For a writer’s work to succeed and thrive, one needs to find their marketable voice. They need to make their personality shine through their words. In this episode, Ella Barnard teams up with bestselling author Nana Malone to talk about the author’s voice. Nana discusses marketability, diversity and helping other up-and-coming authors get marketed. Tune in to this insightful conversation and learn how to find your own voice.
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Bring Your Marketable Voice Front And Center With Nana Malone
We are here with Nana Malone. Let me tell you a little about her. She’s a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author. She writes sexy, feel-good romance and loves all things romance and adventure. That love started with tattered-romance suspense she “borrowed” from her cousin. It was a sultry summer afternoon in Ghana and Nana was a precocious thirteen. She has been in love with kick-butt heroines ever since. With her overactive imagination and channeling her inner Buffy, it was only a matter of time before she started creating her characters. Thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me.
I’m excited to hear more because thirteen is about when I started reading romance. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and your author’s journey?
I like sexy, feel-good romance. I discovered along the way that while I do love to write a fun, light-hearted romance, I prefer it with a car chase, so there’s a lot of suspense. I call it my capery romance. No matter what I’m writing, whether it’s a secret society, deeper romantic suspense or more of a rom-com, there’s going to be suspense in there somewhere.
My heroines are always strong-willed and feisty. They have a lot to say and the alpha heroes try to tame them and fail miserably. I’ve got 106 titles, but primarily, there are billionaires, royals, bodyguards and my bodyguard romances were big hits, spy romances, and a secret society. There are mostly a lot of billionaires and a couple of family sagas in there too. It’s a little bit of everything for you.
I like writing billionaire romances because they have so much money. You can include anything you want. There’s so much freedom when you’re not making them construction workers because you’re like, “Do we want them to create a custom explosive?” You can make them do anything. That’s my favorite thing about billionaires. It’s not that they’re billionaires.
It’s that I can write whatever I want. Can you tell us a little bit about where you started? You borrowed romantic suspense at thirteen, about the same age I was when I read my first, and now, you have 100-plus novels. What was a little bit in the in-between? That’s where a lot of the people reading find their inspiration. It’s by identifying with you.
When you grow up with strict African parents, it was contraband. My cousin was like, “Kissing Day inside.” She slid over the book and was like, “Hopefully, no one notices.” I read it and was so scandalized. I was like, “Tell me more.” I was a huge reader. Even before that, so many things I shouldn’t have been. I was reading Fools Die by Mario Puzo and anything I could get my hands on, I was constantly reading.
Being a full-time writer is amazing because you get to write and do the thing that you love. But you are also running a business.
I didn’t start writing until I was 22. I was living in New York, working this awful publicity job. I had no business being a publicist either. In the summer, Bridget Jones’s Diary came out. I was working in Manhattan, so every day, I would take the train up and everybody was reading the book. I can still see the white cover, the eyes and the orange. I was like, “What is this?” I was trying my little hobby behind Borders recipes.
In the front of the store, there were stacks of these books. As a reader, you don’t know that that’s paid placement. You just think, “It’s super popular. This is the book.” I picked it up and on the way home, I was like, “I can do this.” I didn’t know about character motivation goals. Now I realize that I was responding to Helen Fielding’s voice of the character. I was like, “This sounds like me.” She’s a British White lady, but still, it sounds like how my friends and I talk to each other. It’s funny and self-deprecating. At that time, chick lit was all the rage and I wasn’t finding any chick lit heroines that looked like me. That was the start of it.
When I made my mission statement, I was like, “I can do this. I can write something. I want to write books that are highly marketable in that fun space that feature people that look like me.” That’s how it started. That book that I sat down to write when I finished was horrible. It will never see the light of day. It took eight years to write because I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what I was doing. You start and stop because you’ve put yourself in a corner, take more classes and you’re like, “That’s what I messed up,” and then you fix it.
Eight years later, I was working a job I was better suited for but at a place that I wasn’t suited for. My husband looked at me and was like, “You’re only happy when you’re writing. Get off the pot and finish the book.” I’m so affronted, but I did finish that horrible book and then sent it out to agents because I thought it was amazing and I was going to sell billions of copies. I got a couple of hits to read the full because the first three chapters were great and then I got rejection after rejection because it wasn’t where it needed to be. I sold the next book that only took me six months to write and that was Game, Set, Match, which was the start of it all.
You self-publish.
Primarily, yes. I’m what you call a hybrid.
I wish everybody could get both. That’s ideal to have your eggs in multiple baskets. You sold it and then what happened?
I saw Game, Set, Match and was convinced. I was like, “That’s the next big thing,” but then, I got my cover. You can see it on Goodreads. The cover was so bad. It was green and purple and had a hand on it holding the camera. At the time, my first mentor, who is very near and dear to my heart, Misty Evans, was like, “This is super cute. Write another one.” She also writes amazing romantic suspense. I was like, “What do you mean?” She was like, “You can’t just have one book. Write another one.” I was like, “The first one took so long,” but she’s like, “Write another one.”
