world, created the pen name, set up all of the social media, and started writing the books. Unfortunately, it just. The climate was so much harder to start over in 2019, January 2019. When I started releasing Abby Tyler, it was a very slow start, a very frustrating start, and I was very impatient.
So that year was super hard for me.
[00:44:29] Speaker A: But do you think, okay, sweet is one of those things. Let me say this.
I have a number of author friends who let me say, readers will say, I like sweet, or, I wish it were sweet. I wish you'd take out the swear words, whatever they would say. But I don't know. Other than, you know, Cassie Hayes, maybe in that whole western, like Deborah Holland, other than that. That sort of western bride, all that word sweet never sold as well for most people I know, as the demand seemed to be, there seemed to be a demand, and people went to meet the demand, but the demand was never there. Do you think that was part of the issue, or is there something I'm missing? I never quite understood what I don't read, sweets. I don't know. I never quite understood what people were looking for if it wasn't inspirational.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: There were a couple of factors that I understood to be the thing a lot of readers were going to Ya, because the YA, they just didn't really want the love scenes, the graphic scenes in there. They were skipping huge chunks of the book. And then why the Ya space started to get more and more, you know, graphic itself. And so they were looking for inspirational books because those tended not to have the graphic scenes in them. So it seemed to be a good space. There was also the cozy, mystery aspect to the romance. There would be a town, there would be people who were in every single book. There would be a new couple, but everybody would be related to everyone. So there was a found family sense of community about this type of writing that really appealed to me.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: And I writing Abby Tyler was an absolute joy. Absolutely. Every day I wrote those books. I never had any sort of writer's block. I sat down joyfully every day to write the books. And I. If I just looked at the year as a writer, I would go, what a glorious year that was. But unfortunately, looking at the year as a business person, I went, this is not the right place for me to meet my goal.
So I had to move on. And then, of course, we got to 2020. Right now, I didn't know leading into 2020 what was going to happen. None of us did. Right?
[00:46:34] Speaker A: No foreshadowing.
[00:46:36] Speaker B: But one thing I did know is I had written this random book just off the top of my head called the Accidental Harem. And I didn't know what to do with it, so I stuck it under JJ Knight, because given what the search results for JJ and I were looking like lately, the accidental harem, perfect fit. And it was. It's a smutty book, man. It's just pure. But it was so fun, and the voice came naturally, and it was just a pure comedy, and it was successful in the middle of all that grimness. It was. It's almost like I put all the scenes that I couldn't put my sweet books into, and it did really well. So when I realized that Abby Tyler was not going to be my full time job, it could only be a hobby pen name. And I think it's important to distinguish between a hobby pen name and a full time job pen name, which is what I'm very clear on now. I decided, let me go back to that comedy. I never thought of myself as funny. I never thought that I could write funny stuff, but I successfully did it then. So I was just randomly got this idea when we were looking up euphemisms for male anatomy, and one day, the word pickle stuck out. And I thought, oh, wouldn't it be funny if somebody wrote a book about a pickle? And it was set in a delicatessen with the idea that if Amazon said, oh, you can't write about pickles, I'm like, well, it's just about a sandwich, guys. Fine. It's fine.
And it was actually when we went to that retreat into the end of 2019 that everyone was so excited about the premise of the pickle. I had not committed to writing the pickle series until we went to that retreat. And all of you authors lit up every time I talked about it.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: Okay, I remember this, but. Yeah, yes, but from my own perspective.
[00:48:26] Speaker B: That was a turning point because I realized if this group of writers are going to be so lit up about it, what are the readers going to do? They're going to go bananas. So I wrote Big Pickle pretty quickly and plan to release it in April 2020, having no clue what was about to happen, but it being the perfect moment because it literally came out April 1, 2020. It was designed to be an April Fool's release. Not knowing that just two weeks before we were going to hit the lockdowns and I almost didn't release it, everyone's saying, oh, don't. Don't do anything right now. This is a bad time.
But this was my first big release in a long time. And I said, I just have to go. I just have to go. And what a blessing that I did, because it hit big at the top 100. I'd never hit top 100 on release. I'd gotten close, but I'd never actually hit it until Big Pickle. And of course, I wrote a sequel, and I have a series, and now I have the whole pickle verse.
[00:49:23] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. I mean, I'm guilty of sending you random pickle things, but it's beautiful.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: I love it. I love it. Authors send me pickle stuff. Reader, send me pickle stuff. The beautiful thing about writing a pickle series is that when you see a pickle in the wild, you think of me and my.
