Romance in New Zealand with Cheryl Phipps

This is Episode 14 of Write with Love.

Today we head back to New Zealand and chat to Cheryl Phipps, USA Today Bestselling author. From wealthy Alpha heros to boy next door romance Cheryl writes contemporary stories to fit everyone’s taste. She has even put her hand to a non-fiction collaboration with her fellow SPA Girls podcast co-hosts and has recently released a womens fiction novel.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write with Love. I’m Sarah Williams, best-selling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some are traditionally published. Some do it themselves. Everyone’s journey is different and everyone has something interesting to say. We all love love and love what we do. Today’s show is brought to you by our amazing fans and supporters on Patreon. If you’d like to help support the show and get some awesome bonus episodes, go to Patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to learn more. Now, here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            G’day. I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher and Serenade Publishing. Today, I’m talking to another very successful New Zealand ND author. Welcome to the show, Cheryl Phipps.

Cheryl Phipps:              Thank you, Sarah. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Williams:            I’m so glad you could join us today. Could you start off and just tell us a little about your author journey so far?

Cheryl Phipps:              I actually self-published my very first book in 2014. Oddly enough, it was a romantic suspense, which I don’t write. The rest of my … I’ve published 18 romances and one non-fiction book so far with my fellow SPA Girls, which we might talk about a bit later. I’d actually been doing more Billionaire, Millionaire stories and a bit of chick lit. I have diversified and I don’t really know whether that’s a good thing for me to promote newbie authors. It’s certainly a harder road to try and generate marketing for different genres.

Cheryl Phipps:              Prior to that, I was working in a very well paid job. The idea of giving up the money that I was getting to venture into the author’s world in 2014, it just wasn’t doable. I actually only became a full time writer last May. I had a lot on last year. It was very nerveracking to do it, but the sense of relief that I got was just so amazing. It was what I wanted to do. It was where I wanted to be. Thank goodness, I have a wonderfully supportive husband and family. It became not so much doable. It just became a necessity. I wanted to publish more last year, but, like I said, I didn’t start the being fully self-published until May.

Cheryl Phipps:              I did get out about five novellas. The first one was entered into a box set with a group of women mainly in America. It became a New York Times best seller. Sorry. Sorry, that’s wrong. It wasn’t that. It was … What am I thinking of? USA Today.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, USA Today.

Cheryl Phipps:              USA Today best seller. There was 22 of us. We worked our butt off for the marketing and we were rewarded. We had pre-orders up for quite some time. That was just … It was rarely special. You get to put that on your other books. It certainly helps with getting your name out there. It sort of felt like, not that I could sit back, but now I could just relax. I did what I intended to do by writing full-time. The rest of it is sort of the icing on the cake.

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic. Congratulations on going full-time. That’s an achievement.

Cheryl Phipps:              Thank you. Thank you. Yes.

Sarah Williams:            What were you doing before-

Cheryl Phipps:              I wish that everybody that wants to do it …

Sarah Williams:            That’s it. What were you doing before you became an author?

Cheryl Phipps:              I was working in payroll and admin, sort of HR areas, for a couple of companies, over about 16 to 18 years. That’s where I found myself. I enjoyed it. I love people. That was another little quandary, which I’m sure a lot of newbie writers are thinking as well. It can be a solitary life when you give up work and you’ve been surrounded by people. Especially in the job that I had, because I was talking to lots of different people all day long. Then suddenly I was at home and just me.

Sarah Williams:            You don’t have to force yourself to get out of your pajamas in the morning and go to work.

Cheryl Phipps:              I think the key actually to that, because we all need a lot of balance in all aspects of our life, and for me it was surrounding myself by the people that would help me, would lift me up, and I could lift them up. Very reciprocal relationships. Of course, they’re writers. That’s who you need to surround yourself with are writers who will be your worst critics and your best champions and really push you. When you’re starting out, that’s what you need. You need people to get behind you and nudge you over the edge when you want to take that leap to putting that first book up. Or even your second or third. Sometimes, we have all these self-doubts, don’t we.

