Writing can be a joyous experience until all the pressures on what to write come crashing down on you. Sometimes, trying to write what your agent wants takes away all the spark and passion you have for writing. Today’s guest, Sierra Simone, is all too familiar with this feeling. What snapped her back was simple advice: WRITE FOR YOU. This led her to write a Jane Eyre fan fiction turned Gothic Victorian erotica, where she discovered taboo and erotic romance. Sierra is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling former librarian. Her notable works include Priest, American Queen, and Misadventures of a Curvy Girl. In this episode, she joins Ella Barnard to talk about her journey to making her own path in writing taboo topics. She also dives deep into writing good sex scenes, the benefits of self-publishing versus traditional publishing, and how self-knowledge helps your career.
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Write For You: Following Your Own Path Writing Taboo And Erotic Romance With Sierra Simone
We are here with Sierra Simone. She is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-selling former librarian who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk. Her notable works include Priest, American Queen, and Misadventures of a Curvy Girl. Her books have been featured in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Weekly and Buzzfeed. She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City. Thank you so much for being here, Sierra.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk. I’m like, “If someone wants to talk shop with me, yes, please.” I want to talk about all the business things.
I have a list of business things. Let’s jump right in. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your author’s journey, please.
I write typically taboo and erotic romance, some historical, some fringing a little bit on speculative, but mostly contemporary. It’s mostly in that taboo and forbidden genre. I did not start out as a romance writer on my journey. I initially started out as a traditionally published YA author with a New York publisher who had a great debut novel story. I found an agent and a publisher quickly. It was the Friday that I dropped my contract in the mail for my agent, that next Monday, we had an offer from a publisher. It all happened fast. It was great. This is supposed to be the beginning of my author’s Cinderella story, but it wasn’t.
A lot of factors played into that. It was 2013. My publisher at the time had merged with Random House. There was a big publisher merger, big publishing politics that you can’t control, and big budgetary changes to marketing. Looking back, the number one factor in why my Cinderella story turned into not a fairy tale was that I didn’t know how to advocate for myself, partially because I was 24. What 24-year-old among us is good at that yet? Also, I didn’t have a strong sense of myself as a storyteller, writer, and books that I wanted to write. The book that I wrote was very me and came from an honest and intuitive place.
When asked to partner with the publisher to market that or message that, to describe myself as a storyteller and then pitch future books that I wanted to write, it was hard for me because I didn’t have an anchored sense of why the things that I wrote. The publishing process ended up being a real ice bath for me, like a big shock. I found myself falling out of love with writing, which is not something that I ever thought could happen because I’m one of those people who knew that they wanted to write books for years since I was in high school.
I found myself in a place where writing had lost that spark for me. I lost that magic. One of my critique partners said, “What you should do is you should write something just for you without this cloud of what your agent wants or what your publisher wants over it, without this idea that these gatekeepers will reject it. Write it for you. Write it for me, your critique partner, and I’ll love to read it.” I was like, “Okay.” I started writing these snippets of essentially Jane Eyre fan fiction.
I’m a huge Jane Eyre fan. I’m not a likely fan fiction candidate. Most people are writing like Stuckey or whatnot. Railo didn’t exist back then. This is still back in the Stuckey days. I was writing this Jane Eyre fan fiction and some friends of mine loved it. They were like, “You need to turn this into an original story.” I did. That ended up being my first year Simone series, the Markham Hall series, which is like a Gothic Victorian erotica. At the time, as now, the masses are not exactly clamoring for Victorian Gothic erotica. I know you’re shaking your head.
I’m like, “I don’t know why. Mr. Rochester, damn.”
Context makes things hotter.
Give me as many Mr. Rochester knockoffs as you can write.
Dark, smoldering, tortured. Come on. We love that.
A little bit dangerous. That was how I wrote the first year some of the stories. At the time, I was still navigating this traditional career. I was like, “I’m going to self-publish these because I don’t think there’s any way that anyone wants this.” It’s not what my agent represents. It’s so far away from the young adult brand that I’ve been building. I’m going to make a name and put it out there and then it’s doing something and then this name will be like a repository for my ID. This name will be where I go to refill the well. I made myself a promise. I was like, “You cannot make this name if you aren’t going to use it the way it should be used.”
I decided that if I was going to make the Sierra Simone name, I was never going to use it to write a book, I didn’t want to write, that it wasn’t going to turn into another name that needed to be fed, like this other brand that needed to be fed, that it was only going to be a place for me to work with the things that I wanted to work on. That was me accidentally creating this brand. I stumbled into this idea that Sierra Simone was only going to create works that compelled me and drew me in. I ended up organically creating this brand where I only engaged with the things that were interesting to me. The strongest brands often end up being organic in that way when you’re like, “I’m always going to write about things like religion and powerful cathartic emotions and the sacred paradigms of sex.
Those are things that I’m, as a human, interested in and that I like to read about. Having a brand organically be whatever I’m interested in ends up building a series of a backlist that consistently engages in these themes. That’s how I ended up becoming Sierra. I always tell people like, “I didn’t think Sierra was going to be my main writing job. I didn’t put much work into making that name.” It’s literally my middle name and the street I grew up on.
They sound good together.
I was like, “This is fine.” That’s how Sierra came to be. Here I am several years later and it’s my life. It’s my vocation.
What happened to the young adult books?
