How I Became a Romance Author

On Valentine’s Day, 2017, I picked my sons up from school along with a friend for each of them. They ran upstairs to play Lego and…immediately started shouting at me. “It’s raining in the Lego room!”

Sure enough, it was raining. Inside my house. We had had a lot of snow that year and a spell of warm days that turned to cold nights…the perfect recipe for an ice dam on the roof. We needed to replace the roof and repair the damaged window frames. We needed a LOT of money.

My husband, our friends, and I began to brainstorm ways to get more money for the repairs. We already both had jobs... One friend said, “You could write romance and sell it on Amazon.” I laughed at his suggestion. He persisted: “No, seriously. Why can’t you do that?”

I didn’t have a good answer for him other than I never had written romance before.

We really had nothing to lose if I tried. After all, I have an MFA and have worked as a writer my entire career. I’ve never had a grown-up job that didn’t include WRITER in the title. I just had never written romance before!

My friend knew what I came to learn: romance is the most popular genre there is. By leaps and bounds. I had never thought about it that way before.

My mother was an avid romance reader. She inhaled Nora Roberts books and our stairs were stacked with heaps of paperbacks she traded back and forth with her sisters. I began reading her romance novels after she passed, and I found them comforting because I knew she had loved them.

But then I started loving them for their own merit. I began to inhale romance books, at least 3 a week but often 5 or more... So I was familiar with the genre. I knew what I liked to read: series following big families, with alternating point of view chapters.

I figured the best way to start was just to start!

I locked myself in my bedroom and wrote a novella. (That novella, Seasons of Love: The Jenny Simons Stories, is currently not for sale, but I do have the stories up on Radish bundled as Jenny’s Fling to Forever!)

I knew I wanted to publish independently because I could retain a higher portion of the royalties and I could publish faster than if I looked for an agent and a publisher. I needed that roof money!

You might imagine that I didn’t earn the roof money right away. Don’t worry—we were able to get a loan. But after I published that first novella, I realized writing romance is fun. It was such a pleasant side hustle from my day job!

I started plotting out an idea for a family series. I wanted tall, broody brothers who lived in Pittsburgh so that I wouldn’t have to make up any locations. That family was the Stag family. By the time I published the third brother’s book 18 months after the ice dam, I had earned the roof money.

By then, I really, really loved writing romance! I loved interacting with readers, I loved reading in the genre, and I loved when I got emails asking when So-and-So was getting a book.

A few years after my friend suggested I sell stories on Amazon, I was able to leave my day job and write these stories as my full-time work. I’ve met amazing authors, participated in successful fundraising events for charity, and even held an in-person book signing.

All because of that ice dam and the ruined roof!

I’m so thankful for that awful day and the new direction it sent me toward. I’m thankful for each and every one of you for helping me to get here!

I know my best stories are yet to come and I can’t wait to write them for you.

~Lainey