Many writers, if not most, wear multiple hats while pursuing their author’s journey. There are moments when you need to prioritize and choose yourself. Here to share how she did it is Lexi Ryan. Lexi is a romance and YA fantasy author working in self-publishing and traditional publishing. In this episode, she joins Ella Barnard to share the ups and downs of her author’s journey as a stay-at-home mom, especially during the pandemic. From being on the brink of quitting to now being an award-winning author and bestseller at New York Times and USA Today, she opens up about her lowest moments and the important lessons she learned. Learn from her struggles and success by tuning in!
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Why It Pays To Choose Yourself With Lexi Ryan
We are here with Lexi Ryan. Let me tell you a little about her. Lexi Ryan is an award-winning author and a New York Times and USA Today bestseller of hot contemporary romance and sexy, action-packed YA fantasy. Her novels have sold over a million copies and been translated into many languages. She is happiest when at home in Indiana with her husband and two children, where you can find her reading copiously, hanging out with her family, and thanking her lucky stars. Her next fantasy novel, These Twisted Bonds, releases in July 2022. That is book two of These Hollow Vows duology.
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Thank you so much for being here, Lexi.
Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here.
I am so glad to have you here. I have things I want to say already, but first, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your author’s journey?
I am a former English professor. I was a professor at a community college and taught English. My author journey goes all the way back to second grade when I found an empty notebook underneath my bed. I was like, “There is no story in this,” so I wrote a story about this little girl named Spam who ran away from home, picked berries, and lived in the forest. It was not good. I want to put that out there. I was not one of those children that wrote for the first time and everyone was like, “This child is amazing.”
I took it downstairs and I was like, “Look at what I did.” My mom was like, “Her name is Spam?” My sister was like, “That is my notebook.” That was the end of the fanfare. I was like, “I do not think you understand. I put a story where there was no story before.” They were unimpressed, but that is okay. I decided that that was my thing because when you are in grade school, everybody asks you, “What do you want to do when you grow up? What do you want to be?” I was like, “An author.”
Let’s be honest. I did not fully understand at that point what that meant. I knew it meant writing things and putting things where there were no things before, but then by the time I hit middle school, I was always writing these teenage soap operas that we pass around in class. My friends would want me to put them in as characters. It was this ongoing teenage soap opera. It was probably not that good. I remember specifically my mom read some of it and said, “You need more detail,” so in the next scene I wrote, I described this coffee shop and it was like, “There were 27 chairs.”
In middle school, I was passing around these teenage soap operas, and that was when it was very clear to me that my favorite part about writing had an audience. I like that connection that happens when you write a story and someone else sees themselves in it, relates to it, or gets excited about what happens next.
There are a lot of people who are like, “I would be a writer no matter what. Even if no one ever read my work, I would still write and put it under the bed.” I love that as a theory, but I know for myself that I would write and then make someone read it. I would hand it to my husband and be like, “Read this,” or I would post it on social media. I would find a way to get an audience, and maybe it is because I am the youngest of seven children and I need people to look at me.
Middle school was the same time I discovered romance novels. The first romance novel I ever read was Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor. I read that in seventh grade and I was like, “I want to write stories that make people feel like this. This is amazing.” At that time, it was my first romance novel, so I had no idea how controversial the ending to that book was. It was different and maybe did not follow the rules. It was just like, “I like it. It is sexy. It makes my stomach flip.”
If you are writing your first book and you finish it, celebrate the crap out of that. It is a very big deal because you learn so much in that first book.
For everybody who does not remember the ending, please explain it.
It is a time travel romance. He goes to her time and then she goes to his time, so they are from two different times. In the end, they end up in their own times, so your happily ever after comes in the form of her seeing this guy on the airplane and you are led to believe it is the reincarnated version of her love interest.
I read all of Jude Deveraux.
She is very big on reincarnation and fated mates in the sense like, “You will find each other in every life over and over again. You are meant to be together. You are going to find each other again.” To me, it was still a happily ever after because she found him, but to long-standing romance readers, they are like, “I want that specific version of him with this specific version of her. Make that happen or it is not happily ever after.” She bent the rules. I am a big believer in that, but at that time, it did not even occur to me that that might not count for some readers. I love romance.
Through high school, I continued to write. I went to college and majored in English because I wanted to be a writer and got a lot of flak for that. They were like, “What are you going to do?” I was like, “Write.” I went to grad school because what am I going to do with my English major? I decided to go to graduate school so that I could at least teach some classes. All this time, I am writing, but I was not one of those child prodigies. I did not write my first book at ten years old. I wrote so many first chapters, snippets of scenes, and bad poems. I am not a poet. I did not finish a book until 2005.
