146. An Interview with Julie James: Publishing Expectations and Writing One Book a Year

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Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 146 of the DBSA podcast.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today is Jane Litte from Dear Author and New York Times bestselling author Julie James.  We talk about her brand-new book, Suddenly One Summer, the pressures that come with being an author who publishes one book a year, and also some of the books that she’s been reading and enjoying lately.

The music you’re listening to was provided by Sassy Outwater, and I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is.

And this podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Yours All Along, the brand-new Loving on the Edge e-novella from New York Times bestselling author Roni Loren.  It will be on sale June 16^th.

And now, on with the podcast.

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Sarah:  Okay, so I’m assuming most people know who you are, Julie, but would you be so kind as to introduce yourself and tell us –

Julie James:  Sure.

Sarah:  – who you are and what you do.

Julie:  Sure, I’m Julie James.  I write contemporary romances with Berkley.  I live in Chicago.  Two kids.

Sarah:  Do you have a dog?

Julie:  We do, we do.

Sarah:  Will the dog bark during the podcast?

Julie:  He –

Sarah:  ‘Cause this is totally an improvement for me.

Julie:  Yes, he, he probably will –

Sarah:  Yes!

Julie:  – because our, our mailman comes –

Sarah:  Perfect!

Julie:  – right during when we’re recording here, I realized.  Yes, we do have a dog.  An old one.

Sarah:  I’m going to have to change the name of the podcast to Romances and Random Pets, because there’s always a good pet noise – usually not mine, now, ‘cause I’ve gotten better about it.  [Laughs]

Julie:  Okay.

Sarah:  I’m, I welcome yours!  That would be awesome!  So congratulations on your latest book!

Julie:  Thank you!  Thank you.

Sarah:  You slapped the crap out of the Times list.  Well done!

Julie:  Yeah, that was really exciting!  Yeah!  Yeah.

Sarah:  And you hit the, the USA Today, too, right?

Julie:  I did!  First page.  Like, the way they break it down in the, in the –

Sarah:  Ooh!

Julie:  – when you see it in the .pdf, I was the very last one on the first page (FLAG _____ 1:57).

Sarah:  That’s still a win!  No matter what page you’re on.

Julie:  Yeah, it was, it was just kind of this neat thing to see visually, you know, being on the first page.  That’s the first time that’s happened for me, so, yeah, yeah, that was really exciting.

Sarah:  Can you tell us a little bit about your new book?

Julie:  Sure!  The new book is Suddenly One Summer.  The heroine is a divorce lawyer.  The hero is an investigative journalist with the Tribune.  They live next door to each other for the summer.  She moves in, she rents the place next door to his loft, after there’s a break-in at her townhome and she no longer feels comfortable there, so she rents the place next to him for the summer.  And the first part of the book is them not meeting each other yet but having a series of misunderstandings.  They can hear each other, and they see who’s coming in and out of each other’s apartments, and they start to draw con-, conclusions, but the wrong conclusions about each other.  For example, she sees all these different women coming and going from his place.  Now, she doesn’t know that one’s his best friend, one’s his sister, things like that.  And so the first part is them sort of making these assumptions about each other, so when they do finally meet, there’s a lot of friction and tension between them, but then a little subplot kicks in where she ends up taking on his sister as a client.  His sister is, has a baby, and she’s looking to track down the man she had the baby with to get child support for him, for, from him, and she teams up with Ford, the hero, and they work together to track down this guy, and through that they become closer and get to know each other better, and then a different kind of sparks fly after that, so.

Sarah:  This reminds me a little bit of the, of the book where – I’m, I apologize that I can never remember titles, but the one where Cameron can hear people having sex in the next hotel room and then she wakes up the next morning and they’re, they’re, and someone’s dead?

Julie:  Someone’s dead, right, right.

Sarah:  Yes.  Overhearing and making assumptions on what you hear is a great way to bring people into awkward romance-appropriate situations.

Julie:  It’s fun – well, first of all, it works really well in the city because, you know, you’re in these loft condo buildings that used to be, like, a warehouse or whatever, and the soundproofing – and I know this because the summer before the bar, actually, I lived in one of these, before the bar exam.  I lived in one of these places, and you hear everything.  And so it’s really neat in that aspect, that it worked so well with sort of like the city setting.  But yeah, it is.  It’s also fun because the reader knows generally what’s going on, so you can kind of laugh along that they’re drawing the wrong conclusions about each other, even though we know what’s really happening?

Sarah:  How does this fit with your, with your series?  Can this be read as a standalone?

Julie:  Yes.  It – I don’t call it part of the FBI/U.S. Attorney series, and the reason for that is because neither main character is an FBI agent or an assistant U.S. attorney.

Sarah:  Oh, well, is that all?

Julie:  Yeah.

[Laughter]

Julie:  And no part of the plot has anything to do with the FBI or the U.S. Attorney’s office, so.  That being said, the hero of this book, Ford Dixon, wa-, he showed up in, two books ago, Love Irresistibly.  He was that heroine’s best friend.  So they are linked, and you do see a few characters come back, but I think it can completely be read as a standalone.  Actually, I think all my books, I purposely write them so that you could read any of them as a standalone, pick them up in any order, and sort of go from there.  Some characters do come back, but I try and keep that a little bit to a minimum, just so that those characters don’t overwhelm the story.  They sort of had their story.  That’s been done, and it’s nice to check in with them, but I don’t want it to be too much of an intrusion.

Sarah:  It’s, it’s hard to define.  It’s not quite a series; it’s like a related world set of books.

Julie:  Exactly.  I, I, I don’t even really call it – I mean it kind of is a, the, the, like, readers actually kind of named it – yeah, I think it showed up on Goodreads, and – that they called it a series, and yeah, I would say it’s actually more, it’s, like, this shared world in Chicago where a lot of people are, a lot of the main characters are lawyers or FBI agents, and they kind of know each other, but I kind of look at it more as, you know, a bunch of separate stories in this shared world.

Jane Litte:  So this is your eighth book, and you write one book a year, which is really unusual for authors these days.  Do you feel pressure to increase or speed up the pace of your writing?

Julie:  Yes, and I do, I wish I, I wrote faster, there’s no doubt.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Julie:  I don’t feel any pressure.  What’s great is I don’t feel any pressure from, you know, from Berkley, from my editor, from anyone there.  They’ve been really great about, you know, sort of accepting that this is my pace.  Do I think that it would help if I could get, you know, a book every nine months or more often?  I mean, I think, yes, I think that that would, but it’s just, I’m just a slow writer, and I, you know, I, I blame the kids a lot.  I do have two young kids, that’s true, but you know, it, it really is that I’m also just sort of a, it just takes me time to just figure out what I want to do with a scene and to get it all to come together the way that I want to.  I’m a big reviser; I’m always changing things and going back and changing things, so, yeah, I just kind of, this is just kind of the pace that I’m at for right now.