[00:49:41] Speaker A: Oh, my God. It was like 7th in the morning in Santa Monica at the parking lot, and there was a guy driving. I don't even know what to call it, this pickle green Subaru. They seem to be popular all of a sudden, and I think. I don't remember what his license plate was. It was something, some pickle reference. And I, like, literally stopped my car to take a picture of this guy's car. And the guy was like, okay, it's 07:00 a.m. i don't know what's up with you, but okay. And I was like, well, I gotta get this to Deanna. You just don't understand.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: I love it. I probably get the yodeling pickle once a week, and I don't care. I love it when you when somebody sends me that yodeling pickle, they see it on Amazon. I'm like, I love you because you're thinking of me, and I've branded it. I have accidental branding. That is so.
It's everywhere.
[00:50:24] Speaker A: That is so funny. So, can I ask you a question? What made you. When you were gonna do the pickle thing, what made you use JJ Knight as a pen name? Who had been when I met you? JJ? And it had darker covers, and to me, it was a different kind of vibe. But what made you do that as opposed to, I don't know, starting pen name number 678, whatever number you know that is?
[00:50:43] Speaker B: Well, it's because of the accidental harem, because I'd already written a comedy as JJ Knight. And so I thought, well, if I'm going to be staying in my lane, and also because of that other person who was out there, got in a relationship and quit making the movies. And so Google had separated us, so the problems that I had had with using that pen name had gone away.
So those two things happened also. I couldn't do it as Deanna. You know, I couldn't do it as my romantic suspense name. I definitely couldn't do it as my sweet name.
[00:51:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:51:13] Speaker B: And I felt a little daunted, having just done Abby Tyler, like, just a previous year of doing it again. So I went ahead and said, I'm gonna.
JJ's fan base is huge. She's got 10,000 followers on Facebook. She's got. She's just everywhere. I knew I could resurrect that. One of the things I learned is such an important thing to understand is that you can resurrect any fan base. And I didn't believe it before because I kind of failed for a couple years, but I totally believe it now. I've done it too many times. I can resurrect a dead Facebook group. I can resurrect a dead Facebook page. I can resurrect a dead Twitter feed. I can resurrect anything if I want to make that my goal.
[00:51:53] Speaker A: Okay, so the other question I have. So one of the things that I quite adore about you is that you're, well, in my perception, you're very service oriented. You spend a lot of time giving time and to authors and advice. Trust me, we all need it so much. But what is it about? Is that one of your core values? How is it that you came to do that?
[00:52:18] Speaker B: Well, I'm a number one communication. Number five. Woo. So part of.
[00:52:23] Speaker A: Oh, my God, I'm sorry. The things that you're mentioning are, like, at the bottom of the list, and every time I look at them, I go, I don't even know what it is. I close the thing back to, like, input and discipline.
[00:52:32] Speaker B: Right.
Taking Clifton strengths was really helpful for me because it made me understand why I do the things I do. And being number one, communication. And number five, woo, means I want to make friends with everyone. And one of the ways I do that is by using my communication skills and in the writer space, that's helping other people with their challenges. So I've run the whole gamut. I've been on top of the world. I've been bottom of the barrel. I've had, you know, no friends. I've had amazing friends. I've had my group splinter. I've had to kind of piece together a new writing community around me. So I've been through all of these stages. So, honestly, most people who approach me saying, well, this is where I am. I'm like, I've been there. Let me talk to you about the strategies I used to get out of it, and maybe they'll work for you, maybe they won't, but at least it's someplace to start when people are really lost.
[00:53:21] Speaker A: That's true.
Not knowing where to start is one of the hardest parts, because I think I, when I met you, I wonder how long I'd been separated. But I had. I had to have put writing on hold and, you know, things, pen names, assets, whatever. We can get into all that. But I had to. I had to. I was like, oh, I have to reinvent myself. And I looked around, and I thought, oh, gosh, you know, that it feels daunting. I mean, it's not. No lie. It feels daunting. And you're like, I've done that. And I was like, okay.
But it was. It's super helpful. But then even I saw, and I did not watch all of it because I don't. My child's busy right now. But even you were doing on either TikTok or Instagram or both, you had had a series that you were doing, like, information for authors in the last few months.
[00:54:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I did that. Leading up to the Santa release. I tick tocked every day about what I was doing that day just so people could understand, like, what it's like to be a full time author. I did great for, like, the first four weeks. But as my release got closer, I don't know what I was thinking. Thinking I could tick tock every day because that involves, like, doing your hair. I was like, dang it, I got to get out of my pajamas.
[00:54:31] Speaker A: No.
I was like, she's got it together. And then sometimes I was like, and she's, you're done in the background, clean. And I was like, well, I couldn't do this every day. It'd be Tuesday, and it'd be like, why is there food over there?
