Episode Summary
Steffanie Holmes joins us to talk about perseverance and getting to the miracle moment in your career that changes everything.
Episode Notes
Steffanie Holmes, writing as Steff Green, has come a long way, from publishing her first book with a homemade cover, to building a career as a six-figure bestselling author.
The author behind https://www.rageagainstthemanuscript.com joins us in today’s pre-recorded episode to talk about perseverance and getting to the miracle moment in your career that changes everything.
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Transcript
Kevin Tumlinson [00:00:02]:
You just tuned into the hippest way to start and grow your indie author career. Learn the ins, the outs and all the all arounds of self publishing with the team from D2D and their industry influencing guests. You’re listening to Self publishing insiders with Draft2Digital.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:26]:
Well hello everybody and welcome to Self Publishing Insiders. I’m Jim Azevedo. As many of you know, I run marketing here at Draft2Digital. And today it is my honor and my privilege to welcome our guest Steffanie Holmes to the show. Hey Steph.
Stephanie Holmes [00:00:44]:
Hi Jim. It’s so lovely to be here.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:47]:
It’s lovely to have you. Hey Steph, before I forget, I better like step step in and tell everybody that this is a special pre recorded version of Self Publishing Insiders because Steph is based in New Zealand and since you know I was trying to be a nice guy not having her wake up at 4 o’ clock in the morning, I suggested that we record this in the afternoon California time. So this is a pre recorded version but for those of you who are watching, just ask your comments are you post your comments and ask your questions live in the comments section and Draft Digital staffers like always will be in the comments section to answer those questions to the best of our ability. So we’ve got a wonderful topic to talk about today and the topic is to not to quit before the miracle. But before we get into that, for those of you who are not familiar with stuff, let me read you her bio just real quickly here. So Steffanie Holmes is the USA Today best selling author of Kooky, Spooky, Paranormal, Cozy Fantasy and Gothic Romance. Her books feature clever, witty heroines, secret societies, quirky villages where nothing is as it seems, creepy old mansions and mysterious anti heroes with dark eyes and even darker secrets. Legally blind since birth, Steffanie received the 2017 Attitude Award for artistic achievement.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:20]:
She is the founder of Rage against the Manuscript. I love that name for a podcast. She’s the founder of the Rage against the Manuscript podcast and author resources and the creator of the skeleton drafting method for Discovery writers. Steffanie lives in New Zealand with her husband, a horde of cantankerous cats. I knew I was going to trip over that.
Stephanie Holmes [00:02:42]:
It catches everyone.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:43]:
It does! And their medieval sword collection. So Steph, once again it’s so awesome to have you here. Thanks for being here.
Stephanie Holmes [00:02:52]:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s. I’m so excited to chat about this today.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:56]:
Yeah. So what brought you to this realization of not quitting before the miracle? Because a lot of us, you know, we get so Caught up in life and work and family and then more life. And sometimes it just seems like it’s the best thing to do is just to kind of throw up our hands and stop and maybe move on to the next thing for maybe we’ll have better luck the next time.
Stephanie Holmes [00:03:21]:
Yeah. So I guess I will kind of tell my little story. And it’s interesting because I feel as though to a certain extent there’s a. There’s a little bit of quitting in this story, but you’re kind of. You kind of get the vibes as I go on. So, as you said, I am legally blind. So I was born with this condition and it’s quite a rare condition. I can’t see any colour and I’m also severely shortsighted to the point where I’m considered legally blind.
Stephanie Holmes [00:03:59]:
And I wear these snazzy glasses. And so my dream as a kid, I was always wanted. I always wanted to be a writer. But. But I also. The main thing I wanted to do was I wanted to be an archaeologist. And I wanted to go, like, go around the world and dig up things and be Indiana Jones and like, have adventures. And that was my plan.
Stephanie Holmes [00:04:22]:
And I went to university and I studied archeology and like five dead languages, which is a super useful thing that I highly recommend everyone do. And then I finished top of the class, went out into the world, tried to get a job and. And basically fell on my ass. And part of it was, you know, there are. There are physical limitations to the things that I can do. You know, a lot of archaeology is looking at. To looking at some dirt and trying to tell the difference between that pile of dirt and that pile of dirt. And some of that I can do.
Stephanie Holmes [00:04:58]:
But a lot of it, a lot of it’s color related. So a lot of it I just could not do. And then some of it was discrimination. It was literally, we think you’re a health and safety risk. You know, museums were saying, like, you know, we don’t think we can trust you around artifacts, which is ridiculous. And so I was. I was kind of dealing with this. This dream that I had kind of fading before my eyes.
Stephanie Holmes [00:05:27]:
And I went home. 1. I had a particularly bad experience with a museum curator and I went home one night and I was crying. And my boyfriend, Time, who is now my husband, said to me, well, you could kind of look at this in a couple of different ways. Which I think is the first kind of piece of advice that I have. You can kind of look at this in a couple of different ways. You can sort of keep going with this, with this dream that you have and you can, you can keep trying to convince people that you can do this thing that you know you can do and I know you can do. And even though you’re sort of, I can see you’re falling out of love with it.
