Many people want to read about midlife romances involving characters who are over 40 having a second chance at romance. Ella Barnard welcomes L.B. Dunbar, the author of over 30 romance novels, including Small-Town World and Rock Star Mayhem. L.B. shared how she was ready to close shop and stop writing when her readers asked her to publish After Care as a novel. You’re never too old to reinvent yourself. Even if you miss the first sign, the universe keeps speaking and nudging you in the direction you should be going. Join the conversation to learn more about shifting genres, writing what feels good, and writing to a more mature audience. Dive in!
—
Listen to the podcast here
Writing Midlife Romances And How To Succeed As An Author With L.B. Dunbar
We are here with L.B. Dunbar. She has an overactive imagination to her benefit. Such creativity has led to over 30 romance novels, including those offering a second chance at love over 40. Her signature works include #SexySilverFoxes collection of mature males and feisty Vixens ready for romance in their prime years. I love everything about this. Thank you so much for coming to the show.
You are welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
You are welcome. I’m wanting to jump into this second chance of love over 40 thing, but people need to know you better. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your author journey?
I’m a mom. I have four children who are now pretty much adults. I was also a teacher when I started writing. I had a full-time job, then I was raising four children who weren’t adults at the time. My first book was published in 2014. Prior to publishing that book, people were trying to dissuade me from publishing indie.
I wasn’t sure that I was going to publish more than one book. I wrote one book and the bug hit me to keep writing and keep going. I published that in 2014 and years later, I have almost 50 books. I was fortunate that in 2019, I was able to leave teaching which was twofold. It wasn’t a great experience anymore where I worked so it was time to move on, and then it was this tough love conversation with my husband where I said, “Why do I need to find another teaching job? I already have this second job.”
I’m trying to make this writing into a career like a second job. In 2019, I was able to go full-time. It was in 2017 that I was ready to quit. Things were not going great and the books were all over the place. I wrote this little newsletter story called After Care, about an older couple who meet in Hawaii. A lot of my readers were like, “We want this to be a novel.” I was like, “Fine. I’m going to go out on a bang. I’m going to write this novel and I’m going to put it out and I’m done. I’m going to close shop and be done.”
After Care came out and it was quite a hit. A lot of people wanted to read about people who were over 40 having a second chance at romance. That is all that I write now. During those early years, I was wandering all over the place. I had new adult, rockstars and MMA, but now I only write characters who are over 40. I don’t do any age gaps. The hero and the heroine are over 40, and 99% of the time, it’s a second chance at love. Somebody got divorced or somebody lost a husband. Maybe somebody who has never experienced the first love, holding out for that perfect person but none of us are. That’s what I write now. My journey has been up and down. They say publishing is a roller coaster and it has been in my experience.
I have so many questions. When you were about to quit in 2017, you are like, “I will write this one thing.” Do you write to your newsletter? Do you have a newsletter for people that it was a hit? Who were the people? How did they find you or do you know?
It was in my newsletter. My newsletter is content-driven. If you follow me, you are going to get some short story, outtake scene or something in my newsletter. I had written the first chapter and I put it in my newsletter. I was like, “What do you think?” It wasn’t cute but it was the meaning of the two characters.
Women take care of other people and forget who they are. You need to find yourself.
Many of my readers get my newsletter but also follow me on social media. I’m super active on Facebook. A lot of people were responding, “We need more of this story.” I wrote three months, basically three installments of it, and then the story took off. It helped that the readers were the ones that were super enthusiastic. It’s because I had been told. I have one book out there that was two years prior, it’s called The Sex Education of M.E. She’s an older woman. She’s lost her husband and she decides she wants to date again. The world is so different dating-wise now than when I did because I’m old.
I had some young readers who said, “I don’t think anybody is going to read this book.” I was like, “I still have the story written.” I put it out there. I did gain more readers but I was still writing all over the place. I wrote that, and then I wrote paranormal. I wrote the Island Of Intrigue. I was still scattered. When I wrote those little scenes in my newsletter, it was the readers who were like, “We want more stories like this.” I was like, “I will see how this book goes. If nobody wants to read off over 40-year-old having sex, I’m not going to keep writing. I could not have foreseen After Care happening the way that it did.
I like the aftercare. There are many different meanings to aftercare in terms of over 40, and various other meanings.
