This is Episode 9 of Write with Love.

Today we turn up the heat with Clare Connelly, indie and traditionally published author of steamy romance, who only takes 2 weeks to write a first draft!

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            G’day, I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today I’m talking to hybrid author Clare Connelly. Welcome to the show, Clare.

Clare Connelly:             Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:            No worries. You’re a very busy lady these days, aren’t you?

Clare Connelly:             I am. I am very busy, but in the best possible way.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Can you just tell us a little bit about your journey to publication?

Clare Connelly:             Sure. I have been writing since forever. I wrote my first full manuscript at 15 and submitted it to Mills & Boon, which is who I’ve always wanted to write for and who I’ve always loved reading. It was rejected, but I continued to write. I wrote a lot of blogs, even when I was in high school when the internet had just become a thing, which makes me sound very old, but it was this great opportunity to write about what you wanted and put it out there, and I loved it, and then we lived overseas, and I continued to write even when I was working full-time, but it wasn’t until I was home with my two little guys that I really wrote again in earnest with the hopes of turning it into a career, and when I say that, they didn’t feel like realistic hopes. It felt like a very, very faraway maybe sort of thing.

Clare Connelly:             Again, I started submitting to Mills & Boon, and had a few rejections from them, which were very disheartening, but the fact that it took six months to get your rejection letter, I was already another book down the track by the time I got it, so I was invested in something else and it wasn’t horrifying as it might otherwise have been. At some point, when my daughter was nearly a year old and I was about to go, or thinking about going back to work and to a job that I really loved, my sister and my husband said to me, “Oh, you know, you really should self-publish,” and again, that was in 2014, where self-publishing had been around for a while, but it was maybe at its zenith, I would say, and I self-published. I did it, and I really didn’t think it through because I just knew that I’d written this book, so I was very … Initially I used an Amazon cover creator and an Amazon image. We were single income with two kids, and this was my hobby, so I didn’t wanna put any money into it because it felt almost like a vanity project, and so I did nothing. I didn’t even have a Facebook page for the first three months.

Clare Connelly:             I did nothing to prelaunch myself, I just published, and then the thing with Amazon is you can track. You would know this, but to any of your listeners who don’t, you can actually track your sales pretty much in realtime, so you just can refresh that graph all day long, and you can see little blips going, and about 10 minutes after it went live, I sold my first book, and I was watching Law & Order SVU and I kept watching little dots go, and it was … You know, I wasn’t selling huge amounts, but within that first week I was probably selling 20 to 30 copies a day, which to me was mind-blowing because I’d written it with no expectation of that, and yeah, so that launched me into an indie career, which was incredible and fulfilling,