Since I finished my Master’s degree, I have been working on this same novel. In my junior year in college, I was like, “I am finally going to finish this,” because I had done enough research at that point that I discovered you could not go to a publisher and be like, “Here is what I want to write. Please give me my money and then I will go write it so that I can feed myself.” If you have never published a book before, they want you to write the whole thing before they give you any money, so I was like, “I have got to do this and finish this.” It evolved dramatically over those years. Eventually, I finished a version of that thing that I started writing in my junior year in college.
I was convinced, like, “This is it. What do we do first? Do we send it to publishers? Do we send it to agents?” We went out to dinner and we celebrated it as one should. If you are writing your first book and you finish it, celebrate the crap out of that. It is a very big deal because you learn so much from that first book. At some point, you need to finish a book to know you can. We celebrated like I was going to launch into a new career already, and then that was made worse because I was a Golden Heart finalist with the same book. I was like, “This is it. It is happening.”
It was in 2007 that I was a Golden Heart finalist with that book. I thought, “This is it. This is happening.” It was a romantic comedy. If you were around in 2007, know that all anyone wanted to buy were vampires, which is cool. I like reading vampires, but that was not what I was writing at that time. I went to my first RWA as a Golden Heart finalist, and as people do in the Romance Writers of America conference, they are like, “You are a Golden Heart finalist. What do you write?” I am like, “I write romantic comedy.” They would be like, “I am sorry.”
In the early 2000s, chick lit exploded and everyone started writing romantic comedy, and then as trends go, the market gets oversaturated and then they do not sell. The publishers are like, “Stay away from us. We do not want that toxic stuff over here because it is not selling.” I loved it and I still love it. I have learned that I am not a comedy writer. I prefer to sprinkle in comedic moments. I still love reading good romantic comedies. That first conflict was a little disheartening for me though, because I did not feel like, “I want to go write vampires.” That was not my passion.
I met Kristan Higgins for the first time at that conference, and I did not know who she was. She had one book out or maybe her second book was about to come out, so she was not the huge name that she is now at that point. She said, “What do you write?” I said, “Romantic comedy,” and before she could even say anything, I was like, “I know that is not what is selling right now, but I love it. That is what I am going to write anyway. I do not care.” She was like, “That is what I write and I love it too. I am going to keep writing it because I can’t get enough of it, and my publisher is supporting me. I am proud of you. Keep going.” She was awesome, encouraging, and so sweet.
If you have ever met Kristan Higgins, you would know that she is like a gift. It was exactly what I needed. She was exactly who I needed to meet at that moment. She said the things I needed her to say, so that was amazing, but to make this long story shorter, magic did not happen. I did not go from Golden Heart finalist to contract to full-time author. That was the plan in my mind, but it did not happen. I was still deep in the freshman composition and had my baby shortly after that.
In 2008, I started publishing with a small press. I was like, I am going to write sexy stuff. They are going to be able to sell it and get it out there. I was making a few hundred dollars a book. When you have a full-time job and you have kids, it is very hard to justify a few hundred dollars a book. There were a lot of factors in that, but I was like, “This is not what I want,” so I decided to go big or go home.
Once again, I went after New York and hit my head against that wall repeatedly. I sent this book that is called Text Appeal to Harlequin. I thought that if I could get published with Harlequin and get them to publish 2 or 3 books a year, I could write full-time. Writing full-time should not be everyone’s goal. I truly do not believe that everyone is going to be happiest doing that, but it has always been my goal. It has always been what I wanted to do, and a lot of that is I want to not feel guilty about the time I take away from my family and my job to write because I want to be able to write without guilt.
I still want to be able to write without guilt. We can get that back to that later. There is so much to do. Harlequin had that book for two years, and you are not allowed to double send it to Harlequin. You can’t send them something when they are still considering something else. Every time I would follow up, they would be like, “We are still considering it.”
It was in the spring of 2012 that I finally got my rejection. This was back in the days when you would get it in the mailbox. I do not think that is a thing anymore, but I sat in my driveway and read my rejection letter that had been two years coming. At that point, I felt like I would be rejected by every agent that represented romance and every publisher that published romance. It is probably not quite that literally, but that is what it felt like. I felt like that was my last chance to get into publishing. I remember sitting in my car and crying, but it was not because of the rejection. I have been rejected so many times that I was a pro at it, but because I felt like the best thing I could do for my family was to give up.
