The Joys of Binge Reading

Amy Vansant writes gritty thrillers and cozy mysteries which have one thing in common – they’re all funny because as Amy says – she tried to do serious books but they always ended up full of jokes.

Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Amy talks about her Shee McQueen series about a family friendly team of mercenaries, and her Pineapple Port cozies, set in a 55+ Florida resort.

This Week’s Giveaway

Our Giveaway is another Booksweeps draw – Link To The Past – Historical and Family Saga stories – 51 books, and an E-Reader. It’s open internationally…

Included in this is my Of Gold & Blood Series 2 Book Bundle consisting of Books 1 and 4 in the series.. Poisoned Legacy and the New York Christmas novella Tangled Destiny, the prequel.

50+ novels, 1 E-Reader $550 value

I know many of you will appreciate that because we have listeners from all over the world, so this is your chance to win a library!

enter booksweeps draw

Or – if button doesn’t work – https://www.booksweeps.com/giveaway/may23-win-a-bundle-of-historical-fiction-and-family-sagas/

You can now look for Binge Reading on YouTube if you like to consume your podcasts that way – as increasing numbers of listeners like to.

And don’t forget, if you enjoy the show leave us a positive comment so others will find us too – word of mouth is still the best publicity anyone can get!

Links to things in the show

Amy Vansant – Kilty urban fantasy series: https://amyvansant.com/books/kilty-urban-fantasy

Loggerhead Florida: https://myfwc.com/research/wildlife/sea-turtles/nesting/loggerhead/

Authors XP: https://authorsxp.com/

Life Hacks: https://amyvansant.com/lifehacks

Where to find Amy Vansant

https://amyvansant.com/

https://amyvansant.com/enter-to-win-kindle-books

But now here’s our show. Hello there, Amy. And welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Amy Vansant: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Thriller and cozy mystery author Amy Vansant with Archer the bordoodle

Jenny Wheeler: You’re a USA Today and Wall Street Journal best selling author, and you’re writing across a range of genres, from thrillers to cozy mysteries, some romcoms and fantasy. How did you get started on this trip?

Amy Vansant: I was always a writer ever since I was young. Ever since I could barely write anything, it just seemed like what I was supposed to do.

I was the East Coast editor of Surfer Magazine for about five years, and I did a lot of freelance writing for magazines and I wrote a non-fiction book about surfing.

And right about then was the time that the internet started to get big. I started to do web design as a side gig, and it turned out that was the next big thing.

I ended up doing websites, and I started a web firm for 20 years. I still have it. And then one day I woke up and said, what am I doing?

Why am I not writing? I was always supposed to be a writer, so I went back to it.

Shee McQueen and the family friendly mercenaries

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fabulous. And this Shee McQueen series, which is one of the ones we’re talking about today. It’s your thriller series.

One of the critics has got a gorgeous line to describe it. They say, “Think Stephanie Plum goes to Florida. Full stop. With Jack Reacher.”

That just seems to me to say it all, and we are looking at number five in the series, which is The Girl Who Saw The Truth.

Now, this whole thriller series is built around troubled mercenaries looking for redemption, and once again, I wondered where did that concept spring from?

Amy Vansant: I think it mostly just came from the fact that my other series, which is a cozy mystery is so tame that I wanted to do something that had a little more bite to it, to just to break it up for me more than anything.

I came along with this idea and put the hotel that the father runs where my house is in real life.

I pretended there was a hotel here instead of my house and took it from there.

Jenny Wheeler: I think that’s called Loggerhead Inn, is it?

Amy Vansant: Yes, because this area Florida has the loggerhead turtle sanctuary here for sea turtles. So that word was at the forefront of my mind.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. And Shee, your key character, has some unusual qualities, like seeing numbers as pictures. You explained that so clearly and compellingly that I wondered if that was something that you personally experienced.

Amy Vansant – an unusually calculating brain

Amy Vansant: Yes it’s the way that my brain works.

If I see a date, if I know I have something to do the next Wednesday, I don’t see the word Wednesday.

I have a visual thing in my head where I’m seeing basically a calendar, and a line of seven boxes.

The center calendar item will be lit up or filled in or just otherwise marked in my head.

If I have three things to do that day, there’ll be three little lines on that box. So, I know it’s three things.

I can’t always remember what three they are, but I know there’s three of them. I’ll keep thinking until I think of the third one if I can’t think of it. And it’s just always how my brain has worked.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s amazing. You’re also the master of snappy dialogue in this series, the Shee McQueen series.

There’s a lot of fantastic dialogue and it really made me think of some of the streaming TV we are seeing now, like Breaking Bad, some of those series. Have you been rather inspired by TV?

Amy Vansant: I definitely do it on purpose. I’ve heard back that readers don’t like a book to end in a cliffhanger.

But I think even for my own reading if I get to the end of a chapter and there’s a big punchy cliffhanger, it makes me want to keep reading the book.

I want my readers to keep reading the book until they’re finished and then be wanting the next one.

I started trying to make sure that something exciting happens at the end of every chapter that makes people want to keep going. And it ended up being very much the way TV is written.

Cliff hanger chapters – thanks to streaming TV shows Pineapple Port book 1 – Amy Vansant

Jenny Wheeler: It does definitely keep you reading when you are a little bit tired at night.

It’s a great way to steer people through the story and your reviewers very much comment on that.

Your work’s been compared to some of the masters of this genre. People like James Patterson and Janet Evanovich.

That must make you feel good inside some days.

Amy Vansant: Oh, definitely. Yes.

Jenny Wheeler: As well as the thrillers, you already have mentioned that you do a cozy series, that’s the Pineapple Port series set in a retirement village, a 55 plus Florida community, which you’ve said was inspired by your mother-in-law’s situation.

Tell us about Pineapple Port.