Jane:  So do you –

Sarah:  Remember when one book a year was, like, normal?

Julie:  Well, right, and you know what’s funny is it is, well, I’m going to say it’s, it is normal in a lot of genres, and I don’t know, I’m actually not super familiar with, like, mysteries or sci-fi or fantasy, but I mean certainly in, like, literary fiction, a book a year would be considered fast.

Jane:  Well, I was just going to say, a couple years ago, and, and maybe it wasn’t a couple years ago, maybe it was five or six years ago, I remember that there was an article, perhaps it was in the Times, where they were lamenting the one book a year pressure, because you’re right, for fiction writers, there wasn’t the pressure previously to put out one book a year, and then there, then that changed, and readers or booksellers or whomever, that nebulous entity that’s in charge of determining how many books you have to put out a year – [laughs]

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – it changed from when you were ready to put out a book to once a year, and I remember that article, a lot of authors were saying that that pressure was just too onerous, and now it’s every three months or –

Julie:  Oh, it’s ninety days.  Absolutely.  You go to, you know, RWA or RT and, I mean, there’s, yeah, how to do a book every ninety days, which is funny because I’m actually doing a panel with a couple other authors at RWA called Writing in the Slow Lane – [laughs] – and how to succeed, you know, when you’re not the fastest writer, and a lot of – this was an idea that myself and Susanna Kearsley actually came up with.  We were talking about this at last year’s RWA, about how that was just the message that I was hearing over and over again is, you have to get out something new every ninety days, and I was expressing some frustration at that, because that is just not possible for everybody.  And I felt like maybe, you know, someone who has kids, she has another job that she’s balancing, I just felt that that was such a discouraging message to be telling people, that this is what you have to do, otherwise you have no chance of succeeding, so a lot of the reason we put this panel together was just – I don’t even actually know what we’re going to say yet, ‘cause some of us don’t know quite, you know, how we’re making this all work?  But just to have four authors up there who have had, you know, successes, just being able to say, look, I, I, you know, you can, there are other options, you can make this work writing a little bit slower, so, so, yeah, so we’ll be doing that in July at this year’s conference.

Jane:  I don’t know about Sarah, but I think that I form expectations based on the author’s past history, so if an author is real prolific then I start to expect more from her, or – and if an author like you, Julie, I know that you only do once, one book a year, and so I look forward to that one release, and I don’t have the expectation of, oh, I want five Julie James books a year – [laughs]

Julie:  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Jane:  – but I also think that there’s, like, a burnout for a reader.  For example, I’ll just use Kristen Ashley.  I remember when I first was introduced to Kristen Ashley, the first book that I read was Knight, which was the one with the pimp, the hero with the pimp, and I was aghast, and, but there was something about the book that made me want to read more of hers, and I kept reading, and I kept reading, and I, I read, like, I don’t know, twelve books in a period of, like, two weeks, and, and that’s really like reading 36 books, because Kristen Ashley’s books are, like, 800 pages long.

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Jane:  And I finally reached, like, peak Kristen Ashley, like, where one book was just flowing into another book, flowing into another book, and she actually writes, or she did write, in a lot of different series and in different genres, but at, at one point, at some point I just was like, okay, I’ve had enough.  And I find that to be true with other authors as well, is you do a glom, some authors – Stephanie Laurens is a perfect example.  She writes one type of story, and I love that story.  I mean, Devil’s Bride is one of my favorite books of all time, and I, I can’t re-read it anymore, ‘cause I’ve re-read it so many times that it’s just all too familiar, so there’s no new joy that I can get from it, but her books were, are so similar that it’s almost impossible to read them back to back.  Like, there needs to be a buffer –

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – between the time I’ve read one Stephanie Laurens and the time that I read another Stephanie Laurens, so to some extent I feel like the multiple releases can be exhausting for the reader, even though she loves that particular author –

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – and that you start to have your expectations, like, you know – Patricia Briggs is an example.  I think she only publishes once every nine months at the very most, or at the very fastest, but I think it’s more like once a year, but I just, you know, in between the times that she releases a book, I just look for other books to read, and then it’s a real joy to get, have that book come out, and you just kind of set aside a certain, you know, weekend or evening to read that book, and so it becomes more of, like, an event for the reader, whereas someone, an author who’s putting out several books doesn’t give the reader any time to kind of rest and relax.

Julie:  Yeah, I, I, I think that’s definitely one of the advantages from, one of the few advantages from a marketing standpoint is that, exactly like you said, it does become an event.  You know, I haven’t had a book out four years, so my readers are really, really excited.  We’re gearing up, you know, everybody’s like, you know, waiting for it to happen, and I think, so I think that is a, is a, is a good thing.  You get sort of more excitement.  Another thing that you said that I thought was interesting is, when you’re talking about maybe readers getting a little bit fatigued if you read an author, you know, several of the books right in a row.  Even if the plots aren’t the same, authors have a voice, and you know, it, a lot have a very distinctive voice, and so even if the plots are different, you can just hear, like, they’re just going to sound the same, and it’s not like you’re making the same jokes or whatever over and over again, but, like, I have a sarcastic tone, and I think even if the plots are different, if you, you know, like, you know, other voices have a distinctive voice in that way, like, you would, they would just start to sound the same because it’s so much of the same voice.

Sarah:  I once heard an agent talking at a conference that it was, if you have an author who writes a book once a year as part of a series, it’s un-, it’s, it’s not actually good to read them one after the other after the other after the other, because they’re not meant to be read that way, and I’ve never really fully agreed with her on that, but I, I agree entirely with Jane that when you know how often a book is going to come out from a particular author, you’re totally willing to wait.

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  It makes perfect sense.  When you’re working on a story – I’m assuming you’re working on your next book now.

Julie:  Yes.

Sarah:  Ooh.  Will you tell us about it?  Are you allowed to?

Julie:  I can say a little bit.  This is part of the whole one book a year.  I have to, like, parse out the information.

[Laughter]

Julie:  I have to make it exciting, you know, for six months, just to have some buildup, but yes, I could say very little.

Sarah:  It’s going to have words in it?

Julie:  It will have words.

Sarah:  Excellent!

Julie:  Yes, yes.

Jane:  Girl carrying shoes –

Jane and Sarah:  – on the cover!

Sarah:  Yes!

Julie:  [Laughs] Yes.

Sarah:  Good shoes on cover.

Julie:  I haven’t even seen a cover, but I think there’s a, I think there’s a, that’s a safe bet that that might be part of it.  But, yes, I’m working on my next one now, another contemporary romance, and one thing that I have said that this is kind of new for me is it’s going to be a reunion story.

Sarah:  Ooh, that is new.

Julie:  I know.  Yes, I had –

Jane:  Those are called second chance at love.  Use the appropriate trope terms!