Stephanie Holmes [00:06:02]:
Or you could say, well, I’ve done archaeology. You know, you’ve got to do all these cool things. You’ve gone on these digs, you’ve been to Crete, you’ve worked in a museum, you’ve worked in a conservation lab. Like you’ve done all these cool things. So what would be the next thing that you would like to do? And what would, would that be a thing that you don’t have to convince anyone that you can do? And I immediately thought, well, I would be, I would be a writer if I could do anything else. I can’t do, can’t be an archaeologist if I can’t work in a museum, I would be a writer. And so I basically spent the next kind of 10 years trying to, trying to make that dream come true, you know, pitching books to Trad Pub, working in like doing copywriting for businesses and stuff. And then, you know, it’s the same old story, getting lots of rejections, getting closer and closer, but not close enough.
Stephanie Holmes [00:06:56]:
And then Self Pub Indie came along and I was given a Kindle and absolutely fell in love with reading digitally and being able to like enlarge everything. It was just the best. And hearing about all these authors online who were doing really well and I thought, well, you know, I’ve got this giant pile of books that has been rejected so I might as well. Yeah, I’ve got nothing to lose so I’ll give it a go.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:24]:
How many books were you into it at that point, Steph?
Stephanie Holmes [00:07:27]:
I had probably about six books, okay, six, six or seven that I had completed that had got to various stages of, various stages of the Trad Pub kind of journey. I, I had a contract, I had a contract with Trad Hub that was then rescinded for boring reasons. And so yeah, I had, I had like, I’d like got so close, but not, not nearly, not nearly close enough.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:58]:
What year is this that we’re talking about when you started looking at self publishing?
Stephanie Holmes [00:08:02]:
I think it was about 2013 when I started and I had a three book, Very Dark science fiction kind of steampunky series which I self published in 2013 and 2014 under like, under my, like under a different name, like under my, my real name. And that did, like, terribly. It was, yeah, you know, it was making like, I sold like a handful of copies a month. But the whole process of, you know, finding my editor and, you know, working with a cover designer and clicking publish and just seeing my own book, like holding my own book in my, in my hands was just addictive. I just, I was like, this is what I meant to do. I love this so much.
Jim Azevedo [00:08:53]:
Yeah.
Stephanie Holmes [00:08:55]:
And then so I was sort of kind of starting to look at, okay, I want to do this, I want to do this full time, all the time. I don’t want to work my boring copywriting job anymore. This is what I want to do. But how do I go from selling, like five books a month to, like, enough books to pay the mortgage and keep my cats in the manner to which they have become accustomed? And in 2015, I went to a party and a friend and I were chatting about 50 Shades of Grey, which had come out relatively recently, and she had loved the book and I had read like a chapter and had not loved it. And I was like, like a 23 year old. So I was like, very opinionated about my feelings about this book.
Jim Azevedo [00:09:44]:
It’s so funny. When that book came out, it was, it seemed like there was, you know, you’re either on one team or the other team. You either loved it or hated it.
Stephanie Holmes [00:09:52]:
There was no, like, it’s fine. It was, was. There was only love or only hope. And like, now I kind, you know, like, now I. I’m much more mellow. I’m like, look, I didn’t personally enjoy it. It wasn’t written in a style that I like, but it was so incredibly important for the romance genre as a whole that, like, I have no hate for it whatsoever. Yeah, it’s just what it, what it did for romance and it was just incredible.
Stephanie Holmes [00:10:23]:
So yay. But at the time, at the time, I was rubbishing it a bit and my friends got annoyed with me, which is fair. And she said, well, it’s not like you could write a book like that. That not me. She didn’t think I could write a book, but she thought I was a little bit too kind of sweet and innocent to write, like a spicy romance. And I sort of thought, well, challenge accepted.
Jim Azevedo [00:10:47]:
So not a girl.
Stephanie Holmes [00:10:50]:
So I went home and in three weeks, I, like, I smashed out this super fun, quirky paranormal romance about, like, about a fox shapeshifter. Because shapeshifters were really big at the time. Shifters big at the time, mostly werewolves. But I somehow decided it was going to be a fox Fox shapeshifter. And he was a, he was a reclusive artist and there was a human art curator who was going to like bring him out of a shell. And it was like a shift of war and all this stuff. So I wrote this book and I self published it under a pen, under my pen name, Steffanie Holmes. And I paid someone like 50 bucks for a romance cover.
Stephanie Holmes [00:11:39]:
And I thought I’d like keep it secret for six months and then I tell my friend and we’d have like a laugh about it. And then it sold a thousand copies in a week. Oh, wow. And I sort of had to sheepishly tell my husband that I’d actually made sense some money self publishing. Not from my super serious science fiction that you know, I had been working on for 10 years, but from this like spicy Fox shape shifter book that I’d written in three weeks. And when he finished laughing his ass off, he said, sure. Like, yeah, are you going to write some more? And I said, well, yeah, actually I am. And I sort of realized in that moment that I, that I was, I was a romance writer.
Stephanie Holmes [00:12:24]:
And what I hadn’t kind of articulated until that point and I sort of started doing a lot more research into romance was that I was a romance reader. But because I read predominantly sort of like urban fantasy, paranormal romance, vampires and stuff like that, I sort of considered that fantasy. So, so I sort of thought I was a fantasy reader, but I was actually, you know, what I was reading was like largely romance. So I’d been, I’d been reading this, I’d been part of the genre for a long time, but I just sort of hadn’t really realized it. And yeah, it felt like, it felt like I had found, I had found my voice, I’d found the place I was meant to be. The kind of the place where things that I loved writing about and kind of my style and stuff that people actually wanted to read had kind of converged. And so I basically stayed. That’s where I stayed.
