Queen of Cowboy romance Maisey Yates

Maisey Yates is a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author. She writes category romances for Mills and Boon and longer romances for Harlequin Mira. She best known for Cowboy love stories and her Copper Ridge Series.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            G’day, welcome to Write With Love. I’m here at the lovely Sofitel Wentworth in Sydney for the Romance Writers Of Australia conference, and I have a very special guest joining me today. It is the amazing Maisey Yates.

Maisey Yates:               Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Williams:            No worries. I am just so thrilled to have you. I’m a big, big fan. ‘Cause I write rural romance, which is all cowboys. I love them, love them, love them. Of course, you write the American ones. I’ve learned so much from reading your books. I do absolutely adore them. Everyone should go out and buy them.

Sarah Williams:            So, we’re gonna learn a bit more about you today. So, tell us about being a successful author that you are or how you got to this point.

Maisey Yates:               I think the TLDR version will just be write a lot. Keep writing and write the next book. The detailed answer, so that’s if you can’t possibly sit through my long-winded story, was that I started writing seriously for publication after I started reading Harlequin Presents, which is also Mills and Boon modern and sexy, depending on where you’re at in the world. And I really connected with those books as a reader and I felt like I had found what I loved and I thought, “I’m gonna write one of these books.” I read like 300 of them in the first year that I discovered them, just old ones I was picking up at Goodwill and a book exchange for free and just reading them back-to-back-to-back-to-back and I was just obsessed with them and I saw that Harlequin was running a contest online and I thought I would try to write a chapter and send it in.

Maisey Yates:               So, I did, and it was awful, and I rightfully got a formed rejection for that chapter. But while I was waiting for that contest, for the results of that contest, I had started writing another manuscript, and at that point I was about half way finished with it. And I thought, “I’m too far in to quit now, and now I’ve had my first rejection, and it was through a contest.” Which felt, somehow, more manageable. So I thought, “I will just write this book and see what happens.” And so I finished writing the book and I submitted the partial through the slush pile. And I wasn’t a member of any writers organization, I didn’t know anyone, I was really just a girl out there in rural Oregon in a trailer park and I was 21 at the time. I didn’t know anyone or anything. But I just loved the books.

Maisey Yates:               So, I sent the book in and I got … They used to send you a physical comp slip in the mail to attach with your chapters to show that it was requested. And so I revised the chapters and sent them back with the slip and then, at that point, switched over to e-mail with the editor. And over the course of 20 months, because I was in slush for 7 months. And, honestly, this was probably 11 years ago when I started submitting. And things move so much faster now. Even the response times from publishers are so much faster now. So, everything was a lot slower. And that sounds so funny, ’cause it sounds like I’m talking about the days of yore, but it was literally the mid-2000s. But it was just different, everything was still snail mail and all of that. So, I did three rounds of major revisions and I ultimately did sell that, the first book that I finished. Not without quite a lot of re-writing.

Maisey Yates:               And that was my first sale. And so for a few years, I was writing for present slash sexy slash modern exclusively. And I love the books, I really enjoy doing it, but after doing about 25, I was like, “I’d really like to do something as well.” Because you can only do so much of one thing, I think, before that starts to feel like a grind. And I didn’t want something that I loved to feel like a grind. And so I started thinking about my longer book would be. And I sat down with a friend who is a fantastic author, Lisa Hendricks, and she asked me the single most important question that anyone has ever asked me in my career. She said, “What is your core story?” Because whatever that is, whatever the ultimate emotional truth that is in all of your books, you can transfer that to anything.

Maisey Yates:               This is so funny now, but at the time, nobody did billionaires in single title. Nobody. This was pre-50 Shades, contemporary romance was dead. I was literally just a year early, and so nobody was buying contemporary in the US, nobody would have ever taken a billionaire. And I remember [inaudible 00:04:48] to come up with something else, because I’m writing billionaires for Presents, but there is no market for that anywhere. But if I can figure out what my emotional core story is, that will travel with me to whatever I write. And so I knew that there was a market for small town romance, and I’m from a small town, and because of that, it didn’t interest me. I thought, “That’s my life.” What I love about Presents is that I can set it in places that I’ve never been, gorgeous hotels that I will never be able to go to, and there is something escapist about it. And I do have three small kids, so I love the escapism of it.

Maisey Yates:               And so I thought, “I guess I could small town, but I just don’t know what it would be.” And I ran across a picture online of a guy in a cowboy hat with no shirt, holding a saddle over his shoulder. And I was like, “This is the hero of my book. And I don’t quite know what the book is, but this is the guy.” And so legitimately stumbled into cowboys, and I could not sell that book. Could not sell it. I got all of my rejections after I was a published author who had already hit best seller lists and who had sold more than 25 books to a publisher. So, all of my rejections came later, trying to expand from category into single title. And I got rejected by everyone, some of them twice, because we submitted to all the senior editors and then they rejected it and agent said, “Could I sent it to the lower level editors and see what they think?”