The heroine is a breast cancer survivor, which is the whole reason she’s on her vacation. She’s celebrating the fact that she got the good news that the treatments have worked and she’s in remission. There’s the aftercare that plays on that, but also the main character’s name is Tommy Carrigan and they call him Care for short when they get mad at him. It’s like After she meets Care, how her life changes.
When you were going to write After Care, what inspired you with those characters? I’m curious about that since you’ve been all over the place. Was there an inspiration there?
I don’t know how inspirational it was, but there are two ways I can break this down. One is because of my age. My children were all starting to approach that like the twenty-ish time period. I started feeling awkward writing new adult. I’m writing these characters and then the same way this is my children. I wasn’t comfortable.
The other side of it is that maybe even as a personal journey, life doesn’t end at a certain age. I was in my 40s when I wrote After Care and I was going through this phase myself of like, “Who am I? What do I want to be for the rest of my life?” As I already explained, I was teaching but things were getting pretty bad at the school that I taught at.
I was like, “What am I going to do next? I’m way too young to do nothing.” Now I started considering all my friends who were in these various positions like losing a husband or having divorced. As a teacher, there were many women who were still single in their 40s. Because I have an active imagination, I was like, “Just like when you are young, what if you experience love for the first time when you are 40 or you’ve had some previous bad relationship and now, the love of your life shows up.”
I am feeling this right now on multiple levels because my husband and I are still dear friends. I love him very much but because of life situations, we are splitting up. It’s scary AF for so many reasons. A big one is I am not the same as I was. I am now 41. I’m not 30 or 20-something. On one part, I feel like more of myself than I ever have been. I think that’s a part of letting go of expectations and the way that things are supposed to be that people always told me. I’m finally courageous and experienced enough to not care about that as much.
I’m also still older. I want to find love. I don’t know what it will look like. I can totally relate to all of your teachers and the people that you knew wanting to find some things. I also want to comment on the fact that so much romance is written with all the main characters in there are early to mid-20s or the heroes are in their 30s to 40s, but the women reading it aren’t. They are all in their early to mid-20s. The women reading it are of all ages. If you do the math, there are way more people from 40 to 80 or 35 to 80 than there are from 20 to 35.
Eventually, we are going to talk a little bit about marketing. I do know who my readers are. In doing a general poll, most of my readers are 35 years and older. They are not younger and I have nothing against the new adults. I love it but there is a life experience that is missing in that genre because most of the time, it’s the first job, first love, first time out of the house, and all of those first experiences.
What I hope I capture is that now somebody who is 15 to 20 years past that time period, you bring to the table completely different experiences. It’s interesting what you said about feeling more yourself as you are older. That’s part of everything I write. It’s also partially what I went through too. I have been married for 27 years and I have four children. All women, no matter what, do lose themselves a little bit because, for the most part, women are caregivers. We take care of other people and then we forget who we are. That’s a huge theme in almost every book that I write now. It’s finding yourself.
Finding yourself and allowing the self that you always knew was there, but being able to prioritize it in a way because your kids are grown up. You are older and you are like, “I don’t care as much.” I have co-written a couple of books under a different pen name that nobody knows. I haven’t said this to anybody except for my co-writer.
Paranormal Women’s Fiction has come out in the last couple of years. It’s the same deal as what you are doing except for they are not all romance and there’s more magic. It’s not contemporary, but it is still that same concept of the women who are 40 and older and having an adventure. There’s a huge audience of women out there who would like to see themselves in what they are reading.
That doesn’t mean they won’t read anything else. I still love to read Sarah Moss, but I don’t mind also reading about somebody that’s like me and being able to put myself. I have other questions for you. I don’t go too far down that road. I don’t want to cry in this interview. I do have a question for you because we are talking a little bit about age and things. I will segue this.
Part of what happens to a lot of women at my age to your age is in that transition, were like, “What do I want to do? How do I want to show up in this world?” Maybe it’s because you have experience and you have maybe financial means that you didn’t have when you were in your early-twenties. What was it like and what inspired you to start writing older? There are a lot of women out there that have this idea that we didn’t know from the get-go or we didn’t know. It’s like, “I have always wanted to be a writer and then I started at twenty. Maybe it’s too late.” Some of us feel that way.
You’re never too old to reinvent yourself.
I have all the answers for this. I had my first child when I was 25 years old and I was a stay-at-home mom and it was great. That was the choice that my husband and I made. That’s what we wanted for our family, so I stayed home. When I was 35 years old and my youngest was getting closer to being the age of going to school, I went back to college.