Stephanie Holmes [00:13:20]:
I abandoned super dark science fiction, which I still love to read, but I abandoned that completely. And I went all in as Steffanie Holmes. And so I was publishing a book roughly every two months. And I, yeah, so I was just, I was literally just. I had a full time day job. I had like a four or five hour round trip commute because I can’t drive a car. So I had to take like two buses to get my job.
Jim Azevedo [00:13:52]:
So I was, I mean I lasted six months. I did that once in my life and I’m like, I’ll never do it again.
Stephanie Holmes [00:13:59]:
Yeah, it’s. It sucked. I still kind of can’t believe. I still kind of can’t believe that it was. That was my best option. But, you know, I would. So I would get on the bus and I would like hunch myself against the wall with my laptop and I would get 2,000 words a day, rough. Every single day on the bus.
Stephanie Holmes [00:14:18]:
And then I’d write a little bit more on the evenings and in the weekends. And I was basically just writing books. I had a newsletter and I tell the newsletter when I published a book. And at the time, sort of just like putting book one for free for like. Yeah, just putting like book one for free or book one for 99 cents for a little bit was kind of enough to like keep you high in the rankings. So I was just sort of doing like, I wasn’t doing oodles of marketing, I was just doing oodles of writing. And I did that until 2018. And I sort of, I kind of maxed out at about 3,000 New Zealand dollars a month.
Stephanie Holmes [00:15:03]:
I had some months that were better and some months that were worse. So that’s about 1700 US dollars a month. That was about what I was earning.
Jim Azevedo [00:15:13]:
Yeah, I just want to make sure I got the time, the timing right leading up to that. That time when you’re writing, when you’re publishing one book, say every two months, was that the time where you were spending four hours plus commuting?
Stephanie Holmes [00:15:29]:
Yeah, I started, Yeah, I. I started at sort of like three hours commuting. And then I changed jobs and the next one was four hours. And the final job before I quit my day job was a five hour commute. And yeah, my husband and I moved from like a suburb in the city to like out in the countryside. So I would have to drive with him in the morning to his job and then take two buses to get to my job and then take two buses back and then drive home with him. And if, yeah, if I could drive a car, it would have taken me an hour 20 each way to get there. But because I can’t, I can’t drive and, and they let me work from home three days a week.
Stephanie Holmes [00:16:17]:
So was it two days a week? I think was two days a week. They let me work from home. So three days a week I had to do that commute. But when I took that job, we said, my husband and I said to each other, if you’re going to do this, it’s only for a year. And we wrote. I wrote my resignation day in the calendar at work. Private. Well, I thought it was privately.
Stephanie Holmes [00:16:44]:
Turns out it wasn’t. But that’s a whole other story. That’s a whole other story. I wrote my resignation day in the calendar so I could kind of count down to it. And that was the day I was going to be a full time writer. And yeah, we were, we were in this weird place where I kind of was like stuck at this sort of $3,000 a month level and I, we needed just, really just a little bit more. And at the same time my husband and I were building a house, so we were paying rent and also paying the mortgage on the house we were building. And like, it was just insane.
Stephanie Holmes [00:17:20]:
But we decided it was time we were going to make it work no matter what happened. And then sort of like basically the same month that I had decided that was going to be my resignation month, I published my first reverse harem book, or why Choose Book? And that, that did that like just jumped me up. Just, just, basically just to the level I needed. And it was this sort of like fascinating moment where it felt like, it felt like the universe was like, you, you have made the decision. And so we, we’re going to give you what you need to get to the next level. So I quit my job 2018, on my birthday, which was the best birthday present ever, I guess so. Yeah. And I had a year where I did, I was writing this why two series.
Stephanie Holmes [00:18:15]:
And I was also doing like a bit of freelance work on the side just just to keep the income, just just to bump the income up enough. And then gradually through the year, as the books did better and better, I could, I had four clients. And so every like after like six months, I could drop one and then I could drop the other one. And then it was literally a year later on my birthday again, I dropped the final client and became sort of like officially a full time, a full time fiction writer.
Jim Azevedo [00:18:49]:
You’re definitely not the first person I’ve spoken to who said, hey, I had this date in mind, I had this, this goal. I set it out over here and I just worked toward it. Yeah, what you did. And you’re super productive if you’re cranking out that many books.
Stephanie Holmes [00:19:03]:
Yeah, I definitely do less now. I have been doing basically, I had been doing basically six books a year ever since I started. Some years were even like eight books. And about three years ago I was sort of looking at what I, everything I was doing and realized that if I wanted to level up, I, I was being hamstrung by Myself because I would finish a book and then immediately I’d have to start writing the next book. So in order to keep up with that schedule. So I had no time to do, I had no time to really like dig deep into like different, different kind of marketing ideas or being like creative with the marketing or kind of focusing on my fans or anything like that. I basically couldn’t do anything else because I was too busy writing books. And so we made, I made the decision that I was going to drop down to four books a year, which still saw a lot of books.
Jim Azevedo [00:20:05]:
Yeah, that’s pretty productive still.
Stephanie Holmes [00:20:07]:
Yeah, it’s still a lot of books, but I was going to drop down to four books a year and that would give me some more time to do some more stuff. And it was, it was very scary because that’s two, that’s two release. You know, a lot of authors, we earn, you know, a significant chunk of our income from a new release. So I was dropping new releases a year and so I was a bit worried that. Yeah, that it would, it would mean a drop. And it’s meant the exact opposite. I have gone from sort of low to mid six figures to seven figures. Um, well, Interesting.
