Amy is an award-winning, USA Today best-selling Aussie author who has written seventy contemporary romances in both the traditional and digital markets. Her books bring all the feels from sass and quirk and laughter to emotional grit to panty-melting heat.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            Today I’m chatting to Amy Andrews. Thanks for joining me, Amy.

Amy Andrews:              Thanks for having me, Sarah.

Sarah Williams:            So, you have written over 70 books and sold over 2 million copies. So, first off, congratulations.

Amy Andrews:              Thank you, thank you very much.

Sarah Williams:            So, tell us about your journey so far and how you got into writing.

Amy Andrews:              Well, I was never one of those people that you often meet in writing circles who just knew, from the second that they stapled paper together, that they were gonna be a writer. It never occurred to me to be a writer at all, really. I was very good at english, I loved creative writing, but it never occurred to me that people did that as an actual job, which is stupid ’cause clearly there are books, so people must do it, but, I don’t know, it was not in my realm of things I could do.

Amy Andrews:              And then we moved to the UK after I first got married, where I was temporarily unemployed for about six weeks, and it was our first winter in the UK and it was freezing cold. One week it didn’t get above zero and there were frozen cobwebs in our house, and it was just really cold. And I thought “What can I do that involves me not getting off my electric blanket?” And I thought “I’ll write that book that’s in my head.”

Amy Andrews:              And that was an epiphany, ’cause I was like “I have a book in my head?” And it was then that I realized [inaudible 00:02:11] so then I wrote long hand, a chapter a day for ten days, 50 000 words, and it just flew out of me, just fell out of me. And I’d written a book and that’s when I realized … Then you open that portal, when you do that you open almost a like portal and I realized then that actually I had always had thoughts in my head, I just never really realized that’s what they were, I just thought it was a bit of an active imagination. And so, it took me till I was 22 to really realize they weren’t really people talking in my head, they were actually plots. So, that was a relief in lots of ways.

Amy Andrews:              This was back in the days before we had PC, everybody had a computer in the house, so I had to pay somebody to type it [inaudible 00:02:59], it cost me a hundred pounds, out of my scribbled notes, and sent it off to the somebody in the UK, so I sent it to Harlequin, and nine months later got a rejection.

Amy Andrews:              And that was … So, I always feel that was my moment when I knew I wanted to become a writer, because I thought “Alright well, I’m gonna show you, I’m gonna teach you a lesson. I’m gonna show you that I can write a book that you will publish, if it kills me.” So, I always say that rejection made me bloody minded.

Amy Andrews:              And so, I kinda went on from there and when we got back to Australia, I thought to myself “Well, clearly I’m not as good as I thought I was, clearly I’m not going to have a millions of dollar advance and get a movie deal straight off the bat, so, okay, what can I do, I’ve gotta learn.” So I looked around to whoever could help me, so I rang [inaudible 00:03:58] and asked if there was a romance writing group anywhere in Brisbane and I found BRISROM, from there I found RWA,