I felt so selfish that despite all of these signs that this was not going to work out for me, I did not want to give up. It was so obvious that I should because at that point, my daughter was one year old and my son was almost five. I was a faculty member at the local community college, and that job was pretty demanding. I also liked spending time with my husband too. It was so much. It was a moment where if I could just be okay with not doing this, my life would be so much easier. I could be good at these other things that I have.
I cried because I did not know how to give it up. I did not know how to let it go because it was something I had wanted for so long. I was almost in that moment that I was like, “I have friends that are traditionally published who are starting to self-publish because they feel like it is the only way they can get the value for their work. If they can do it when they have been proven by these bestseller lists or these publishers to be good, then why can’t I do it and have success as well?”
I published Text Appeal in June 2013 myself. It was not super successful right out of the gate. 2012 and 2013 were magic years for self-published authors. The Amazon algorithm was working in our favor. People had read Fifty Shades of Grey and were hungry for more of the same. It was an amazing time. I did not find that out of the gate visibility, but I got there.
You really have no idea how amazing it is and just how many lives and hearts you can touch.
In February 2013, Text Appeal, the book that had been rejected by everyone, the book Harlequin sat on for two years, and the book I used to hit my head against New York forever, hit the New York Times list. It did not happen right away. It was published in June 2012 and hit the New York Times list in February 2013. I had done all these things to push it and promote it, and I made it happen.
It was not all about the list. To me, my mindset has always been I want to be able to write full-time and support my family with my stories. I continued from there and had a few traditional offers for a contemporary romance. That never made sense to me because I am able to support my family with my self-published romance.
It is hard for publishers to give you enough money to compete with that but when I decided I wanted to write young adult fantasy, I was like, “Here is my chance to do a traditional contract because this is such a heavy hardcover market and bookstore market. I can’t get there myself well.” That was when I decided to take a traditional contract for the first time, and here we are. Now, I do both.
One of my favorite things about doing these is hearing how the author’s journey happened. My favorite one is yours. You are a very good storyteller because you followed the curve of inciting the incident, a breakdown, and then the climax of where you were like, “I am going to do it myself.” It was very awesome. I have a couple of things that I want to point out that were my favorites. This is why I love books and authors. It is that bit about a story where there was none before. It is magic to me that you can have nothing, and then somebody has their ideas and some words and then makes it into a story.
I was like, “This is magic. I want a piece of this magic.” At that point, you have no idea how amazing it is and how many lives and hearts you can touch, but you feel it. It is a spark inside you.
I also love that you followed your spark. A lot of people make the other choice, so what happened for you?
This comes with a word of warning as well that I will get to in a minute. It was such a big part of my identity. It was who I was. To give it up felt like letting go of myself. I would have bad postpartum depression after my first child was born. I realized, in retrospect, that it was because I was on all the crunchy granola mom blogs, making his baby food, and nursing exclusively. I did all the things that I thought I was supposed to do and I had abandoned all other things to be this mom that I thought I was supposed to be and be 100% there for him. The consequences of that for me, and they are not like this for everyone, were pretty catastrophic.
I was in a dark place, which is not where you want to be when you are trying to be your best mommy self for your baby. My kids are about four years apart, so before I even got pregnant with my daughter, I knew going in. The best thing I can do for her after she is born is to make sure I still tend to me. For me, those are not bubble baths and candles. If that is your thing, that is cool, but we can oversimplify what self-care means. For me, it meant giving and saving time and energy and a life that would easily allow for none to be there to save for the things that make me feel whole and who I am. Writing was the most obvious thing for me, so if I could give attention to my writing even after she was born, then I would stay grounded within myself.
At that moment, I was crying because I felt so guilty that I could not give it up, but there was no question in my mind. The tears were not because of the failure. I was because despite the failure, I knew I had to keep trying and that was hard. I told you that story comes with a caveat because I also think one of the things we need to do for each other as writers is to be careful that we encourage each other to be more than writers. It is dangerous to be like, “I am a mommy. That is the most important thing to me. That is all I feel like I am,” and then your kid leaves and you are like, “Who the heck am I? What am I? What is my purpose?” You fall into the bad place of emptiness.
Feeling like I am a writer and that is who I am could also be a problem. A career comes with so many ups and downs. If you have a dramatic up, you need to brace yourself because the rollercoaster is coming for you. That is not a bad thing. You just have to go on a few of those hills before you realize that the downward slope does not mean that you are going to crash and burn. It is part of the natural rhythm of being in publishing. I am sure there are some people who have taken off into the sky and stayed there, but they are one in a million.