She had started indie publishing and was like, “You should look at indie publishing. I’m making money. A lot of people are also making money.” It was right as Kindle came out and I was like, “Ah,” because I had sold one and then got my first royalty check for $56.72. I was like, “That’s not millions. You’re missing several zeros.”
Back then was when Ellora’s was around and all these other smaller presses. There was a call at one of them for a paranormal romance. I thought I was doing paranormal, but I was not. It’s fine, though. I wrote something and they rejected it. Now I know it was not paranormal. Misty was like, “You have this finished thing. Hire an editor and put it up.” I was like, “What if I could sell it?” She’s like, “Put it up,” so I did. In less than three hours, I had surpassed my first royalty check.
That book only took me three months to write, so I was getting faster. I was like, “This is great. I love this,” but in Game, Set, Match, which was a rom-com, to something paranormal, readers did not know what to do with me, so I was like, “I should probably fix that.” It was my first inkling of branding. The next idea was the Stilettos series, which was Sexy in Stilettos. It was the one that I hit the USA Today list with. That’s 1 of the 9-book series. I was like, “Let’s bring it in closer to that.”
Sexy in Stilettos was the reason for my first big check from Amazon. I realized I could make this a full-time gig back, but I knew I had to get faster. The internet is great. You can look up anything on Google. I learned to write faster and the rest is history. I’m only limited by how quickly I can bring an idea to fruition and sometimes, those ideas don’t work. I have to be able to fail fast and go. Even if I’ve written three chapters and I love the concept, but it’s not working for some reason, I’ll put it down and move on to the next thing.
Thank you. You are a Wall Street and the USA Today bestselling author with 100-plus books and still going strong and fast, which is lovely. I want to touch on a moment where I almost cried. You didn’t even probably notice because it kept moving on, but when your husband said, “You’re only happy when you’re writing,” to have somebody notice that for you and then say, “I want that for you,” is beautiful.
He is supporting me even when he should not have. I was a Project and Program Manager at a tech company. I was getting paid very well, but at that particular job, it was unpleasant. Those jobs are high-stress. Every Sunday, I was sitting on the bathroom floor crying about going to work the next day. I recognized that those were anxiety and panic attacks. It was horrible. It was a very high-stress situation. Also, there was no demarcation between when I would leave the office and then be on call. If something went wrong, I was getting called.
We had a baby who was two at the time. He looked at me and was like, “Quit.” I was like, “What do you mean quit? I need another job.” He was like, “You have a job.” I was like, “This is a nice check, but no. I can’t foresee it.” I’m not going to say that was easy because that was terrifying. I always say to new authors that being a full-time writer is amazing because you get to write and do the thing that you love, but if you are indie, you are also running a business. Some of us don’t love that. It’s awful.
People always ask me if they should go indie or traditional. I’m like, “It all depends on what you want and the level of control you need.” I learned that I liked the control. I stopped controlling the product because the product quality is the same for me either way. I’m not fussed about edits and I like a heavy hint edit. I don’t get emotional. I’m not the person who’s steadying everything. I’m like, “I’ll fix it.” That’s not a problem for me.
Did romcoms go out of style? They sure did, but now they’re just calling it contemporary romance. It’s really about how you market it.
What is a sticking point for me is I have an opinion about covers. It’s terrible because I can’t tell you how to get a great cover. I can tell you what a great cover is. For trad, they’re not always great. Sometimes, they try and shove the covers down your throat. I’ve sold six other books with Harlequin. We had a great working relationship, so I could say to them, “Not this cover.” They were like, “That’s just the cover.” I was like, “It’s not.” I would then give them names of other cover artists and be like, “These are people I’ve worked with in indie. They’re amazing. This is what they’ve done before.” Not everyone gets the chance to say that.
I like that you emphasize that. Indie publishing is lovely. The royalty percentage is so much better than trad. You can release as often as you want if you can, but it is a lot of work. I never tell anybody, “You can be doing what you love.” There are other things that you have to do. If you get to a good enough point, you can hire some of those out if you are willing to give some of the control away. At some point, you could be like, “I’m going to have help with that. I don’t have to do that all on my own.” It’s not nothing.
That’s the caveat. I’ll talk to other writer friends and be like, “They told me to be an indie author. They said it’ll be so easy. They said I’ll love what I do,” and I do. When I am in story mode outlining and figuring out the puzzle of what it is, it’s amazing or when I’m looking at characters that are irritating me and I’m thinking it through, that makes my whole brain light up.
I have a natural skillset for the organization so I can manage the editing process. I’d be like, “That’s the deadline when I have to be done, so it goes to the editor and it comes back by this time so that I can have that release it.” I can do all that but not all the other admin tasks. Every time someone’s like, “Did you know that’s radish?” It’s the seventeen steps. I can also be like, “I’m going to quickly format this,” but it’s not a quick format because you have to make sure all the chapter headings are the same or be like, “What image am I using?” There are also backlinks. All of that admin stuff is heavy and a lot. It’s not one thing.