I was 35 years old and went back to college. I got my Master’s in teaching and that’s when I became a teacher. It wasn’t like I graduated from college. I was a teacher at 35 years old. Now I don’t even know how old I was. In my young 40s is when I started writing my first book. The first book that I wrote, I wrote it and then I set it to the side. Another year passed and I started to believe in signs from the universe. I had this sign and I was like, “I’m going to revisit that book.”
What was the sign?
My first book started because there was a small town we visit every single summer and there was this man. I was totally intrigued by him and how he was interacting with his daughter. My husband turned to me and said, “He’s an interesting character.” It was like a light switch went off. I suddenly had the whole backstory for this man and his daughter. I saw them the next day and he was in this small town parade for a sound system. His daughter was in the car with them. I was like, “Wouldn’t it be so strange if you were a sound person and then your child didn’t speak.” That was the start of my first book.
This person or this inspiration was real life. I came home. I wrote the entire book and I set it aside. The next summer we go back to the small town. I bumped into the guy and I’m like, “I never met this man.” I revisit the book again and that’s when I started talking to people about publishing. This was 2012. People were like, “I don’t know,” which is silly because 2012 was like the boom.
At the time, if you weren’t in the boom and if you are just looking at it was like, “Okay.”
One more year passed and I literally was crossing the street and almost bumped into the man. I did like a double-take. I was like, “That’s it. I’m going home. I’m fixing that book and I’m going to publish it.” That’s what I did. It was the fall of 2013. I finished the book and immediately started writing three more, and then it was June of 2014 when I hit publish. Life went on from there. This is wacky as it sounds about believing in signs. I was well into my 40s by this point. I was teaching. My kids were still all pretty much in elementary school or high school at that time.
I always had three goals in my life. I wanted to be a mother. I wanted to be a teacher, which I had put on hold because when I was twenty, I changed my mind. The last thing was that I always wanted to be a writer. I always joke that I wanted to write a great American novel. My friend said to me, “Why does it have to be great? Why can’t it just be good?” As much as that might sound hokey, it’s true. I didn’t need to be the next Hemingway. I just wanted to tell a good story. Because I love love, I knew that it was going to be a romance.
It went from there and then I decided, “I’m 52. I will be 53 this year. The year I turned 50, was the year I quit my job and decided to write full-time.” I post this about once a year on social media that you are never too old because, at 35, I went back to college. At 40 something, I started writing. At 50, I had a totally new career after only being a teacher for twelve years. I don’t think you are ever too old to reinvent yourself.
Sometimes, in the middle of it, as I am right now, this is hard. It’s not always like it’s an easy thing. It took you two years from when you saw the guy the first time.
It’s frightening. A big thing was when I started writing, I was worried that when people read the book and my books have sex in them, they would be like, “She’s a deviant or something.” It’s scary. Even when After Care came out and it was doing so well, I was on this high like, “I can do this.” Six months later, I was like, “I can’t do this. I need to keep being a teacher and writing.” There’s that saying about if it doesn’t scare you, then it’s not the challenge it should be or whatever. I think that’s true. As you said earlier, it takes bravery but it is worth it. Take the risk. The worst that could happen is that you fail, but even with a failure, we learn things.
Sometimes with that risk, I go through the worst-case scenario. I’m like, “Let me break down what would happen if this doesn’t work. What’s the worst thing that could happen?” Let’s say somebody finds out what I’m writing. The worst would be it doesn’t work and somebody finds out what I’m writing. Somebody judges me for my sexy scenes and tells everybody that or something, and then I ended up like, “I’m just making this up,” but then I sit there and I’m like, “Is that something I could deal with?” The worst thing that happened is not like I die in the worst-case scenario. Is that something I could deal with?
I think so many writers out there have pen names. It is like this shield. If you don’t want your family to know your writing, then you don’t tell them your pen name.
Are you saying that your name is not L.B.? Is that what you are saying? That’s not what you go by in day-to-day life?
My real last name is Dunbar. The only reason that I chose initials, which are my first name and my maiden name is because I was teaching middle school. I didn’t need 500 7th and 8th-graders trying to find me on social media under my own name. Do I wish I had not gone with the initials personally? I do because L.B. is a mouthful. It’s pretty close to who I am, but if you choose a pen name, it takes the fear out of it for some people.
I will share one of my worst-case scenario stories that happened which I’m fine with. When I started writing, my dad and I have never been super-duper close. It was a family drama. There was a good period of time when we were not even talking at all, and then we started talking. The talking started happening after I started writing.