Let me talk for a second. I am going to deep dive a little bit into it in a minute, but what you are saying is at that moment, it was part of your identity, and then later, you also learned that it couldn’t be the only part of your identity. I did almost cry and I want to emphasize this because that bit about being who you, giving that up, and living into who you are supposed to be, which in some ways, unless you are very lucky in life, is not necessarily who you want to be sometimes.
We have all seen Moana. She just wants to be a good daughter, and that means staying there and not being so obsessed with what is beyond in the water. It is a universal theme.
Your life gave you the chance to learn this. Not everybody is gifted with this. You learned about taking care of yourself in terms of being a writer, making you a better mother, which I feel like a lot of people that are reading this that I talk to have this challenge. They feel like if they take time for writing, it is taking away from their family, which you also had that moment.
If you think about how hard it is to justify writing when you are not published yet or your books are not making you money yet, it is so tough. It would be very easy for me to forget how hard that was, except that here I am, the primary breadwinner for my family, our lives have changed radically because of my success in publishing and I still get flack for getting help with my kids. When I left my day job to write full-time, everyone was like, “Your kids are going to love staying at home with you.” I was like, “I am sending them to daycare. I am writing.” No one got it. Let’s pray my mother-in-law is not into this episode because I am going to give you an example.
She is an amazing, wonderful woman, but she is not a writer, so she does not fully understand. During the pandemic, we were all home. The kids were doing remote learning. My husband was working from home. I was trying to work from home, but my kids were knocking on my door all the time and wanted help with schoolwork.
My husband went back to work way before they went back to school. On one weekend, I did what I liked to do at the end of a book and got a hotel room and locked myself up to finish the book. I was saying to my mother-in-law that I do that probably twice a year so I can get writing done. I do it over the weekend when Brian is home with the kids anyway, so it does not affect anything or cause a problem.
She says, “He can’t get anything done but I guess at least you can write.” I was like, “Okay.” She is very protective of him. They had very traditional gender roles in their family. Her expression of love is, “I am going to do your laundry, make your food, and bring you things.” My husband and I do not have a relationship like that, which has been hard for her to understand.
I am sure she is lovely.
You deserve your own space.
She is. I feel bad for throwing her under the bus. She is only a representative of a very common idea, like, “It is okay if you occasionally make your writing your priority.” It is a very common feeling that I had. Also, I live in the Midwest, so that might have a lot to do with it too. We still have a lot of old-fashioned values here.
You did mention that you were the youngest of seven, and in the bio, we all know you are in Indiana. We might be making some assumptions generally, but not specific.
I do not mean to throw her under the bus. This woman who loves me, cares about me, and is very proud of my career still has that gut instinct of, “Why would you do that? It is his weekend off and he might have things he needs to do.” I am like, “I need to write a book and I have been stuck at home doing remote learning.” It is tough, and it is tougher when you do not have the excuse of this is how I make money or pay the bills.
It is so hard to justify it because it makes you happy or it fills your well-being. I am on a big kick these days about women specifically making their lives work for them. They are organizing things in their lives to support them. It could be stuff like sending out your laundry or some of the things you have talked about with taking the weekend off. Do you have a couple of things that you could share with people? It does not have to be like, “Everybody should do this,” but like, “This is something that I do too.” In a way, seeing examples of women doing it and making it gives permission to the people who are reading that have not gotten there yet but are like, “This is a possibility for me.”
While I was still working the day job, I am so sympathetic to that. I was like, “How do I make time for writing, my family, and my full-time job?” When people write about it on Facebook, asking for advice, I feel the tug in their hearts because I know exactly what that feels like. I wake up at 3:00 in the morning and write between 3:00 AM and 6:00 AM. After that, I wake my kids up, get them ready, and take them to daycare, then I go to work. That is not sustainable long-term. This was when I started self-publishing. I saw what was happening and how people were making careers with self-publishing. I saw what was possible and I wanted it, and I was driven.
At that point in time, when I first started self-publishing, my goal was to write ten books over five years and be full-time after five years. In retrospect, I was full-time after one year. Things were a little hasty, but things worked out. Now that I know more about the ups and downs, I am like, “That could have gone badly, but thankfully, it did not.”
Some people are night people. I am a morning person, so to give my best self to writing meant to give those first waking hours to writing. That is not a long-term solution. I am not sure that I have one. I am shocked at the number of full-time authors who still write at their kitchen table, and that is fine if that does it for you, but you deserve your own space.
What do you do now? I want people to be able to have the vision of maybe not what is possible for them but what they can live into if they keep going. This weekend that you took, is that twice a year?