Julie:  No, no, because this is a Julie James book, so they didn’t like each other.  They hated each other –

Jane:  Oh.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Julie:  – so this is a reunion story.

Jane:  But then you have to, so you still have to use the same, the appropriate trope terms:  enemies to lovers!

Julie:  Okay, okay.  So, it’s, it’s that.  They, see, in my version, they knew each other way back when, but of course they hated each other, and six years later, they now are brought together via circumstances and have to work together and get along through that, so.

Jane:  – exciting coming in August; can you share that?

Julie:  Yes.  So, we’re doing a trade re-release of It Happened One Wedding, which was last year’s book, and I’m excited about that.  I’m really excited to see, you know, kind of, you know, what happens with that.  It’ll be the same cover and everything; it’s just trade.  We talked, this was something that we talked about last year, Berkley and I.  We talked about it.  You know, I think there’s some, I think we’re, you know, we’re interested in, in going into this trade format for some of my books, but as I was very, like, you know, firm – although I, I didn’t get any pushback from this on Berkley – that I wanted the mass market to come out first and not be going into trade first, because that’s just a much higher price point, so these are going to be re-releases that we’re going to do after the mass market comes out first.  So, yeah, so we’ll see.  It’s just an opportunity to, you know, be in a different part of the bookstore, really, and get different eyes on the book, different people who, you know, don’t go to the back, maybe, to the romance section, haven’t read romance yet.  And so I’m, I’m curious to see how this does, so that’ll be, that’ll be fun.

Jane:  Well, I, I think going back, ‘cause I, I remember reading some comments about the podcast where readers said they kind of like to know the, some insider-y stuff, and as it relates to the mark-, the, the fr-, frequency of releases, I think the, one of the reasons that publishers used to do those, if you’ll recall – and maybe, Julie, this pre-dated your entry into the romance genre, but Sarah would remember – do you remember the Bantam back-to-back-to-back release of the Tracy Ann Warren historicals?

Sarah:  Oh, totally!

Jane:  I think –

Sarah:  I remember, I remember getting this huge package about the, the new back-to-back releases of a trilogy.

Jane:  That was the first one that I remember.

Sarah:  Yeah.  Oh, yeah, and then it was like, oh, my gosh!  This is a thing!  We all must do the thing.

Jane:  Right, because it was super successful for her.

Sarah:  Yes, it was.

Jane:  It turned, they took her from a, I don’t know what she was selling before, but she became a New York Times bestselling author after that, so everyone started to do this back-to-back-to-back release, and I think, my understanding was I was told that it, they were able to use their marketing money more efficiently because they were advertising three books at the same time, and so that was one of the nice things about a more frequent release, and it had to do also with the time that your books spend on the shelf at a store.  The paperback has maybe a sixty day – at the time; I have no idea what it is now – a sixty-day shelf rate, shelf life, where, before the bookstores would then take the books off the shelf and put new books out.  For trade and hardcover, the, the shelf life of those books is much longer.  And then the other thing, one of the things that self-published authors, why they say that you should publish sixty days, ninety days, it has to do with the Amazon, what they perceive to be the Amazon algorithm.  I mean, obviously no one knows because it’s secret, but indie authors have perceived that if you don’t have a release every sixty or ninety days, then you fall off in visibility, so those are the reasons that authors are being encouraged, told, badgered – [laughs] –

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – whatever adjective you want to put there, or action verb you want to put there – to release faster.

Julie:  I think Courtney Milan, I think – I didn’t attend this workshop, but I heard people talking about it, that she did something at RWA last year talking about the ninety day thing, and –

Sarah:  I, I was there for that, yes.

Julie:  Oh, okay.  And my understanding is that her take on it was, okay, let’s be honest, not everybody can do a book every ninety days, but that you should be doing something every ninety days, and maybe that’s a price drop.  Maybe that’s a giveaway.  Maybe that’s, you know, just something else, and I liked that idea a lot, and certainly that’s something that I, you know, do as well.  I, I think I try and do events even, you know, more than, you know, every ninety days.  But just staying on the radar of your readers, and all of those opportunities are opportunities to get new readers and everything, so I really like that take on it, that you should be actively making sure that you’re doing something every ninety days.

Sarah:  Yep, that was pretty much it, that in order to stay within that attention cycle of various algorithms and, and vendor preferences, doing something to highlight a book, even if it’s not a new book, is better than pushing yourself to release books that you’re not exactly ready to release ‘cause you have to do something every ninety days.  I, yeah, I could, I could not do that.  I know that that is not something I could do.  One thing that makes me a little sad, though, is the idea that someone would, would look at the publishing world in romance and say, oh, well, I can’t do that, so I might as well not do it at all.

Julie:  That’s exactly my, my fear is I, and I just, I really felt that particularly, you know, some of the conferences last year, that that, it really was this you have to.  You have to do this, and I, I just think there’s a lot of people who have, you know, other things going on in their lives, but maybe they would want to try writ-; you know, they have a job, but they’d want to try writing, you know, I’m going to say, on the side, although it kind of becomes, like, it’s just a second job.  And I would hate for anyone to be discouraged and think that that’s the only way to break into this market anymore.  I just, I would like to think that it’s, it’s not that set, that there are other ways, and –

Sarah:  So you –

Jane:  You have obliquely used people in your life, maybe not based books off of them but used, say, personality traits or tics or events in your books.  When you do that, do you ask permission first?  Do you give them the books?  Do you, how do you handle that?

Julie:  I’m trying to think of specific examples where I’ve, I’ve done that.  I mean, I use –

Jane:  Well, I remember the one, you had the girlfriend who had the list?

Julie:  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah, I did have, a good friend of mine, a very good friend of mine was single into her late thirties, and we would have many conversations about her frustration with dating in the big city as a thirty-something and just that whole scene, and you know, yes, there were conversations about a list that she had put together of things that she was looking for in a guy, and that made its way into It Happened One Wedding.  The heroine kind of comes up with this list, and you know, I think one of the things, this actually is something that my friend realized and something that the heroine in this book realizes is that, you know, in having a list – I mean, it’s a, there’s, there’s, certainly there’re certain things that are, you know, deal breakers for everyone, but to just go into the dating scene with this list of specific traits that you’re looking for is probably not such a great idea, and so that was something that I used in that story.

Jane:  I know that you’re a big fan of the Alexander McCall Smith series, but what else would you recommend to readers, or what have you read that you’ve really enjoyed?

Julie:  Actually, can we go back to that Alexander McCall Smith series?

Jane:  Oh!

Julie:  Because, Jane, you and I had a deal.  Do you remember this?

Jane:  [Laughs] Yes, and I always remember it.  And, like, every time I see you, I’m like, shit, I have not read that book yet.