It’s so many things. If I had more time, energy and desire, I would find people to format books. I have a certain level of excellence that I like, so I would be hiring somebody to do it the way I like it, do it well and then I would be like, “Did you like mine? I can offer you, my lady.”
That’s what I love. Indie authors are so supportive. We’re all always looking for an editor. I love my editor. She’s so dope. I’m always looking for a proofreader. Even in trad, mistakes get through. Ideally, a level of three proofreaders is great because then you’ll get maybe 1 or 2 errors. We’re all forever looking.
Someone in a group I was in was like, “Does someone have a paid beta?” Not someone who’s going to be like, “I loved it,” but someone who would intellectually read it and not try and change my voice because they also want to be a writer. They’re someone who’s going to be like, “I thought it was good with the character like this, but I was wondering, were you trying to do this or that?” People are looking for a great beta.
Readers, if you like reading, want to read romance novels and have some of these skillsets that we’re talking about, there are so many jobs and people that would pay you money to do some of this stuff. I wish twenty-year-old me had because when I was getting out of college, I was like, “I want to do something with books, but I don’t know what.” I wasn’t going to move to New York to work.
I wanted to be a professional reader. I didn’t know they called them editors. I don’t think being a professional reader was a job. There are so many possibilities because everything’s remote. You don’t have to be in New York at a publishing house to do these things.
You’re wanting to write highly marketable books and this was good. You mentioned it when you were early on in your career. I know because I saw you at RAM. You have all these books and you’re doing well. What does creating books that are highly marketable mean for you?
It has taken me a while to set into my branding. The thing is, the content of my books has never changed. It’s sitting into your voice. You’ll hear from people like, “Write to market.” If you’re not authentically doing that and it feels good to you, readers are going to notice that. I would say don’t write to market. Be aware of what the market is.
I don’t love a mafia don. That’s not my thing, but I can give you a taste of that powerful energy, a taste of that uber-rich to the point that it seems like they don’t care about energy and that anti-hero energy. That’s what I did in my London Lords world. They were billionaires and like Robin Hood. I’m paying attention that over here, everyone loves the mafia and this underworld of people who don’t follow the rules. I can give you that energy but still be me running to be like, “Mafia don book,” makes no sense. That’s not what I write and particularly enjoy.
I know a lot of people are KU but go and look at the other vendors, particularly the bigger vendors like Apple. Go and look what’s in the top 100. Look at the blurbs and the tone. Feel the feelings. See who is consistently successful. Make a quick note of who the top ten people are. Do you see their names on that list a lot? Is it over and over again? Then, you can be like, “This is what people are reading.”
I remember years ago when it was Bella Andre. She wrote this great family rom-com style about the family Sullivan and that was the thing. Everybody was like, “How do I be Bella Andre?” Bella Andre’s still publishing, successful and doing great, but when you look, she is not as ubiquitous as she once was, so pay attention to the market.
When I read Bridget Jones’s Diary, I loved the energy, the vibe and the fun of it. Did chick lit “go out of style?” Sure did, but then you read other things and I was like, “They’re calling it rom-com.” Did rom-com go out of style? Sure did but now, they’re calling it contemporary romance. You would read these things that were contemporary romance with a fun, funny bend but they were just calling them contemporary romance. It’s about how you market it. Chick lit had lots of cartoon covers at the time. Everything was super light. It was more in women’s fiction light but there was always romance. This was back in the day. I was like, “We’re not going to call it romance even though she ends up with the dude and it’s a happily ever after.”
I am working on a worksheet. I spent hours creating these two worksheets for my course. It’s called The Sweet Spot. To me, it’s where you call it voice. It’s in alignment with what brings you joy and then finding the sweet spot where what brings you joy matches what people are reading. That’s the thing that is so interesting. You can take a fairytale retelling and make a dark, steamy or rom-com fairytale retelling. They wouldn’t even have to be that different in the writing style, depending on what you emphasize in your marketing. It’d all be the same story.
Pay attention to the market, but don’t write to the market.
That’s the key and where I’m going. When I started my Royals series at the time, I could’ve called them rom-com with a hint of suspense. Sometimes, people need to get kidnapped and then get returned. In terms of the market, it’s about how you communicate what is in the book and what people want to see. For someone who writes a light-hearted book, you can call it many things. Rom-com is back, so you’re going to call it rom-com. Whereas the same book a few years ago, you were going to slap a hot dude on it shirtless and call it contemporary romance. You were going to code that it was lighter in your blurb.
If it’s a friends-to-lovers, you are going to make sure you were very clear it was friends to lovers. If it was an office romance, he could be shirtless but wrap a tie around him so you can code that it was an office romance up on the cover. Shirtless dudes were a big thing. Before that, it was cartoon covers and now, the cartoon covers are back. People also want alternate covers. They’re like, “I don’t want to see any couples on a cover.” I’m like, “I don’t care.” The content is the same, but your packaging is what I think of as a market.