Stephanie Holmes [00:20:44]:
Yeah. While releasing fewer books. And I hired, I hired a very close friend of mine to be an assistant. So she’s my part time assistant. So she’s taken a significant chunk of my admin as well. So I do this now and make way more.
Jim Azevedo [00:21:05]:
I mean, is that because, like, did you spend the extra time that you had on marketing and promotion or do you think it was the gap between releases that just lit a fire under your readers? What do you attribute it to?
Stephanie Holmes [00:21:17]:
I think the main thing, I think, I think there’s a couple of things. I think that in my early days being rapid releasing books was an effective strategy because it means I could build a backlist really quickly. So if someone liked one of my books, they were going to like the nine other books that were set in the same world. So I think that was a really effective strategy. But I think now because of, you know, the market is different now to what it was then. And I think, I think a couple of things. I think that because of BookTok and sort of the ways that we’re marketing books now, a book in your backlist can become kind of become your front list like really quickly, which is sort of a little bit of what happened to me. And so I think having that anticipation between releases actually helps a release do better.
Stephanie Holmes [00:22:14]:
Yeah, my book releases have done so much better since I’ve had fewer of them in part because I have time and like, space to build up some excitement about the release. So I think that’s one big factor. The second big factor is not spending all my time writing means that I can do other projects. So I moved into, I basically moved into sort of special edition books and Kickstarters. I have loved Kickstarter for years as a reader and I back all kinds of, all kinds of projects on Kickstarter. So I did my first Kickstarter project in 2018, which was for a children’s book that I always wanted to write. And then I did a Kickstarter for special editions for my most popular series in 2022. And that did sort of, I, I, my goal was $10,000 New Zealand and we ended up at $55,000 New Zealand.
Stephanie Holmes [00:23:21]:
So like, that was, that was better than, you know, that’s more than I’d ever made from like a new release ever.
Jim Azevedo [00:23:29]:
And so to hear what indies are doing out there on, I don’t even want to say on your own because, yeah, everyone’s got like a little team members that they’re working with just beyond themselves. But it’s just, it’s so inspiring to see what’s happening out there and not just marketing yourselves, but the Kickstarters street teams. And just watching people just explode onto the scene is.
Stephanie Holmes [00:23:54]:
Exactly, it’s so interesting. It’s also fascinating because, you know, when I started in this business, indies, we were all about, look, we can’t do, you know, we can’t do paper, we can’t do print books the way that tradition can. So we’re just going to focus on ebooks and capturing that market. And now we’re all like, we’re all like tiny publishers, you know. Yeah. Like I’m, I’m printing books overseas and like massive print runs and it’s like it’s completely changed. And you know, ebooks used to be 99.999 of everything I made and now it’s probably 50, 60%. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s so fascinating that.
Jim Azevedo [00:24:47]:
Our authors publish print books all the time now because I got my start at smashwords back in 2011. I remember the days when there were authors out there saying, you know, why should I even consider print? Because I’m selling 100 ebooks for every single print book I made. But now it’s starting to kind of shift back. We’re seeing in the numbers where the authors, I’m sorry, readers out there are, they’re clamoring for the print books. Not even the special edition print books. Some of them just want to hold the paperback.
Stephanie Holmes [00:25:15]:
Again, just the normal ones. I, When I started. I have never been very good at tick tock, so I. Yes, but when I, I started on tick tock in like 2023, I think, and when I started it kind of I got like a little, like a little jump in everything. Just having like a steady sort of one to three TikToks a day about my books and it just kind of jumped the numbers up a little bit like this. But what was interesting about that is it jumped the ebooks up and then it jumped the print up massively. Yeah. And now my print used to be like $200 a month or something and now it’s like $2,000 a month.
Jim Azevedo [00:26:00]:
Really?
Stephanie Holmes [00:26:01]:
Just, just the, just the plain old paperbacks from Amazon and it was everybody. Yeah, it’s so interesting. It’s definitely worthwhile doing print. Yeah. Having the, having the print on demand options or you know, looking at a special edition if you want to. Yeah, it’s. But the print on demand is so, it’s, it’s so worth it. Like, you know, you’re halfway there with the ebook.
Jim Azevedo [00:26:30]:
Oh yeah, yeah.
Stephanie Holmes [00:26:32]:
Yep.
Jim Azevedo [00:26:34]:
So I interrupted you. I forgot where we were. Exactly.
Stephanie Holmes [00:26:39]:
This is what we were going to do. This is what we were going to have like a free form discussion. So that’s, that’s kind of what it means. Yeah. So. So we were sort of talking about not quitting before the miracle and I had a couple of. Really. We sort of talked about a couple of points in the story already, but I had a couple of other bits where this sort of happened.
Stephanie Holmes [00:27:02]:
So 2019, I had my very first. So 2019, I’ve been full time for a year. I’m like, things are doing, you know, I’m like doing fine, but I’m not like top of the charts or anything. And in 2019 I had my very first hit. So I. It was around the time when Bully Romance was just starting to. And dark romance was just starting to become a thing and I had notice readers talking about these books that they were calling Bully Romances. And I had read a couple of the ones they were talking about and I was like, I, I vibe with the story and.
Stephanie Holmes [00:27:47]:
But then I sort of thought, well, you know, I could never write one of those. You know, they’re contemporary and I just, it doesn’t sound like me. And you know, I love reading that. Love reading them, but can’t write them. And then I was in the shower one day, which is where you get all your good ideas. And I had an idea for one and it was a. Was a bully romance that combined like Lovecraftian sort of Cthulhu mythos in like a gothic school with like a. Yeah.