You can learn from failure.
I started writing. We are talking a little bit more and I told him, “I’m writing.” I don’t know why I chose to tell him but I did choose to tell him my pen name at some point. I don’t know why I did that. He went and looked it up and I hadn’t thought about it. At the time, I was releasing a whole series of an age gaps. With daddy in the series title. The next time I saw him, he’s like, “I looked you up.” I was like, “This is the worst moment ever.” It was so awful but we are fine and I’m fine. I’m still cringing over that. I’m like, “He knows.” Let it brush off. Everybody, they know what happens but whatever, it’s fine. We will all be fine.
I thank you for sharing. I love hearing about and interviewing or any context that I can find about women who are 40 or older taking action and doing their dreams. I love that so much because it’s not something that you see on the media or anywhere. It’s very rare to see an older woman go for it. It’s like we don’t have anybody to look to and be like, “I can do it too.” I appreciate that so much. I have another question. You are a teacher and stuff, but did you try to teach yourself to write or what was that process? The actual learning to write process.
I’m an avid reader. Maybe we should start there. I read a lot but I pretty much only read romance. I hoped that I had the sense that I knew how to write a story. Was the writing great? Probably not in that first book. As a matter of fact, my whole first series which was five books long, I rewrote all of them in 2020 during the pandemic. We published them with new names and everything.
Personally, I can see the changes in how I write. As far as teaching myself, I feel like I had a sense of writing. I had a sense of what a plotline was and what needs to be included. The attraction and drama. I would say that it took time for the writing to improve. Don’t get me wrong. There are some people who right off the bat published their first book and it is beautifully written. God loved them. For me, I wouldn’t say my first books were perfectly written. Over time, the other thing is I have taken more classes or read more books about writing specifically romance. I think I’m The Queen is probably a Gwen Hayes, Romancing The Beat.
I probably read that book three times and made myself little graphs and everything. I have attended conferences and I have also taken some courses to improve my writing as I have gone. I also think you get into a rhythm of this is going to be your style. You get into the rhythm of how you write and you are not going to change too much in that process. I know for me, I don’t have a strong vocabulary. I say this all the time to editors. If they want to give me recommendations for word choice, I’m always open to it because I know that I don’t have a big expansive vernacular.
You just use the word vernacular. I think you might be wrong.
That’s my big word for the day.
I relate with you on that because I have a pretty good vocabulary but my recall for it is awful. If I’m reading it, I know what that is, but trying to come up with it when I need it, nope. I’m with you on that. Because I’m a reader too, I have noticed that as I have written more, I read differently sometimes. Not all the time. I’m like, “I never would have written like that but I like it,” and I admit it when I did. I wouldn’t have before I started writing.
I agree with that. Sometimes as I’m reading, I will find I’m looking at it more from an author’s perspective of how they have laid out their sentence structure, how that paragraph is and the pacing. Sometimes I read it and I will never be this kind of writer, but there are some who write beautiful words. For me, I get lost in that sometimes too like, “That was the best sentence. That was an amazing simile that she put in there.”
I never would have thought of that ever but it’s amazing. I want to point out though that you are still successful. You don’t have to have a large vocabulary and fancy sentence structure to be a good writer. I have been reading romance and fantasy and variations of that for many years. For some reason, I was in the mood to try something else. I don’t know why. I can’t remember, but I went and read Lee Child’s book Jack Reacher. He doesn’t write fancy at all.
Romance and fantasy tend to be more flowery. If you go look and open up a Lee Child book, you can look at the way he writes his sentences. I was like, “Lee Child is incredibly successful.” I read the whole book. It’s a good story and he’s not writing the way that I thought I needed to write. It was a revelation because I thought I had to write in a certain way to be a good writer and to tell a good story and you don’t. You can write a good story the way that you write.
I’ve been around forever way back when Twilight was popular, and I was in love with Edward. She took a lot of flack because of the writing. Who cares about the writing? It was a darn good story and on top of it, she made millions of dollars. As much as people are like, “It was not so and so,” I try to sway people to be like, “Look at it from an author’s perspective.
Even if she didn’t have the greatest sentence structure,” and I’m not saying she didn’t but many people do say that. The bottom line is she told a great story and it made a bunch of money. The next book after that which was a modern retelling of it was Fifty Shades Of Grey. Some people want to comment on the writing in it, but who cares about the writing? It was the story that she told. She’s making millions of dollars, so who cares if she’s not putting the correct sentence.