The tone of your voice has to match the cover and the blurb, but you can marry all those things together to either say contemporary romance. What is contemporary romance? It’s a billionaire romance. That’s all it is. It’s still the same funny, hilarious, whatever book. He just happens to be rich. Also, I can code it to say, “Ella is super cute and fun. She’s like calamity penny. She’s almost fired from her job because these accidents happen and it’s not her fault. She is this gorgeous billionaire.” That codes as chick lit and rom-com. It’s the same book. I didn’t touch the contents of the book. Pay attention to the market but don’t write to the market. Don’t be like, “I have to turn my mafia book and make it funny.” That’s not your voice.
I’ve been on some other show. Some people have found me because I started writing short contemporary romances. I created this program because I love helping authors make money. That’s what I love. I love books, but writing isn’t the thing that brings me sparkle. I’m good at it because I love books. People weren’t buying my program because I hadn’t done it, so then I went and did it. I started writing short romances. The point to this was I’m talking to people because I made money with it. I was good. Everyone’s like, “I can write short romance too.” We talked about the marketable part. Now, I want to talk about the voice part and finding what you love.
It’s so hard because they’re like, “I can do that.” I know because I’ve been writing free people to a lot of my series to bring people in. Writing short is very hard for me, especially because I’m like, “Can we still get kidnapped or have a car chase?” I can’t let go of that. Writing short is awful for me. Although I write short, snappy chapters, I always want to add seventeen other layers.
It is difficult. Writing short is a challenge.
It’s a skillset.
I fit the whole romancing the beat into 12,000 words. You can’t have any extra characters.
That’s the key and what I’m talking about. At the end of the day, because of my style and voice, I love a big ruckus or found family. That’s a thing that I do all the time. If you want to write short, no friends are allowed.
You’re very picky about who you can include in these stories. The reason it worked for me is that at the time that I started, it was just for fun. My energy as I came to it was I love romance. I didn’t know these short ones existed, but I’d been working on this program trying to help women writers for a long time. I’m like, “It’ll help them if I show them it works.”
I haven’t always wanted to be an author. I came into it with this light like, “Let me try this and see what happens. I’ll know within a month or two because I’m releasing quite a few.” When you write shorter, you can release faster, so I was like, “I’ll know if it works,” and then I had this great light, joyful energy around it. That was my voice at the time.
I had fun with it to get started. I stole it from my life in the first scene or meet-cute I wrote in the book. I’d met some guy online and we’d email back and forth. He was like, “Do you want to meet in person?” I was like, “Yeah.” He was like, “Let’s meet at Starbucks.” I showed up and he was outside at one of the tables. I walked in and was like, “It’s nice to meet you. I’m going to go in and get something to drink. I’ll be right back out.”
I went in to get something to drink, came back out and he was gone. I saw him driving away in his truck and saluted me as he left. It was awful. I was like, “That meet-cute, I’m going to rewrite that into what I would want it to be.” I still had the guy drive away. He was an asshole, but then, I had in my story another hot tattooed biker guy at the other table who saw the whole thing.
I thought that’s where the story was going. The guy saluted and then this other guy was like, “You should pick better guys.”
I rewrote it. That brought joy to me while I was writing it. The point of the story is that rewriting that terrible experience brought joy, so it was in my voice like, “What would I have wanted to happen?” I had fun as I was like, “It would have been nice if this happened.” That was my joy coming out in the story. Did you always know? Did you always have this Bridget Jones’s Diary type of voice? What have you discovered about yourself as you’ve been writing?
I’ve always had that funny or snarky side of me, but when you grow up African, you are not allowed to be funny or snarky in response to things. That’s not going to end well. I’m direct but also self-deprecated. If I do something wrong, I’m the first one to make a joke and be like, “Flub that past.” I’m not afraid to laugh at myself, so it’s naturally my instinct to laugh about something, especially something that’s traumatizing. My best friends and I would have these epic text conversations. I always loved to read and gravitated to those shows, movies and books that had this sparky conversation. Banter is my thing.
The number one way people buy books is through word of mouth.
Gilmore girls.
We are besties. There’s also Buffy. I am like Sarah Michelle Gellar. I don’t know why no one noticed, but I knew I had that smart, snarky tone to me already but in a light way. I wasn’t the mean girl at school. I was mostly laughing at myself, to be honest. That has always been part of me. I don’t know if anyone has ever taken the Write Better-Faster courses by Becca Syme. I highly recommend Becca Syme. I’m a convert. StrengthsFinder is one of her things as well. It’s another personality test.
I finished taking it because everybody at RAM was like, “Do it.” I was like, “I’m doing it.”
What are your top five? I need to know.
Futuristic was my number one. Activator was number two. I also had a maximizer. My number six is self-assurance, which the coach told me is the least common of any of them. Then, there was positivity and developer.
