What's the story behind your Starstruck series?
I’m often asked where I got the inspiration for the premise behind my Starstruck series. The answer lies way back in elementary school, around third grade. A girl in my class back then, who shall remain name- less (mainly because I don’t remember her name!) insisted for quite a while that she was really a Martian Princess. Of course, we all made fun of her and asked lots of questions to try to prove she was making it up, but she stuck to her story—for several weeks, anyway. Many years later, something made me think of her again and this time, with my writer’s brain, I suddenly started wondering, “What if she was telling the truth?” And thus, the idea for Starstruck was born. If you’ve read it, you’ll see how I worked in that little snippet from my own childhood memories.
What motivated you to become an indie author?
After I'd spent many years publishing traditionally with some of the big houses like Harlequin and HarperCollins, the ebook revolution started to gather steam. I began requesting the rights back to my previously published books and as they were returned, I had new covers made, re-edited them, formatted them and put them up as ebooks. Smashwords helped to make that process easy back in the day when there were few formatting or distribution options out there. As my older titles began to find new readers (and make me new money!) I was also writing new books in a new genre--my Starstruck series of YA science fiction romances. After trying to sell the first book traditionally for a while only to be told it crossed too many genre lines, I decided to put it out myself in both ebook and print. I've certainly never regretted that decision, as those books are now my bestselling series and have won me a very loyal readership clamoring for more!
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