Sarah Williams:            Yes, that’s it. We say this to all the aspiring authors out there. Joining something like the Romance Writers of New Zealand or the Romance Writers of Australia, or even both, like most of us do, can be really-

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes, exactly.

Sarah Williams:            It can be that really good way of giving to make people learn those craft workshops.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes.

Sarah Williams:            Of course, wonderful conferences.

Cheryl Phipps:              Great conferences. I was writing for years, many, many years. I wrote stories for my children when they were younger and had done quite a few courses actually and upskilled myself with lots of things to do with writing. It wasn’t until I attended a talk at my local library, where Jean Drew, who’s the founder of RWNZ, Romance Writers of New Zealand, that that’s where I got the bug. It’s quite funny because I’ve listened to some of your podcasts and I hear that time and time again, that it just takes one person, doesn’t it, to say, “You can do this. If you want to do this, here. Here’s an opportunity. Here are some people you can meet in this sort of environment.” Away you go.

Cheryl Phipps:              Through there, I met my very, very dear friend, Wendy [Valor 00:07:20], who is a prolific author and has done just some amazing things. Apart from Nalini Singh, maybe one or two others, I can’t think of any other New Zealand author who is doing as well as she is. She’s very humble, which kind of …

Cheryl Phipps:              If that’s a good place to get into the segue of the SPA girls, which is a group I belong to. We do our own podcast. I help newbie authors. Wendy and I and Shar Barrat and Trudi [inaudible 00:07:50], the four of us … I should say Trudi Jaye, because that’s her pseudonym, sorry. The four of us, we do podcasts to help people. We love to have people come and talk to us and ask us questions, because we’ve been there. We know what it’s like when you’re starting out to hear no. Real direction. You’ve got a product. You think it’s good enough. You’re not sure. How do you get it out there. We all know that it’s not just sitting down and writing a book. It’s not that easy. There’s so much more to it than that, not that I’m wanting to frighten anybody off.

Sarah Williams:            We do. We hear time and again that it’s hard to get that book written, let alone then you’ve got to publish it and promote it. It is a big effort, especially if you’re going to do it as an indie like we are.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, no. Tell us how the podcast is going, how many episodes you’re up to and who are some of the people you’ve gotten to interview.

Cheryl Phipps:              We’ve already done 121 episodes. I mean, bearing in mind, this was four women who just got together and knew nothing about how these things work. Apart from we obviously listen to some really cool ones. We’ve interviewed people like Joanna Penn, a really big favorite if you’re just getting into the world of being an author because she can take you from grassroots right through to doing what you should be doing, what all of us should be doing, to make sure that we’re making a profit from our writing. I think if you’re looking at writing commercially, this is what we are talking about after all. It’s not a hobby. This is your career. I don’t think anybody has a career where they just give away their time for nothing. We want to do well at it. Along that line, of course, we’ve got Brian Meeks, whose big thing is the Amazon ads, Mark Dawson, who does the self-publishing formula. Honestly, I have never met a nicer group of people. They are so giving.

Cheryl Phipps:              We actually, Wendy and I actually interviewed Mark Dawson over in American at RWPA last year, which was so much fun. First time we’d ever been. We just felt so welcome.

Cheryl Phipps:              I can’t believe how just down to earth they are. These are people that are doing exceptionally well. I don’t even know how much money they’re making. I don’t really care because I know. I can see how well they’re doing and how well they are seated in the community. Even somebody like Roxanne St. Claire, she hopped up on the bed. We had the phone. We were doing the recording just sort of like between her legs. She was as natural as anybody I’ve ever met and just sweet. Really, really sweet.