I love that you said developer. The moment you said that you wanted to help these other women grow their businesses, I was like, “She has to be a developer.” One of my dearest friends in the writing community is a developer. I’m like, “Whatever you say.” My number one is achiever, in case you can’t tell. Number two is a harmonizer. It shows up funnily because I don’t care about pleasing people, but I do care about taking the whole team to the goal. I’m like, “Why are we fighting? We have things to do. Let’s talk about it and figure out where to go.” That’s how my harmonizers move together.
I also had consistency, but consistency in terms of procedures and justice, which is why I have to write this suspense and I can’t take it out. The coaches were like, “This is why you write suspense.” People were always like, “Stop writing this.” I couldn’t understand why I was always like, “Why?” I’m like, “I need there to be justice.” Then, I also had learner and focus.
I’m a relater. That shows up in my interviews because I’m like, “I want to connect over something important or meaningful to me. I don’t want to chat about the weather. I want to chat about how you discovered your voice.”
People say to me, “You seem so fun.” I’m like, “Only for five people.”
Everybody who has not taken Becca Syme’s and is like, “What are they talking about?” Go check it out. It’s very excellent. She does it multiple times a year. I highly recommend it.
If you want to be a writer, it’s a great tool to understand yourself and help you understand why you write the way you do, why your process is the way it is, and how to leverage other strengths that you have. She calls them all strengths. They’re your top strengths and lower strengths. None of them are the bad side of you. They’re things that aren’t as well developed. I highly recommend that. Every new writer that’s like, “How do I do this?” I’m like, “Take Becca Syme’s class. Go now.”
It’s fun. I did it with a writer friend of mine. We’re planning on co-writing. We knew we had complementary strengths before we did it, but then we did it together and we were visually looking at the strengths. We’re going to hire one of her coaches for a session to help us set up our writing system to our strengths. It’s fun, but while we were doing the course, we were like, “That’s me. That’s you.” It’s very educational.
I’m going to resume a minute on the voice. It sounds like you’ve allowed the voice that you’ve always had to be in your writing. Maybe you have a natural gift for that. Some people maybe struggle with that, especially in the beginning. That’s why I brought up my short story because people were like, “I want to try that. I could do that.” Even when I started writing, in my head, I had a vision of how it was supposed to sound. It legitimately takes practice for a lot of people to let it sound the way you sound instead of the way you have it supposed to “sound” in your head.
That’s accurate. I love romance. I had no business spending my earned money from my little college job on Nora Roberts’ hardcovers, but I couldn’t wait, so I did. I thought that’s what romance writers sounded like. I love Nora Roberts and Sandra brown, but I was like, “I don’t sound like that.” It’s not like, “This or that is better.” They sound very specific to them with a specific tone. I was like, “I don’t write like that.”
I used to love Mary Higgins Clark and I was like, “I don’t sound like that.” Learning voice is one of the most important things because I was like, “That’s why I connect to this because it’s funny.” Also, Bridget Jones’s Diary was more than just a rom-com. It was very snappy. I was responding to the voice because I was like, “This feels like Pride and Prejudice,” which I love, but the Bridget Jones’s Diary story was like, “Why would she go out with this guy?” I would have all these preferences because justice was annoying, but in terms of voice, I was like, “This sounds like me in terms of the snappy tone and speed,” but in the self-deprecating snarky way, which is accurate.
What was interesting was when I started writing, people would say to me, “Reading your books is like talking to you.” A dear friend of mine who I met long after I started writing discovered I wrote romance was like, “I love romance.” She went, bought my backlist, and said, “It’s like having you tell me sex scenes.” I don’t know how I feel about that.
Make sure that you’re amplifying other voices because there are people who are already doing it and doing it well.
I read primarily very spicy romance, so I’m reaching out to my favorite authors like, “Can I interview you? I loved your book. Can I talk to you?” Later, I’m like, “This is a little weird.”
We all have tried to write like someone else and be like, “I should sound like this,” but you will read it and think it is hot garbage. It is natural for me because I have had that awful writer moment of losing a chapter or part of a draft. We’ve all had it. Even with Dropbox and Google Drive, we’ve all been there. Your computer crashes and you’re like, “I’ll get a recovered file,” and no recovered file shows up. That has happened before, but because I’m high consistency, I’ve discovered that sometimes I’m like, “I’ll just rewrite it. It’s fine,” and then I’ll find the file or a snippet and it’s scary how close it is. It’s always written better because I’ve mentally self-edited it.
I have a question. I’m going to segue using your justice thing. You like to include justice in your stories because it’s part of who you are, including the suspense and the bad guys. I am for it and justice as well. Can you tell us about how justice not only shows up in your books but in your life?
