Steamy, Small Town NZ Author Tracey Alvarez

Tracey Alvarez is a USA TODAY BEST-SELLING author living in the Coolest Little Capital in the World (a.k.a Wellington, New Zealand). She’s a successful Indie author who writes steamy, small town New Zealand, contemporary romance.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:                  Welcome to ‘Write With Love’ I’m Sarah Williams, best selling author, speaker and creative entrepreneur.

Sarah Williams:                  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.

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. Now here’s today’s show.

Sarah Williams:                  G’day I’m Sarah Williams, romance author and independent publisher at Serenade Publishing, today I’m chatting to Tracey Alvarez, thanks for joining me Tracey.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Thanks for having me.

Sarah Williams:                  No worries, so tell us about yourself, and your writing journey so far.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Okay, well I write contemporary romances, so far set in New Zealand, and I’ve been writing them since about 2010 but only started publishing in 2013. I’ve always written so I’ve been writing as far back as I can remember, one really bad novel when I was in my early 20s but it wasn’t until my kids were older that I started writing novels. So that’s pretty much how I got started back in 2010.

Sarah Williams:                  Brilliant, so you’ve been writing for a long time, did you have a few ready to go when you started publishing?

Tracey Alvarez:                 No, because before that, when my kids were little, when they still had naps, I would write short stories. So I had quite a few short stories published in New Zealand Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day, New Idea, that sort of thing, when they still published short stories. And one or two competitions and then when the kids started getting older it wasn’t so easy to find time to write, and I actually home schooled them for quite a number of years so that kind of went on the byside and it wasn’t until they went to school that I actually had the time to write longer works and now I cannot write short.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, I completely understand, I have four kids, they’re all at primary school and there’s no way I would have been able to home school them at all, let alone try and write as well.

Tracey Alvarez:                 We haven’t got enough brain power for that.

Sarah Williams:                  So, pre-writing, did you ever do any courses or anything like that about writing or you had a different [crosstalk 00:02:55]

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’ve done lots of online courses, I’ve never done something like university level creative writing or anything like that, but I have done tons of online writing courses, everything from craft to marketing, to you name it, and I’ve still got all of the notes on my hard drive. So, I feel like I’ve done my dues learning my craft as best I can, yeah.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, brilliant, are there any of those that you could recommend the most?

Tracey Alvarez:                 There’s so many and there’s so many good teachers out there, Margie Lawson has some really good courses, and I mean there’s a lot of really good craft books out there like James Scott Bell, he does some really awesome ones. I mean there’s just heaps of stuff out there, you just have to go looking for it, look for recommendations and I can’t think of… I’ve got like two book shelves full of craft books as well.

Sarah Williams:                  And are you like most of us, we like our craft books to be paperbacks rather than Kindles?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yes, but I’m saying that, I’ve got a lot of craft books that I haven’t actually read, they’re just sat there looking pretty, one day I’ll get round to them, I keep telling myself.

Sarah Williams:                  We just need to get all the information through telepathy or something like that rather than read it.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Osmosis, now that would be good.

Sarah Williams:                  Who has time to read?

Tracey Alvarez:                 The best way I’ve found as to actually write, I mean you can spend years just saying you’re researching and learning how to write, but unless you are actually putting fingertips to keyboard and doing it, you’re not going to learn anything from just reading about how to write.

Sarah Williams:                  Yup, absolutely. So you’re based in Wellington in New Zealand. And I have had a few New Zealanders come on this show, which is fantastic, I love that you guys just are doing so well, these Kiwis, it just astounds me.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I know, it’s great, and Australians too, next door neighbors. So, you rock.

Sarah Williams:                  So you write contemporary New Zealand romances and I know you have the ‘Stewart Island’ series which is, for those of us that don’t know about New Zealand geography, Stewart Island is the little dot at the bottom of the south island, separated by some ocean, and ‘Bounty Bay’ series which you’ve got a fictional town-

Tracey Alvarez:                 It is, it’s actually based on a real area that I have lived in for almost a decade up in the far north near Kaitaia, Te Hapua, 90 Mile Beach for Kiwis who know where that is. But I thought it was easier just to create a fictional town. It’s sort of a mash up of all of those areas and it just works easier for me that way, there are certain challenges when you are writing Stewart Island with Oban, I think that’s how you say it, which is actually a real town, and I’ve kind of fudged a few details there, so apologies to anyone from Stewart Island who’s read my book, big creative license.

Sarah Williams:                  But they probably love it in Stewart Island, because they don’t get mentioned very often.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yeah, actually have a friend of mine who’s a very chatty person who had a holiday down there and was actually handing out copies of my book, gave one to the library. I wouldn’t even do that, I would be much too shy but she didn’t have a problem with it.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s classic. So why did you decide to set them in New Zealand?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Well for the Stewart Island series, actually I think the first book I wrote was the first Bounty Bay series before it became Bounty Bay, and we lived up on the far north as I said and an area that was surrounded by nature’s bush, beautiful area and one of the experiences, that actually was the cute meet at the beginning was the heroine getting her car stuck in mud and trying to dig it out, and that really happened, a lot, and my husband.