I wrote two books for the publisher and I had originally sold three. It was the year after Priest came out. That was the year that, ostensibly, this third book should have come out and they canceled my contract and rejected the book. It was one of those situations where there wasn’t going to be going back and offering them a different book because we had already done that. We had already tried to offer them so many different kinds of books that I could use to fill that slot in the contract. My agent was not interested in any of the ideas that I had pitched her. They weren’t big enough for her. She’s a fantastic agent. She has fantastic tastes in books. She likes that high concept story that you can immediately see as a movie kind of story.
I am fundamentally not that writer. That was something that I had to learn, too, is that it’s okay not to have an idea that’s going to be the next Hunger Games or next Red Queen. There’s room for all kinds of books. What’s great about indie is that you don’t have to prove that there’s room for your book to someone else before you start going out and finding those readers. With indie, you can gather that proof yourself and say, “Here’s my wackadoodle book that a publisher might not know what to do with, but I can market in a targeted way. I can market in a scalpel way to find the right readers.”
I have a number of questions. You already answered some of the questions that I had written down before. You already touched on them, which I was like, “We’re vibing.” I hadn’t read your books, but I was like, “I have to. I’m interviewing her.” I read Priest. I enjoyed it a lot. I’ll tell you the part that I enjoyed. I was raised a Mormon, which is not Catholic, but it’s a conservative religion. I could tell there were some things that I had no idea about. I’m like, “These are references that if I was Catholic, I’d be like, ‘Yeah.,’” and I don’t, but one thing that’s similar in some ways is that it knows two religions. The idea about how sex is dirty versus sacred, which you talked about, is one of the things I wanted to ask you about because I had two questions related to that, specifically that sacred sex.
The first one is writing those scenes. I write short romances. Sex scenes are for me to write. I’ve looked up how different people, like, “Why do you it?” Someone’s like, “There’s a YouTube video that was good about it.” You could do all the emotions. You could do all physical or you can do feelings and physical. When I try, it ends up being all physical. The emotions are how good it felt when it tingled through her body. The emotions are not like, “I love him,” or whatever. Can you talk to me about writing the way that you’re writing the sex scenes? I’ve only read the one once. I don’t know if all of them were like that, but it was good. Can you talk a little bit about that? I have more questions.
This is interesting because this is a question that I occasionally get asked and then I feel like my answer is different every time because I feel like it’s something that each book brings a different challenge to the table in terms of writing sex. The different points at which I’ve been asked this question, I’m usually evolving a different part of my feelings about it because of the book. For me, because I write erotic romance, there are a lot of gray areas between what we would call maybe spicy adult romance and erotic romance, a huge amount of overlap. These are general categorizations. The idea is that with a high-heat contemporary romance or any romance, you could potentially skip a sex scene and not miss anything crucial in terms of character and plot development.
The sex is important, but it’s not foundational. I6n erotic romance, the sex is foundational. I’ve heard this defined a couple of different ways. In one way, it’s foundational to the plot. I listened to a podcast a few years ago and the host of that podcast said that she had heard the definition that erotic romance, the sex is foundational to the character and the character’s growth. It might not sound like a huge distinction, like foundational to plot versus foundational to character, but it’s enough of a shift that it helps me get a lens into something that I was already doing accidentally.
I get it now. I’m like, “I know how I would do that,” from what you said. I know how I could put that in if it wasn’t just sex for sex’s sake. Monitoring my strengths is the emotions, but I had never tried to put the growth into a sex scene. I could see it reading it because it’s fresh in my memory that it’s pivotal. The sex scenes are pivotal to the character and to the plot.
The other thing I would say is this is like more of the craft too, but I had seen a panel years ago, 2014 maybe. Christina and Lauren were both on the panel and they were talking about how, when they start to write a sex scene, they always start with the setting. They say, “This is on a swing set or a hammock.” They start there and figure out like, “If I’m promising you, for example, like a scene in a shower. What’s in a shower that I can make use of? What can happen in this setting that can’t happen in any other settings?” Priest is a book that famously I use things that are available in a church but are available at home. Even if it’s something as innocuous as in a kitchen, we’ve got a kitchen counter, we’ve got a big bay window that overlooks a yard and maybe a neighbor could look in and see us. You have things in each setting that are specific to it that afford you opportunities that no other setting can. That usually is enough of a prompt to get me going.
Sex isn’t sexy on its own.
That’s the other thing. I write short romances. I’ve been co-writing them. We’ve taken a little bit of a break, but co-writing short romances. It’s like a lot of redoing the same thing. It’s interesting because I do want to talk about writing what you love because that’s why we paused. It’s because the short romances are rarely regurgitating. You were making money, but it’s not fun anymore. I want to touch on that later.
We’ve written a lot of sex scenes trying to get creative every time because each book has a sex scene and we’re releasing one every week or two. In each book, it’s a lot. You’re like, “How do I make this new?” Because you’re writing them every week and you’re still you, you’re like, “Am I using the same language that I used last time when I wrote this sex scene?”
I feel this a lot. For authors who write high heats, first, I recommend you read a lot of high heat. What I started doing several years ago was every time I came across a sex word or sex description that I loved, I wrote it down in my notes app. Over time, I’ve built this pretty robust thesaurus. It ranges from an actual thesaurus structure where it’s like, “Stab, thrust, pound, jam.” Also, it has phrases that I like. If I write down a phrase, I will be like, “This is from this book. It’s a direct quote. I know not to use it.”