In 2020, I started with the book club, the #BrownNippleChallenge, which I’m very proud of. For years, people have always said, “I don’t even know where to find diverse books.” I’m like, “Is your Google broken? If you typed in diverse romance, a whole slew of people, including me, would show up.” After December of 2020, I was left bereft of the state of the world and the country. I wanted to do something sustainable that I could maintain. We had all been stuck at home and our brains were fried. I was like, “How do I take a small part of my world and effect change there?”
I started this book club, which is called #BrownNippleChallenge. It’s a hashtag on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and wherever you may be, but I hold it primarily on Instagram. I invite diverse authors that I’ve read their books and loved, but my audience would also love to read and enjoy them. The authors I pick are very similar in voice and tone to me, so it’s an easy jump from my books to their books. The idea behind the challenge is that every month, I pick a new author, put it out to my team, and go in my newsletter. It’s everywhere. I announce it and then we all buy the book.
Buying the book is the key because we want to put money directly in the pockets of Black and Brown women or authors who were writing romance. I recognized that I’ve been very fortunate along the way. I recognize people haven’t had the same advantage that I have had in this genre. Especially in the writing space, I had some great mentors along the way, so I want to help bring up others and give them a little shine and visibility that maybe they don’t get to have because it’s already difficult enough in this industry and then also being an author of color where you’re not getting as much visibility.
Amazon is certainly not helping you out. I started this book club and it has been great. By the time this airs, I’ll pick my new ones. You have to check my Instagram for who it is, but we had great authors. Mia Sosa, Talia Hibbert, Alexa Martin and J.J. McAvoy have been on. Lucy Eden was on our spinoff audio and color. We’ve had a lot of authors on.
You have them do the book club and they get the book. Do the authors come because you know them or do you reach out to them and you’re like, “Do you want to come and talk about your book?”
Usually, I try to reach out before I select the book because I have all these books on my Kindle. I’d be like, “What did I read and love?” I’d make the list and be like, “I love this person. They can come.” I invite them to the show and then we talk about their book. That’s one of the key important pieces. It’s not just being like, “Go buy someone’s book.” There’s no connection to that. I can be like, “I’ve never read this author. Go read their book. I hear it’s great.” That’s not what it is. It’s for you to also read the book and engage with it and the author because the number one way people buy books is word of mouth and when they feel like they know someone.
We all do it when we are talking to our book bestie. We’re like, “Read it. It got this and there’s this scene.” We’re very excited and animated. People connect to that, so they’re like, “I have to go do it now.” I need to bring that energy, which means I have to read the books and then I bring the author on so that the readers can meet them and be like, “So-and-so is super fun.” The number of times people have gotten my book or a BookBub, they’re like, “You’ve been on my Kindle and I’ve never read you, but now that I’ve met you, I’m going to go read your book and buy all your books.” I was like, “Thank you for the $374.32.” I know how much your backlist is going to be.
As authors, you’re selling yourself and your storytelling and that’s part of the package. Even if someone’s awkward and shy, I find that they all light up the moment they start talking about their characters. Everyone gets excited, animated, and dying to talk about this great thing they did or this book they wrote. I love being able to support them and put money directly in their pockets, which is the number one key.
Part of why I’m so passionate about helping women make money is it’s not just the money for me. Money, to me, symbolizes power and access in the world. There is nobody who would want to have more power and influence in the world than creative women, especially authors. I’m like, “You have to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes because you do it for a living in your writing. The more money you have, the better the world will be and the happier you will be. You deserve it.”
I have a platform. I want to do my best to make sure that I uplift. I didn’t tell you this, but on my Instagram, I was going through something and I saw somebody who started following. She was like, “When you’re buying something that you would have bought anyway, one way that you can empower women, people of color or diversity is if you have the money that you’re going to spend on something anyway, see if you can deliberately find something in that same line item in your book budget. It doesn’t have to be lesser. It can be the same thing.” If you’re in the mood for a rom-com, go find a rom-com by a person of color.
It’s the standard always. People like to go, “I don’t know where to find these books and I don’t see the color of the author.” I’m like, “That’s because Amazon pushes authors who aren’t diverse to you.” They do it on purpose because they go, “This is what you’ve read before, so we’re not even going to introduce any of these other people.” People aren’t lying when they say, “I don’t even see that.” The thing is, you’re not looking. I was like, “It takes two seconds to hit Google and type diverse romance books.” The list that would come up is amazing. It’s a whole world. The reason you haven’t heard of them is that they haven’t been pushed. I always say, “Which came first? Is it the chicken or the egg?” I pick up some of the big-name authors that I love their books. They’re great, but it’s not them, or. It could be them, and.
When I see Apple send an email out that has very popular rom-com or contemporary romance authors at the top, I’d be like, “Email is free.” You could have done a split screen and said, “Love this person or read this person.” Do a diversity split and not even blink. That is free because you were already paying that person for that newsletter. People are always like, “How can we do better?” I’d be like, “It’s easy. If you have a platform, use it.” Don’t sit there and then ask someone like, “How do I do this?”