I do that once a book, so it is usually about three times a year, but it depends.
You also sent your kids to daycare.
They are older now, so they do not go to daycare anymore. Part of it is family roles too. We have never been that couple that if I leave and my husband is with the kids “babysitting.” He is home with his children. His view of that helps a whole lot. COVID made this tough. I used to be a coffee shop writer. I love writing at Starbucks because there are no dishes to do.
There is no laundry to fold. There are no packages coming to the door with a dog going crazy and losing her mind. I had two years where that was not an option. I ended up renting a room from my aesthetician. She had this good-sized closet that she was not using. I was like, “Do you want to rent that to me for a year?” She did. It was so that I had somewhere to go that was not home where there were no kids doing remote learning.
I am sure I sound like an awful mother, but when my now fourteen-year-old was doing remote learning, I needed to not be here. He is a super high achiever. He is very literal. A lot of these assignments were not very specific, so he would get so wound up about it. Rather than making something happen, he would come and ask me 100 questions and then get frustrated with me when he did not know. He needed to not have access to me that easily and I needed a space where I could have more than fifteen minutes at a time to think.
I do not think anybody should be making any judgments about mothering during the pandemic. It is still your fight. You did it.
It was tough. That is what balanced you. You deserve more than fifteen minutes at a time to think and find where that can happen for you, whether it is in your own office, in your home, at Starbucks, or renting a tiny office. There are office share spaces. We have one in our community that I have not looked into because they are very big on collaboration. I am like, “I do not want to go in and have you talk to me.” That is important.
I am saying this from a weird space because you were like, “Tell us how it works and how it looks.” I had written less in five months than I had written probably since before I started college in any given five-month period. My father has dementia and his girlfriend was his primary caregiver. She passed away in November 2021.
I am in no position to bring him into my home and care for him around the clock, so he is in assisted living but still, there is so much to handle. He has this house that is off-grid and way in the boonies. He and his girlfriend were both pack rats. He has rental houses in town where people have not paid rent in six years. There are all sorts of real estate stuff that is needed to be dealt with. Also, he has medical appointments that I am now responsible for taking him to. It has hijacked my life, honestly.
Thank you for sharing those because another important thing that I am building into when I help writers myself is one of the benefits of being an indie author, especially if you are already making your money, is you do have somewhat more flexibility. I have stopped writing because I want to focus on building my coaching. I have also re-started this show. It was because my real passion is not writing. My real passion is helping other women make money.
It’s important to not just be a writer.
Sometimes, when you love books and publishing, it is hard to figure out where you want your place to be in it. I had a period of time in college where I was like, “Do I want to go to New York and be an editor? Do I want to be an agent or a writer? Which of these things is more likely to put me into this world that I want to be part of?”
You found it. I like certain parts better than others, but I am doing what I am telling people. I am shaping my life and my career to work for what makes me happy or feel good so that I can be more generous and give more to the people that I love, including the people that I am talking to here.
I like that you figured out what feeds you. I mentioned earlier how important it is to also not just be a writer. I have been thinking about this for years. There were many slumps in terms of sales along the way, but in 2015, the first book that I launched crashed and burned. I had been working so hard and putting out books at such speed, a speed that is faster than one I am comfortable with, that I was burnt out on top of it, so I was like, “Can I keep up this pace?”
I launched this book that was romantic suspense, so it is a little different than what readers expect from me. It did not do well. It was a time when I was already wondering if I needed to make adjustments, but now that I see the payoff is not there, then I need to make adjustments. I was struggling. It was burnout and disappointment. It was, “Am I going to come back up from this or is this the new pattern?” It was the first time I had a big dip.
I was on the phone with Jessica Lemmon, who is a romance author who writes for Harlequin and a few other ones as well. I was saying the words that I felt like I needed to say when I said to her, “It is okay if this does not do that well because I am more than an author.” She said, “You are so much more than an author.” I was given lip service, but having her say it back to me, I was like, “Oh.”
As I have gone through these five months and struggled, I do not want to pretend that I have been a superwoman. My mental health took a hit when I had to cancel a release and some deadlines. It has been rough, but I keep thinking about that mind shift that happened during that slump. I say slump because it happens over and over again. You peak and you slump.
If this were happening when I was still struggling, the most important thing about me is that I write books and they sell a lot of copies. It would have been even harder because it has been hard, but knowing I am more than an author, a mother, a wife, a friend, and a daughter to a man who never gave much to me but who is willing to sacrifice an awful lot for him nevertheless. I am glad that lesson came before during an earlier slump so that I can deal with this particular moment a little bit better.
