Monday musings on an author’s decision by bestselling author
Raine Thomas
I’ve never met an author who didn’t have at least five stories running through their minds at any given time. I’m no different! I hear characters in my head whenever I’m not focused on anything else…while I’m walking the dog, washing the dishes, taking a shower, or riding in a car, for example. (I’d say I never heard them while I was driving, but that would make me a bald-faced liar.)
With so many stories to choose from, how do I decide what to write? Do I follow the trends? Listen to reader demands? Or do I cave into the loudest voices in my head and share their stories first?
In my career, it’s really been a combination of all of the above. I started writing my Young Adult Fantasy series about the Estilorians back when my daughter was a toddler. I had just lost my job and it was the perfect time to finally sit down and write the stories of sisters Amber, Olivia and Skye. It did so happen that YA, in general, was really popular at the time thanks to series like Harry Potter and Twilight, though I would have chosen to write the Estilorian books first in any case. They were simply the stories in my head begging to be written most.
Thanks to the popularity of my first Estilorian trilogy, it made the most sense to write more books in the series. Thus, the Firstborn trilogy came next. I got to know new characters in the world I’d spent years creating, which made it a fun writing journey. I’ll admit that the reader feedback (reviews) from my first books helped shape some of the characters in the Firstborn trilogy, and I’ll always be grateful for that. They’re some of my absolute favorites!
After publishing my sixth Estilorian book, New Adult fiction was all the rage. It was a new genre pioneered largely by indie authors and it called to me. I wrote For Everly (a New Adult baseball romance) in six weeks. It was the fastest and easiest I’d ever written a book, and it’s still one of my most popular and well-reviewed. I made more from sales of For Everly in the span of four months than I’d made in two years of my full-time job’s salary. I was sure I’d be writing full-time in no time!
Unfortunately, the New Adult market, like many others, quickly became saturated. Millions of new authors published books that year. I published Meant for Her (another New Adult baseball romance) five months after For Everly. Sales fizzled across the board and they’ve never bounced back. I heard the same story again and again from my fellow authors everywhere.
After that, I realized it was foolish to write to trends unless it happened to align with a story I want to tell. Now, I write the stories I want to write when I want to write them. It’s been remarkably liberating!
I published my seventh Estilorian novel, Deceive, the year after my baseball romances came out. From there, I moved on to my House of Archer series (New Adult rocker romances). Now I’m working on For the Win (a New Adult baseball romance). I’ve got plenty of other stories waiting patiently in the wings too…and I can’t wait to share them with the world!
Raine Thomas
is the award-winning author of bestselling Young Adult and New Adult fiction. Known for character-driven stories that inspire the imagination, Raine has signed with multiple award-winning producer Chase Chenowith of Back Fence Productions to bring her popular Daughters of Saraqael trilogy to the big screen.
Raine is a proud indie author who is living the dream. When she isn’t writing or glued to e-mail or social networking sites, Raine can usually be found vacationing with her husband and daughter on one of Florida’s beautiful beaches or crossing the border to visit with her Canadian friends and relatives.
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