[00:54:44] Speaker B: Oh, to be honest, there were a couple of days where I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna have a TikTok day. And I would change my clothes the next days because I was getting under deadline pressure, and I was feeling it. But I get asked a lot of questions. People are always looking to find new resources, current resources. And also, I was trying to break into TikTok, and they were saying, you need to publish every day on TikTok. And I'm like, who has time for that? And I thought, well, what if I just killed several birds with 1 st? I'm like, I'll do it every day. I'll talk about the things that I wish I had known.
Because sometimes I think people who are new to writing and publishing, self publishing, think that is so glamorous, or that we have all the help, or that we have this magical fairy dust poured on us, or even more that we know important people, and those important people are what make our book sell. And I wanted to say, here's what I'm doing every single day. I'm leaving nothing out.
If somebody big has put me on their instagram, I'm going to tell you. And that never happened, because it does not happen. It did not happen. Right?
[00:55:52] Speaker A: No. It's such a nitty gritty career. It's something. I was just. I did an interview for somebody else as a. As the. Not as the host. And all I could think of, she was asking all these questions about writing, and I was like, so there's writing, and then there's the other stuff. And the other stuff is, like, probably the more part, a bigger part of my day and the harder part of my day. It's a job. You know what I mean? Like, the writing, I find quite joyful for the, you know, in the way that we do. It's slightly torturous, at least for me. But the other stuff, you know. Well, did you. Did you make these graphics? Did you get them up? Did you talk to this reader? It's more of a job, right?
[00:56:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And all those things. Yeah. Currently, I don't have an assistant, so I'm doing everything so it.
But I think everyone has their own process. I mean, my process right now, is that what I'm writing? I'm writing, and I'm doing very little maintenance, because, like I said, I've learned I can resurrect my group. I can resurrect my page. I used to feel frantic. I've got a post every day, or I can't let it go, or I can't not send an email out for two months. And now I've learned over ten years. Yeah, yeah, I can. It's fine. Yeah, I'm going to lose a few here and there, but it's not worth the insanity of feeling that day pressure.
[00:57:01] Speaker A: Okay, I'll think about that now. So I will think about it. So when you. Okay, so the pickle mango, the verse of, I don't want to call them vegetables, fruits, whatever.
Did you ever hear from the MMA readers? Because to me, I just wonder what they thought, because the comment, it was so much more. I'm gonna say light, because I read. You sent me aries. They were light and funny and double entendres and all of that, which is a sort of a different kind of. Just a different kind of book. And I don't even know if the MMA books continue or the motorcycle books. Like, all of that was its own era.
[00:57:44] Speaker B: It really was. And they were all cliffhanger serials as well, which is really only. I can't get away with it anymore. More. I tried writing one more MMA cliffhanger serial, I think. I don't remember what year it was, and it totally failed. And I went, okay, this era has passed. And so when I feel like I really started JJ Knight over again, and I do, I do. I'm a total nerd with spreadsheets, and I do have, like, siri spreadsheets. So when I release a book, I like, okay, here's how many pickle books sold. Here's how many tasty books sold. And I do include the MMA book, and they barely move. They really barely move.
[00:58:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:58:21] Speaker B: It's just. It's a different readership, and I'm okay with that.
[00:58:24] Speaker A: Right?
[00:58:24] Speaker B: I mean, the superfans who become superfans, they go back and read everything, of course, and that's good enough. I don't advertise the MMA books. I'm not trying to get book bubs on those, because that's just a whole different era, and it doesn't work anymore.
[00:58:37] Speaker A: So how do you feel? Because you write to trend, not more than other people. There are people who do it a lot. But do you have a feeling because I have so many feelings about, like, new adult. I love a lot of new adult books, but they're not as popular or dark romance, but they're not as popular or motorcycle. And the dips, the hills and valleys in popularity in romance seem quicker, maybe because of the nature of publishing. They come and go so quickly. Do you have any feelings? Do you have any in personal feelings about that? Are you just, are you just willing to ride the next wave?
[00:59:11] Speaker B: I like writing the wave for my day job, and that's where I separate the books that I'm writing to support myself versus the books that I write that I want to last over the long haul. So even though, like, the Forever series was a new adult, it had a resonance to it that made them sticky books. My MMA books didn't. They are not long haul books, but they were amazing at the time for supporting me. So it doesn't really matter to me. What if I'm writing to trend for my day job? Because that's the fun of it and I'm doing it right now. I am going full tilt into, you know, the J. Lo movie that's coming out. Marry me in February. I am writing a book that hits that audience square in the nose, and I'm so excited about it and I'm thrilled about it. Do I expect that book to still have a lot of popularity in 2030? No, I do nothing.
But I am having a blast doing it. And it's a great day job.