That is beautiful. This feels like a conversation about being true to who you are as best you can with everything that happens in life and being multifaceted, and then being able to ride the wave of who you need to be in different moments but then keeping on coming back to who you are, whatever that might be.
I had so many things on my list and we have not gotten anywhere near them. You are not the only one who has had mental challenges in the last little bit. You have some specific ones for a while. My audience knows that I was suicidal not long ago. I was bad. If anybody that is reading this is not a successful author yet, you are not just whoever it is that you think that you are. That is not all that you are. I was an administrative assistant for a long time. Now, I am able to say, “This is not all of who I am. I have so much more.”
It is more dangerous to fall into the, “I am X,” whatever X is, whether it is a mommy, an author, or a Broadway star. When X is the thing that you desperately wanted for so long, I remember that when I was trying to get published with New York, I was also desperately trying to get pregnant with my second child. I remember lying in bed at night and thinking, “What if I had to choose one or the other?” It was so stupid. Why would you do that to yourself? That is not the way life works.
It is very easy when you are like, “I am so lucky to be a makeup artist on Broadway. I am so lucky to be a mommy or a gardener.” Whatever it is that is something that you have worked so hard to become or that you take so much pride in the way you do it, it is easy to fall into the, “This is who I am,” and it is dangerous because we are all multifaceted. When you think you are just one thing, there is always the potential for any one thing to fall apart. When that happens, the suicidal ideation is going to haunt you, especially if you have any history of depression. I certainly do. There are a lot of us.
I was looking for my brother-in-law. I was like, “I should try and get him a therapist.” I emailed some places, but everybody is booked. As you are talking, I agree because why I became suicidal is because I have always wanted to be a mom and I realized that it is probably not going to happen for me in the way that I always envisioned, which was bad. It took a long time, but I was like, “What was it about being a mom? What was it that was so important to me?” I was journaling stuff and I was like, “It was partially being able to love somebody or love a child in a way that I was not loved to heal something in myself and provide that to somebody.”
You have so much to give. It naturally wants to pour out of you and wrap around someone else. You are like, “What do I do with this?” That has always been your plan.
Also, I really love the freedom that children offer in allowing you to be yourself. I am goofy. I do not have a lot of filters. I have been called weird. Some of my three-star reviews on the show are like, “She has good information, but she laughs too loud,” and it is not just the show, but I have had people tell me that my whole life. Kids do not do that, so then I was like, “Okay.”
I then had to look at myself. I do think this is useful even though it has nothing to do with all of the marketing. I firmly believe that you have more success when you come from the truest part of yourself or when you have integrity. The success comes from that part. We could talk marketing and book covers, but I do think this is a very important conversation.
I had to look at other ways that I could still get those things. Are there ways that I can still have the love that I want to give, the joy, and the goofiness in my life without being a mom? Gradually, you start coming to the realization, “It might look completely different than I expected, but it can still happen.” It has been pretty powerful in a way.
I still want to hug you though, because we still have to grieve. It sounds very petty compared to wanting to be a mother and having to renegotiate that with yourself, but I wanted to be traditionally published. I wanted to be in bookstores, and my decision to self-publish. I wanted my debut novel to be a big deal, not this soft launch, a quiet thing I did while I was figuring out self-publishing. The new path has been excellent. It worked out great, but that does not mean that I did not have to grieve the old path. You are learning things, making plans, and finding ways to fulfill this instinctive spark in you, but you still have to grieve the plan that you have had for so many years.
There has been so much Krispy Kreme every weekend for a year.
It’s easy to fall into the “This is who I am,” and it’s dangerous because we are multifaceted. When you think you’re just one thing, there’s always the potential for any one thing to fall apart.
If that is helping you heal, then that is okay.
Part of my grieving process was eating a lot of Krispy Kreme. I do not compare pain. I am trying to relate this to the audience in a way, and I am not sure that I even can, but digging into those really difficult moments, allowing them to happen, grieving, and picking yourself back up. I am now where you were when you were like, “Maybe I can self-publish.” That is where I do not know what it is going to be for me exactly.
You are like, “How can I reconfigure this dream to fulfill still the basic part of who I am?”
Part of that is talking with people and helping women. That does fulfill a part of me. I get to give a lot of love to the people that I work with and the people that I meet. We will see how it goes. I do not know, but I am pretty excited about it. Like you, you now support your family and your path has been a good one. I think I have that in my future as well. Our paths are different, but all of us have those moments where we are like, “Can I?” then, we lose.