I said this before but not everybody knows. Reading Twilight was the book that had me like, “I could do this.” It’s because I did not like Twilight at the time. It wasn’t because of the sentence structure or her quality as a writer. It wasn’t that at all. I knew how many girls were reading it. I didn’t like the way that Bella reacted. It was a personal moral of like I don’t want any teenage girls reading this and having somebody dump them and thinking about killing themselves. Guys aren’t that important. That was my thing for it but I read it and I was like, “This is good but I have read a lot better writing.” It’s not the great American novel. I was like, “If she can do this, then I can do this.”
I shouldn’t say everybody has this moment, but I hope that people have this moment. I had the same thing. It wasn’t Twilight, but I had read a book back in 2010 and it wasn’t great. A lot of people did think it was great, but it was that inspiration too. This is what I mean in some ways that in failure, you can still learn something. I didn’t think the book was great and it pushed me to be like, “If she can write that kind of book, I can write what I wanted to write.”
The Dragon Tattoo book, but I was like, “What?” I read that and I have had a number of those. This is my own personal preference. I’m not dissing anybody. It’s just that I read it and I was like, “I could tell a good story too.” I could tell a good story as well as these people telling a good story. I don’t have to be an amazing novelist, because I know my vocabulary. I know I have that recall. I know these things about myself. It doesn’t matter. I have had numerous of those moments. Probably it might have been a sign that I didn’t recognize at the time, but I got there anyway because I’m writing now.
Even if you miss the first sign, the universe keeps speaking and nudging you in the direction you should be going.
If you miss the first sign, the universe keeps speaking. It keeps nudging you in this direction that you should be going.
It’s still scary because I agree with you on that too. Usually, if you are not scared, it’s not the right direction because fear means that your heart is engaged. For people, if you don’t care about it, that’s the reason you are not scared. It is because your heart isn’t engaged. If you are not scared, it’s because you don’t care about it that much because your heart isn’t engaged. If your heart is engaged, that’s where you are supposed to be, where you can offer your heart to the world and do what you love because it’s from your heart. I want to move on and touch on marketing a little bit. You were able to quit your job and go full-time with the writing, how has the marketing influenced and enabled that?
When I started writing, I didn’t do any marketing. I did a lot of the basic things like blog tours. I did some social media posting but I knew nothing about advertising. That’s part of the reason I was coming to that point of I’m going to quit because I wasn’t making any money off of the books. I started out strong but it was like I was writing more books but it wasn’t increasing my income.
Obviously, I suck as a writer so I’m going to quit. With After Care, when it came out, it also was the first book that I advertised. I credit that I have some author friends in my wheelhouse who were like, “You need to do this and this.” I was like, “I will do it,” but I didn’t know what I was doing, and that helped. For marketing purposes, I run Facebook ads and then I do AMS, which is Amazon Marketing Services. I did the AMS at first, then I let it go, and then I went back to it. Those are the two things that I do.
I am not an expert on marketing at all. There are plenty of people who are. The person I recommend the most to follow is Skye Warren. She teaches a Facebook course for authors and I follow everything that she says. If Skye says to do it. I do it because I have found success in her process. Speaking of Lee Child, Mark Dawson who is a good friend of Lee Child, is another one who has a Facebook marketing class. Many people like his philosophy and take this course and follow him as well. My advice on marketing is that if you are going to be a writer, learn marketing.
A lot of newer authors are successful right away because they have learned the marketing process. It’s not so much that they wrote a book and put it out, which is what I did. I do not recommend following my strategy. They wrote a book and they learned what they are supposed to do to market this thing. They then put out their book and they followed up with all the bells and whistles for marketing afterwards.
There’s a new wave of authors who are successful and doing it the smart way, which is looking at writing as a business. If you want it to be a business. Some people don’t but in that case, they want it to be a business. They want it to be their career and so they learned all the marketing behind it. If you want to write for it to be a hobby, which is how it started for me, I hoped it was going to be a career, but I didn’t have that long-term vision that it was going to be, then do what you can. I was writing books and putting them out because that’s what people said. Write the first book, write the second and the third one. I was like a machine. In the first two years that I was officially a writer, I had published ten books but I wasn’t doing any marketing. I was just writing the books. In my opinion. Don’t do it that way.