Julie:  Yes.  So, for people who don’t know –

Jane:  And, and you, and I know I owe you, ‘cause you read The Bride, which I don’t think you liked, but I can totally appreciate that.

Julie:  Yes.  So for people who don’t know, Jane and I had a deal that if I read The Bride, that’s Julie Gar-, Julie Garwood, right?

Sarah:  Yeah.  Yeah, The Bride by Julie Garwood.

Julie:  Yeah.  Yes, if I read that one, that Jane would read the first book in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, so I’m waiting.

[Laughter]

Jane:  It’s going to happen.  All right, since we’re doing the podcast and I don’t like to have unfulfilled obligations, I will read it before the next podcast, and I will give my little mini-review on the next podcast.

Julie:  Great!  Nice!  Nice.  Okay, so what other books do I recommend, was that the question?

Sarah:  Yes.

Julie:  So who else do I like reading?

Jane:  That you’ve read recently and enjoyed.

Julie:  Shannon Stacey, Falling for Max.  That I loved.  I loved this book.  I just read this, I think, like, a couple months ago, and the reason I loved it so much is the hero was so unique.  He’s a beta hero for sure, but also quirky.  He’s very socially awkward, and I love the way Shannon Stacey did his, like, his point of view and his thoughts and sort of his anxiety about navigating certain social situations, and I thought it was very cute and very romantic, and I really, really like that.  And just not the type of story, because you’re always seeing alphas and, hey, this is coming from someone who, I write alpha heroes and heroines, and so – but I just thought it was a very refreshing story, so that’s one that I read recently.  What else?

Sarah:  I really liked that he was insecure about how to interact with people, but it was a genuine insecurity.  Like, it wasn’t, like, just an act.  He generally, he genuinely had no real sense of how to go about dating or meeting people or interacting with people, and his sort of matter of fact vulnerability about it was really powerful.

Julie:  Yeah.  In, in some ways it reminded me of The Rosie Project, which I thought was also a great book.  And, you know, it’s certainly more of a – whileThe Rosie Project is a romance, I think the romance is even more front and center in Falling for Max, but it just sort of reminded me of that, the type of hero and just sort of his concerns and, like you said, these very genuine concerns about how to navigate certain social situations.

Then in terms of other books that I’ve read, so I’m in a book club, and we go, we meet once a month, and so I tend to read, and we read mostly literary fiction.  Well, we, we read a mix, mix of everything.  And so I end up reading, like, one romance, then one non-romance, so what I most recently read was my first Harlan Coben book, The Stranger.  And I –

Sarah:  Ooh!

Julie:  – I did like that, and I would call it a beach read, but a different kind.  We were laughing about it in our book club; we were calling it a man’s beach read.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Julie:  Like, this is what the guy would have at the beach.  But we, you know, we all, we, we really liked it – I shouldn’t say man’s beach read – but it was like a fun, suspense-y, very fast-paced, not-too-heavy serious plot, not too ridiculous, either, though.  You know, sort of an average guy caught up in this, you know, sort of whirlwind, suspenseful situation.  So I liked that; that was good.  And I’m trying to think.  I am catching up still on Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling series, and I’m so excited because the book that’s up next, and I know you’re all going to laugh because I’m very far behind, but the next one is Caleb’s book, Heart of Obsidian?  Is that the name of that one?

Sarah:  Yep, that’s it.

Julie:  So that’s, so I’m finally up to that book, and I’m almost kind of, like –

Sarah:  You’re not that far behind!

Julie:  No, I’m not, I’m not.  I’m, like, you know, I’m here, and I’m at this book, and I’m like, ooh, do I want to draw it out even more, the anticipation?  But yes, so that’ll be the next one for me in that series.

Sarah:  I have a weird question for you.  You said at the beginning that you write contemporary romance, which is totally true, and as Jane was pointing out, the trope tags are so important because contemporary romance describes a whole lot of books, many of which are completely not the same.  So you have contemporary romance like yours that’s set in a metropolitan area.  I, I had a, a long conversation with a couple different people in different podcasts, and we describe your books as competence porn –

Julie:  Mm!

Sarah:  – because the heroes and the heroines are incredibly competent at their jobs, and you see them doing their jobs, and you see them enjoying their jobs, which is the part that I really like.  Like, I’m really glad I have this job; I really like it.  I like what I do.  I’m going to keep doing it, because I like it, ‘cause I, that’s why I do it.  I really like that, but then you also have contemporary romances that are small towns; you have contemporary romances that are super, super hot; and you have contemporary romances that have no sex in them at all; and so one of the reasons I think that the trope and, and subgenre tags are so important is because it helps readers communicate specifically what it is that they’re looking for and, and specifically what a book is, so if it meets their particular catnip needs.  Do you have a particular way of describing your books to make, make sure that people understand how your contemporary romances are distinct from other contemporary romances?  I’ve, I’ve been calling them to people who I recommend them to metropolitan –

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  – [laughs] – which sounds so pretentious I can’t –

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  It’s so pretentious of a term, but I could not think of a way of saying, it’s not small town, it’s set in a city, although one thing I do like is how, when you write a city, you, you capture how a city functions in small neighborhoods, and moving from one neighborhood to another means you change your drycleaner, you change where you get Chinese food, and you change everything, ‘cause it’s, every little neighborhood functions as a small town in a lot of ways, and that’s true of a lot of, lot of metro areas.

Cat:  Meow.

Sarah:  Hey!  Cat on the podcast.  So how do you describe your books?

Julie:  So I call them romantic comedies, and in fact, I think, I think I’ve told this, this story before, but when I first started writing, I started with – so I, I, I’m a lawyer, and I practiced law for a while, and then I just got this idea that I would write a screenplay.  I’m a big fan of movies, and, so I wrote some screenplays and had some minor successes with that.  Ultimately decided to turn one of my screenplays into a book, and in my first conversation with my editor at Berkley, I kept describing the book as a romantic comedy, and she said, you know, that’s just not really a term that we use in the literary world.  This, this would be a contemporary romance.  And I think, I’ve been told that some of that is, there’re just different notions that you get in the book world when you hear comedy, and I think, I don’t know, I feel like if you think back to, like, was it the nineties?  Maybe not the nineties, but when we went through the really, I’m going to say the term chick lit, when it was, like, the cartoon-y covers and everything.

Sarah:  I was just going to say, you mean the cartoon covers where everyone had, like, giant heads and tiny little stringy bodies?

Julie:  Right.  And I, I think there’s some thought that if you say romantic comedy, people are thinking of that, and not that there’s anything wrong with that, but maybe that that term feels a little bit dated or something?  But that is how I would describe them, that’s how I see them is just sort of, you know, lots of dialogue between, and, you know, banter between the hero and heroine, and yes, sort of like the big city as a backdrop and the friendships and everything, so, you know, I still tend to say romantic comedy, but Sarah, didn’t you actually have the term contemporary comedy – what did you say?  You had a term that you came up with.