Stephanie Holmes [00:28:14]:
With this like dark romance plot. And I was like, this is amazing. So I wrote it. I wrote the first book in three weeks, which is very.
Jim Azevedo [00:28:25]:
I’m just laughing at three weeks. Okay.
Stephanie Holmes [00:28:28]:
Yeah. Just, just, it just poured out of me. It was like twice as fast as. Yeah. And, and, and I put up a, I put up a pre order and I put up a. I wrote a blurb like before I’d written the book. And basically because the readers I like hit the market at just the right, you know, it’s complete, like right place, right time. Just as readers were desperate for more of these books, so they didn’t know who I was, but they read this blurb and they saw the COVID and, and they were like, oh, that sounds like this thing I, I want and there’s not enough of them.
Stephanie Holmes [00:29:03]:
So they grabbed it and I had so many pre orders. I had, I think a thousand, roughly a thousand pre orders. And my previous report was like a hundred. So I had a thousand pre orders. And so when the book launched, it launched into the top 20 in the Amazon store.
Jim Azevedo [00:29:19]:
Okay.
Stephanie Holmes [00:29:20]:
And it was, it was insane. Like, it. I, I could not believe that this was possible and that had happened overnight. And I was just like, oh my God. So, yeah, it was, it was so exciting. So I, you know, I followed it up with, you know, I finished the series, three more books in the series. And that took me to sort of January and I had stopped writing my kind of more light hearted, sort of kooky, spooky, paranormal stuff to write this darker book. And so the series finished and I’m thinking about, what do I do next? And the thing that, the thing is, the first thing I say is that, you know, this is kind of.
Stephanie Holmes [00:30:07]:
This example of. This was the 33rd book that I wrote that took off and if I had not written books 1 to 32, I never would have got there. And the amount of times I thought, look, this is, you know, this is what I want to do. But you know, why. Why don’t people want my books? You know, why. Why am I just not as good as everyone else? Why, you know, why is it not me? And then it, it took to book 33 before it was me. But if I hadn’t, I needed to write those other books to know what I was doing because if book 33 had been book number one, it wouldn’t have. It wouldn’t have hit because I needed, I needed to learn the craft, I needed to learn the business.
Stephanie Holmes [00:30:56]:
And it was such a kind of right place, right time. But if you keep with such an element of luck, but one of the ways to find luck is to, you know, keep releasing books and eventually you will get, you know, you will get a book that’s the right place, right time.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:18]:
Um, and that wasn’t that long of an amount of time overall. It’s not like it took you 30 years or.
Stephanie Holmes [00:31:29]:
Yeah, I mean, I had that 10 years beforehand where I was like writing for Trad pub, you know, So I, Yeah, like, you know, even indie coming along when it, when it did. Because when I was doing, when I was trying to look for Tribe Hub, Traphub was really the only option you could indie publish. But no one, it was kind of a. It was kind of a thing where you would pay like 10 grand and you’d get 500 copies of your book and you’d stick them in your garage and you try to sell them to your family and stuff. It was not the same. It was not what it is now. And you know, even just indie coming along when it did was like a right place, right time. But if I hadn’t been focused on making this my, my dream, you know, then I wouldn’t have had my eyes open for the opportunity.
Stephanie Holmes [00:32:20]:
So I think this is like, for me, this is a big thing. It’s like, yeah, you, you don’t know when you’re. When it’s your time, but if you could, it’s never going to be your time. So that was the first, that was the first kind of thing. And then, so, so I had this amazing series that did incredibly well. And I’m thinking about what am I going to do next? And I think, okay, well, I’ve written this dark romance, so that’s who I am now. I’m a dark romance author. So I’m going to take all these kind of elements of this dark romance and write a new series and it’s going to be even better than the last one.
Stephanie Holmes [00:32:54]:
So I did that and this was literally the biggest flop of my whole career. Yeah, this new series and I just. It was. I can look back at it now and see exactly what I did. I kind of took all the wrong elements and use those. What brought. I really should have done was done like a second generation of the. The old series and kept it in the same world.
Stephanie Holmes [00:33:21]:
But I had kind of like a new world. It was. It was like a creepy gothic school with a ghost, but it was like, it was too contemporary for paranormal readers and too paranormal for contemporary readers. So I basically just lost everyone. And, yeah, it was the biggest flop of my career. And it can be very hard to. I sort of. Even though I told myself, you know, you don’t know what’s going to happen next, I sort of thought.
Stephanie Holmes [00:33:57]:
I sort of thought that this was my level. Now I’m like, okay, well, this is what I can expect now. And then it was kind of hit a new.
Jim Azevedo [00:34:04]:
A new level.
Stephanie Holmes [00:34:05]:
Yeah, I thought that’s where I was now, and then straight back down again, you know, worse than. Worse than before. And that kind of launched me into a couple of years of, okay, I. I have. I have achieved this once so I can achieve it again. And I had it in my head that the only way I could achieve that was as a dark romance author. So I wrote like, five different dark romance series, and they each got, like, darker and more unhinged and, like, crazier as I kind of tried to get back to that level. And finally I hit in 2024.
Stephanie Holmes [00:34:47]:
-
- I finally achieved it. I finally hit, like, hit that high level again with a new series. And I’d written that was like, the darkest, most unhinged book I’d ever written. It. I’d hit tick tock hard with. With it, like, promoting it.
