Wendy Vella is a bestselling Kiwi author of contemporary and historical romance fiction. She is also 1/4 of the SPA girls Podcast. We have a great chat about romance genres, being Indie and getting a little help from friends.

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Transcript

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write With Love. I’m Sarah Williams, best selling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week, I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published.  Some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different, and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love, and love what we do.

Sarah Williams:            Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            G’day, I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today I’m chatting to Wendy Vella. Thanks for joining me today Wendy.

Wendy Vella:                No worries. Thanks for having me on Sarah.

Sarah Williams:            It’s a pleasure. So, tell us how you started out and your writing journey so far.

Wendy Vella:                Yeah, I’ve always been … I love romance. I’m an absolutely incurable romantic, and my mother, many years ago, started me on Georgette Heyer and wrenched the book out of my hand and said, You need to try something a little bit … Broaden your mind a little bit. So then I went out to Georgette Heyer, and I never looked back, really. The Regency era has been a particular favorite of mine for many years.

Wendy Vella:                So I wrote for quite a long time. I joined Romance Writers of New Zealand, and did competitions, and just basically spent some time honing my craft. Then I entered competitions, and as I started, I won a few and got Reader’s Choices. I thought, maybe I’m ready to publish. So at one of the conferences I pitched and was picked up by Random House for the Loveswept Line. And, so I published my first book traditionally; it was in November, what am I saying November, it was January 2013.

Wendy Vella:                Then I really had a few problems with trying to get them to pick up another book. What I wanted to write and what they actually wanted to publish were two different things. I had a wonderful group of writing friends who I went on with some of them to do the SpaGirls, which is our podcast we do. And we talked, and they said, Why don’t you have a go at self publishing? That was fairly terrifying.

Wendy Vella:                So I went and got a cover and based on my ability and got someone else to read it and thought okay I’m gonna have a go. So in November 2013 “Duchess by Chance” was published and that went fairly well actually, considering the errors that were still in it. Christmas that year I put out a novella called “Christmas Wishes”. Then I was [inaudible 00:03:11] after that, I really decided that because I write quite quickly I thought this suits me. Being able to adjust and change things and move with the times and covers, and things like that, I thought well okay I really enjoy this.

Wendy Vella:                So I carried on writing in circles for a while and then I thought self publishing allowed me to write across genres and I get bored very easily so the next step...