It is also important to understand your personality and how it works into this. I do not know if you have done the Clifton StrengthsFinder.
I did. I finished the course with my husband.
Are you high in Futuristic?
I am number one futuristic.
I am number two futuristic. If you talked to my husband and you were like, “Our life is now going to look like this. It is different than what I thought,” he would not struggle with it nearly as much because he has not lived that future the way I have. He would not have to grieve that plan the way I do because it is not here yet. He is very much in the moment.
One of the things that I am struggling with my father is my futuristic self wants to be like, “Is he still going to be alive in 5 or 10 years? What happens once the kids go to college?” He is 80 years old in 2022. He was diagnosed with this awful disease a couple of years ago. I have to constantly remind myself, “This is not something you need to plan for,” but I am a planner. I am futuristic.
Having a strength coach is like therapy. I have worked with Jess Michaels, who is a romance author but also a strength coach. It is like, “Here is what you can do to feed that part of your personality that wants to know what the future looks like while also being true to the realities of your situation.” The last time I had coaching with her, I was like, “You are going to hear me and you are going to think I need a therapist and not a strengths coach. I want you to know I am working on that side of things, but now, you are going to help me with this anyway.” She was super helpful and awesome. The way you talk, I am like, “She is so futuristic.”
It was awful. I have talked with Nana Malone and she was like, “Are you futuristic?” She knows all of them and I barely do. You can also try Becca Syme’s Write Better-Faster if you want to get in on the cool kids.
I also joked that Becca should rename her class, “Write at the Speed That is Right for You and Quit Wasting Your Time on The Crap You Should not Be Doing,” but Write Better-Faster is way catchier.
That is the marketing side, which is awesome.
In the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I am like, “It should be renamed The Art of Being Selective about What Crap You Give.” It is not about not giving a crap. It is about being choosy.
It is so catchy. You know all about marketing because you know a lot about the art of having a good cover and a good title, which, by the way, I love the covers for your YA.
Thank you. I was blessed by the cover fairy. The North American and the UK covers are both gorgeous. The North American did the illustrated people cover and the UK is the more of the object covers. I love them both.
I am going to go look it up. It is the kind that you want to buy and put on your shelf just because they are pretty, regardless of what the story is. Futuristic is my number one. It is when you have a future that you have been living since you were a baby until you knew that you could be a mom.
The new path is excellent but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to grieve the old path.
That is what futuristics do. We have already decided.
It is not abstract at all.
I am sorry if I am going to get off on this tangent for a little bit, but that is why once futuristics achieve the goal, there is a little bit of a letdown and it is like, “I have already done this,” because we have already been there in our head. We are like, “What is next? What is after this?” I remember being on my honeymoon in Jamaica and being like, “Why do I feel listless?” It was because I had spent the whole year planning my wedding and it was done.
I was grieving for the first year, then in the second year, I was like, “Let me make a new future. I do not know what it is going to look like.” It was very hard to have any motivation.
It is much harder if you do not get to get the thing.
At least for the moment, I would be like, “For now, what makes me happy?”
One of the things that Jess suggested I do is I do not have control over a lot of timelines.
I have already written down her name. I will be reaching out.
She is awesome. She is also a futuristic and a high achiever, so she gets that. She was like, “Since you can’t do the timeline, write that once you sell the house, you will be able to XYZ. Once we get his glaucoma issues figured out, I am going to be able to XYZ.” I am a planner junkie. I love making quarterly goals and all that other stuff.
I love planning out what my next year looks like, but then I went into this year and was like, “I will write a book this year. Maybe I can do 1 or 2. I have no idea what that looks like.” That is a tough adjustment. That is why it is important because I can’t be like my husband and not think about the future. I can’t be like him and just live in the moment. That is not who I am, so I have to find ways to work with this unique situation but still feed my personality.
I feel like that statement is the summary of this whole conversation. How do I deal with this unique situation while still being true to my personality and who I am? I appreciate you so much for sharing.
As you can guess, I am high empathy. The touchy, feely stuff is where it is at for me.
It is a cool thing. I was going to ask, “How does it feel? How does that happen?” This is the thing that I tell authors when I talk to them. We were talking about Write Better-Faster. It is sexier. It gets people in. There are so many courses and people who will approach you where all you need to do is do this thing. Becca does not do that.
That is why we love Becca. There is not a universal relation.