Usually, it sparks something inside me, like, “How would I describe that feeling? I’ve never seen someone talk about their lips tingling after a good feeling. I want to make sure I tag that in my next scene too.” Having that as the source, especially if you feel like, “I’ve written this body part word seven times on a page.”
Quick aside, there are many words to describe men’s body parts and few to describe women’s body parts. I want to start adding words. I’m not sure exactly. It would be great if we had more.
What I thought about it is that we’re limited by the words we have. On the spectrum of being purely anatomical to extremely flowery, like our grandmother’s red, there’s a wide spectrum. Readers, I would tell any author, never watch TikTok videos or read posts about words that readers don’t like because they’ll get in your head. I had seen a TikTok trend. I hate when they use this word for the boy part. I was like, “That’s one of the main words.” You see everyone in the comments. They’re like, “I hate the other word for this male part.” Other people are like, “I hate euphemisms.” They’re like, “I hate the technical term.” No one likes any words is the moral of the story.
Do what do the best you can. I want to move on from that. I was curious and you gave me a great answer. Thank you. I have a number of questions about Priest. Some are marketing, some are not. Was Priest the first book that took off under your Sierra Simone name?
Yes, for sure. The first series I had written was that historical Victorian erotica. Priest was my first book after that. It hit the USA Today bestseller list. This was back in 2015. It was a little bit of a different world.
I know why I enjoyed it, but what feedback have you gotten? Why do you think people liked it so much? It is taboo and I still like it so much because it is a little taboo. I would say in terms of steamy, spicy, it’s spicy, but the sex scenes, because it’s taboo because it’s a priest. Not necessarily because you’re describing at least in this one particular book, sorry for all the other books that you’ve read. It’s not because you’re describing the physical parts like I would. It’s because of the context with the setting and the characters and stuff that makes it hotter than it would be otherwise. As I was reading, I’m like, “This is hot,” but I’ve read books that were more descriptive of the actual physical things in some way. You softened it with the emotions and the sacred part in terms of the taboo. Do you think that’s why people liked it? That’s my question. Why do you think people liked it?
That’s a huge part of it. You said context makes things hotter. Whenever I teach writing erotic romance classes, one of the things that I’ll say is, “Sex isn’t sexy on its own. You have to make the sex sexy.” There are a ton of different ways you can do that. You can do that by evoking the senses to immerse a reader fully in it. You can do that by making huge emotional stakes for the characters. You can do that with the context of maybe it’s forbidden. That’s a big part of it. Truly, I would say of the letters I get about Priest, they are probably 60/40, 70/30 split between people who are religious or have grown up in a religious context. I’ve found something resonant in the idea of sex being holy and sex not being profane.
The other are people who have pushed themselves away from a religious context. I get messages from people from all sorts of religious contexts, not just Catholics. I do think that Christianity, in particular, has this response from adults who’ve pushed themselves away from that childhood because it was not working for them. I don’t even know what the right word would be permission or an invitation in a new way of looking at religion.
I was not interested in going to church or prayer until I read your book. It made me realize that I don’t have to give up parts of myself in order to go back to church or I don’t have to accept what these authorities inside this hierarchy say that my faith has to be. I get to reinvent or interpret my faith the way that I need to, which is what that whole Priest series is about.
At the end of the day, it’s like different ways to lead a holy life. For me, holy means whole as well. We are whole people. You can’t take us into a laboratory and splice apart our spirit and our body. Our spirit doesn’t just live inside our bodies. It is our body to some extent. We worship physically. We experience the world physically. Why wouldn’t our physical sex be part of how we experienced the holy? That’s how that series explores it. I do think that’s been a lot of the response.
You had the third one because I looked it up. Priest and then you come back. This is why I keep mentioning it because I know Priest was a long time ago when you wrote it, but you said at the beginning that sacred sex is one of the topics that keeps showing up. It’s something that you know is part of your brand. I haven’t read the other books yet, but I appreciate what you’re saying. I grew up Mormon, which is conservative. I am not anymore, but I don’t judge anybody. Everybody has their own path to whatever. Mine doesn’t include that religion or any religion, but some people do and I don’t care.
I’m identifying with you a little bit on this. When I left the Mormon church, I went in and I started reading all different kinds of books. I was like, “If I don’t believe that, what do I believe now?” One of them was The Feminine Face of God, which is the old book now. It’s something that it was a bunch of stories of people who have religion who are able to bring in their faith. It’s amazing how your passion for this topic in this taboo story, this taboo erotica romance is something that could shift, but I like that. It’s powerful. That’s why romance can be so powerful. Whether it’s erotic or not, it’s about love. I love that it’s about love.
Whatever you put into it, it’s like different people being able to be like, “Oh.” Talking about that, writing what you’re enjoying and writing. You created Sierra Simone to write what you wanted to write. Now you realize you’ve found that with that was a brand. What was that process like as you’re writing it and you’re like, “Oh?” You don’t know what your voice is or your brand is when you’re starting sometimes. You can try to be like, “I think this is it,” but then you realize, “Later.”
Romance can be so powerful because, whether it’s erotic or not, it’s about love.
We talk about branding. It’s so much easier to talk about branding after you’ve written a few books. This is people applying fantastic advice with the best of intentions. Sometimes people start out with a new name or a new venture and they say, “I want to write. I’m looking at the top 100. There are all these small-town cowboy romances. I’m going to write those.” They sit down and they set out to write these small-town cowboy romances. The brand is predictive, set in an advanced type of thing like this roadmap you’re going to follow.