Maisey Yates:               And so it took us over a year to sell the first book and the deal was a digital deal because, again, contemporary was dead, nobody wanted to do anything with contemporary and by the time we were getting to the third book in that series, something was happening with cowboys a little bit. And they said, “We’ll put the third book in print now.” And I was like, “Fantastic.” To this day, only the third book in that series is [crosstalk 00:06:34] [inaudible 00:06:34]. None of the others, just the third one, and people ask about that all the time. And then I had the opportunity … Really, honestly, this is what my story boils down to: Write a lot of books and say yes to a lot of things, say yes to a lot of things that don’t pan out and don’t count failures as a loss. Because also, during that time, I wrote for a couple of Harlequin lines that don’t exist anymore. I did some experimental series that didn’t go anywhere. But what happened was I built up a reputation as being someone who’s very professional and who meat their deadlines.

Maisey Yates:               And an opportunity came around for me to participate in an anthology that Lori Foster used to do every year for charity. And so it was no money or anything like that, it was just for a really good cause, for an animal shelter and I was like, “That sounds great. I would love to participate in that.” ‘Cause they basically said we have like a week. They had to replace someone who dropped out of the anthology and another writer who wrote for Harlequin said, “You know, Maisey’s really fast, she’s done a couple of cowboy books, maybe she could get something together really quickly.” And I said absolutely. And so I wrote a novella in five days and sent it in and the editor who read it was at HQN, which is Harlequin’s … That’s their single title. It’s like their MIRA in the US. So, they have MIRA in the US, but it’s different than MIRA is here. Like my cowboy books are done in MIRA here but they’re HQN in the US.

Maisey Yates:               And I had been rejected from HQN because the senior editor, at that time, didn’t connect with my voice. And so I ended up having this anthology that got before this other editor, who said, “I absolutely love this and I’d love to work with you again.” And in that time, she ended up getting promoted to senior editor for the line. The other editor left and it was really all a series of fortunate events and the fact that I was doing cowboys, which I’ve been doing since before it was cool. Let me put on my hipster glasses, you know. And it’s like it just so happened that it ended up being this thing. So, for me, it was all about these kinds of funny opportunities that came up.

Maisey Yates:               And quite a few opportunities that I did that didn’t work out as well, to find my audience, to find my readers, and where I fit. And I would say that I feel like I fit in small town, in cowboys. But then in Presents as well. And what has happened with me writing the two things is that not only have I found the primary successful piece to my career, it gave me the joy back in writing the Presents as well, because by the time I’m finished writing a small town book, I get to go back to this very high fantasy romance. And now this thing that had felt like a grind for a little bit, I love it again.

Maisey Yates:               And so, for me, it’s doing the work, loving the work, loving writing, and I think if you don’t love writing, don’t be here. Don’t do it because there’s easier ways to make a living. But if you love writing, then that’s obviously where you should put your focus. And I think, then, it’s a joy to say yes to these things and to not take … I don’t believe in the concept of a failed project, because everything I’ve done, even if it’s sold 50 copies, taught me something, even if it was just about what I wouldn’t do next time. And I have had things that have sold 50 copies. Really, I’ve had some interesting educational moments where you’re like, oh, that’s a few copies you can sell. Okay! Well, now we’ve learned something.

Maisey Yates:               That’s how you find your feet, is through not just success, but failure as well. And that’s how you find how you get up and move on from that, is what the failure is or isn’t. So, for me, it’s like, yeah, write, keep writing, and keep looking for the new opportunities, and don’t put yourself into a box. Because I think if, in the beginning, I had said, “But I write billionaires.” There ended up being a market for that. So, it wasn’t that there wasn’t. I probably could have sold into it if I had waited a little bit longer. But I don’t think that was the right place for me and I think expanding into small town, which I thought, “I don’t wanna do that.” I actually found something very integral to my voice now, as an author, and it was a learning experience. And I love writing those books. So, it’s so funny to me how resistant I was to it.

Maisey Yates:               I didn’t think I would like it. And it’s funny, I used to sell wedding dresses for a living, for a very small amount of time. And what we used to tell people when they came in was, “I know that you’ve looked at wedding dresses in catalogs, but you’ve never tried them on. So, it’s alright, you tell me exactly what you want and we’ll find those dresses, but then I’m gonna take some things out for you, what you don’t think you want, like the exact opposite, and you’re gonna try them.” And nine times out of ten, they would buy the thing that they said, “I absolutely don’t want.” Because they’d never tried it on for themselves, they’d only seen wedding dresses on models, and it’s like what fits us isn’t necessarily what we think when we haven’t tried it on. And so for me, that’s how I feel about writing, we get very wedded to this idea of I write this, I am this writer. But until you try, you don’t know. And actually, it can be the best thing for you as an author, to stretch yourself.

Maisey Yates:               I’ve written Presents, billionaires, I’ve done Cosmo Red-Hots for Harlequin, which was a hotter kind of line. It was really fun. And I did a series, Fifth Avenue, which was darker and grittier, and I did a biker series with some friends. I’ve done a lot of different things, and through that, I’ve found a lot of different things that I love and enjoy. It’s a very validating thing, to be like, well, I’m a writer, I’m a romance writer. So, I think I can find the love story anywhere, and I can find my story in that anywhere. And like I said, through that, I have built up a really good reputation within the industry, which has given me a lot of opportunities. So, that is my extremely long-winded story about how I am where I am and how I continue to be where I am. We’re writers, so at the end of the day, it’s not an online platform, it’s not algorithms or anything like that, it’s the stories, because that’s what our readers are here for.