Sarah:  Oh, contemporary comedy romance.

Julie:  Yes.

Sarah:  Yeah, it was, it was a way of saying it was a romantic comedy without people thinking, oh, so it’s like a Sandra Bullock movie in book form, because –

Julie:  Right.

Sarah:  – they’re not always like that.

Julie:  Right.

Sarah:  And I also noticed that there aren’t, there aren’t as many movies being made that are called romantic comedies anymore.

Julie:  It’s true.  I, I have a friend who’s a producer in Hollywood, and we were talking about this, and he said that directors, it’s the, it’s directors.  They don’t want to take on romantic comedies.  Frankly, so many of them don’t turn out well that it’s just, you know, I think there’s a fear that you’re going to go into this as a project, as a producer, as a director, and it’s, you’re just dooming yourself from the beginning, from, like, in terms of reviews and everything.  And so, yes, it’s, and the ones that are getting made are these, I think they’re skewing more R rated and tend to be a little bit more bawdy than sort of what you and I would think of, like the Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock type romantic comedy.

Sarah:  Yeah, there’s definitely more of a – I think bawdy is the right word – sort of a bawdy, gross-out, buddy humor?

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Bro humor, too, more than meet-cute romantic comedies, ‘cause there used to be, you know, one per quarter, sometimes two.  Now there’s –

Julie:  Right, and Hugh Grant was in, like, all of them.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Yes, Hugh Grant was a frequent player in those movies.  But I don’t think romantic comedy is the right way to describe what you write, even though it’s comedy and it’s contemporary and it’s romantic, it’s, it’s not quite the same thing.  It doesn’t have the same narrative beats, if that makes sense.

Julie:  Yeah.

Sarah:  So I always think of what you write as contemporary comedy romance, but when I’m, like, giving recommendations to people, I always have a few sort of key words that I use for different authors’ backlists, like yours are, you know, set in Chicago with competent heroines and pr-, and professionals.  Like, they people who are working in these books are professionals, and they’re really good at their jobs.  There’s also the, you know, the sort of contemporary trend of something, something has happened, and I am starting my life over, and I just realized that I have not been my true self, and so now I’m going to go to this quirky place with the cute name – [laughs] – and I’m going to find my new life.  There’s a sort of a start-, starting-over contemporary.  Does that make sense?

Julie:  Right.  Yes.

Sarah:  There’s the starting-over contemporary, but none of your characters are starting over.

Julie:  No, my –

Sarah:  They’re, they’re adding on.

Julie:  That’s right.  Mine are not starting over.  Mine are people who think everything is set and that they totally have their acts together, and they’re, like, going along with their lives, and like, this is good, I have everything figured out, and then something is going to happen that is going to completely shake up their world, and they’re going to have to figure out where to go from there.  I like throwing people who think they have their acts together into a situation that they’re completely not comfortable with.  And either, maybe it’s something like in Suddenly One Summer where it’s a break-in and it really, you know, sort of changes everything for her, or it’s even just somebody comes into their life that rattles them –

Sarah:  Yes.

Julie:  – in a way that they’re not prepared for and, you know, gets under their skin, kind of in a bad way, but kind of in a good way, in a way that no one else has before.

Sarah:  Yep.  Totally.  And one of the things I really liked about – it’s so embarrassing when I talk to an author and I’m like, you know, the one you wrote with this one, the one who gets the tacos in the first chapter –

Julie:  What color is, what color is the dress on the cover?

Sarah:  That’s a good way to remember it.  The one I remember most is – [laughs] – tacos! – [laughs more] – she gets tacos in the first chapter.

Julie:  Oh, right, right, in the first chapter!  Yeah.

Sarah:  I, I can’t remember which – [laughs] –

Julie:  Chicken, chicken tacos, extra pico, yes.

Sarah:  Yes, thank you!  I remember that so clearly.  Do I remember the name of the book?  No.  It’s very –

Julie:  It’s Love Irresistibly.

Sarah:  Thank you!  It’s the red dress.

Julie:  Yes, it is.

Sarah:  The –

Julie:  Which is a very famous dress, apparently.  It’s a Hermes Band-aid, Band-aid dress, is it?

Sarah:  The, the Band-aid dress, yes.

Julie:  Yes, or bandage, or, I don’t, I’m probably saying this wrong, but yes.  When that cover came out, I had a whole bunch of people write me, people who obviously are much more fashion-savvy than I am, saying, oh, my gosh!  That’s the Hermes dress!  So.  Which I thought was kind of cool, ‘cause that was a photo shoot, so that means that Berkley went and –

Sarah:  Got themselves a dress!

Julie:  – got, got that dress, yes.

Sarah:  Well, between your cover and then the Darynda Jones Charlie Davidson series, the first one has the skull silver sandals, I believe those are Alexander McQueen, so I mean, between the two of you, you have, like, a whole fashion lineup.

Julie:  Right!

Sarah:  Right.

Julie:  Well, and there’s some theory that the shoes in It Happened One Wedding might be Louboutins that the bottoms were Photoshopped to be pink on the cover instead of red.  I’m not sure.

Sarah:  That makes sense, ‘cause that’s a trademark.

Julie:  Yes.

Sarah and Julie:  So –

Sarah:  – can’t use that.

Julie:  So, yes, but what were we saying before we got off on the chicken tacos, extra pico?

Sarah:  [Laughs] Chicken pico.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  That the conflict of the taco book – [laughs] which I am now unfortunately stuck with in my – my brain is such a sad place – that the conflict in Love Irresistibly is, in part, these are two really busy people; how do they make room for someone who is increasingly important?  I mean, a lot of the conflict was work-life balance, and I remember we did a, a, a chat at B&N about it – or Barnes and Noble in, I think it was the Upper East side, or the Upper West side – and, and I was saying, you know, one of the major conflicts is work-life balance, which sounds really boring and dull when you say it out loud, but in the book, it is an actual piece of tension.

Julie:  Yeah, it was.

Sarah:  These are some busy human beings.

Julie:  It, it, you know, look, in contemporary romance, like, you know, sometimes you have books that have, like, a Big Thing, you know, that’s keeping them apart, but for the most part it’s, you know, people’s sort of fears and insecurities and their anxieties, and so in that sense, you know, this is just one of those things, but it’s a very real thing that I, I see amongst my girlfriends is, you know, how, is finding that time for your personal life and whether it’s, you know, my friend who was in her, you know, thirties and finding time to date, you know –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Julie:  – while having a very busy career, or, you know, maybe you are married and you have kids and, you know, balancing that aspect of your personal life, and I think that that’s something that a lot of people can relate to, and it can be a very real obstacle, you know, just – so, so yes, that is something that the heroine and the hero in that book are, are sort of trying to navigate.