That’s not the way to do it to get results fast or to get financial results fast. Although, I do think there’s a lot of learning that happens when you write your first ten books. It’s hard to say. Everybody has a path, but especially in all different genres, that is not the path to fast financial success. There are a lot of other pros or a lot of things that you’ll learn and get from that, but money is not necessarily one of them.
In this industry in particular too, for every one thing you learn, there are two ways that you failed. It’s a big reason why I always say that the smart girls are the ones that have done all of the research and learned marketing before they hit publish. Those are the people who want to make it financially right away. I’m not saying that they did make it financially right away either.
I am one of those people. I did this show and I created a course based on 60 interviews with successful authors plus other people that I have coached a little bit. I had done a little bit of coaching but I wanted to help women writers like us. Nobody was buying it because I hadn’t done it myself. Nobody was buying the course that I made even though it had all of the good information.
If you do StrengthsFinder, that’s one of my things. It’s taking that and being like, “Here.” After a while of it not selling, I was like, “I’m going to do it myself.” I did my own course which included all the marketing stuff. The course is what I learned from all these authors condensed to like, “Here’s the absolutely necessary stuff. There are all these other things, but here’s the necessary stuff.” I did it and then I was making $3,000 a month in my third month. It’s because I did my own advice. To be fair, I was writing short romances, not longer books. It wouldn’t have been probably in my third month if I was writing full-length novels. Part of what works is being able to have multiple books. That’s part of the challenge for so many people. It takes time to write.
I do agree that there are benefits to that philosophy of publishing your first book and then getting your second one out. You can’t have a following if you have nothing for people to follow. They are going to read your one book and it’s like one and done. You can’t do it that way, but it does take time.
It takes time but you can have it be abbreviated. You can have it shorter. It doesn’t have to be from 2014 to 2019.
It shouldn’t because you will be frustrated with yourself.
The Facebook ads course by Skye Warren. I have taken that. I haven’t gone through the whole thing. Facebook ads is something I need to work on. Would you say that has been more effective than Amazon for you?
Facebook has been more consistent. I will put it that way. When I used AMS, it was brand new. It’s very different now than how was it originally. When it first came out and people were using it as a marketing tool, there was a certain cost and there was a certain, “Do this, do that.” A few years later, it’s like, “Now do this, do that.” It’s something different.
Successful people constantly learn new things.
I feel like Facebook is consistent. I feel like Facebook has been beneficial. I went back to AMS ads. I started using them again. I had this big conversation with myself where I said, “This is stupid. People are on Amazon looking at books. You’re usually paying for ads where people are looking for books.” I will say that starting back up did help. I don’t spend as much money on Amazon ads as I spent on Facebook ads but I think it’s complementary.
I’m going to throw this out because Amazon is so like you have no idea. Their algorithms are anything. In the last couple of years, you also refined your genre to romances for women over 40. I do know that Amazon pays attention to genres, bots, who are buying, and stuff like that. In the last couple of years, you have refined that. You are like, “All my books are an over 40 romance.” I bet it’s easier for them to put your stuff in front of the right people. I want to point out that you’ve had a newsletter for a long time which is a part of marketing.
I had a newsletter from the beginning. I didn’t use the newsletter effectively at first. There are books and courses out there about how to use your newsletter. I didn’t read any of those books but I would recommend them.
Which one would you recommend? Pick 1 or 2 that you liked the best.
I took a seminar from Penny Reed. She’s the one that I feel like a light bulb went on for me. Everybody runs their newsletter differently. For me, I wanted people to feel like they had a reason to open the newsletter. The reason was that they were going to get something to read. It wasn’t going to be opening the newsletter and it’s like, “New release, buy this book, and here are twenty other friends that have books.” It wasn’t going to be that kind of newsletter. Mine is content but I didn’t start out that way. I probably started becoming more content-driven around the time that I was writing the short scenes for After Care.
One of the big things that I’m getting is that you kept learning and learning. I’m a course person too. I do courses. I’m like, “Where can I learn new stuff?” Besides interviewing people, I’m like, “Okay.” I went to Skye Warren’s Romance Author Mastermind and it was amazing. I’m like, “There is so much more to know. There’s always more to know.” I love that stuff. I signed up for the Writing Better Faster course.
I’m also taking that course.
I was going to do it with my co-writer because everybody in the last mastermind was talking about it. I was like, “We haven’t done it. We need to do it,” but we had some life things happen. Now we are doing it. A lot of the successful authors that I talked to don’t stop learning. They keep like, “Now what?” There has never been this assumption that it’s going to like, “It worked and I’m done.”