It doesn’t have a lot of you in it necessarily.
It does work out for some people, but I think it works the best for those who’ve been around the block a few times and who know themselves. Either the brand they’ve already they’ve picked is something they do genuinely love to read and write and can do a lot of, or they have the personality and creative skills where they can write to order. Those books can be just as good as any other books. That’s not me knocking writing order. If you can do it, do it. It’s an amazing skill. It’s not something that I have.
It took me a while to learn to be okay with that because I knew so many people who could sit down and write seven of the same things and not feel stifled or feel like their tank was empty. I formed a little bit differently. For me, the method of writing a few books and then identifying what my brand was what had arisen organically was good because my books, like my first few years of Sierra, those books have nothing in common on the face of it. Markham Hall, the pre-series, and the New Camelot are like a Manasseh retelling of King Arthur going to be in Lancelot’s story.
You’re not like, “This is a sci-fi romance.” You’re like, “This is historical. This is fantasy. This one’s a little taboo religious.” They’re not, on the surface, consistent branding, but tell us more about how they are.
Looking back, though, it was around the time that I had released Sinner. New Camelot was done and then I released the second book in the pre-series. I was looking back and I was like, “I don’t know what my brand is.” All of my friends had these easily identifiable brands, like teens in small-town Texas or billionaires or something that a brand that was also a category on Amazon.
To have a brand, you probably can’t see them. I have notes on my desk and bookshelves here. These are all things that I’ve needed to learn that once I learned them, I write them down and stick them up, so I don’t forget. Having your brand be something like lyrical high heat stories with compelling characters is not a brand on Amazon. It’s the brand that you have to build over time, guaranteeing that each of my books has a promise of emotion and high heat and also a promise of something forbidden. It might not be taboo in the sense of like I’m a serial killer and I have fallen in love with my psychiatrist, but it’s going to have something that is flirting with the liminal edge of what love and sex should be and how they should behave.
After I published Sinner, I was like, “I have to start getting a little bit more intentional about the things that I’ve been doing accidentally that have been organic.” The good news was that all of my backlists at that point was consistent with the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. There were queer characters and complex women characters in that atmosphere and setting that played a big part in all of the stories. It allowed me to make decisions going forward about what covers and blurbs continue to promise the experience you’ll get once you’re inside the book.
That is how I start out to this day. Any decision about covers and blurbs is how do I make a promise about what the reader is going to find inside the. When they look for the cover of A Lesson in Thorns, for example, they can immediately get a sense of the atmosphere of the book and the feeling that the book is going to leave them with because what all of my books are about is a feeling.
I want to point out that it takes more time to generally speak, especially these days because you were publishing in 2015, which is slightly easier. These days, it’s going to take maybe even more time to make money. Not necessarily to publish, but the money is a lot easier to make when you were writing. I like to call it the sweet spot, which is where you can find what people want to read and what you love to write.
If you can find that and be consistent on that for a while, then I like to tell people, “Start with something that you can do for a while and then you have others that you love enough to do for a while. If you have other interests, once you’ve made the money, it’s a lot easier to then be like, ‘Okay.’ Once you have a presence, once you have to be like, ‘Now I’m going to go write the Jane Eyre book.’” I appreciate that because when I talk to the authors, me and my co-writer, we’re going to do all of our books co-written because we complement each other, but we’re going through that right now, like, “What do we really like? What is fun for us to write?”
I’m hoping it’s leaning on this a lot. I talked to somebody. She’s been publishing traditional Harlequin for decades, maybe, for a long time. She might be one of those people who could write whatever to whatever. I’m like, “What is it that you enjoy?” If you’re going to start writing indie, what is it that you love writing? If you can find the readers, you can write what you love.” She’s like, “I saw that this was big a couple of months ago.” I’m like, “Yeah, but you can make a good living not writing what’s big if you love it.” Are you a little woo-woo?” You seem a little woo-woo.
A little bit.
Being able to write your passion and how that shows up in your writing and your financial results may be, is there some correlation that you’ve seen or know? What do you think?
Yes and no. I feel like this is one of those conversations where I fundamentally believe that indie provides you the way to connect with readers who need your book and your book in particular. Traditional publishing is a giant apparatus and it’s great. It’s got a huge reach if you want to be in libraries, bookstores, and schools. I’m not in schools, obviously, but if you’re writing, you have a dollar or something. If you want pervasiveness, traditional publishing is great, but the reason their apparatus is so efficient is because they are able to slot things in certain kinds of categories and market almost like a shotgun blast.
It’s wide and a little bit clumsy. You paint different books with the same brush for efficiency’s sake. Indie, you can market with a scalpel. You can be extremely specific about how you promise what’s inside your book. That apparatus affords you the potential to connect with readers who are looking for exactly what you write. Instead of finding more readers, it’s the best way to build a career long-term. That might look different for other people. I don’t want someone reading this to be like, “I’ve read the book of my heart. I still have to work at my day job. Am I not doing the secret hard enough or something like that?”
Measure success by how long we’re here instead of how much money we make each year.