As a reader, if you’re going to read ten books a month, you can say, “I’m going to make sure two of those are by people of color or women of color.” I purchased one software, read this article and then switched. I was redoing everything because I was like, “No.” There might be more, but one thing that I’ve purposely done is my books themselves are diverse. The story is the same. I am White, but I don’t try to be like, “I’m going to be Black,” or figure out how a Black person is. I make the story the same. It’s a love story with someone who works in a bookstore and somebody who’s a firefighter. Is the firefighter Black? No.
Expanding your brain is never bad.
There are a couple of ways to do this when you’re a writer and you’re like, “I hear you that books are not diverse at all or have one sassy black friend in the background. What can I do?” The number one thing I tell everyone to do is, “Amplify first. Don’t let the first-time readers read someone who doesn’t look like you be in your book. Make sure that you’re amplifying other voices because there are people who are already doing it and doing it well. They’re out there doing it great and you’re not aware of that, so amplify. Do some research. It’s not hard. Google is free.”
Also, it can happen when you’re doing specifically newsletter swaps.
That’s such a simple one because you’re already going to do a newsletter swap on your life. My dear friend, K.A Linde, always does this. She’s so great at this. Whenever she gets invited to something, she’s like, “This is amazing. Thank you for inviting me. Do we have any LGBTQ authors or authors of color in the mix?” She simply asks the organizer that. When she puts something together, she makes sure that she includes people. That’s an amplification thing. That’s easy. You have to think about it and take the step.
The other thing I always say is when people are like, “You’re not going to write someone who’s diverse or doesn’t look like me, LGBTQ or differently-abled.” I’m like, “First of all, find a friend and have a conversation with them.” I’m Black but not Black-American. I’m Black-African, specifically Ghanaian and, more specifically, Akan. That’s a whole different experience and set of cultural values and culture that comes with that. Do I include that in my books? 100% because that’s my culture and I love to talk about being Ghanaian or having crazy African parents. I do that all the time.
I have friends who are White and have written diverse before. They’ll do their research and then be like, “I have questions. Can I pay you for your time?” They’re my friends, so I’m not going to make them pay me for my time. That’s not what I’m going to do. We can have a conversation and they’re like, “I’m writing this character.”
I still remember when Sierra Simone wrote Sinner and was like, “I’m on YouTube on this Downshire alley. Can you explain the silk scarf to me?” I was like, “Yes. Here’s why we’re doing it.” She’s like, “I was watching this blogger and they had the pillowcase. Is the pillowcase better than the scarf?” I was like, “It’s not either. It’s both.” That line in the book is a small line, but the number of readers who reach out to her and they feel seen is amazing because it’s one piece of cultural context. That’s the important thing. There’s an authenticity to it.
If you do a smidgen of research or you mentioned a hair product and you’re like, “That Shea Moisture on her counter,” every reader of color that you have is going to be like, “There are some Black women in there.” One throw-away line adds something of authenticity, which said that that author did their research or work.
Her advice is better than mine. As I’m thinking about my books, though, my books are 10,000 words. The description is my worst thing, so I don’t describe anything. I’m like, “I didn’t do a lot of that,” mostly because I didn’t have words.
You write something different. People think that it has to be a whole thing. Let’s be clear. Black and Brown folks, differently-abled folks, neurodivergent folks or people living their lives, 90% of the time, are doing whatever they got to do. Ten percent of that time, they’re living in that experience as a different experience than your own.
Julie Murphy always said, “If you want to talk to me about a curvy girl who gets the billionaire, that’s great. I would read that book in a second, but if you want to talk to me about my curvy girl journey, I’m going to be like, ‘Are you the right person to write that book?’” For readers or writers, if you’re going to write someone diverse and do descriptions like, “She’s a Black girl,” you should also point out who’s White. White is not the baseline.
I’m pretty passionate about this. I grew up Mormon and very conservative. I’m not anymore and when I realized how ignorant I was, I went out and was like, “I need to educate myself. I am so ignorant.” My education is in African-American History. That’s what I did for college, which does not make me an expert in any way. All it does is it allows me to know what I don’t know and where I need to ask questions. That’s all that did for me. I’d be like, “I’m aware.”
That gives you a bit of a knowledge base. There’s so much more to learn. Expanding your brain is never bad.
This is a topic I’m glad we talked about. I don’t think it’s something that people talk about very often. I’m glad because as a White woman wanting to do better and not knowing how all the time but also not wanting to put the weight of educating me on the people of color that I’m friends with, it’s not the responsibility, but I do want to do better so this conversation has been very helpful for me and hopefully for other people who want to do better or want to be able to use their platform in some way. I appreciate it.
Some conversations are vegetables. Some things have to be unlearned, like how to be an anti-racist. It’s unlearning what you’ve been taught as default, beautiful, right and wrong and how Black women especially are viewed. People have to unlearn that and Black people have to unlearn that as well. Some things are vegetables. The unlearning has vegetables, but over in romance, we have vitamin-enriched cake. You can read stories of Black and Brown people who are cake. It’s fun. There’s sex, falling in love, adventures, hilarity and mafia dons.