Amy Vansant: Before I started that series, I was visiting my mother-in-law over on the west coast of Florida, and it’s just such an adorable little place that she lives.

They’re all modular homes. So, they’re mobile homes in the sense that they’re modular, but they’re not on wheels.

They’re just little boxes. And they all have their little yards that they’re super proud of with all the little knickknacks in there.

And I just thought it was adorable and would make a good place to have a series.

And then I thought, what if the person that the series is mostly about was young and she grew up there amongst all the retirees, instead of making it strictly about the retirees?

And I’d like to the dynamic of old and young, That let me work with.

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Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting. I serve at a community which gives out meals once a week, and there are some retirees that come to that meal.

One of them has got a much younger granddaughter who comes with them every time that they come. And I’m quite fascinated by this situation.

Obviously there is a very similar setup where somebody in this community has got a much younger person living with them, so it’s not so far beyond the realms of possibility that this kind of thing happens, although it probably is rather unusual.

Amy Vansant: Yes, and it also gave me the chance to… there was a lady who was maybe 20 or 30 years older than me that I was talking to when I first started writing.

I was reading her books and there were a lot of mentions of things that just weren’t relevant anymore.

Someone would sit down at a typewriter to write when you know that now they would sit down at a laptop and it pulled me out of the story, because it wasn’t supposed to be a historical book.

It was a contemporary book, except it wasn’t contemporary anymore. I thought to myself, this would be a neat way for me to sneak in the way my brain works.

And I’ve of course, got a lot of references that a 50 plus year old person would have.

But when they come out of my 26 year old character, it doesn’t matter because she grew up with all these people.

So, she might use some kind of old timey phrases and it would just make sense.

A nerd who loves her reverse Outlander urban fantasy Kilty As Charged – a reverse Outlander urban fantasy – a time tossed Highlander comes to 21st century

Jenny Wheeler: That’s very interesting point because I did feel with the Shee McQueen series that you were way, way up with the technology.

I mean, that series, I was really gobsmacked by what I felt was some of the research that you might have done for it because it feels so 21st century.

So you’ve got the feet in two camps, haven’t you?

Amy Vansant: Yes. Thanks to the web business that I’ve been in for so long. I’m a nerd anyway, so that makes it a little easier.

Jenny Wheeler: There’s also a rollicking, fun quality to both of these series of books.

They’ve both got a lot of humor in them, and you say that you “tried to write serious books, but they always end up full of jokes, so I gave up.”

Tell us a bit about that experience and what serious books did you try to write at the beginning?

Amy Vansant: My “Kilty” series, which is definitely super goofy in a good way. It’s about a time traveling Highlander and it was originally going to be dark.

I was going to make that my dark series and I didn’t get very far before I started putting jokes in there instead. And I just knew it was never going to work.

I can’t have something really intense and dark happen and then have jokes the rest of the time.

And I didn’t want not to have jokes. So, one of the things in that book is the idea that the Highlander comes to modern day instead of in Outlander, where it’s the modern day woman going back to the Highlander.

Pineapple Port cozies – a change of pace

And I thought it would be hilarious if he was, once he got here, obsessed with soap and shampoo and getting showers all the time because that wasn’t something that was readily available for him.

And that was one of the things that bothered me about the Outlander series that they never talk about. Of course, cuz I would ruin the romance, but I just knew that he stunk.

Jenny Wheeler: I agree with you. Sometimes when I’m in the shower, I think this is such a pure, sweetest pleasure, and I think to all those who people who maybe will probably never, ever have had that simple sensation

Amy Vansant: Exactly. And they’re always, in that series falling into bed and whatnot, and it was just like ‘eergh.’

Jenny Wheeler: I notice that the Pineapple Port series are in Kindle Unlimited, and that really makes sense with you being, as you say, a nerd.

And you also run a very good promotion business for authors called Authors XP. I wondered if you would like to talk a little bit about the huge changes that are hidden publishing now, including AI.

Amy Vansant: I mean, things have certainly gotten harder since I started in 2015 or so.

The landscape has changed entirely. Amazon’s so dominant that I think it’s 80% of the books that people read they get from there.

That’s why I went with KU personally. I’ve tried to take my books wide once or twice over the years and went running back again.

Book marketing becomes more challenging by the day

I have friends that are wide, that are perfectly happy being wide, and I think I’m going to take the first Pineapple book and put it on Barnes and Noble and leave the rest of them, just for something different.

Because when you’ve got, how many do I have now? I’m just about to release 18 in that series, so it doesn’t kill me to have the one book free for everybody to get them into the series.

It’s definitely gotten harder. It’s getting easier for people to publish. If you make it easy, there’s going to be a lot of people publishing.

So the competition gets harder. And of course, with AI, I’m having a lot of fun with it.

It’s great to use it for certain things like creating subjects for emails and the marketing emails that you’re sending out and even just to keep your brain flowing when you’re writing.

If you’re writing and you want a series where two people go to a farm and they find out the alpaca’s been sold stolen, or something like that, and you’re just not sure how it’s all going to go down.

You can type a little bit of that scene into AI and it’ll spit out its version of how things happened, and it’s going to be written horribly, but it might give you ideas how you can keep writing with your own stuff.

So, it’s not the end of the world, yet.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. And Authors XP also is very good for readers as well, isn’t it? Tell us about XP for readers.

Amy Vansant: I offer a daily newsletter that readers can sign up for so they can get notice of books that are free or 99 cents, very much like Book Bub.

That’s a newsletter. And I’ve also got a lot of things that readers can do, become beta readers, become reviewers. Work with authors directly, find a lot of new authors.

Between the things that I want and the things that the authors I work with want – and there’s about 5,000 authors now on the site – we come up with stuff all the time that we think people would like.

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Amy Vansant – Friendly Mercenaries