Stephanie Holmes [00:35:06]:
And it did insanely well. And I was starting to write book two, and I was sort of thinking, okay, well, when I finish this series, I’m gonna have to do it, like, I’m gonna. I have to do, like, a next generation series and, like, keep the world going. And I just didn’t want to. I just. It took having a hit again and thinking, okay, how would I leverage this to realize that I didn’t want to write dark romance anymore? And it just. I had been so focused on, like, trying to. Trying to, like, beat myself, like, competing with myself, like, how can I do better than this one? Before that, I had not kind of realized that actually I was writing kind of characters that I wasn’t happy with.
Stephanie Holmes [00:35:55]:
Yeah. It just wasn’t. Wasn’t who I was. Yeah. And I love. I love reading dark romance, but just because. Just because you like reading it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s where you’re supposed to be as a writer. And that’s.
Stephanie Holmes [00:36:09]:
It took me a couple of years to realize that, but I was gonna.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:12]:
Say that’s pretty Interesting that you had that self awareness to realize, you know, there was something amiss here.
Stephanie Holmes [00:36:18]:
Yeah, yeah. And it just, it just hit me. It just hit me one day that I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to keep writing these. I didn’t want to like try and like one up myself again. I just, I wanted to write something. Yeah. I wanted to write what is right for me. And so I went back to before I had my first dark romance hit.
Stephanie Holmes [00:36:43]:
I published this series called the Nevermore Bookshop series. I published books one to four that year and then stopped writing it to write the dark romance thing. And Nevermore Bookshop is about a heroine who is going progressively blind through the books and she ends up. She gets fired from her dream job because people don’t think she can do it because she’s going blind, which is a completely made up thing that never happens in real life. And she ends up working at a magical bookshop that brings infamous fictional villains from classic literature to life. And it was a y true series. And she had Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, and a shape shifting raven named Koth from Edgar Allan Poe. And they will, you know, she had a sort of, she has a romantic entanglement with them and she works in this quirky little bookshop with them and they solve little supernatural mysteries in their village.
Stephanie Holmes [00:37:45]:
And also there’s like a big overarching mystery. So it’s like, it’s like a paranormal cozy mystery, but also it’s like a spicy romance. And it, when it came out, it did like fine, but nothing like nothing really exciting. But these books always, I always felt like a, I always felt like such a connection to them. They were really personal. And I thought that’s what I want. That’s, you know, that’s who I am as a writer. That’s what I want to go back to.
Stephanie Holmes [00:38:16]:
And literally the same week that I had this realization that I was going to go back to those books, I had a couple of things happen. I had done this special edition kickstarter for the Nevermore Bookshop series. And I had done that because even though it’s not my most. Was not my most popular series at all. It’s the one that I get all the fan mail about. And I thought, yeah, every, all the fan mail I ever get was about Nevermore. And so I thought, well, if I’m doing a thing for fans, then that’s the series that, that I’ll do it about. So I did these special editions and they had These beautiful different covers on them.
Stephanie Holmes [00:39:02]:
And I thought, well, if the covers did so well on the special editions, I will change the covers of the ebooks and the paperbacks to match and just see how that does. And then so that. So I had just done that. And then that same day I had put up a TikTok about the series and it was my first ever TikTok that went kind of a little bit viral. It went to like 100k, which I had never had. I. The most I’d ever done is like 20k before. So I had like 100k TikTok, like this is, this is all happening the same week.
Stephanie Holmes [00:39:39]:
Yeah. And I thought so that must. So that. So the way I talked about these books in that TikTok is what resonates with readers. So I thought, well, that’s interesting. So I took, basically took the wording of the TikTok and made that the blurb of book one of Nevermore Bookshop. And so these two things happening within a week basically shot Nevermore Bookshop up to being my best selling series, like better than this new Dark Romance series I had. And it has basically stayed there ever since.
Stephanie Holmes [00:40:17]:
So like overnight I had made this decision that I’m going back to this. Going back to. Back to where I’m supposed to be, back to the types of books I’m supposed to write. And it was like, yeah, it was like the universe had, you know, had made the decision for me. They were like, it’s like, you know, I’ve been shown the way. This is what you’re supposed to do. And yeah, so yeah, I finished the Dark Romance series and then I went back to Nevermoor and finished the series. Ten books in the series.
Stephanie Holmes [00:40:52]:
And then I wrote a spin off series and then I wrote the first book in another, basically another spin off series, another brand new series set in the same world. And that book published September last year and that did the best out of any book I’ve ever written. And in December of last year it was picked up for Trad Publishing. And so I’ve just had that book released re released as a Tradpod book, which was super exciting.
Jim Azevedo [00:41:24]:
That is exciting.
Stephanie Holmes [00:41:25]:
Yeah. And so just all these crazy things just happened like this. And yeah, everything didn’t just happen because.
Jim Azevedo [00:41:34]:
You’Re, you know, you were doing the thing. I mean, do you have any regrets about. And I’m gonna. I guess that your answer is no. But I’m thinking back now for the series that, you know, you said they flopped. For the series that flopped or for Some of the books that didn’t perform as well as maybe you had expected at the time, I would imagine that some of those flops or some of those, you know, air quote failures, quote unquote failures were actually blessings in disguise because they served as just really key educational fodder view as you work through your career.