Cheryl Phipps:              Christie Craig, I did meet at RWA, but she came to the New Zealand conference last year. So much of what she said resonated, to the fact that this woman has a tiny suitcase full of rejection letters, that she carried around with her! I don’t know how many awards she’s won and how many books she’s published. I’ve got it written down somewhere. Seriously, the woman has a box of rejection letters and loves to show people. Because it’s almost like saying, “Well, somebody thought I was rubbish.” Usually that’s from the traditional side of it. Self-publishing is a little different. Then here she is, this woman that is just doing so well.

Sarah Williams:            Wow, that’s hilarious.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yeah. It’s very humbling, but it’s inspiring, don’t you think, that you would carry on in the face of that adversity when others of us might crumble into a ball in the corner of the room.

Sarah Williams:            That’s it. That’s it. It is something to say. Perseverance and just keep writing, just keep writing.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes.

Sarah Williams:            It’s not like you’re going to get worse the more you write.

Cheryl Phipps:              No! No. That’s right. That’s one thing that CC Hunter says, which is Christie Craig, never give up. That was her tagline as it were.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, excellent. That’s really fantastic. Yeah, I definitely recommend people to go and listen to the SPA Girls, the podcast. It’s weekly.

Cheryl Phipps:              Thank you.

Sarah Williams:            You’ve got a book out as well. Tell us about that. The SPA Girls book.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes. We were trying to look at ways that we could put all of this information that we had together. We’re not wanting to preach that this is the way to do anything because as we know in self-publishing, there’s no one way. A lot of different roads will get you to the same place.

Cheryl Phipps:              Our book, which is Kick Author Overwhelm to the Butt is very dear to our hearts, because everybody suffers from it. Every writer at some stage. A lot of the stuff that we do on SPA Girls is geared to the newbie writer. We try and take it a little bit further, but we don’t want to make it so unattainable so the information is so unreachable that it’s just jargon. Because we are all guilty of that in whatever place we tend to have this jargon, this shortcut of words. I think that this book does it. We haven’t put it out there to make heaps of money. It would be quite nice if it paid for the podcast. Trudy has moved away from us, so we have to get together sometimes in the middle of the country. Because I think that’s nice, we Skype every week, but it’s quite nice to be with each other in person. That’s just an aside, really.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yeah. That’s just something that we thought we’d do. The next book is coming up this year. I’m not quite sure when, because again Trudy is off to the Smarter Artist Summit, which again is one of those high level learning centers. When she comes back, we’re hoping to publish our second, which is more on focus.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes.

Sarah Williams:            That’ll be great.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes.

Sarah Williams:            It’s wonderful, too, that you guys do go to the RWA in America and Smarter Artist. Have you thought at all about sending someone to the 20 Books to 50 K conference?

Cheryl Phipps:              We’re all on the [inaudible 00:14:46]. We’re on the Facebook group. I think it might happen. It just might happen. We’re hoping to do some really cool things in New Zealand as well. We might start there. We might get our feet wet, as it were, doing that before we venture … We were thinking about coming to Australia this year, but just didn’t tie in with the fact that at our conference … So excited that Bella Andre is coming out. We’re really looking forward to that, going to that.

Cheryl Phipps:              We did do a workshop at our New Zealand conference last year. That went down really well.

Sarah Williams:            Awesome.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yeah. I think we feel like we’ve got something to say, and that people actually do want to listen. You’re never really sure.

Sarah Williams:            I think between the four of you, you’re a wealth of knowledge. We’ll get back to your books. How many have you published? Tell us about the different series that you’ve got.

Cheryl Phipps:              Okay. The romantic suspense, I don’t even really count that among my books because probably, this is a terrible thing for an author to say, but it would be my worst book. A part of me thinks, “I should just take that down. I’m not writing in that series,” but another part of me is like, “Well, this is where I came from. This is where I started.” I don’t even make any sales from it probably. I never, ever advertise it. It just sits there. It reminds me.