I would say that if we could measure success by how long we’re here instead of how much money we make each year, I think it’s a much better indicator of success because authors who are here in 5 years, in 10 years, in 15 years, they’re here for a reason. It’s because they found their readership. Any of us could name an author who probably made $1 million in 2012 who’s not writing books anymore. They’re not making millions of dollars year after year. They made $1 million 1 year or 2 years, and then they fell off the map.
Everyone wants $1 million. This isn’t like an either-or question, but if you gave me a choice between being a flash in the pan and consistently earning enough money that I get to do this as a full-time job, even if it’s not like pack up your bags, we’re moving to the South of France money, I would choose consistently being here, making a living over two years, making seven figures.
That’s more sustainable and I didn’t burn myself out or lose my joy in this job in the process. I still got to keep everything in terms of my creative joy, my spark and my inspiration. I wrote books that I am proud of and that I love and that have stood the test of time. I still get to be here. I choose that over chasing something and maybe getting it, but then I’m burned out, or I put all of my eggs in one basket and that basket catches on fire.
Thank you. I feel this sense of ease and relief. I do want to clarify that when I’m talking about loving what you write, I’m not talking about like $1 million financial results. I’m talking about living on financial results. It’s easier because it is going to take time. I have a course helping others. When they pitch it, I’m like, “I’m sorry, it’s not sexy for me to say this, but it’s going to take time. I know that you might not buy my course because I’m not promising that it’s going to work instantly, but it’s going to take time. Since it’s going to take time, you should be doing something that you love.”
It’s like you’re speaking my thoughts back to me. One of the things I love about indie publishing is that if you can find the people who love your books, you can make a living off of it, which has opened up the queer books. There are so many books out there now that would never have been there if they’d had to go through traditional publishers. People can find whatever romance they want. You can go find it. You can find it with whoever’s in that romance you want and have people you identify with and read their love stories. If you can’t find it, you can write it and you’ll find somebody else who wants that too. That’s the part that everybody wants to know. How do you get that scalpel? How do you find those readers who love what you love?
I know this is a boring intro to this, but I think that the most important part about this marketing is your mindset shift. I invite authors. The point is to find your readers, not more readers. You need to stop identifying success as, “However many books I sold with my last book, plus one more for this release.” This idea is that each release needs to find more and more readers. Once you have this your readers, not more readers mindset, I think it allows you to make choices about, for example, newsletter swaps. This is a tool that I’ve used for years. It’s a great tool where a group of authors will get together and they’re going to offer free books of theirs that then everyone in the swap promotes. To claim that book, readers will need to sign up through like, BookFunnel usually for that author’s email list.
They work. Everyone loves a free book. Most of the time, people are more than happy to be like, “I’ll sign up for this newsletter for a while. I’ll see if I like it. I’ll unsubscribe if that doesn’t work for me.” To choose that kind of cross promo with people who are your cops, rather than people you think are going to net you a lot of subscribers.
For example, if I was in a newsletter swap with some heavy heading inspirational romance authors, then I would probably not expect that newsletter growth to be what I wanted. I would also not expect people to read my book or get to the end of it and be like, “I want to read more, 1 or 2 of them might.” You could make a case for Priest as an inspirational romance, but for the most part, that is not the audience who’s going to be ready for it.
You could make a case for it, but by clicking through somebody, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Cross promo with people who are in your comps. I also think that the point isn’t to lure people to your book who aren’t going to want to read the rest of your books. The point isn’t to get a reader for one book. The point is to get a reader for life. Doing Facebook ads is super alchemical because copywriting and marketing writing is about coaxing people to come to try out your product, but you want to do it in a way where you’re promising what your book is so that someone who prefers gentle cinnamon roll heroes doesn’t pick up a book with this kinky alpha billionaire, and feel turned off or misled by any kind of advertising.
You want your Facebook copy and your ad copy to promise something that a lot of people are going to want to read, but you don’t ever want to be disingenuous about that kind of experience. Your images and your copies should be pretty clear about the vibe the book is going to have. This is high heat, or this is a little bit gentler. This is a little bit more about family and found family. That kind of dynamic you want to be clear about. My main marketing tools are my newsletter, where I feel like I have the room like more room than I do in an Instagram caption to talk about the nuance and context of my books because I don’t write a ton of them each year. I’m a two-book-a-year person.
The last few years have been one book year. I take a long time writing them. It takes me five months or more to write a book. I have a lot I want to talk about. A newsletter affords me that room and reminds them of the brand. The brand is playful, but it is taboo. It is sexy, but it is nuanced with complex characters. I liked newsletters for that reason. I mainly use my Facebook page and my Instagram as indexing tools to index what events I have going on. I don’t concern myself too much with being almost like an influencer on Instagram or TikTok. Some authors do it amazingly. They do it well because I think it repletes them.
They get something out of that. If you do too, do it. If you feel like you’re swimming uphill with posting a picture of you looking gorgeous every single day in a swimsuit, then don’t worry about it because I think that it’s less necessary than something like a newsletter. Word of mouth is the strongest marketing tool for finding readers who are going to like what you do. Any way that you can facilitate word of mouth is great.
I have a number of questions, but this is related. I have two more topics that I want to touch on before we end. I went to your Amazon page. At the top of the Amazon page, they have them in order of popularity. I can tell which one’s selling the most right now because it’s first. It’s still your number one. It’s the one that I was like, “Sierra Simone. Priest. How is it with newsletter swaps and things? If you’re only releasing 1 or 2 books a year, how are you keeping a book that’s several years old hot? Not hot in terms of the writing, but hot in terms of it’s always hot. Is it part of newsletter swaps? Is it with word of mouth? Is there something you’re doing or is it just taking a life of its own? What’s going on?