Stephanie Holmes [00:42:11]:
Yeah, I think that it’s so. It’s so interesting because I. I don’t really look back at these things and think, gosh, I wish I’d done it differently because I just. That kind of just feels like a waste of energy to me. Yeah. Like, I’d rather just look forward and I am very proud of all of the books that I wrote during my. I call it my dark romance era. During my dark romance era.
Stephanie Holmes [00:42:39]:
I’m very proud of all those books. I think they were really, really good. And I think I learned a lot about storytelling and about trying to look really carefully at a market and at reader expectations and trying to, you know, trying to. Trying to meet them, basically trying to meet them while also maintaining my own kind of special stiffness. And I think in a lot of ways, I. I failed that. But sometimes you have to. You have to, you know, you have to write the thing the way that it’s meant to be written and look at it when it didn’t do very well and go, okay, well, yeah, I see why.
Stephanie Holmes [00:43:17]:
I see why that. I see objectively why that did not do very well. But. But also, I’m still really happy I wrote it that way. And also it was very interesting about Nevermore, because, you know, sometimes you write a book and you just. It just feels that you Just from the very beginning, it feels like a spark. It just feels. You just get this fizzy feeling like this.
Stephanie Holmes [00:43:42]:
This could be, you know, this is the one. This one’s particularly special. And Nevermore felt like that. And then when it published and it was just so meh, and I sort of didn’t know what to do with that feeling like this book was supposed to be special. It was so. You know, the series was so personal to me, and it was so much fun that I poured a lot into it. And then it just did so meh. And I think it was.
Stephanie Holmes [00:44:08]:
It just needed. It was just not the right time. And I think it. I think perhaps it resonated with that TikTok audience in a way that it didn’t resonate with the sort of urban fantasy audience that I’d kind of aimed it at in 2019. And maybe it needed me to have a little Bit more experience before I could figure out how to market it properly, like how to kind of aim it properly at the right readers. And so if I hadn’t, yeah, I needed to have written those dark romance books, books in order to figure out how to market a book, basically.
Jim Azevedo [00:44:50]:
That’s a really important point. I mean, because I’m looking at the clock and we’re getting close already. No, this is like, this is such a perfect conversation, but something that you just said that I really, I don’t want to miss it and I don’t want our viewers to miss. And that’s about when you, when you write that book and you could just feel it into the depths of your soul. Like, this is the one. And maybe that’s the book that you’re shopping to traditional publishers out there and they’ve rejected it, or maybe that’s the book that you self published and you’ve been self publishing for a while and it still didn’t resonate with readers. What do you say to those readers who, like, they’re just right there, Steph. They’re just right there on the edge of just breaking out.
Jim Azevedo [00:45:35]:
They could feel it, but then that wind just gets taken out of their sails or that drive just gets extinguished because someone told them no, it didn’t take off like they expected and they want to quit so badly.
Stephanie Holmes [00:45:50]:
Yeah, I just. Oh, I, I just, I’ll give them a big hug. Like, it’s, it’s okay. It’s totally okay to have a bit of a pity party and go, you know, it’s not fear. Like, this is supposed to be my, supposed to be my champion book. It’s supposed to, supposed to be, you know, the one that. And, and it just, it just didn’t. And I don’t understand.
Stephanie Holmes [00:46:13]:
It’s okay, you know, it’s okay to wallow for a little bit. And then I think you have to realize a couple, you have to pick yourself up and remember a couple of things. The first thing is that this is not a, you know, writing and publishing is a long. It’s a long game. It’s a long career. Most of us are not making our, you know, if we’re making a full time living, we’re not making our full time living off of one book. We’re making a living off of a collection of books and a collection of projects that we, you know, and, and different kind of income streams that we have. So we’re bringing in a lot of income from.
Stephanie Holmes [00:46:53]:
Income from a lot of different places and a lot of different books. So just because it’s not this book doesn’t mean that it’s not that that book doesn’t form part of your picture. One thing I realized about Nevermoor is that with the series, I had created this world and if I could pull people into the world, then they wouldn’t just read that series, they would read all the series. And so the second series that I published in this world, the Grimdale Graveyard series, the four book series that’s about. It’s kind of the same concept, but it’s. The heroine falls in love with three ghosts from different historical eras. And this is not a thing in romance. And I sort of knew this a bit going into it, but I wrote it anyway because I really wanted to.
Stephanie Holmes [00:47:44]:
And so this is not really a thing in romance. Like ghost smart is not a thing. And so this series has never done amazing. It always does fine and it largely does fine off of the back of Nevermoor. But if I pull someone into Nevermoor, I’m probably pulling them into Grimdale as well. So instead of giving them 10 books, I’m giving them 14 books. And it might be the same thing with you with this series that might not be the series that pulls people in, but if you’ve created a world or a character that you can pull into another series, then maybe it’s that series that then lifts up the other series. So it may not be, it may not have the piece in your kind of your kind of publishing empire that you expected it to have, but it’s still a really important piece, I think, is the first thing.
Stephanie Holmes [00:48:38]:
And the second thing is that just because something doesn’t work, you know, I think because indies have for a long time been really focused on rapid releasing in particular as, as a successful strategy. And rapid releasing can. Can be a successful strategy. And I have certainly used it. But it’s not the only successful strategy. But I think because we’ve been so focused for so long on rapid releasing as kind of like the indie strategy, that we have a tendency to release a book and it does kind of meh. And a week later we’re like, oh no, it’s done really, it’s done really awful. It’s like the end of the world.