The people who are continuing to be successful are the people who are constantly learning new things or even refreshing their memory. I love Melanie Harlow. I’m a huge fan of her writing but also her personality. She has talked about how many times she has re-read particular books on marketing or writing. This is the teacher side of me. I think it’s important to constantly reflect on what you know and then improve on it.
Melanie Harlow. I went to her Round Table.
I love her. She’s a top author now too. I’m not sure if it was her Round Table or some other presentation she gave. She has the same story. You start out and a lot of it is so much trial by fire. You keep trying things. Maybe it worked for so-and-so and it doesn’t work for you, then you got to let it go and figure out what does work for you.
Keep going until you do find those things. A big thing too is staying true to yourself. I know who I am and I knew that there were certain things I was never going to do on social media or act in a certain way as a person. Maybe that held me back as an author. I also feel like now at least I have a very strong brand. It is what it is. If you don’t like over 40 romance, that is totally fine. I want to be very clear that that’s what I write. If you like that, great. If you don’t, then that’s fine. There are millions of other books out there to read.
On that note, what’s your best advice?
I have already given one advice which was the marketing. If you want to make it, it’s your business to market. I honestly think the best advice is to stay true to yourself as a person. Social media allows people to hide behind a screen unless you are on TikTok. Now you are on this screen. You need to be self-aware that what you put out there, what you say, what you do starts to become affiliated with everything.
Your name and your books are not separate. You are an entity. It is an overall brand for you. At least for me, when I started out because I was all over the place, I learned some hard lessons about people in the industry. It was a little bit of a wake-up call for me to be like, “I’m not going to be like that.” If it takes me longer to get where I want to go but I stay true to myself, that is way more important to me than becoming a success for the wrong reasons.
There are a few deep things in this interview, but I especially love that. I think there’s a cap for your success when you aren’t true to yourself. I also think that consistently over time, the length of your career is going to be a lot longer when you are true to yourself because you’ve been consistent. You don’t have to fake. It’s a heck of a lot easier to be consistent when you are being true to yourself the whole time.
I’m still myself. It’s still me. For example, I have taken a two-year break from my podcast. Because I was being true to myself, most of the people who listened before will still listen because I am very authentic. There’s the longevity that you get in terms of marketing. In this day and age, people can tell. Their bullshit meters are so high. They are so sensitive like, “We know.” People don’t want that anymore.
For a lot of reasons, energetically, you will have much more success if you are true to yourself. Woo-woo style, the universe right now wants people who are true to their heart and authentic, but the audience too. If you are not woo-woo, the audience wants it too. Everybody wants authentic integrity. Where is the best place for people to find you and these Sexy Silver Foxes books?
The best place is my website, which is www.LBDunbar.com.
We will have that and all of our social media links and our link to Amazon. Her newsletter, go get on it if you want to see it. If you have an interest in some Silver Foxes stories, go check them out. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s like, “Romance over 40. Let me see what I’m about to be jumping into here in life. Let me come up with some new fantasies for people like me because I’m not going to be doing some of the gymnastics that some of the twenty-year-olds are doing in those romance novels.” I don’t go to bars anymore. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me. I am honored to be here. Thank you for listening to me ramble.
We touched on some fun things that I enjoyed, so thank you. Thank you. everybody. Hugs and happy authoring here at the show.
Important Links
- L.B. Dunbar
- After Care
- The Sex Education of M.E
- Paranormal Women’s Fiction
- Romancing the Beat
- Jack Reacher
- Twilight
- Fifty Shades Of Grey
- Sexy Silver Foxes
- www.LBDunbar.com
- Skye Warren
- Penny Reed
- Melanie Harlow
About L.B. Dunbar
L.B. Dunbar has been an over-active imagination. To her benefit, such imagination has created over thirty novels, including the creation of a small-town world (Sensations Collection), rock star mayhem (Legendary Rock Star series), MMA chaos (Paradise Stories), rom-com for the over forty (The Sex Education of M.E.), and a suspenseful island for redemption (The Island Duet).
Her alter ego, elda lore, creates magical romance through mythological retellings (Modern Descendants). Her life revolves around a deep love of reading about fairy tales, medieval knights, regency debauchery, and strong alpha males. She loves a deep belly laugh, a strong hug, and an occasional margarita. Her other loves include being mother to four grown children and wife to the one and only.