Sarah:  And it’s a totally valid, totally understandable conflict, too.  It’s hard to make it sound interesting in the cover copy, but it’s, it works perfectly.

Julie:  Well, and notice we didn’t say that in the cover copy.

Sarah:  Yes, exactly!  [Laughs]

Julie:  So the cover copy – and, and it’s true, ‘cause we’re sitting here, we’re telling this about the book, and the book is not just like, oh, where do I find time to date?  You know, the book starts off, they meet because she is the general counsel for a restaurant company, and the FBI wants to bug a table so that, they put microphones under the table so that they can listen in on a, on a conversation, so there’s actually this very sort of –

Sarah:  Specific meet-cute.

Julie:  – more, there’s their more exciting, like, you know, plot that gets kicked off with the FBI doing this investigation and everything, so, so yes, there is other stuff going on other than just where do I find time to meet someone for coffee?

Sarah:  But it’s a good conflict.  It works.

Julie:  It does.  Well, it’s real.

Sarah:  Great.  So you didn’t quite answer the what’s your next book about?  What’s going on with the next book?  Is there any tiny tidbit of information that you can give us, aside from the fact that it will have all of the same letters of the alphabet as your previous books?

[Laughter]

Julie:  Well, remember, you know, the whole thing about stringing this out.  I haven’t –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Julie:  Well, I’ll say this, because I dropped this hint and some people have started figuring out, I did tweet in February, and I think I posted on Facebook, that I had met – so, one of the people that I work with, you know, for, as my research consultants is this FBI agent in Chicago, and – an active FBI agent – and I did mention back in February or March, which is, which is when I tend to plot my books, that I had just had lunch with him to discuss sort of things that, you know, he’s working on, and I think people can maybe draw conclusions about where the next might, book might be going from, from that?  But other than that, no, I’m not saying too much.

Sarah:  Bummer.  I was hoping for, like, a whole plot summary here.

Julie:  No.  Well, I’m still writing it, so that means –

Sarah:  Okay.

Julie:  – still, you know, figuring things out as I go along, but –

Sarah:  Is there a, is there a Pinterest board yet?

Julie:  I do, well, I have a Pinterest board for the book that just came out –

Sarah:  Right.

Julie:  – so there is one for Suddenly One Summer.  I have a Pinterest board that’s not public yet that I’m working on, because I do tend to be very visual.

Sarah:  I was going to say, I know that you are, you include a lot of visuals in your writing.

Julie:  It just helps me, like, if I’m thinking, oh, the heroine, you know, she’d be, she’d have a cute suit in this outfit, and for the last book, where the heroine was a divorce attorney, like, her whole wardrobe was basically Olivia Pope’s from Scandal.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Julie:  You know, I just love that character’s wardrobe, and so on the Pinterest board it’s, like, all pictures of Kerry Washington in different, in different suits.  So, you know, yes, and granted, some of this is a little bit of a distraction when you’re writing, but I’ll be thinking, oh, she would have a cute suit on in this, and then I quickly Google, you know, cute suits or something like that.  But it just helps me to sort of it see it, so I do the Pinterest board.  I don’t make it public, but I do start putting things in there as I, as I’m writing, as I go.

Sarah:  Where do you find all of your visuals?  Like, do you have things that you have in mind, like, I want the heroine to be wearing something like this, or do you just sort of say, okay, for the next two hours I get to go shopping online for my character.  Woohoo!

Julie:  Yeah.  Honestly, it’s like, truly, I’ll type in cute outfits, cute work outfits 2015 or something, and you’ll get, like, somebody else has already done that Pinterest, you know –

Sarah:  Woohoo!

Julie:  – and put that together, so, yeah, so it’s, it’s that.  Then for the board, the things that I also put together, I use, for the most part I use real locations in Chicago.  So, real restaurants, real bars and stuff, and so I’ll break and I’ll check and see, if it’s a place that I haven’t been too, you know, I’ll check their website out and look at, you know, and, and, at that.  So that’s another thing that I’ll use.  And then of course we all have our hero and heroine inspirations, like, who we sort of picture in our head for the character, and if you get really bored, you know, you can always go Google Henry Cavill pictures or something –

Sarah:  Yeah.

Julie:  – [laughs] which is always a nice way to, to pass the time.

Sarah:  It’s horrible that that’s part of your job.

Julie:  Oh, I know, it’s just terrible.

Sarah:  So, we can’t get anymore hints about the future book.

Julie:  I think I dropped a very big hint there.

Sarah:  Hmm.  Okay.  I’ll, I’ll –

Jane:  – saying the next book is about an FBI agent.

Julie:  That’s, well, yeah.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Julie:  Maybe.

Sarah:  Is it, is it, is it Melissa McCarthy?  Or, no, she’s CIA in that, in Spy.

Julie:  She’s CIA.  I want to see that.  I heard it’s hilarious.

Sarah:  Oh, I heard it’s fantastic.  I really want to see it too.  There’re a lot of movies I want to see.  When my kids go to camp, I’m going to be like, we’re going to the theater and we’re living there now.  ‘Cause, you know, it’s really hard to enjoy a movie when you’re paying money for a babysitter?

Julie:  Absolutely.

Sarah:  Like, it bums me out, ‘cause the tickets are already fourteen dollars, and then I’ve got to pay the babysitter, and I’m like, this is not worth it.

Julie:  It’s –

Sarah:  I like to be on my couch and go pee whenever I want.

Julie:  It’s, it’s the question we ask:  is this a hundred-dollar movie?  That’s what –

Sarah:  Yes!  [Laughs]

Julie:  – every time.  After you pay for the sitter, it’s at least a hundred dollars.  Yes.  It’s nice – although this doesn’t help with the sitter – my son is eight now, and what’s been fun is he finally is the age where we can take him, like, he saw Avengers 2 in the theater.

Sarah:  Whoa!

Julie:  And we’re, and we’re taking him to see Jurassic World tomorrow, which is, he’s been looking forward to this since, like, last year.  And it’s fun when they get to that age where you could start taking them with.  I mean obviously we still need a sitter for my daughter, ‘cause she’s too young; she’s four.

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Julie:  But it’s fun to, to be doing those things, like, with them and seeing how excited they get.

Sarah:  Are you going to start writing characters who have children?

Julie:  That’s a good question.

Sarah:  I can almost see in my mind Jane shaking her head, no, no, no, no no no no.  No, she’s not a big fan of kids in books.

Julie:  Well, I’ve been wanting to do a pregnant heroine for forever, and I just –

Sarah:  Ohhh?