There are a lot of people who do say that and I always tell them there is not. There are so many things that you have to do, but for me, the people that I coach and the people I most love to talk to, the core where you need to start from is being true to yourself as best you can and then finding where that fits within marketing and readers. Marketing for my audience will not work if you are not being true to yourself.
If we want to extrapolate that out into something very practical, it also means that once you can afford to do so, like hiring out the things that do not make your heart sing. I would rather stab myself in the eye than sit here and do graphics all day because I will never come up with something that I think looks good. It is not my skillset. I need somebody else to do that.
It is a place of privilege to be able to be like, “I hire out this,” but once you can afford to do so, and then focus your energy on the things that are true to your passion in your heart that only you can do. Only you can write your book and interact with fans at signings. There are an awful lot of people who can close out giveaways. There are some very talented people out there who can make beautiful graphics that are way better than anything I could do. They can do in fifteen minutes what would take me all day and I would still not be happy. You can take that core touchy, feely thing. They get very practical.
I am going to say this because I am very woo-woo. The more time you are able to spend on the thing that you are the best at, whether that is because you are hiring it out or you have rented a space at your aesthetician. The more time you can give to that, the more success that you will have.
Persistence is so key.
It is gone through my romance writing career, agents and publishers would come in and they’d be like, “Nobody does everything well, so figure out what you do.” This is to the heart of what Becca tries to do too. Quit worrying so much about your weaknesses and focus on your strengths because that is going to get you so much farther. If you write sexy, focus on the sexy and readers are going to gobble it up and it is going to get you farther.
If you write community well, focus on the community. We always want to be better at things we are not as good at, but lean into those strengths of how you run your business, how you write a book, and how you operate friendships. If you lean into your strengths, there is so much more return than being angst over the things that do not come as naturally to you or that you naturally resist.
Thank you. I want to ask what your best piece of advice is, but we have gone through a lot. First, I want to say thank you so much for being so open and generous. I am sending all my best, good, loving energy to you, your family, and your dad because that is not an easy thing. My mother-in-law has dementia, but she is very healthy physically. It is a challenge. I understand, I empathize and I am sending you good love and appreciation for taking some time and doing this and sharing your experience. Do you have a piece of advice that you want to share with people?
It is a tough one to swallow when you got what you want and you want it now. You have got to persist in whatever way that looks like to you. You are a perfect example of, “I need to reshape this so that I can persist in this thing that I need to be who I am. I need to reshape it, but I am not going to let it go.” That is hard to do. It takes tremendous strength, courage, time, and mental energy.
Persistence, especially if you want to make a career in publishing, is so key. It is hard because I had people telling me that when I was like, “How do I do this? How do I write full-time? How do I make this happen? How do I get agents to notice me?” They are like, “Keep doing it. Keep writing.” I am like, “That is not what I want to hear. I want it now.” It is important to hear because if I had given up any spot along the way, then I want to get to share my stories with so many people. That is important to me.
Thank you. It is time for me to go buy some of your stories and read some more. I will go with the fantasy because sports romances are not my favorite, but you have a lot to choose from. What is the book that you would like to share with people and where is the best place for people to find you?
I am super excited about my fantasy duology because the second book comes out in July 2022. The first book is These Hollow Vows. It does end on a cliffhanger, so I am excited to get These Twisted Bonds, which is the conclusion, into readers’ hands. You can find me anywhere. You can find me at LexiRyan.com. You can find all your good links there.
If you happen to be a fan, you can find a link on how to get a signed copy of These Twisted Bonds from my website. I have a little plug. I have some cool maps going out with those pre-orders. My brother drew the map for the series. He is an artist and he is incredibly talented. He drew the map for the series and it is inside the book, but I made some map prints of it that he is signing to give away at the pre-orders.
There is something magical about maps. It is maybe me because I like to travel and imagine other lands and worlds. Thank you so much for sharing and for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you, everybody, for reading and sharing the conversation with us. Hugs and happy authoring.
Important Links
- These Hollow Vows Series
- A Knight in Shining Armor
- Text Appeal
- Fifty Shades of Grey
- Jess Michaels
- Write Better-Faster
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
- These Hollow Vows
- These Twisted Bonds
- LexiRyan.com
About Lexi Ryan
Award-winning author Lexi Ryan is a New York Times and USA Today bestseller of hot contemporary romance and sexy, action-packed YA fantasy. Her novels have sold over a million copies and been translated into many languages. She is happiest when at home in Indiana with her husband and two children, where you can find her reading copiously, hanging out with her family, and thanking her lucky stars. Her next fantasy novel, THESE TWISTED BONDS (book two of the These Hollow Vows duology) releases in July.