When Priest came out, it was a USA Today bestseller and it sold pretty well in its first year. Everyone was like, “Write the next Priest book.” I was like, “I cannot, because the Priest books I write from a real intimate place inside of myself. I never wanted to use the Catholic church, which I grew up in, as a crutch or for shock value, or even as like a trope, so to speak. I didn’t want to flatten what the church is to me into that.” I only write another Priest book when I’m genuinely asking myself a new question about what it means to live a holy life.
I don’t ride them until I’m ready to explore something different. I was like, “I can’t like. It’s not in the cards until I’m ready to write this next story.” I wrote American Queen. The New Camelot series, for years, was my big tent pole. Priest is popular and buzzy, but it faded from mind. I had the sense that like, “If anyone’s going to be like, ‘What is Sierra Simone known for?’ It’s going to be this trilogy.”
Not all time has to be productive in the sense that we have something to show for it.
It was for a while.
This little app called TikTok, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, came around. BookTok found Priest in 2021. With Priest, I have done no paid ads. I have never made a TikTok video about it. I have done the standard backlist. BookBub’s featured again in my newsletter. I don’t typically use it for swaps anymore because I feel like it’s public property. I usually use Sinner for swaps or American Queen. It is truly only word of mouth that sells that book. My sales quadrupled in 2021 because of TikTok and it’s nothing that I did. Here’s what I will say about TikTok. The authors who are on there doing a great job are 1,000% people to study from and to look at if you also are excited about being on TikTok.
If the idea of being on TikTok sounds fun to you, then do it. That’s how I approach all marketing. Writing newsletters is fun for me. I do it because I get something out of it. Being on Instagram and full makeup all the time, not fun for me. It’s not something that I do. It takes me an hour to get an idea out of my mouth. TikTok is not the right platform for me. I don’t have enough time. When TikTok sings, when it’s powerful, it’s readers talking to each other about your book.
Colleen Hoover has an amazing TikTok account, but the huge amount of her sales have not been because of her videos. It’s because of readers talking to each other about her books and what they mean to them. If I were going to put time and energy into doing something for TikTok like I did with Saint, it was putting together blogger and influencer boxes for the book around release and then sending them to a list of TikTok influencers and bookstagrammers rather than making my own series on Instagram or TikTok. Get them to talk to each other about it.
I call that the marketing sweet spot, which is where you would love to do. It’s the same thing I call it. There’s probably going to be a course called The Marketing Sweet Spot for me because there are many different ways of interacting with potential readers. Find the one that feels good to you. Although I will say newsletter, find a way to make newsletter feel good to you. You’re a writer. Allow yourself to write to your audience. Find a way to make that one word, but all the other ones, find what works. Thank you. You’re a mini tip. You’re knowledgeable. I love it. I was like, “This is what I would do for TikTok if you don’t want to do it yourself.”
We’ve had so many topics that I want to talk about. I’m like, “This was one of the first things I wrote down.” You’re talking about advocating for yourself and having a sense of why I wrote what I wrote. You were saying in the context of when you were younger and you didn’t have those things, what has changed? I’m curious about why you write what you write. For me, they’re related a little bit, but can you talk more about those two things now?
This is not for everyone. For me, I seem to have a well of stories. Some people will call them like a core story or a family of themes. I definitely have this well of a handful of things that have been preoccupations for me since I was a young person and have only evolved. Probably everything I write, you’ll always be able to distill into these 4 or 5 different kinds of themes. One of my favorite authors is an author named Holly Black. All of her books are completely different. There are vampires, haunted dolls, fairies, and con men. They’re all different books, but when you pick it up and get inside the pages, you immediately know it’s a Holly Black book.
She is interested in things that do not change, but she’s finding a new angle into those things with every different story. Every different story is an interrogation of that theme but from a different perspective. I am also wired that way. That is something I’ve known about myself for a long time that I struggled to write to order or to put it another way. We’ve all heard of writing IP, Intellectual Property. There are a lot of writers who it might be something like ghostwriting, or it might be something like I write Star Wars novels, or I write a novel for the DC universe where it is the DC universe’s intellectual property that I am writing with. I’m using their characters. Therefore, I have to be consistent in certain ways with their universe and their laws.
I sometimes joke that there are some authors who are good at writing their own IP. They’re already starting out with like, “This is a James Patterson book.” It’s going to have all the things that you associate with the James Patterson brand in it. When I start out writing, I already knew what this James Patterson book was going to be like. I can’t do that. I can’t be like, “This is going to be a Sierra Simone book that’s going to have all these checkboxes that I’m going to tick as I’m writing it through.” I have a friend who describes it this way. It’s like we have to build a new boat to get to the same place every time using all the boats we’ve already built.
What I had had to accept in that transition into being indie was not accepted, but I see that that was an opportunity as well as a limitation. This is the way that I’m wired. I need to write this way because this is what I get out of writing. I need to see that as an opportunity. With every Sierra Simone book, it’s better not to know what it’s about until you go in. With every Sierra Simone book, it’s going to take you on a ride and you’re going to be changed on the other side. Turning that into part of the brand is like an A24 movie where you’re like, “I don’t know. It’s going to be weird, but it’s definitely going to be interesting.”