Maisey Yates:               And so for me, that’s it, just write the next book. It doesn’t matter if something over here was a crashing failure, you just have to write the next book and you have to keep moving forward and keep experimenting and not look at failure as something that’s fatal or something that’s the end of the line. But, you know, success goes like this. Like I said, I didn’t get my first rejection until after I had published 25 books. So, I consider failure now just to be all part of it. I’m not on a trajectory where I’m not escaping it or I’m now immune to failure. It’s happened before, it will happen again. Like life, we have ups and downs in life, so publishing is just life. A writing career is life. So, it’s going to be great and it’s gonna be bad and it’s not gonna be one thing forever and if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s change. So, having that core, belief in the fact that you’re a writer and you will find where you fit in the market, whatever it’s doing. You can do it, you have control over that, you know your core emotional story and you know that you can tell it whether you’re writing billionaires, vampires, cowboys, or dukes. Then, I think that gets you a long way.

Sarah Williams:            Oh, that’s fantastic. I’d love to see what you’re gonna do next, I’d love to see a vampire in the outback or something.

Maisey Yates:               That is great. I’d like that.

Sarah Williams:            That’d be awesome. So, you’re entirely with Harlequin now, in publishing?

Maisey Yates:               Yes, yes, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            And so you are still writing your categories, then you’ve got your single title, the longer ones, and you’ve got your novellas. So, do you plan a year in advance what you’re gonna publish or put out or-

Maisey Yates:               I am contracted several years ahead. And so I write for three different imprints at Harlequin. I write for HQN, I write for Harlequin Presents, and I write for Harlequin Desire, as well. So, Presents and Desire, 50,000 words. The Desires connect with my longer series. And I do novellas as well. We go back and forth on novellas and Desire. The great thing about Desire is they get to come out in print on their own and my readership is primarily print. And so when novellas come out, because of the length, they’re only digital. They tend to put them in the back of my longer books as bonus content, but then people who like print have to wait quite a few months to get them. And so it’s something that we go back and forth with.

Maisey Yates:               But with the long-running series, I am so planned out, because I have to be, because you can’t have the connecting characters spring out of a hole on the ground. So, I have a whole series bible with ages, names, eye color, hair color, as I mention it in the books, I note it down, so that I don’t have to go back. And this is a trial and error thing, that with my first series, I did not do. And it ended up being a giant pain in the butt. And it’s good, because in the Copper Ridge series, there’s about 17 books of varying lengths in Desire, HQN, and novella. And there’s so many characters to keep track of and then the Gold Valley series is a spin-off, so many of the same characters appear and timelines are really important and I still make tons of mistakes, even with all the information that I keep.

Maisey Yates:               So, those are very, very planned. The Presents, one thing that I love about them so much, is that I don’t have to plan them in advance. I know I’m gonna do one, but my contract for the Presents is completely blind. So, it’s just eight Presents over the course of the next couple of years. And so, if I sit down and I go, “Oh no, I have this idea, and I’m gonna do this.” I just get to do it and it’s not connected to this gigantic world that I have to refer back to all the things and there’s something wonderful and comforting about slipping into this world that I know so well, which I get with the long-running series, but there’s also something so wonderful about just being like, “I’m inspired to write a …” Probably the weirdest one was my kids were binge watching Sophia The First, you know that kid’s show? And my friend goes, “I hate that show so much.” ‘Cause she’s got kids who are [inaudible 00:16:48] to me. She’s like, “I hate that show so much.” She’s like, “It’s so bizarre and why is her step dad kinda hot and what’s the sexual tension with the step brother and what’s the story?”

Maisey Yates:               She goes, “You should write a Presents that’s basically Sophia The First.” And I was like, “Challenge accepted.” So, I’ve got this step sibling royal Presents coming out next year. I like being able to just do that, to be like, “Oh, okay, my friend dared me to do this thing, I’m gonna make it work.” And I can go with whatever wild idea that takes my fancy and it doesn’t have to be connected to anything and it’s really exhilarating to ride your immediate inspiration. Which, when you’re contracted out as far as I am, you often don’t get to do. But then I will say with the connected books … And I just did this the book that’s coming out September 25th, [inaudible 00:17:35] Cowboy Christmas.

Maisey Yates:               I knew the hero’s backstory, I knew he was a widower, because he was the third brother to get a book in this series, and he’s the last one in this quartet that’s coming out in 2018. And so I knew him, at least through the eyes of his brothers. So, I knew what they thought his issues were and what they thought about his marriage and his wife that passed away and all this kind of stuff. And I had this idea for what the story was gonna be, based on all that, and then I started thinking about writing it and I was like, “I’m not excited about it at all. I don’t like the setup that I have it centered around.” Like an inn and the heroine was coming into the inn, and that’s a great story, but it felt very done to me. And I just didn’t feel like me and I was going, “I don’t know, I’m not psyched about this heroine, I’m not psyched about this guy.” I really love writing sad widowers, it’s kind of my thing, because I love really emotional stories and I love to mine the …

Maisey Yates:               This is such an odd thing, but to me, grief is universal. We’ve all felt it. So, for me, exploring that in a book is a cathartic thing, and I know that is for readers as well, because we all understand that, we all fear it. So, I write, I am writing a lot of characters that have experienced really heavy loss. So, I was like, “Why am I not looking forward to this book? This is totally my thing.” And I just wasn’t excited about it. And so I went back and I re-cast the heroine and it changed the entire story. And I changed some things about his marriage too, which I won’t say, ’cause it’s a spoiler, but if you’ve been reading the other books, there’s something about Grant you don’t know. And I think you’re gonna like it and it was a suggestion that a friend of mine had. Because, again, she was like, “We only know what his brothers think about him. We don’t actually know about him.” And I was like, “That gives me a lot to work with.” Because who he actually is and what he’s actually been through is not necessarily what everybody saw externally, because we know that it’s true in our own lives, everybody doesn’t know everything about us.

Maisey Yates:               So, changing this thing about my hero that I didn’t really see coming and I re-casted. Instead of this very together woman who’d been care taking her mother and who now is opening a bed and breakfast, I ended up with this completely feral runaway who he discovers sleeping in a cabin on his property. Because she’s homeless and she has nothing, and so they hire her to work on the ranch and that’s how he ends up meeting this heroine. And she’s completely different to the heroine I was gonna write and she’s just snarky and sharp and very wounded. But I was like, “That’s what he needs is this super tough girl and she can handle all of his stuff, because he’s got a heavy weight.”

Maisey Yates:               And so I plan things and then, sometimes, at the last minute, I panic and go, “What can I feasibly change, despite what I’ve already said about this character in ten other books? Because I don’t like the story idea that I have and I don’t wanna do it.” And then the one that I’m currently writing was another one that was a surprise to me. And I think this one’s called Lone Wolf Cowboy. When I don’t have covers or anything, it’s harder for me to remember the titles. We do come up with the titles really far in advance and then I usually get covers before I’m done with the last two and so then I try to work the covers they give me into the book and with the clothes and stuff, ’cause that’s really nice. The first two never match as well as the last two. [inaudible 00:20:48] work off the covers, which is fantastic.

Maisey Yates:               But what I’m working on now, Lone Wolf Cowboy, which will be out in 2019, I didn’t know who his heroine was gonna be. He had been in a bunch of books, but I didn’t have a heroine for him. And I had readers ask me quite a lot about the heroine in Smooth Talking Cowboy, which was out earlier this year, in February. She has a twin who is not in the book at all because she’s a drug addict and no one has spoken to her in years and I thought, “No one will want to read a book about a woman who is a drug addict.” And I had so many people ask me about her. I didn’t consider, for a minute, that she would be a heroine, but I had so many readers say, “Vanessa’s book is the one I’m looking forward to the most.” And so because of my readers, Vanessa’s getting a book. And that has happened now twice with the cowboy books.

Maisey Yates:               I had a bartender named Ace and I was like, “I am not gonna write his book, he’s not a hero name. His name is Ace.” And I just thought, “He’s just a background character.” And so many people were like, “The book I’m looking forward to most is Ace’s.” And I was like, “Well, Ace isn’t gonna get one.” And so then Ace had to get a book, which is One Night Charmer. And people love that book because it’s a character they were invested in. So, if you are one of my readers and you like a background character, harass me about it, because, inevitably, I’ll end up going, “Huh. Now I gotta write that book. But wait a minute, how do I write that book?” Because, usually, if there’s people hanging around in the background, I know what I’m gonna do with them, I know who I’m gonna pair them up with, I know that they’re going to be a hero or heroine. But every so often, people really surprise me.

Maisey Yates:               Actually, the heroine in Down Home Cowboy, Allison, was a battered wife and she first appeared in the very first book in my Copper Ridge series and she was still married and she was being abused by her husband. I did not wanna write her book because I did not wanna write that story. That, to me, was too heavy, I didn’t wanna get into it, I thought, “I’m not gonna be able to do it justice, I’m not gonna be able to write this woman’s story.” And so many people were like, “But when is Allison gonna have her happy ending?” And so the great thing about doing the long-running series was it gave that heroine a space of years to heal before I got to write her book and when the hero appeared, I knew he was the one to go with her. When the right man appeared, I could give her the book.

Maisey Yates:               So, I do a lot of planning and then my plans change.

Sarah Williams:            And those characters driving the story.

Maisey Yates:               It’s totally characters. Characters and readers who give me this thought and they make me think about it. It forces me to think about, well, what is their real story? And I think that it what it comes down to, is we all think we know this character, ’cause we’ve seen her through the eyes of other people, and it’s the same with the heroine I’m writing right now, Vanessa, who has had addiction issues in the past. Everybody thinks they know why she’s done certain things but nobody really knows what she’s been through because, of course, she’s the kind of person that’s covering up her pain with other things. So, it’s actually been really rewarding to get in there and say, “Well, I think she can be a heroine and I think she does deserve love.” ‘Cause everybody deserves love. And so to take a heroine who has a more challenging past and say, “I think that she deserves this too.” It’s a great thing. It’s just great to have readers who are that invested in everything and who make me think about things and challenge me, as a writer, to do things that I’m not naturally drawn to and to make me go, “No, wait a minute, I’m gonna stretch myself and I’m gonna do this thing and I’m gonna work really hard to get that character the story that she deserves and not shy away from it because I think it’s hard.”

Maisey Yates:               Because there’s an interest there from the readers and I wanna give them the stories that they want because, ultimately, I write books to please myself but I also write books to please my readers because they’re the reason that I get to do it. So, what they want really does matter to me and yeah, so, ask me about characters.

Sarah Williams:            That’s awesome. I feel like these are real people now. Oh, they’re awesome.

Maisey Yates:               That’s how they feel to me too, especially with the long-running series. You live with them for so long and you live with the setting and the mentions of all these people for so many years that you just kind of … I have a hero who has a teenage son and his name is Dallas Dodge, and I’m like, “There’s no way he’s not gonna be the hero.” So, they really need to be letting me write cowboys, still, in like ten years, so that I can write Dallas’ book. He’s Dallas Dodge, he’s gotta have a book.

Sarah Williams:            He’s got to.

Maisey Yates:               Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            So, we were talking. You’ve got the Copper Ridge, so that was the first big series that you were writing. And then you did the spin-off, which was Gold Valley.

Maisey Yates:               Yes.

Sarah Williams:            So, I love the way you’ve done that. That’s cool. So, how many books have you got in each of those series so far?

Maisey Yates:               It’s like 17 to 18 in the Copper Ridge series, I could be off by a couple, it may be closer to 20 with the Desires as well. So, that goes across HQN and Harlequin Desire and then there are some novellas, as well, and I do think everything is available in print. Some of them are just in two-in-one kind of things. And then, yeah, spun it off into the Gold Valley series, which is a neighboring town, and is currently contracted for about nine books. Well, no … Maybe like 15, actually, because there are novellas and there are Desires, as well. So, that’s where we’re at with it right now. It’ll probably go a few books longer. The reason we did a spin-off is I think, for readers, it’s so intimidating to come into a series that’s really long. What I try to do as a writer is, first of all, every romance is a stand alone romance. All of them have a happy ending. So, I feel like people can totally skip around.

Maisey Yates:               But if you wanna build that anticipation for a particular couple, I begin and end those arcs within a trilogy or quartet that comes out in a year, because I don’t wanna draw it out over twelve books and then it’s just a disappointment. And so one reason that I do that is I feel like then we keep … Within the big town, you’ve got these kinds of trilogies and quartets of families that are very tightly connected so that you don’t have to start at book one if you’re more interested in book four, which was the beginning of a new trilogy. And so it’s to try to make it manageable within the broader world of the different series. And then spinning off into Gold Valley was part of that, as well, where we’ve got all these characters that I still wanna write books for and they were based in this winery that was between the two towns. So, it was really easy to move them over to this other series and still give everyone their stories. So, some of the characters have been around since the Copper Ridge series, so people who have read the other series will know who they are, but if you’re coming in at Gold Valley, it’s totally fresh and I don’t think you’ll feel lost.

Maisey Yates:               I try really hard to make sure people don’t feel lost wherever they come in. But I know that it’s super intimidating and some people really feel like they have to start at book one. So, it’s like, well, now we have this other town and it’s book one. So, it’s not as insane and doesn’t have that much of a demand on the reader. But I wanted to make it a spin-off because I had all these people that I was like, “I have to write their story because I’ve introduced them and I’m invested in knowing what their happy ending is and I can’t leave them without one.” So, a lot of that was just selfishly for me.

Maisey Yates:               I had set up a couple ages and ages ago, I’ve finally written their book and it’s coming out in 2019 and it’s called Unbroken Cowboy. And the hero, Dane, and the heroine, Beatrix, have been in all these books since the Copper Ridge series and I was like, “I’m gonna build to their book.” And then we decided to do a series switch and I was like, “Okay. I have to move them a little further in.” Because of the way that I was setting it up with the family. But I was like, “But it’ll get done.” So, they’ll have their happy ending, gosh darn it. That’s also really important to me, that I’m not leaving readers hanging. I say it’s about readers, it’s actually about me. But we pretend that I’m so nice, I don’t wanna leave you hanging. I really don’t wanna leave me hanging, not to write the books, so … Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Well, we should talk about [inaudible 00:28:55]. So, you’ve got sex.

Maisey Yates:               Absolutely.

Sarah Williams:            Absolutely, great.

Maisey Yates:               So, whether it is the Presents or the cowboy books, there is sex. I’m a super nosy reader, so I actually really want to know everything about the romance, and that includes the sex. And for me, as a reader, when sex is done well, it’s an integral part of the story like any other scene. If you don’t read the love scene, you’re not going to understand what changed in the relationship in the following scene and why. So, for me, as a writer, that’s true, as well. If there’s going to be a love scene, it needs to progress the emotion or it needs to break something. I think when your characters are not ready for sex and they have it, it just blows everything apart. So, for me, it’s always building something or breaking something. It’s always advancing the relationship slightly or causing a retreat. And so, for me, they’re super important scenes. Also, it’s very important to make the hero get naked in some point in the book, because I’m here for that. I’m like, “It’s my reward for dealing with his bull crap for the entire book.” Then I get to get to get his clothes off of him and he’s always really hot, even if he’s a giant pain in the butt, which is, frankly, the heroine’s reward, as well.

Maisey Yates:               So, yeah, for me, as a reader, as a writer, those scenes are super important and you’ve been warned. There’s gonna be at least three love scenes in there. It’s a happening thing. It’s two in the Presents, as well. The language that I use between the two books is a little bit different, because with cowboys, you’ve got an earthy quality about them, and I think that’s well-suited to that kind of environment in that series and it feels organic to it. And with the Presents, it’s high fantasy language, but they’re doing all the same things.

Sarah Williams:            And then you’ve got your billionaires, as well. You’re still writing billionaires.

Maisey Yates:               Yes, absolutely. I’m still writing the Presents for Harlequin and just signed a contract to do eight more. That is my first love, it’s my first home, at Harlequin and in publishing in general. For me, there are stories you can tell there that you cannot tell anywhere else. I give you the Sophia The First royal step siblings idea. It’s just fun. But there is also an intensity of emotion to the Presents that is so much fun to do and you get to do such a powerful hit in such a small book. And I always say Presents is only the hard parts, ’cause it does not take me two times as long to write the longer books, because the Presents and the Desires have to have everything that the longer books have in terms of emotion and in terms of the romance. So, the longer books have more characters and you can show them connecting to their world in a slightly broader way.

Maisey Yates:               You can show them dealing with their conflict, not just with the hero or heroine, but with a friend and with a family member and you can take more time to unpack their issues. But in the Presents, they have to have all those issues. They just have to solve it in a shorter time frame and you have to keep the scenes very focuses and they’re very internally-focused books, so it’s all the internal conflict, all of the emotion, with no other vehicle to help you get there. So, yeah, that, to me, they’re not easier books to write, [inaudible 00:32:17] the imagination, sometimes I’d say they’re harder. ‘Cause with the cowboy books, I can write more words in a day, sometimes, ’cause I’m sitting there writing this one scene that gets to go on longer and can have more people involved in it and there’s a richer cast of characters to help your characters change, whereas with the Presents, it’s a lot of them dealing with each other and you need to have enough conflict that they can literally be dealing with each other constantly and not just work it out in a conversation. And also a lot of internal monologuing that you have to keep interesting.

Maisey Yates:               It’s a challenge. But it’s very fun and it gives me, as an author, that variety that I love. A lot of my readers only read one or the other, some of them read both, which is fantastic, but I totally understand, also, that one might be your jam and the other one might not be. And so that also allows me to keep both of the readerships that I’ve built, as well, because I care very deeply about both of them. And, certainly, the Presents has more of an international reach because of the fact that cowboys do not translate into every market.

Sarah Williams:            That’s true, that’s true.

Maisey Yates:               But yeah, they’re very American and I would say Australian, because that has been a more successful market for me overseas, Australia has been, because it’s difficult to get enthusiasm about cowboys in Europe. The billionaires definitely translate a little bit better. So, yeah, it’s all about serving all the readers that I have and then keeping things fresh for me.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. And definitely I have been doing some research lately and cowboys are number one for America.

Maisey Yates:               Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Sarah Williams:            They’re huge. You were on the top twenty, I think I reading [crosstalk 00:34:07] [inaudible 00:34:07] of authors and, yeah, nineteen percent are cowboy stories.

Maisey Yates:               It’s true, it’s absolutely true. Right now, it’s a great place to be in North America, and markets change. Because, like you said, it is like comedic levels of the amounts of cowboys on shelves right now. It was not that way when I started, ’cause, like I said, doing it before it was cool. Adjust my hipster glasses there. But it’s been a fantastic place to be, we have such an enthusiastic readership and everybody’s really interested in it and it’s really wonderful and there’s so many great books with so many different interpretations of what that story is. Some will grab a little bit of suspense, and mine are more like a small town western kind of thing. There’s the community and the ranch and some are very dusty westerns and they’re set in Texas and mine are set in Oregon, so they’re a mountainous, green kind of setting. So, there’s a lot of variety within it, for sure.

Maisey Yates:               But yeah, it’s a competitive market and it’s very, very American. Very, very not super international. So, yeah. And honestly, to a degree, that’s just how the market is. There’s things that work in the states and things that work other places and that seems to be my experience as a writer.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, that’s true. I remember the very first romance I read. It was a cowboy, but it was a historical cowboy, ’cause it was pioneer, the real, true westerns. But I loved it, it was Janet Daily, who still writing. And that was … How old am I? That was a long time ago.

Maisey Yates:               Well, I love historical westerns. I really do. That was a gateway for me as a reader. I used to read a lot of inspirational romance, like Janet Oakes and Lauraine Snelling. And they did these big western series and I think those work well, still, in the inspirational market. But in the broader market, historical westerns don’t have a ton of traction, which bums me out as a reader because I love them. Actually, I love historical romance in general as a reader. I love it. It’s like my catnip. So, for me, I’m always looking for ways to bring the emotional intensity that you get, particularly from the societal element in historical, and figure out how, without the societal element, you create these barriers in a contemporary and how I can bring that to a contemporary. Because my books are different, they are billionaires and cowboys, but what I try to do across of it is have the same level of emotional intensity because I like a high conflict romance, I like a high tension romance, I like there to be big barriers in between.

Maisey Yates:               And so when you don’t have society almost as a characters to keep your characters apart, you have to do a lot of internal conflict. It’s been observed many times by my readers that my characters all have a traumatic past. It’s like, well, you know, they have to have something to keep them from being fully actualized at the beginning of the book, because we all know how romance novels are going to end. So, we need the readers to invest in the journey, because they’re not gonna keep reading to find out how it ends. They already know. So, for me, as a reader, what keeps me turning pages is lots of tension, whether it’s sexual tension or emotional tension. Ideally, it’s both. And that sense of this is impossible, how are they gonna get together?

Maisey Yates:               So, for me, and I find a lot about historical, they tend to be very high stakes, very high conflict, and so I’m always asking myself, “How do I take that and put it in a contemporary setting where, yeah, society’s not going to keep them from having sex?” And that’s another thing I love about historicals, sex is a really big deal because it costs the heroine quite a bit. And so I’m always like, “How do you take that and make it an emotional component?” Because, again, for me, I want everything to have a weight and to be really intense and I want the sex to be really, really important if it’s going to be there. And I want people to wonder, well, how can they possibly? Because she’s his best friend’s younger sister.

Maisey Yates:               I have one wild ride cowboy where he, essentially, ends up as the caretaker of her ranch when her older brother dies and they were in the military together. And so he’s kind of taking care of her and she’s a bit younger than him. And he’s got all this guilt and this sense of … And so the real barrier is him. She’s up for whatever. But his sense of honor and all that creates that barrier. And so I’m always looking for that and, like I said, I love it as a reader. I wish there was more historical cowboys. Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Well, I’m just kind of wondering, with Outlander … Do you watch Outlander?

Maisey Yates:               I have not watched it and the only reason that I haven’t is because I have heard all the things that poor couple gets put through and I am like, “I will watch gifs of that man’s body all day, ’cause he is a whole thing, but I don’t think I can do that to myself.” Until I know how it ends, I don’t think I could ever get into it, because I get too invested. I had to quit Downton Abbey because I was like, “It has to stop! I just can’t!” So, yeah, I need my happy endings guaranteed. So, somebody can tell me how it ends when it ends and then when it’s done … I’m reading a mystery series right now, the Lady Sherlock series by Sherry Thomas, which is fantastic, but they’re mysteries, they’re not romances, but I got sucked into them. And I’m like, “If those characters don’t end up together, I am going to have a riot of one outside my house that no one will care about but me because I’m so invested in it and I’ve walked myself into not a romance series and I dunno what’s gonna happen.”

Sarah Williams:            Well, I’m just wondering, with Outlander, I wasn’t reading Scottish historical at all. Now I devour it. Now we’re just going into, I think, season four, which is bringing it into America. And it’s in the, what are we doing, about like late 1700s, early 18, so it’s kind of pioneering times, so I’m like, “Could happen.”

Maisey Yates:               It could happen and I hope it does. [crosstalk 00:40:05] [inaudible 00:40:05] I would love to because what I really wanna do that I haven’t figured out yet is I have a novella called Mail Order Cowboy and that was my nod to a mail order bride, but she’s really a mail order nanny. I was like, “I’m gonna do Sarah Plain And Tall but with sex and it’s a contemporary, so that’ll be fun.” Where the hero, a one night stand of his drops the baby off on his doorstep and is like, “So, this is your kid, I don’t want it, I’m out.” And so he has no idea what to do, he’s just this man ho who’s never done a serious thing in his life and suddenly he has a baby and he’s a good guy so he wants to do the right thing. And he basically ends up hiring the heroine through e-mail to come be his nanny and they end up falling in love. So, I’m like, “I’m gotta figure out how to do a mail order bride, because that is my dream to make work.”

Maisey Yates:               In Presents, we get to do marriage of convenience all the time. I love that so much but it’s so much harder to do in that grounded real world contemporary. It’s possible, for sure, but I think you have to give reasons that people … In Presents, I can make up a country and be like, “He has to get married because I said, ’cause there’s a law that I wrote in the country that means he has to, ’cause I love creating my own world because it’s mine and I can say exactly what I want happens in it, happens in it, and no one can question me.” Which is great. But even though my town in Oregon is made up, Oregon is still in the United States and we have some established rules, so I have to play nicely.

Maisey Yates:               I’m all about it just needs to be slightly believable. It doesn’t need to be realistic. You just need to be able to believe the motivation. So, either I do need to write historical western or I need to figure out a way to do a mail order bride. If anyone has any ideas, inbox me.

Sarah Williams:            Oh, that’s fantastic. So, you’ve got lots of books coming out, it seems like every month you’ve got a book coming out.

Maisey Yates:               Basically, in 2019, I almost do. I think I have 11 books out with Harlequin in 2019. And there will be some re-issues, as well, so I’m basically on the shelf constantly the entire year.

Sarah Williams:            And you’re saying some of these are in print, but they’re always digital?

Maisey Yates:               They’re always digital, yes. Those will always be available in digital across any platform. They are available in print. In the UK, for the first time, the cowboy books will actually be available in print starting February 2019. So, we’re starting with the first book in the Gold Valley series and that’s really exciting because I know western romance is not a thing in the UK and so we’ll see how that goes, I hope. I have a lot of readers in the UK and a lot of them have expressed interest in wanting to read the cowboy books because they read me in Presents. So, I’m really excited that they have some interest in that and that they’re willing to experiment with it, so that’s great. It brought into the availability. I really, for me, want my readers to have the option to have everything. Because a lot of people do prefer print and I know Book Depository’s great, I know people can order my books that way. But it’s great, they’ve been really good about putting them out in Australia. So, it’s easy to get them here and they’re now doing them out at the same time so people don’t have to wait and that’s really fantastic for the readers.

Maisey Yates:               So, yeah, hopefully just more and more availability of all the books, as well. So, that’s good.

Sarah Williams:            Fantastic. And you’re online, so you’ve got your website.

Maisey Yates:               Yes. I have my website, which is maiseyyates.com. And that’s how you spell my name. This is gratuitously showing you my pretty cover of my book, my latest book. So, maiseyyates.com. And I have a new feature on my website. If you go to the books page, you can search books by theme, which you’ve always been able to do, but it’s a little bit neater now. So, you can just go to the books page and you can find themes like best friend’s little sister or virgin heroes or friends to lovers, marriage of convenience, and you can narrow the books down by that. And if you want to, you can narrow them down by series, as well. So, if you wanna find all the virgin heroes that I’ve written for Harlequin Presents, you can do that. If you wanna find all of the friends to lovers that I’ve written in the Copper Ridge series, and yes, there is more than one … There’s more than one virgin hero, too. You can narrow it down that way and you can, basically, search by your catnip. Search your favorite trope and find the thing that you’re into because there are a lot of books.

Maisey Yates:               So, you can either, like I said, just look at a series or you can look at your favorite tropes within that series or within my entire back list. So, that’s cool. You can also contact me there. I am also on Facebook, just as Maisey Yates. I have an author page, I have a personal page that’s boring and is private and you don’t wanna find me there, you wanna find my author page. And then I’m on Twitter, as well, as Maisey Yates, and on Instagram as Maisey Yates, also. And I like Instagram possibly most of all because it is just pictures and it’s really fun. So, if you wanna see pictures of the traveling that I’ve been doing this year or some curated pictures of my adorable children, who are very cute. And really pretty pictures of Oregon, which is where I base the Copper Ridge and Gold Valley series around, is where I live, so you can get a really great sense of the scenes in the books, I think, by following me on Instagram. And then I am actually on Pinterest, as well, with an open page under my name and you can see all off my inspiration stuff there and you can even follow me on Spotify if you wanna see what I’m listening to while I write my books.

Maisey Yates:               And if you follow me all those places, it’s a very heavy commitment to all things me and I don’t even think I wanna follow myself on that many things. But yeah, but you can, if you’re nosy. I’m literally everywhere and everything’s open. So, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            And we should give a nod to your husband. ‘Cause I think it’s amazing, you have three children and you write so many books.

Maisey Yates:               Yes. He is an awesome dude and I always say, because he did not know he married a writer, we were in a much more traditional set-up in the beginning. I was a stay-at-home mom and he was running his own business doing landscape, which he did not love. So, when things started to take off in my career, he ended up staying home with the kids and it’s actually so good, ’cause he is more patient than I am, which is fantastic. We have a son who has autism and he is almost as big as I am now, so it’s really great to have him around to help with that. He’s a great kid, he’s a sweet kid, he sometimes want to take off in the other direction and I used to be able to stop him and now I can’t always.

Maisey Yates:               So, my kids are twelve, ten, and eight. Now, my daughter is as old as my career. I was nine months pregnant when I sold to Harlequin. I had her three weeks after I got the call. So, he’s awesome and he’s supportive and that is something that I think cannot be overlooked, because when you work at home, there are no boundaries unless your family members respect them. And you can say all that you want, but I know that doesn’t always happen. You can try to lay down boundaries, but unless people respect them, it just doesn’t work, and so he has always been incredibly supportive, incredibly respectful, even before it was making any money. And back then, I was squeezing writing around his work schedule and now I get to have a normal work schedule, really. And that’s a testament to the support he gave me early on, because if it wasn’t for that, we wouldn’t be here.

Sarah Williams:            He’s the ultimate.

Maisey Yates:               Yeah. He is. He’s a fantastic guy.

Sarah Williams:            And he’s gorgeous looking, as well. He’s probably your inspiration.

Maisey Yates:               He is. Follow me on Instagram and you’ll see.

Sarah Williams:            There we go.

Maisey Yates:               He’s actually an incredibly handsome man, and I’m not just saying that. Follow me on Instagram and you’ll see.

Sarah Williams:            Oh my God, we are so gonna all be following.

Maisey Yates:               Yeah, definitely.

Sarah Williams:            He’s gonna have his own fan page.

Maisey Yates:               I took him to RT this year for the first time and I said to him, “People are gonna think you’re a cover model and I’m not just being nice to you.” We’ve been married for 13 years. I’m like, “I’m not just being nice to you. People are gonna think you’re a cover model.” We were there for five minutes. I’m not exaggerating. We walked in and a woman came up and put her hand on him and was like, “Are you one of the cover models?” And I was like, “No. He’s my husband, hands off.” So, yes, he has that look about him.

Sarah Williams:            Oh, that’s awesome.

Maisey Yates:               He’s tall, dark, and handsome.

Sarah Williams:            Oh my God. We’re all gonna be [crosstalk 00:48:23] [inaudible 00:48:23]. We’re all going to be swooning over Maisey Yates’ husband.

Maisey Yates:               Yes.

Sarah Williams:            Oh my gosh. Well, thank you so much. I so appreciate your time and I know you’ve got a big weekend at conference before you fly off to your next destination.

Maisey Yates:               That’s at home, thankfully. I’m ready to be home.

Sarah Williams:            With that hot husband.

Maisey Yates:               Yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Well, thank you so much.

Maisey Yates:               Yeah, absolutely.

Sarah Williams:            Go and check out the Instagram page, the website. Thank you so much, I really do appreciate it.

Maisey Yates:               It was great. Thank you for having me. Thank you for watching.