SPA Girls Podcast

This week we were lucky enough to convince the lovely Nalini Singh to come on the show. A fellow Kiwi, Nalini is also a very smart, savvy author who's been on the NYT Bestseller list an incredible 27 times, and has hordes of ravenous fans the world over.

Nalini is also the kind of pioneering author who knew that she would need to do more than simply write great books (you know, cause that's easy, right?)  if she was going to make this writing malarky her career. She knew she would need to connect with her readers and give them something more. With this in mind, she started a popular blog when she first set out to conquer the writing world, and then created a massive organically grown newsletter when the time was right, and finally conquered Facebook, where her current page has over 70,000 readers regularly interacting with her.

She gives us the low down on how she's created such a strong reader connection, the kind of content she thinks is vital for authors to give their readers and her secret sauce for interacting with all kinds of people. This one is a little long, but it's well worth the listen for the various wise gems of knowledge that Nalini drops on us throughout the show. (I did say she's a smart cookie, didn't I?)

Small town settings are a common backdrop in romance. Writers love them because they give us a landscape that we can go back to again and again, with familiar secondary characters that our readers will recognise and become attached to. Readers love them because once they've found a town with a cool cafe, a watering hole where all the locals hang out, and characters they can fall in love with - well, why would they want to leave? 

Wendy and Cheryl both have successful series featuring a small town setting, so this week they both talk about how to create fictional small towns that your readers will love, with tips and tricks that will take your town from ordinary to exceptional. They tell us how they put together the small towns in their contemporary series', why they did it a certain way, including best practices on how to create a memorable small town. It's a fascinating insight into the creative process, and well worth a listen... :)

Small town settings are a common backdrop in romance. Writers love them because they give us a landscape that we can go back to again and again, with familiar secondary characters that our readers will recognise and become attached to. Readers love them because once they've found a town with a cool cafe, a watering hole where all the locals hang out, and characters they can fall in love with - well, why would they want to leave? 

Wendy and Cheryl both have successful series featuring a small town setting, so this week they both talk about how to create fictional small towns that your readers will love, with tips and tricks that will take your town from ordinary to exceptional. They tell us how they put together the small towns in their contemporary series', why they did it a certain way, including best practices on how to create a memorable small town. It's a fascinating insight into the creative process, and well worth a listen... :)

Do you have one of those people in your life? Someone who thinks the glass is always half empty and wants to bring you down the whole time? Negative Nellys and Doubtful Dougs are around us all the time, and this week we talk a little about ways to deal with the negativity in our lives. If you're going to achieve everything you want to this year, you need to have some strategies to deal with the negativity and turn it around into something more positive.

Do you have one of those people in your life? Someone who thinks the glass is always half empty and wants to bring you down the whole time? Negative Nellys and Doubtful Dougs are around us all the time, and this week we talk a little about ways to deal with the negativity in our lives. If you're going to achieve everything you want to this year, you need to have some strategies to deal with the negativity and turn it around into something more positive.

Are you all set to achieve everything you really want to achieve in 2018? If you're still not sure, this episode will help! We ask three really great questions around our mindset as self publishing authors for 2018, and try to answer them as honestly as we can. There are some home truths, some deep and meaningfuls, and some nearly-tears (we don't do real tears, we're too tough...!!) as we try to unravel what's going to make 2018 great for the SPA Girls. 

It might seem simple, but the questions actually made us think quite a bit about what we really want to achieve this year, and what we need to let go of to succeed. Come prepared to put your thinking caps on, to delve deep and to be honest about what you really want as an author this year...

Are you all set to achieve everything you really want to achieve in 2018? If you're still not sure, this episode will help! We ask three really great questions around our mindset as self publishing authors for 2018, and try to answer them as honestly as we can. There are some home truths, some deep and meaningfuls, and some nearly-tears (we don't do real tears, we're too tough...!!) as we try to unravel what's going to make 2018 great for the SPA Girls. 

It might seem simple, but the questions actually made us think quite a bit about what we really want to achieve this year, and what we need to let go of to succeed. Come prepared to put your thinking caps on, to delve deep and to be honest about what you really want as an author this year...

This week Wendy and Cheryl talk dirty with Kiwi historical romance/erotica author Nicola Davidson, who gives them the real story of the sex lives of the aristocracy in Recency London.

Nicola has delved deep into the research, and she tells a captivated Wendy and Cher (who, I imagine, blushed their way through the entire interview...) exactly what it was like in the sex clubs and private parties of the regency: from orgies and threesomes to dildos and birching, they cover it all.... :)

It's a fascinating interview, full of details that you didn't know you needed to know, and provides another great resource that you can can use, especially if you're considering writing about the Regency era. (Or even if you're just curious about sex in those times...)

A quick warning - don't listen to this one in the car with the kids! The topic is a little more graphic than usual...

This week Wendy and Cheryl talk dirty with Kiwi historical romance/erotica author Nicola Davidson, who gives them the real story of the sex lives of the aristocracy in Recency London.

Nicola has delved deep into the research, and she tells a captivated Wendy and Cher (who, I imagine, blushed their way through the entire interview...) exactly what it was like in the sex clubs and private parties of the regency: from orgies and threesomes to dildos and birching, they cover it all.... :)

It's a fascinating interview, full of details that you didn't know you needed to know, and provides another great resource that you can can use, especially if you're considering writing about the Regency era. (Or even if you're just curious about sex in those times...)

A quick warning - don't listen to this one in the car with the kids! The topic is a little more graphic than usual...

This week we dive into the world of tropes for self publishing authors, to explain exactly what they are, why they're important and how you should be using them in your writing career. 

Knowing and understanding the tropes in romance is important for everything from choosing your plot line, to writing the blurb and finding your readers. They're also vital in helping us as authors understand our books and our readers. It's an important cog in the publishing wheel, and this episode is another must-listen show!