Julie:  – I just –

Sarah:  (FLAG _____ 44:13) what?  [Laughs]

Julie:  I just, the idea never fully comes together, it just never works out, but I always just thought that that would be just a very interesting comment.  There’s – and I think we’ve maybe actually talked about this, but there was this movie – and it was not a good movie – but there’s this movie with Jennifer Lopez where she decides to go forward with in vitro, and right after she goes through the procedure and is pregnant, she has her meet-cute with a guy in a taxicab, and they start dating, and it’s like the idea that she’s dating while she’s pregnant and everything, and I just thought that was such, like, a neat idea.  I don’t think the execution of the movie was that great.  But, you know, well, it’s so hard for me because I never plan ahead.  I don’t know what my book after this one that I’m writing will be.  I have no clue; I have no thoughts about it.  So I would say that on the issue of children, it’s, I’m not opposed to it, but I’m also not trying to do that, if it fit with the storyline.  But I do think that doing authentic kids’ voices can be tough, because –

Sarah:  Yes, I agree with you.

Julie:  – either they’re going to be, they’re going to sound way too mature and old and wise, and you have, you know, the, the wise six-year-old character – [laughs] – and that doesn’t ring true to me, or they’re authentic, and then, you know, they sound like, you know, your four- and your eight-year-olds, and you know, how much are you going to, you know, do with, with, with that, really?  I mean, you know, I, I just think – so I don’t know.  I think it’s tricky to, to do them and to not have them be, like – I always use this as an example – Ben in Friends, Ross’s first child in Friends –

Sarah:  Yes.

Julie:  – who, like, we saw so heavily in the first and second season because they needed him for the plot, and then, you know –

Sarah:  Gone.

Julie:  – gone.

Sarah:  Just like the monkey.  Didn’t he have a monkey for a season, too?

Julie:  Yes, but we did see the monkey.  I mean, that’s a –

Sarah:  Yes.

Julie:  I think the monkey got more of a farewell than Ben ever did of –

Sarah:  Yes, definitely true.

Julie:  Yes.  Marcel.  And so I think that’s another problem is using them well, but then you don’t want them around when it’s time to have a nice hot, sexy scene.

Sarah:  So true.

Julie:  And where, you know, where are they?  Where are the kids?

Sarah:  Yep.

Julie:  So I think it’s tricky to do that.

Sarah:  It is very difficult.  I – [laughs] – I remember reading an Amish romance at some point, and it was like magical Amish childcare would show up at every perfect moment?

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  Like, just as the hero and heroine were having a moment –

Dog:  Bark!

Sarah:  – my dog did not like it, first of all, and somebody would be like, let me take your daughter!

Dog:  Woof woof woof!

Sarah:  Hey!  [Snaps fingers] Let, let me –

Julie:  For the whole weekend.  For the whole weekend!

Sarah:  Yeah, let me just take your daughter; we’re going to take her for a few hours.  Bye!

Julie:  Yes.

Dog:  Bark!

Sarah:  My dog is not a fan of Amish romances.

Julie:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  He has many things to say about them, apparently.

Julie:  Right, right.

Sarah:  We can’t not have pets in the podcast.  I’m going to have to, like, start reaching out to PetSmart and be like, hey, would you like to be a special guest sponsor?  We have a lot of pets!

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  They will all speak positively of you.  Of course, when we want them to talk, they won’t.  I’m really glad we talked about the, the pressure to publish something every ninety days, because I, I, I have to think that that is incredibly stressful, especially for someone who (a) like, you, publishes every year or someone who’s been publishing once a year, and it’s been working so far.

Julie:  Well, yeah, and, and I’m, I’m actually really glad we talked about that too, because it’s something that, you know, last year, you know, I was really thinking a lot about, because I just felt that was such the message that people kept hearing over and over again, and you know, this is coming from, you know, the way I got into writing, I had a job that, I was a lawyer at a large firm, which, you know, you work tons of hours.  If you had told me back then the only way that you’re going to be successful is if you can do this and keep turning out a new book every ninety days, I would have been like, what’s the point?  You know, I’m not even going to, that’s not feasible for me, and I just felt like that’s so not realistic for some people, and I would hate for people to get really discouraged from that.  So I’m, I’m glad we got to talk about that too.  And it’s interesting, because I don’t see why – I don’t, I don’t know if that’s how it is in sci-fi, you know, and, and other commercial fiction genres.  I don’t know, so maybe somebody can tell me if that’s how it is, but if it’s not –

Jane:  I, I think it has to do with the fact that there’s, romance readers are very price-conscious –

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – and so a small, a dollar raise in the price of a book can mean that that reader will wait until she can get your book – not you personally –

Julie:  Right.

Jane:  – but a book used or some other on sale or something else like that, and they will replace that with a cheaper, even lower quality good.  They read fa-, faster, and they consume more, and that’s why.

Julie:  Well, that raises an interesting question, then, whether, right, whether that there’s sort of a pressure on the romance author to, you know, be making your product unique enough that you still are offering something that still gets that person, even though, you know, they could get four of the same, you know, within a year period or whatever, so.  I don’t know.  It’s a, it’s an interesting thing, but yeah, no, I’m glad we got to talk about that.

Jane:  Right.

Sarah:  And then you were talking about, Jane, the, the burn-out cycle, where people get through with a particular thing relatively quickly.  I’m, I’m so curious.  Okay, we’ve had billionaires, we got stepbrothers, what’s next?

Jane:  Oh, I think the burn-out rate is tremendous right now.  I mean, I feel like the readers burn through tropes so fast.  I think in order to have a sustainable writing career, you have to either be the voice of the, the subgenre, like I think Jo Wylde is the voice of motorcycle club books and that she could always write those books and still have success –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – whereas a new person coming in, it is very difficult to break in, I think, because the market is really saturated, although, you know, people still want those books.  You know, a smart author who is capable of writing a variety of things, I think, looks at the list and says, what’s not popular?  I’m going to write that.

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  ‘Cause I think that’s the smartest way to go, because you want to be ahead of the trend, especially if you’re writing, you know, something that you’re releasing every ninety days, and if you look at some of these authors that are releasing every ninety days, their things are, you know, 10,000, 12,000 words –

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – so if that’s all your putting out every thirty, sixty, ninety days, that’s pretty small output, but, you know, for these subscription-based services, a reader doesn’t get mad about that.  I had read a subscription, or a serial by an author who had eight parts, and I think that each part was about 8,000 to 10,000, and had I had to pay for those individually –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Jane:  – I, I, I would have stopped, but since they were part of my subscription, it was like, fine, I’ll read the next one, and I’ll read the next one, and I’ll read the next one.  There’s no inv-, there was very little investment for me, both in time and money, for me to read those, and I think that a lot of readers feel that way.  I also think there’s a little danger in that for readers.  Like, I think about myself and how once you get used to reading something, for example, first person, present tense.  I mean, do you remember how, I remember just being super resistant to first person past, and I hated it, and then I would never even read first person, present tense, and now it’s, like, hard for me to read a third person because you, you get so used to a certain type of writing style –

Sarah:  Yep.