The easy and simple thing you can do is start reading books by diverse authors like neurodivergent authors and differently-abled authors who are already doing the work. They’ve written these stories. The stories exist. We were talking before we were on screen. You were like, “I want to write books that are more diverse.” That’s great. I love it because everyone should. The world is not White, able-bodied and just that.
Writing only books that reflect that is problematic, but the first time your readers learn about someone different shouldn’t be from you. It shouldn’t be your book that your readers hear you ever talk about someone different for the first time. You should be amplifying people who’ve already done the work first. Use your platform. Be like, “I’ve got this friend. She is Korean and has written this fantastic romance. You must read it. Here’s why I loved it.” Give them some snippets.
People are people. Find out what makes them individually interesting.
It’s not just like, “Go buy it.” Tell them why you loved it and why you think they would love it. Amplify it. If you have a podcast, have different people on. If you have a newsletter, that’s the number one way to share your space. Say, “If you love this book of mine, you’ll love this book by this author. I don’t know them, but I read them and they’re amazing.” That’s an easy thing to do. After you’ve been doing that for a while and also doing your vegetables work because that’s the important thing and then you want to write diverse, do it.
A lot of authors think it’s this heavy lifting that you have to write some pain-inflicted story. I read stories. It’s like joy. If my heroine is Black and Brown, she’s living a joyful life and giving some billionaire, a race car driver or a prince a run for his money. She happens to wrap her hair up in a silk scarf at night or be learning from her mother how to make roti.
The thing that people don’t understand is that there’s a breadth of experience. For every Brown person you’ve ever met in your life, their experience is only one of the tiniest slivers in the whole breadth of experiences of that culture of where they’re from. Even to be Black-American is different than to be African. I grew up African and the way other Africans grew up is different. I’m from Ghana. Nigerians and South Africans are going to have different sets of cultures. Do we all band together and be like, “African parents?” We do because there’s going to be a lot of similarities, but then, we do this and that. People are people. Find out what makes them individually interesting.
A great way to do that is to participate in the #BrownNippleChallenge. Read the books and talk to the authors. If you want to dip a toe into the beginning of this or what we’ve been talking about, your first step could be joining the next #BrownNippleChallenge, buying the book, showing up and chatting with the author. That would be the best way to start the journey.
Our #BrownNipple author of the month on May 1st, 2022, is Nisha Sharma in Dating Dr. Dil, which is so funny and sexy. A lot of the rom-com illustrated covers or code has less sex, but this is so sexy. Dating Dr. Dil is amazing. Nisha is funny. She’s South Asian. She’s amazing.
Go read it and then join the next #BrownNippleChallenge.
On my Instagram, @NanaMaloneWriter, you will see the conversation with Nisha. You can go watch it and then get to meet Nisha as well. I’ll announce the next person after Nisha.
What’s the best piece of advice that you would give people who are at the beginning of their indie author journey?
Start a newsletter. Even if you have nothing to say, get your newsletter. Talk to them often or at least once a month, especially if you’re starting. If you have nothing to push, tell them how it’s going with writing or what you’ve written that month. People are always afraid to send a newsletter. They’re like, “What if they don’t subscribe?” Then, they’re not your reader. You don’t want them because you’re paying for the newsletter.
Where is the best place for people to find you?
You can hit me up on my website, NanaMalone.com. For social media, I’m most active over on Instagram @NanaMaloneWriter. I’m at the other places too. You can find me on Facebook @NanaMaloneWriter and TikTok @NanaMaloneWriter.
If they go to their website, can they find the links to all of those?
They sure can. It’s all there in my bio. You can find me easily.
Plus, all the books. On Instagram is where you can find the #BrownNippleChallenge. Thank you so much for chatting with me and sharing all of your loveliness.
Thank you for having me. I had fun.
Thank you, everybody, for reading. Hugs and happy authoring.
Important Links
- Nana Malone
- Fools Die
- Bridget Jones’s Diary
- Game, Set, Match
- Goodreads – Game, Set, Match
- Sexy in Stilettos
- Write Better-Faster
- StrengthsFinder
- Pride and Prejudice
- #BrownNippleChallenge
- Sinner
- Dating Dr. Dil
- @NanaMaloneWriter – Instagram
- @NanaMaloneWriter – Facebook
- @NanaMaloneWriter – TikTok
About Nana Malone
Wall Street Journal & USA Today Bestselling author, Nana Malone writes Sexy Feel-Good Romance and loves all things romance and adventure.
That love started with a tattered romantic suspense she “borrowed” from her cousin. It was a sultry summer afternoon in Ghana, and Nana was a precocious thirteen. She’s been in love with kick butt heroines ever since. With her overactive imagination, and channeling her inner Buffy, it was only a matter of time before she started creating her own characters.