Stephanie Holmes [00:49:19]:
This book is never like, I’ve wasted all my time and now I have to write the other two books in the series and oh my God, it’s a disaster and catastrophize it. And the book’s been out for a week or a month or two months and this book has a shelf life. Of forever. And so just because it doesn’t work now, it’s. Just because it hasn’t hit the market now doesn’t mean that that’s going to be. That’s the result. Forever. The thing that you wrote could be.
Stephanie Holmes [00:49:50]:
Could come into fashion in a couple of years. It could be like my series where it. The packaging wasn’t right and the book. The book was perfect, but the packaging wasn’t right. And so all it needed was a. A change in packaging. And maybe that revelation isn’t going to come to you for a little while. It could be, like I said, it could be that it’s not that series, but it is that world and you just need a better, more kind of mainstream entry to that world.
Stephanie Holmes [00:50:26]:
Or it could be the wrong format. It could be that it doesn’t do very well as a traditional book, but as a lot of people find that the least successful books often make their best special editions because. Yeah, because the special edition market is not looking for the same thing that people who are shopping on Amazon or Kobo for a Kindle, like, for an ebook. They’re looking for two different things. And so you can be creative with your covers when you’re doing special editions in a way that you can’t for the kind of. The kind of general marketplace. And so sometimes those really creative covers actually attract more readers. So some, yes, a lot of people find that books that do really poorly will actually be their best sellers if they have, like a direct store or they’re doing a Kickstarter or something like that.
Stephanie Holmes [00:51:22]:
So it could be that. I’ve just been reading about authors who are doing, like, epistolary books where it’s like a book that comes in the, you know, it’s like a story that comes in the mail as, like a bunch of letters or something like that. And I’m like, oh, this is intriguing. You know, it could be a different. You know, it could be a different format. That’s sort of what I’m saying. So don’t give up on the book if the launch doesn’t go very well, because that book has a shelf life of forever. And it’s just like we said, it’s a.
Stephanie Holmes [00:51:58]:
Don’t quit before the miracle. Yes. Yeah. And the miracle is not necessarily the launch of the book.
Jim Azevedo [00:52:07]:
I love that. That’s a great place to end this. I think in these, especially for those of you who might be newer to this space, it’s not game over. As Steph was just saying, if that book launch, you know, doesn’t take off as you expected it to. And because you are an indie author, you still retain 100% creative control. So that means if that cover design doesn’t resonate with your readers or that description just sort of fell flat, or there’s errors inside the manuscript itself, all that stuff is fixable. That that book isn’t a static object that’s sitting on a store shelf somewhere collecting dust. It’s like a living, breathing animal that you can nurture and grow over time, so.
Stephanie Holmes [00:52:54]:
Exactly. Exactly.
Jim Azevedo [00:52:58]:
Well, Steph, thank you so much for being here and I’m so glad that our schedules kind of lined up. We made it work.
Stephanie Holmes [00:53:05]:
Yes, I’m so happy that we did. And I hope you didn’t mind me just rambling so much.
Jim Azevedo [00:53:11]:
No, that’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what, that’s what we want you to do. Because I’m just some guy back here kind of, you know, feeding you questions here and there. But all of the wisdom and the expertise, the experience and the advice is coming from you. You’re the one doing the thing. So, you know, and I so appreciate that coming from you. So I, I, we want you to ramble. So.
Jim Azevedo [00:53:33]:
And you weren’t rambling, you were giving the drops of wisdom. Well, we, and we would love to have you come back again.
Steffanie Holmes [00:53:42]:
Oh, absolutely. I would love that.
Jim Azevedo [00:53:45]:
I’m going to read through some, some end of show notes here and just kind of remind our, our visitors here. For those of you who are coming back week in and week out, we really, really thank you. For those of you who maybe are visiting Self Publishing Insiders for the first time, thank you too. And welcome to Draft2Digital. And welcome to Self Publishing Insiders. If you’re watching, if you can like share this, this particular episode and subscribe to the channel, it helps us increase our visibility out there and it helps us to attract guests like Steph here to come back and to come onto the show for the first time and talk to all of you and to share their expertise and wisdom with you. For those of you who are watching, if you want to know what the next topic is and who our next guest will be, we encourage you to bookmark ddlive.com that website will show you who the next topic or show you who the next guest is going to be and what our next topic is going to be. And finally, for anybody out there who is watching, if you are interested in self publishing, maybe you were traditionally published in the past and you’ve got your rights reverted back to you and you’re just kind of dipping your toe into the self publishing waters.
Jim Azevedo [00:54:57]:
You can go to DraftDigital.com and sign up for your free Draft2Digital account today. So that’s all we’ve got for today. Until next time. I want to thank our guests again, Steph, and for all of you for joining us here again. And Steffanie, hang out backstage. I’ll meet you back there. For the time being, I’m going to play a quick little D2D print commercial here and I’ll see you backstage. Thanks everybody.
Jim Azevedo [00:55:25]:
We’ll see you here next week.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:55:29]:
Ebooks are great, but there’s just something about having your words in print. Something you can hold in your hands, put on a shelf, sign for a reader. That’s why we created D2D Print, a print on demand service that was built for you. We have free, beautiful templates to give your book a pro look and we can even convert your ebook cover into a full wraparound cover for print. So many options for you and your book books and you can get started right now at draft2digital.com that’s it for this week’s Self Publishing Insiders with Draft2Digital. Be sure to subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with your will be author friends and start build and grow your own self publishing career right now at draft2digital.com.