How Lainey Davis Became a Hockey Romance Author (It Started With a Leaky Roof

Lainey Davis, a USA Today bestselling author with an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, started writing romance in 2017 to fund an emergency roof repair. An ice dam sent water into her children's bedroom, a friend dared her to write and sell books online, and she left her day job to write full time in July 2021.

Every author has an origin story. Lainey Davis has a roof.

In 2017, her kids told her it was raining in their bedroom — an ice dam had formed on the roof and water was coming through. The family needed money for repairs, and a friend suggested she write romance and sell it online. She didn't have a good reason not to, so she picked a pen name and started.

It didn't pay for the roof overnight. It grew into a side hobby, then took off during the pandemic, when readers were hungry for feel-good fiction. By July 2021 she left her day job to write full time. She now writes about four books a year and has published more than three dozen titles.

Davis publishes independently, which means she controls her own catalog, and she's deliberate about strategy — offering the first book in a series free to bring new readers in, then letting the interconnected world do the rest.

She tells the whole story, ice dam and all, on the Neighbors Neighboring podcast: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1323-neighbors-neighboring-289702979/episode/ep-17-hockey-heat-home-slippers-lainey-davis-on-love-loot-and-local-life-317116001

Where should new readers start? Davis recommends Playing for Keeps, the first book in her Pittsburgh-set hockey romance series, as an entry point into the connected world she's built.