If you are looking to self-publish a romance novel, why not work with the people you know? You just might have an expert in your home or in your friend group who knows how to write or publish a book. In this video, the Self Publishing Show interviews Lucy and Tim Score (aka–Tim Hoot), a husband and wife team. Lucy does the writing and Tim does the marketing and publishing.
Lucy Score has always been a writer who loved to read romance novels. She was a journalist but did not like working for newspapers. She began writing stories in notebooks, and her brother told her that she could self-publish. So, she wrote a book after being laid off from a newspaper job. It took her a year to write 25,000 words; she found it difficult to focus and commit to writing and publishing.
She worked as a freelance author and wrote her novella in her downtime. She published it in 2015 and sold 35 copies. Her brother helped her make connections to expand her novella into 50,000 words and get her book into the world. The new version – Undercover Love – came out a year later.
She learned how to be a better writer and speed up her writing to work as a full-time novelist in five years. Her novels are contemporary romance, which is the biggest genre in the world. She has explicit sex scenes, but there’s a story in her books.
When her second book came out, it hit #1 in the Kindle Store on Amazon. She had just been fired from her accounting job the day before the book came out on Amazon. Her independent publisher gave her an advance on the sale of the book, which was enough for her to quit her job immediately.
Her two-week advance from the publisher of $40,000 was as much as her annual salary. With her 50-50 royalty split, she made $250,000 in one month. After her second book hit #1, more people bought her first book, too. She felt very insecure about not having any control over trusting her livelihood to write romance novels. But, people actually do.
Eventually, Score wanted to have control over her books and how they were published. Her husband became her publisher, after doing other self-employed work. There is so much to learn about writing, self-publishing, marketing, and communicating with readers.
Score learned how to “make herself sticky” with her readers. She needed to learn how to get her readers to want to stick with her and keep buying her books. Score made a significant mistake of turning a long text into two short ones with a cliffhanger in the middle. Readers did not like that strategy.
Instead, she learned practical ways to keep her readers wanting to read her work:
- Created the “back matter.” She built a website and created a newsletter. The back matter is the information about the author on the last page of the book.
- Started a Facebook reader group. Her Facebook group has helped to build her career.
- Attended conferences to work with other writers. Getting connections with other writers helps her rank higher on the book-selling lists.
- Attends events with her readers. Her readers participated in a book-signing event with Nora Roberts. Her readers traveled together to meet Score after planning an event on Facebook.
With a set of readers, she writes books that she would like to read. She does not think about her readers, but she does drop Easter eggs in her books, like her regular readers’ names. Indie writers get to have relationships with her readers in a different way that writers connected with their readers in previous decades.
As a husband and wife team, the two work well together at home. Score writes, and Hoot works in the basement in his office. The pair are workaholics, so they make time to be together outside of work situations. She does all of the writing, and he does all of the marketing and business work.
You can learn more about Score’s books on her website. She is the author of the Sinner and Saints novels, the Blue Moon series, the Bootleg Springs series, and several stand-alone novels.