Cheryl Phipps:              Then I went on to my Millionaire’s series. I went into my chick lit series. I had this opportunity last year, it was some amazing authors I was telling you about, these box sets that I [inaudible 00:16:36]. The first time was through Kenya Cooper. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her. She writes at K.N. Lee. She has her own publishing house, as well. So clever. Just amazingly clever. Between her and another lady called Victoria [Pander 00:16:57], went into a box set with her. Between the two box sets, they formulated my whole series. I thought, “If I’m writing a book for each of them, I’ll write it in a series. Then I can add to that,” which is what I did last year. I ended up with five by the end of the year and was very happy with that.

Cheryl Phipps:              What did I do after that? We had our SPA Girls book come out last year, as well. That’s kind of like six books last year, because I do the form editing for that. I had my Prossers Bay series, which is set in New Zealand. That actually came after the Millionaire’s. Isn’t that terrible to forget about it! There’s five books in that series. Four books and a very short story, which I give away for free actually. Amazon very kindly price matched that, so anybody can pick that up if anybody feels the urge to sample some of my writing for free. The Millionaire Next Door and Doc’s Town are currently free.

Cheryl Phipps:              Then my mentor, which is Shar from the SPA Girls, pointed me in the direction of cozy mysteries. That’s what I’m currently writing. I’m going to try the plan of writing three before I put them up. I probably won’t have anything new up for the next couple of months, but when I do it’ll be bang, bang, bang.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent.

Cheryl Phipps:              Another friend of mine is doing the covers for those, and I love them. I absolutely love them. They’re just so cute. Sort of quite kitschy and apple pie and arsenic and [inaudible 00:18:46]. It’s a little bit different, but it’s interesting, isn’t it, that it’s kind of come full circle. The romantic suspense has that, the murder aspect of it. The cozy mysteries does too. Although, they’re very tame. You don’t have any gory bits or anything like that.

Cheryl Phipps:              Of course, the sexual tension is a lot less in cozy mysteries. Whereas my other books could be deemed warm to relatively hot.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, excellent. Tell us about the one set in New Zealand, Prosser Bay.

Cheryl Phipps:              The name, Prossers Bay, which in hindsight was probably not a good idea, is actually my maiden name. I wasn’t going to actually write under my name. My parents passed away a couple of years after each other. When I decided to publish, I thought, “Well, I don’t care of what anyone else thinks of me and my writing now. Apart from readers. I will publish under my married name.” When I started that series, I needed a name for the bay. It was kind of like an homage to them, to, I don’t know, perpetuate the name, I suppose. That’s how that came about.

Cheryl Phipps:              It’s basically about women. I write a lot about women, the woman’s side of it more than the male, even though I write it from both points of view in my other books. In all my books, and perhaps in the cozy mysteries. There’s a patriarch of the town. I can visualize the town, and that’s what I want to share with people, that they can appreciate small town New Zealand and get a flavor of it. The smells and the people. There’s a group of four friends. One of them runs a cleaning company and that one is actually working together. Then they branch off into what their true passion is and what they really want. It deals with things that people might find a little bit uncomfortable. There’s adoption. There’s infertility. Mothers not being nice. All that sort of thing. They’re happily ever after stories. I can’t really write anything else. That’s how I want my life to be and everybody around me. Without cramming it down people’s throats.

Sarah Williams:            No, that’s really great. Your covers and editing, you outsource for all of that?

Cheryl Phipps:              Absolutely. I do a couple of drafts myself and edit those as best I can. I’m very much into doing fines for words that I use a lot, which we all do. I love to say actually and that. I do that. I do things like that. The more I do, the less it’s going to cost me in the end. Right?

Sarah Williams:            That’s true.

Cheryl Phipps:              I have an editor that I like for the steamier books and then an editor I like for the Prossers Bay books. I am using an editor that I have used before for the cozy mysteries, because I think that she’d be suited to that. You don’t want people, an editor, depending on what you pay them for of course, but you don’t want an editor to come back to you and say, “This is great,” because you know that there’s going to be mistakes. You want them to say, “Well, actually, what about? Really, you missed this here.” That’s what I want. I always ask for what I want. I think it’s something not to be shy of. You’re paying somebody. This is a professional deal that you’re making. Ask for what you want. Then it’s all sweet.