Now you advocate for yourself in terms of, and it’s not even necessarily an outward advocating. It’s like advocating for self to yourself. You’re like, “This is how I work. I’m going to advocate for how I work to myself against whatever expectations that I think I should be.”
Especially in indie romance where the best way to succeed is to write the same thing consistently and to write four times a year. We all have wonderful friends that we can look at who are doing that model and it’s working so well. Sometimes it feels frustrating to be like, “Why can’t I fill in the blank? Write four books a year. Why can’t I write the same book every year?” That internal advocating is important to say we have a different model.
The model is that we’re going to write an experience that people, four years from now, can still recommend to each other. It’s going to be a different experience with the things that they have to give their friends, like, “I have to get this book for you. You got to read this book. We can’t be friends if you don’t read this book.” Writing that book allows you a different kind of career where maybe you can have a book a year and still make a living doing it. It takes a lot of patience.
It’s hard sometimes. To find that balance between who you are and how you work because we’re each unique. That’s why I can ask the same questions in every interview if I want. We’re talking about brand new topics every time. I’m talking about the same thing, but it’s valuable for every person because every person is unique. Your approach will be different from mine or any other person I’ve interviewed. The person reading might take one thing from your interview and then one thing from somebody else’s interview and make that into their own approach.
That’s one thing I find a bit frustrating from the coaching side and looking at the other people that I help or that are helping authors. They make it sound like one size fits all and it isn’t. They make a lot of money doing that. Here I am trying to be like, “It isn’t one size fits all and I’m not making a lot of money doing this, but I know how many of my customers are still writing years later. I can guess how many of theirs are, and it’s not.”
I’m so glad you said that because one of the most important things I think for any author at any point in their journey to know is that there is no one size fits all answer. Prescriptive models rarely work for everyone. Prescriptive models typically work best for people who are like the person who prescribed this. We talked about internal advocating and writing from an internal place. It sounds cliché and maybe a little bit out there. Still, I think that self-knowledge, like knowing who you are as a creative person, knowing the kinds of stories you want to tell is foundational to literally everything else, marketing, drafting, publishing schedule, all of that is not going to fall in an aligned pattern until you know yourself. You know how to lean into what you do best. I’m sure you’ve probably talked or heard Becca Symes’ Strengths for Writers classes.
You can always change your name and start over.
I did it a while ago. Every author I’ve interviewed since I did it is like, “Did you?” I’m like, “Yes, I did.” Thank God I did because everybody’s bringing it up.
I swear that I don’t get a commission for talking about this, but what I will say is the operating principle of her class is that if you try to get better at the things that you’re worse at, you’re going to spend a lot of energy, maybe only getting a little bit better, but if you take that energy and you instead lean into the things that you’re already great at, you will find exponential growth. You don’t have to take the class to get that little wisdom nugget. Authors can use embrace that, lean into what they’re already good at and use that to work for you. If you feel like you need to be doing a TikTok video every day and it makes you want to claw your face off, don’t do it because your TikTok videos will not be that enjoyable for people watch anyway, because they’re going to sense your misery.
There’s no guarantee that it’s going to sell your books. Lean into the things that you are good at. If it is writing fast, then write fast, write the next book. Nothing sells back like front list. Have your energy go there. If you love writing newsletters like me because you like ranting at people, then lean into that, do that, and become a newsletter marketer. Identifying what you already love, what you’re already good at, and focusing your efforts is such better advice than every author needs to be on TikTok. Every author needs to have an Instagram reel every day.
I’m revising my whole course. It had that, but I’m centering it because, in the last couple of years, I’m like, “No.” When challenges happen, the thing that gets you through them is when you’re being yourself and loving what you do. It has to be in every part, what genre you are writing, what social media you’re on, and the tropes you’re using. Love it all.
I do think that part of what we have to shift our thinking about around writing and marketing is that it is work like any other work is work. In some respects, that is true. It is a job. The more you treat it like a job, the more it acts like a job for you. I firmly believe that. I used to be a librarian, but shelving books is the same as writing paragraphs is fundamentally untrue because cerebral work, knowledge work takes a different kind of thinking. It’s a lot more intimate and personal than shelving books or answering emails or updating spreadsheets.
We have to give ourselves the grace of saying that work that happens literally inside of me invisibly is allowed to be something that I love doing that is it’s closer to a vocation than almost any other job that we have is, like day jobs or jobs before this. Treating it like a vocation that we are called to it and that it requires parts of us that other jobs might not. Accepting that allows us to get more mileage out of our decisions and choices because it’s not as easy as sitting down for eight hours every day and then at the end of the year, I have eight books and $1 million. It’s not that simple. I wish it were, but it’s not.
I love doing this show, but I can only do a couple of them a day. I can do two interviews a day, max. I did have it at three and then I was like, “No. I’m taking that to two,” because even though I’m just chatting about something that I love, I love these conversations. They do feed me in a way, but also the energy of the intention. It’s a lot. I love it, but I’m going to take care of myself. The work happens afterward when I sit and zone out. That’s also work.
That’s another thing that I think we need to allow ourselves to believe is that not all time has to be productive in the sense that we have something to show for it. This is a Western way of thinking. Particularly, I think an American way of thinking is that we need to always have something to show for our time. Whether that’s words, Instagram posts, whatever. This work is not the work that benefits from constant output.