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – and that when you encounter something unfamiliar, you’re kind of like, hmmm.  This is going to take more effort from me.

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  Do I want to give it that effort?  I think of the book, which is, you know, my favorite book of the last five years, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  He talked about how the reason that you, that certain songs are popular are because they’re the same song over and over, and that’s true.  Taylor Swift’s 1989album, which I love, is basically the same beats and notes over and over and over.

Julie:  Actually, there’s a –

Sarah:  Oh, no, that’s totally true.  There’s a descending scale in all of her songs.  The same so-, the same notes that are “Boys only want love if it’s torture” –

Julie:  Mm-hmm.  Yeah.

Sarah:  – that same descending scale is the background for the next three songs that she’s put out.  That same scale is in every song.  It’s freaking me out, so, yeah, that’s amazing.  I didn’t realize that it wasn’t just me who was crazy thinking that.

Julie:  No, I think her, I – Maroon 5 is, is another one.

Jane:  There’s funny video on YouTube where these three comedians who play instruments go through, like, the last ten years of –

Sarah:  Oh, I’ve seen that, and it’s all Pachelbel!

Jane:  Yeah, and they’re, it’s all the same chords series.  It’s not only the same chords but it’s the series of chords that are the same –

Sarah:  Yes, it’s Pachelbel’s Canon.

Jane:  – and in Charles Duhigg’s books, he talks about how we’re habituated to respond a certain way to certain stimuli, and so they talked, the, the example that they were talking about in the book was the movie, or the song OutKast, “Hey Ya!” –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  – and how that was so unusual of a song, and even though the record executives loved the song, and they thought it was really catchy and very different, when they started playing the song on radio, it was a total bomb, so what they did, I guess, ‘cause, I don’t know, they really believed in the song and they wanted to make it popular, they started playing it in between, like, Celine Dion and something else.  [Laughs]

Julie:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  Something that people professed to hate but listened to anyway, so they, I don’t – they must have paid radio stations to do this, but the radio stations started playing “Hey Ya!” after a very popular song –

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Jane:  and then they would play another very popular song after “Hey Ya!” with the more familiar tunes and progressions and notes, and that’s how they felt that “Hey Ya!” became a success.

Julie:  No, well, well, yeah.  And, well, I mean even in a broader sense, bringing it back to books, like, you know, just, there are beats to romances.  There are beats to mysteries and, and everything, and I think, yes, that’s something that readers like, and that’s good.  You know, I was thinking about this because that book that I was talking about, the Harlan Coben book that was the suspense, it had – I don’t read a, a bunch of mysteries, but I’ve read a, you know, some, and they all have – and in fact, The Girl on the Train had this as well – the scene at the end where the villain explains their whole plot, and how they did it, and why and everything, and in our, these were two book club books, both The Girl on the Train and The Stranger were book clubs books, and so I was talking about this, is my frustration with that, how it’s in every mystery that I read, that scene.  And then I realized, well, maybe that’s because that’s part of what we expect to see.  That is the equivalent of the break-up scene in a romance or a romantic comedy.  You have to have that beat, that dark moment, and so – I, I was saying, like, clearly this, this must be something that is completely accepted within, you know, people who love mysteries and read a lot of these, because if I’m picking this up after reading just a few here and there, you know, clearly I’m not the only one noticing it, but yes, it must be something that that’s just part of what you expect to see.

Sarah:  And it all gets explained to the detail.

Julie:  Oh, yeah, it’s this long, like, monologue.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Which is hilarious, because that was actually a running joke in The Incredibles, ‘cause my son was home sick, so we –

Julie:  Yes!

Sarah:  – we both, we, we caught The Incredibles –

Julie:  I caught you monologuing!

Sarah:  I caught you monologuing!  And so the, the, it’s like a running joke –

Julie:  Yes.

Sarah:  – that that’s something that heroes do.

Julie:  Yes, yes.  Every mystery had this.  I read J. K. Rowling, her other name, The Cuckoo’s Calling book.  These are very talented authors who are having this scene, so clearly it’s either, there truly is no other way to convey this information, which I don’t think, or this is what the reader expects –

Sarah:  Yep.

Julie:  – and they want this moment, like they want the break-up scene in the romance, and so we’re going to give it to them, so that’s kind of what I’ve drawn from that.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this week’s podcast.  I want to thank Jane and Julie James for hanging out and talking about all of the things.  I’m always fascinated when we have a conversation with an author that goes from discussing writing as a craft to writing as a business to reading as an entertainment.  It’s, I always think it’s so cool that all of the romance authors that I speak to are also very much readers as well, and, and we all think about how we read and how it changes, so thank you for that conversation.

We have a bunch of future podcasts coming up, because we publish one a week, and that’s how we roll here.  We’re going to talk to sociologists who are studying romance; I’m going to talk to RedHeadedGirl; and we have to find out if Jane actually read The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and what she thought, because she said she was going to, so now we have to find out if she did, right?  Obviously!

This podcast is brought to you by InterMix, publisher of Yours All Along, the brand-new Loving on the Edge e-novella from New York Times bestselling author Roni Loren.  You can download it on June 16^th.

And if you were wondering, is this more Peatbog?  Why, yes, yes, it is.  This is the Peatbog Faeries from their new album Blackhouse.  This song is called “Strictly Sambuca,” and I don’t know about you, but I am entirely in favor of things being strictly Sambuca, because that would be awesome for everyone.  You can find this album on iTunes, on Amazon, or you can find out more on the Peatbog Faeries website.

And of course, thank you to Sassy Outwater, who you can find on Twitter @SassyOutwater, for providing the music, because I think she has production credits on this album.  And if you were listening last week when I was talking about how Sassy was undergoing brain surgery, she came through her brain surgery very, very well.  She has a very long recovery, but her MRI shows that they got all of the tumor, and she is now cancer free, which is freaking awesome!  Plus, if you listen to our interview, you know that surgeons were going to have to 3D print a piece of her skull.  I have not yet heard whether or not we have a unicorn, we have elf ears, what’s going on here.  I would like to find out, and so, you know, this is the kind of hard-hitting journalism that you can expect from me.  What is the shape of the piece of the skull, and did she get a horn?  Because everyone needs to be a unicorn, right?  So, Sassy, if you are listening, we hope you are doing very, very well, and dude, if you’re not a unicorn, I’m going to be really bummed.  But you knew this already.

As always, if you have feedback, ideas, or suggestions, you can email us at [email protected].  Y’all send the best email, and we love to hear from you, so if you feel like saying something back to use or you find yourself talking back to the podcast while listening to it and then you want to write those things down, that’s totally cool!  [email protected] is where you can find us.

In the meantime, on behalf of Julie James and Jane and myself, we wish you the very best reading.  Have a great weekend.

[Sambuca-drinking music]