[01:00:08] Speaker A: That's true. Oh, that's okay. That is such a different way to look at it. Because I guess if you looked at it as a day job, like in any job you have, if I had worked for, let's say, Microsoft and you created the software and the software goes away, I don't know if I'd be lamenting, oh, the death of Windows seven, you know, but okay, that's okay. That's a good question.
[01:00:26] Speaker B: And also the work you did on a day job, I mean, if you're making a restaurant and you're making food, you don't expect ten years from now that food to be memorable to the people who ate it. It was just what you did at the time as part of your daily work.
[01:00:40] Speaker A: Okay, so I literally am going to have to put that in a box and think about it because it's such a different perspective that I've never considered before, but it makes a lot of sense. And I think in my head, just dial down the angst about 1000%.
[01:00:54] Speaker B: Well, I will admit I have plenty of angst. In fact, this year I went ahead and got an agent and I am, we're submitting some Deanna Roy stuff, like the stuff that I do want to last. I wrote an epilepsy book because my daughter and all the things I wanted, I want a YA book about epilepsy to be in the world. And so I'm very angsty about that and very angsty about changes and edits and all the things. But I will self publish it if I need to. But I still feel that angst about what I find is my core pen name, my legacy pen name. My legacy works. But what I write day to day is not legacy. Legacy works. It's fun. I have a blast. I enjoy it, I enjoy the fans and it makes the best day job in the world.
[01:01:38] Speaker A: That is the best way to end this interview. I literally am, I literally do need to lay down and think about that because you have just shifted my mindset about how I feel about two of the pen names I have because I drive and I think, but is anybody ever going to read those anymore? But I'm like, I guess if they made their money and they did their thing and they paid the bills or they fed me that day, then they did, they did a great job. They really did a great job.
So what's next for you then? So the book that you're talking about coming out in February, will it be what pen name? I guess we need to ask that.
[01:02:12] Speaker B: I'm still writing in the pickle verse.
[01:02:14] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:02:14] Speaker B: So it's going to be, it's a follow up to tasty mango. Okay. It's going to be called tasty pickle. So it, oh, that's the best, right? The tasty and the pickle. So all my books kind of are in the pickle verse now and they're all standalones. You don't have to read any of them in order. I did that on purpose because I just, if you enter the pickle verse at any point, I will then point you to where to go next. But it doesn't matter where you enter the pickle verse. So this is, yeah, it's going to be a, it's going to be a romp. It's going to be so fun. I wrote the summary this morning and I'm like, oh, I'm so excited to get started on this one.
[01:02:45] Speaker A: Oh, wow. So that'll be out in February.
[01:02:47] Speaker B: That is hopefully.
[01:02:49] Speaker A: Hopefully. I know, but it's, we have, there's time. There's time. There's time.
Can I want to say I thank you so so much for doing this interview. And ask will be willing to work with me on time because I had to drive.
So where can well, you gave me all of your links, but where's the primary place that readers can find you?
[01:03:11] Speaker B: I recommend they go to readlaffswoon.com. that is the website that a taught my daughter how to make websites because she built them for me, but also where all my books reside, no matter what my pen name. And there you can look for how do you want to feel? Do you want to laugh? Do you want to cry? Do you want to be suspense? Or if you want a specific type of book boyfriend, you want a lawyer, you want a military guy, you can look for a book by that out of my 56 books and find something.
[01:03:38] Speaker A: Okay. And then also, where are you most active on social media? I feel like I see you on Instagram every day, but that's probably where I am.
[01:03:45] Speaker B: I'm probably the most active on Facebook, but I'm growing my TikTok and I'm growing Instagram.
I try to be all three of those places fairly equally.
[01:03:58] Speaker A: Okay, so I'll include in the show notes your handles. I believe you sent them to me for all of those. And so, Deanna, thank you so, so much for doing this interview. By the way, I love the way your hair comes out during these TikTok. Sorry, that's just random. But I like the way your hair looks in the TikToks.
But thank you so much for doing this and it was great speaking with you.
[01:04:20] Speaker B: Thank you so much.
[01:04:27] Speaker A: This has been a time to thrill with me. Your host, author, Amy Austin. If you've enjoyed today's episode, I hope you'll share it, rate it, and give it a five star review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Reviews will help other listeners find my conversations with brilliant creators. Also, please hit the follow or subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. In addition to hosting this podcast, I am the author of the forthcoming Nicole Long series of legal thrillers. Outcry, witness, and major crimes are available for pre order. I'm also the author of the Casey court series of legal thrillers. They are available wherever books are sold at your local library and also an audiobook. You can follow me on Instagram irillerpod, or on facebookegalthrillerauthor or at a time to thrill. Thank you for listening. I'll be back next month with another great conversation.