We need restorative time and we also need input in order to continue to do this job well. Putting boundaries around that and treating it like work too. Stephen King famously said that a good writer writes for four hours a day and reads for four hours a day. Part of your job is to read books. I’m not saying it has to be that model specifically, but the idea of treating all of the thinking time, the recovery time and the input time as work as well, instead of just the time we write words, is important and valuable.
I could talk to you forever. I could talk about these topics. There are topics that I have on my list that we have not talked about, but I don’t have time to talk about them. I’m like, “I didn’t talk about this.”
You’re going to have to have me back.
I will be inviting you back because I’m like, “I didn’t even talk about this.” Your book that’s coming up. I’m so curious about it, too but we will talk about it briefly.
My upcoming book is traditionally published. When I come back, I’d be happy to talk about being a hybrid author and how to balance indie and traditional marketing.
You said when, which means you’ve already agreed. We’ll cover that in the next one. There are lots of have lots of questions there too. What is your best advice for authors right now?
This is the advice I’ve given for years and I’ve done it myself. I know it works. You can always change your name and start over. It sounds flip, but I need it seriously. There is no failure, nadir, or dry spell that prevents you from reinventing yourself and starting over. The beauty of this job is that we can be phoenixes, protean, and we can shift and change exactly how we need to. You have to pick a new pen name, get back on the horse, and start over again. That’s such a powerful gift even now in a world where it feels like things like LinkedIn or something like our past employments haunts us.
The beauty of this job is that we can be phoenixes; we can shift and change in exactly the way that we need to.
This is a real gift where you get to truly reinvent yourself every time you need to or even want to. I had my first career as a traditionally published YA author. For a variety of reasons, it didn’t work out. When I was able to create Sierra from the ground up, I was able to build it. That spoke to me. I was able to build a paradigm that I could not only survive in but thrive in. That is the gift of being able to change your name and start over.
It’s almost like you’ve done it once, but you can do it numerous times and take what you’ve learned and then be like, “Okay.” To me, it feels like I went through a phase when I was growing up. It wasn’t a phase growing up. I would get an apartment. I got an apartment and I’d be like, “This is this apartment.” As I would live there, I’d be like, “This apartment doesn’t have a bathtub. It just has a shower because it’s a studio. My next department has to have a bathtub.” I learned that.
The next one, I’d be like, “This one has a bathtub, but it doesn’t have enough closet space. My next apartment needs a bathtub and closet space.” I’d moved to a new apartment. Each apartment got progressively better because I knew more about what I needed. I’m like, “You can do the same thing with a new pen name.” You’re like, “Now I know with my new pen name, I like Instagram. I do this newsletter. I like the genre.” You use that to launch it new if you need to.
I’m so glad you use that apartment analogy because we must state the same mind in just different bodies. I use this analogy with houses too. My second house is so much better than my first house. In my first house, we have one bathroom. I learned that if you want to stay married to someone, you have two different toilets in the house. Things that you learn over time, and it’s the exact same thing, I think because each iteration, you’re able to bring all the wisdom that you’ve learned and know more about yourself. There’s that self-knowledge again about what you need in order to balance what is a commercial enterprise, but the product originates from you.
That’s one of the things that I say a lot is like most small business owners have a cafe or they sell embroidery supplies on Etsy or something. This is one of the only jobs where you are the sole means of creating the product as well as its storefront. That negotiation is necessary. We are selling our books ultimately. We have to be business people, but being the sole means of production means that you have to protect that means of production a ton. You can’t hire new workers in the factory if they all quit. You have to protect yourself.
Let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Where is the best place for people to find you? We’ll talk about your book in the next episode.
I am old-fashioned. You can find me on my website, TheSierraSimone.com, and then you can sign up for my newsletter right there at the bottom of the website. If you want to read my unhinged ramblings about whatever I’m writing or whatever research I’m doing, that would be there. It’s also where I have books on sale or free books that you can grab. I’m in lots of newsletter swaps. Typically, I have a free book from my friend in the monthly newsletter. It’s a good place to keep up to date.
We’re not going to deep dive into it, but she has a holiday rom-com, which the premise is so fun. I want to talk about it next time. It’s about an adult film star who gets accidentally cast into a wholesome Christmas movie and all the shenanigans that happen. It looks hilarious and fun and I’m like, “Why am I not writing that book?”
You know how sometimes you see movies that you’re like, “If I were an actor, I’d want to be in Mamma Mia!. That’s the movie that I would want to be in.” I’m looking at the premise. It’s called a Merry Little Meet Cute. I’m like, “If I was writing, which I am, that’s the fun story to write.” It looks like it’s super fun to read too. Go check it out. Thank you so much for being here, Sierra.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you, everyone, for reading. Hugs and happy authoring.
Important Links
- Priest
- American Queen
- Misadventures of a Curvy Girl
- Markham Hall
- Hunger Games
- Red Queen
- The Feminine Face of God
- New Camelot
- Sinner
- A Lesson in Thorns
- BookFunnel
- Facebook – Sierra Simone
- Instagram – Sierra Simone
- Amazon – Sierra Simone
- Saint
- TheSierraSimone.com
- Merry Little Meet Cute
About Sierra Simone
Sierra Simone is a USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling former librarian (who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk). Her notable works include Priest, American Queen, and Misadventures of a Curvy Girl, and her books have been featured in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Weekly, and Buzzfeed. She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.