Sarah Williams:            That’s it. That’s really good advice, too. Did you go through a few editors before you found these folks?

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes. Yes. Yes. I found one of the editors I use … It was kind of like she was trying to make my voice hers, or her voice mine. It just didn’t fit. Even though, living in New Zealand, we’re trying to write for the American market, so my spelling is all American, which is kind of irksome but a necessity, I didn’t want my voice to completely disappear. There’s nothing wrong with [inaudible 00:23:38], what I aspired to when I first started writing, but that’s not really what my books are. I try and hit the same tropes, but I still think they are my voice.

Sarah Williams:            That’s [crosstalk 00:23:55].

Cheryl Phipps:              Which could have … Yeah. [inaudible 00:23:59]

Sarah Williams:            International market. America is your biggest market?

Cheryl Phipps:              Definitely. Definitely. I’m starting to sell in places like Japan and Brazil. Not a lot. UK a little bit. Australia of course.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, excellent. I saw my first sell from Denmark the other day and I’m like, “Oh.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes! I sell them in Denmark, too. I thought that was pretty cool. That’s really cool.

Sarah Williams:            I had not thought of that. There you go.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yeah, yeah. I want to branch out into the audio market, but I really have to get myself organized and get all my books available in print versions. I think that that’s actually a very important thing to do. I think it creates that difference between an ebook and a print book, because they can see how much it would cost them, the customer, to buy a print book. I think that’s going to make the ebook seem much more attractive. It’s a bit of time, but I use Vellum. I’m in love with Vellum.

Sarah Williams:            I love Vellum. I automatically put everything with mine into the print versions, as well. I do it through KDP for Amazon and then Ingramspark for the rest. Yeah, my print books are steady, slow kind of. It also gives you the distribution into the libraries. I do find it helpful.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes. Yes. Somebody was asking me a question on the RWNZ group the other day about how many of your books are in the libraries. I thought, “Gee, I had no idea,” so I looked myself up. [inaudible 00:25:42] and I looked myself up. I thought, “Well, there you go.” Now, it’s kind of given me that little push to …

Sarah Williams:            That’s it.

Cheryl Phipps:              [crosstalk 00:25:53]

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Excellent.

Cheryl Phipps:              I’ve just got to chip away.

Sarah Williams:            That’s it. You’re working on your cozy mystery at the moment. Do you have anything else coming out or will that be your next one coming out?

Cheryl Phipps:              That will be my next one. First one is nearly finished and I’ve got a big done on the second. I think it’s actually going to give me a bit more leeway in making alterations so that the books flow, because they are attached. Hopefully, they’ll be read alone. That’s the intention, because there will be a mystery in each one. Of course, the characters will be the same and you just introduce a few more, a few will obviously pop off.

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic. While we’re waiting for those ones to come along, we can get your freebies and the rest of your series …

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes.

Sarah Williams:            … via your website or your links.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes, absolutely. Cherylphipps.com. That’s my website. You can find me on Facebook at Cheryl Phipps Author and Twitter @cherylaphipps.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. I’ll just spell out your last name. It’s Phipps.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yes. That’s it.

Sarah Williams:            It’s not an F.

Cheryl Phipps:              Yeah, no.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing your advice and your experiences with us today, Cheryl. We really appreciate it.

Cheryl Phipps:              I’ve loved being here. Thank you, Sarah. It’s been nice chatting with you.

Sarah Williams:            I’ll see you in Auckland at the conference.

Cheryl Phipps:              All right. You keep well until then.

Sarah Williams:            Thanks for joining me today. I hope you enjoyed the show. Jump onto my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com and join my mailing list to receive a few preview of my books and lots of information. If you like the show and want it to continue, you can become a sponsor for just a couple of dollars a month. Go to patreon.com/sarahwilliamsauthor to find out more. Remember to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and leave a review of the podcast. I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye.