Clean indie reads with S M Spencer

SM Spencer writes clean, contemporary small town romance and young-adult (YA) paranormal romance.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            Welcome to Write with Love. I’m Sarah Williams, bestselling author, speaker, and creative entrepreneur. Each week I chat to passionate and inspiring authors about their journey in creative writing. Some internationally 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.

Sarah Williams:            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.

Sarah Williams:            Now here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:            Good day, I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing. Today I’m talking to Sandy Spencer who writes as S.M. Spencer. Thanks for joining me Sandy.

Sandy Spencer:             Thank you for having me Sarah.

Sarah Williams:            It’s not a drama. Can you just tell us a little bit about your journey to publication so far?

Sandy Spencer:             Okay. Well, I suppose I wanted to be an author since I was a small child. My mother was a librarian, so the house was always full of books and she encouraged us to read from a very young age, and I think what really did it for me was reading Daphne du Maurier. And one of her books, Frenchman’s Creek, I think I must have re-written that book … re-written the ending to that book several times and it stayed with me, cause I would have read that book over forty years ago, and I can still remember the emotions that that book brought up in me. And I always wanted to do that for someone else, I wanted to be able to create something that could do that. But when I first went to university, after about twelve months I realized that this little english major that was 19 years old and hadn’t lived anywhere and hadn’t done anything, wasn’t really gonna make a terribly good author. So I decided to change my major and I studied business instead, business and accounting.

Sandy Spencer:             And so, I sort of put all those dreams of writing on hold for quite a few years while I did a job that paid well but didn’t really satisfy my creative instincts. But the good thing that it did was it got me to Australia, because the company I was working for transferred me over here for three months and at the end of the three months I was like, “Wow, can I go back?”

Sandy Spencer:             So I was very fortunate to able to come back to Australia, and after again working for, sort of, 20-odd years, I ended up working in Melbourne in Franklin Street, which was very close to the Queen Victoria Markets and Flagstaff Gardens. And Flagstaff Gardens was the original Burial Hill in Melbourne, and Queen Victoria Market, the car park, was the large graveyard. And there’s still some 9000 bodies under that carpark at the Queen Victoria Market that were never exhumed.

Sandy Spencer:             So here I found myself working in this area that was just brimming with ghostly possibilities. And so, I started writing a book about ghosts and vampires, vampires were very popular at the time, Twilight was, sort of, at its peak. And so, I wrote a vampire and ghosts story, trilogy, and absolutely loved it, sent it off to a few agents and a couple of publishers and got a lot of “Thank you very much for your submission, but it’s not right for us at the moment, you kind of missed the whole vampire time-frame.”

Sandy Spencer:             So I just, sort of, put it aside and in the meantime I ended up retiring and started playing Bridge, and met a gentleman who had self-published and we started talking. And he encouraged me to just do it. And so, I just did it, and then, after having published that, I gained confidence that I could do it and …

Sandy Spencer:             I was [inaudible 00:04:32] from a five-year-old, and I was not a city person, so coming to Australia was like heaven for me. And I started dreaming about, you know, what it would be like to live in one of those small towns in, sort of, that Golden Triangle area, which is, sort of, Bendigo, Ballarat. And I actually bought a small property in Trentham that I owned for a few years and, sort of … it was miner’s cottage and I had dreams of going up there and becoming this little author, sitting in my little miner’s cottage and working in this small town. Never happened. I ended up … We got married and we’ve moved to six acres South of Melbourne.

Sandy Spencer:             But those feelings in that small town were still in me, and so I thought “I’m gonna write a story that’s, kind of …” you know, I can draw so much inspiration from my own life. Here was this woman who wants to live in the country and she takes her horse and goes off and buys a little house and she’s gonna be a writer.

Sandy Spencer:             And so, that was the beginning of my Copperhead Creek series, and because I’d self-published the vampire ones, I thought well … I sent it off to one woman and it wasn’t right for her and then I just thought “Nah.” I’m just too impatient to send it around, and I just thought “I’m just gonna do it,” and I did it. And that was my journey to publication.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent.

Sandy Spencer:             And my … With a big house, and can I see my books at the airport? No-

Sarah Williams:            Not yet.

Sandy Spencer:             … but I have a lot of fun with it.

Sarah Williams:            That’s fantastic. So you’ve got your vampires and you’ve got your rural romance, so that must be an interesting crossover. Do people ever get a little bit confused between it?

Sandy Spencer:             It’s reasonably easy to tell, but … Yeah, they’re very different stories, yeah.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Excellent.

Sandy Spencer:             One’s very much a young adult, the vampires is very much … is a nine-year-old girl, so …

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Oh that’s awesome. So how many-

Sandy Spencer:             And all my writing is … It’s …

Sarah Williams:            Go on.

Sandy Spencer:             Oh, sorry, all my writing is quite clean, I try to avoid any language that people would find offensive, and even though they are adults and they have adult situations, it takes place behind closed doors. So, if somebody has read the vampire books and then reads my other books and they’re a young teenager, it’s not gonna matter.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Excellent. That’s brilliant.

Sarah Williams:            So, I love how you were saying that moving out to the country and becoming a writer, I’m reading that book at the moment and I’m loving it, it’s gorgeous. I love Tom, he’s beautiful.

Sandy Spencer:             Thank you.

Sarah Williams:            And yeah, so that’s an interesting thing, I guess a lot of, particularly us writers, we all aspire … Oh, it would be so nice to move to the country and be able to write full time and fall in love with this gorgeous, tall guy, and have horses and … Oh, I love it, I’m just really going “I want this life.”

Sarah Williams:            So why do you think you’re writing Australian? Have you ever thought about writing an American cowboy story? Or is it … it’s really more an Australian passion.

Sandy Spencer:             Well, I’ve lived here now for 33 years, so … Yeah, I thought about writing a book based in San Francisco, because I was gonna write a fourth book to my vampire series, but I don’t feel like I know San Francisco well enough anymore to do that, to write a contemporary book set there. And I sort of feel the same about most parts of America, I’ve traveled more in Australia than I have in the U.S., I’ve never been to Texas, I’ve never been to Oklahoma. It would be really hard for me to get my head around those areas, and this is easier for me because it’s what I’m surrounded by, it’s where I live. I actually live on six acres, I have three horses, and even though it’s not rural, it’s sort of a small town feel, so it’s sort of what I’m living and breathing.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Okay, yeah, that’s gorgeous. Actually, I do know there is an Australian romance author who lives in the city and she writes country rural romance like us, she said she’s learnt everything she writes about, through YouTube. That was quite funny actually.

Sarah Williams:            So you sell your books through Amazon, through the Kindle Unlimited program. How is that going for you?

Sandy Spencer:             I like it, it enables me to run a promotion for each book once every three months. So, I have a choice between either having it free for up to five days, or I can do a countdown deal, which … I’ve only done one once, so I’m not entirely sure how it creeps up, but it starts at 99 cents and then it creeps back up to the full price. I’ve only done that once and I’ve chosen for the others to always go with just having it free for a few days in the hopes that I might attract some new readers that then read that book and go “Ah, I might get the rest of the series.”

Sarah Williams:            Yeah.

Sandy Spencer:             So that’s working.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, that’s excellent. That’s cool. And do you think you’ll go wide at some point in the future, or are you pretty happy with Amazon?

Sandy Spencer:             I probably will at some stage. I think I’m a little bit chicken, just because I feel comfortable with what I’ve been doing and so, that’s a change and it’s like “Whoa,” it’s sort of, I’m comfortable where I am. But I know that the illusive BookBub is very difficult to get and you have a much greater chance of getting it if you are wide, than if you are simply with Amazon. So yeah, I think I’m gonna have to go wide if I want to expand my readership.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, yeah.

Sandy Spencer:             And I need a website.

Sarah Williams:            Yes, you do need a website. You’re on social media, but no website. It’s crazy.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent. Yeah, do you think, though, using Kindle Unlimited helps with getting your American market? I know there’s a lot of us here in Australia, myself included, we do quite well getting the Australian market, but it can be a bit trickier trying to break into the American market. So, a couple of questions on that, do you think it helps you getting the American market, being on Kindle Unlimited, and how do you write in terms of your spelling? Is it American spelling or is it Australian spelling?

Sandy Spencer:             With the Kindle Unlimited I get a huge number of downloads … I get a huge number of pages read with the Kindle Unlimited, and most of that is in the U.S. So, I don’t know how many books have actually sold in the U.S. versus the Kindle Unlimited pages read. So I’d say it is a big help, being on Kindle Unlimited, because I think it’s only 9.99 a month for them, and so if you get somebody that’s reading a lot, you know, they can go through hundreds of books in a month or whatever. And so it’s a very economical way for them to read, so that has helped a lot.

Sandy Spencer:             Sorry, I forgot the second half of the question.

Sarah Williams:            Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked two questions at once.

Sandy Spencer:             I forgot the second half of the question.

Sarah Williams:            Do you run your books with an American spell check or Australian? So, mum or mom?

Sandy Spencer:             Oh. Yeah, no, I use Australian spelling and I use the Australian single quotes for dialogue.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah.

Sandy Spencer:             What I do try to do, except it’s very difficult for me to remember, cause I’ve lived here for 32 years now, but I do try to use words … If I think that one word might work better. Like, for instance, a kitchen bench versus a kitchen counter. Australians would talk about a kitchen bench, Americans would talk about a kitchen counter. So where there’s a word that I think is gonna be confusing, I try not to use it, I try to restructure my sentences, but I do use Australian spelling and I’m not afraid to throw Australian slang in there and give the characters realistic dialogue.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Oh, that’s fantastic. Brilliant, so what are you working on at the moment?

Sandy Spencer:             I’m … In my series, in the Copperhead Creek series, there is a policeman, he’s sergeant Rob Anderson who’s the town cop. And so, the next book I’m writing, at the moment, is a murder mystery. And so he becomes the main character rather than just a small, minor character, and it’s a murder mystery. So if I do well with it, if I’m happy with it, I may continue that as a series, and if not, then that would become the last book of the current series.

Sarah Williams:            Oh, excellent.

Sandy Spencer:             If I don’t think that I can keep going with it, if I …

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, yeah. And more vampires in your future?

Sandy Spencer:             Well it’s interesting, a friend of mine the other day said “When are you gonna write book four?” So, maybe. I could continue that story, I don’t know.

Sarah Williams:            Yeah, vampires never really get old.

Sandy Spencer:             I’ve always been fascinated with the occult. The …

Sarah Williams:            No, that’s fantastic-

Sandy Spencer:             Well I went to Port Arthur a week ago and saw all the ruins, and a friend of mine lent me her little device, it’s like an electromagnetic thing, to look for ghosts. And so I walked around [inaudible 00:15:26] knock around in rooms and made sure nobody was watching and I did my little thing. Didn’t find any, unfortunately.

Sarah Williams:            I did the night tour there one night and, oh my God, that is the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life, so never again.

Sandy Spencer:             Port Arthur?

Sarah Williams:            Yeah. Very scary place.

Sandy Spencer:             You did the night one at Port Arthur?

Sarah Williams:            Yeah.

Sandy Spencer:             Oh, I didn’t do that, no. That would be a little bit scary.

Sarah Williams:            Very scary. Very, very. They take you into the morgue and you can smell … Oh, I forget what it’s called, but that stuff that they use with embalming, it’s quite a … [inaudible 00:16:13]

Sandy Spencer:             Oh, formaldehyde.

Sarah Williams:            Formaldehyde, that’s what it’s called, yeah. It’s really strong in there and … Yeah. No. I love reading about it but I don’t wanna do that again.

Sarah Williams:            Well thank you so much Sandy, I really enjoyed talking to you today. Where can we find you online, even though you don’t have a website?

Sandy Spencer:             Well, I have a Facebook author page and I’m on Goodreads and I have my Amazon author page. And I’m on Twitter, so … I promise I will do a website in the not too distant future.

Sarah Williams:            Excellent, we might do a workshop and it’s “How to do Sandy’s website.”

Sarah Williams:            That’s wonderful, thank you so much for talking to me today Sandy.

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 free preview of my books and lots of inspiration.

Sarah Williams:            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. And 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.

Sarah Williams:            I’ll be back next week with another loved up episode. Bye!