Tracey Alvarez:                 So I just kind of had this idea and ran with it, way back when. But the Stewart Island series I knew I wanted to write about a police diver, and I knew I wanted to write about a small town and I’d also seen an article about a female diver with great white shark’s head coming into her dive cage and I thought, ‘Man, that woman’s got balls of steel’, and so I thought, ‘Oh sharks’, because I have a morbid fascination about sharks. But where can I find all of these things? I thought ‘Okay, it’s either Stewart Island or Chatham Island.’ But I thought, ‘I don’t know anything about the Chatham Islands, but Stewart Island’s part of New Zealand, let’s run with that.’ And it just kind of happened from there.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, brilliant.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I guess because I know New Zealand and someways that makes it easier to write, when I’m not having to research what color the taxis are. [inaudible 00:08:18] and I just love New Zealand so why not

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah, and do you use New Zealand-isms in there, or do you make it bit more American for-

Tracey Alvarez:                 I do. I do both because I would say something like 80 to 90 percent of my audience is American, and a lot of Americans just love New Zealand and Australia, and it’s like ‘I want to go down under’ so I do try to cater to them and then I spell with American spellings. But I do use New Zealand slang, but not too much, I substitute some words that will pull an American reader out the story, for example we say ‘jug’, I don’t know what Australians say? But, ‘put the jug on,’ Americans are like ‘What?’ I just have to put kettle, most people know that is.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Just little things, I try to make it a bit easier for the reader experience. I’ve had by beta readers say, what was one of them? There’s a few funny ones that they have hauled me up on, that was just I don’t even think of them being New Zealand-isms, and they’re like, ‘What does that mean?’

Sarah Williams:                  So you still chuck the odd ‘pavlova’ and ‘Jandles’ in there?

Tracey Alvarez:                 I actually, no, I do flip-flops. [crosstalk 00:09:51]

Sarah Williams:                  I’m actually from New Zealand-

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’ll say [inaudible 00:09:54] Australians are actually pretty smart, ‘We know what that is.’

Sarah Williams:                  I’m trying so hard to teach my kids it’s Jandles it’s not thongs.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Oh yeah, we don’t want [inaudible 00:10:04]

Sarah Williams:                  And we ended up compromising.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Fanny pack or something, and I suddenly thought [inaudible 00:10:21] So you’ve gotta have the beta readers that are gonna say ‘You can’t say that.’

Sarah Williams:                  ‘That’s not right’. That’s excellent, so tell us about publishing, did you always decide you wanted to go independent and self-publish? Or did you have dreams of traditional?

Tracey Alvarez:                 When I first started in 2010 in self-publishing really wasn’t much of a thing it was only the few outliers and rebels that had tried it, so my first conference, the Romance Writers of New Zealand Conference I went in 2010 I actually pitched what become a book that I have just released called, was it Quake? I have just released an earthquake book set in Wellington, it was a book I had written, I can’t remember which one now, was the hopes of going traditionally.

Tracey Alvarez:                 And I’d actually, from that point filling and even won a couple of those IWA contests, you know the first few chapters got some requests from editors. One of them was Harlequin Editor and she asked to see the full, which was awesome, but then she lost it and so I ended up waiting for about a year to hear back from her and to cut a long story short she really liked it, she couldn’t use it on her line, she wanted to sent it to another editor and I just said, ‘No thank you’.

Tracey Alvarez:                 And by then I had already self-published the first two Stewart Island books I think it was so I’m like ‘No, I’m just gonna do my own thing’ and I’ve never looked back.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent, so you’re happy that you did do that way and that you didn’t wait for traditional deal.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I really don’t have much of an interest in traditional, going the traditional way. I mean if one of the big five knocked on my door I would certainly look at what they had to offer, but otherwise I’m just quite happy publishing myself.

Sarah Williams:                  No, that’s brilliant. And again I’ve interviewed quite a few New Zealander authors and they are all doing it independently and all doing very successfully, especially with the American market. And I think that possibly for Australians our own market is quite big, so I know a lot of us do publish quite widely in Australia. And actually getting into the American market can be a little bit trickier. So yeah, it’s really amazing to see that you guys are just going straight to the American market as indies.

Sarah Williams:                  So you got USA Today best-selling status, which book was that for? And how did you manage it?

Tracey Alvarez:                 That was my box set which had the first five Steward Island books in it, and it’s normally $7.99 and I discounted it to 99 cents once I’d scored a book promotion on it, otherwise I never would have tried to make a run for the USA Today list on a single title.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I think for indie authors unless you’ve already got a huge following it’s extremely hard to hit the USA Today list on a single book, so I discounted the box-set and then I staggered a bunch of promotional sites like Bargain Booksy and Robins Reads and ENT and all of those ones that most of the authors are familiar with. And I staggered them that week and I went into it with an aim to make the list, and so I called on every favor of every author I had helped in the past, and I said, ‘Help, can you mention my offer in your newsletter or post it on Facebook that I am having this sale’ and yeah I was really terrified the whole week that I wasn’t going to make it, but I landed at number 63 so I was absolutely blown away, I was so chuffed.

Sarah Williams:                  That’s awesome, that’s really brilliant and so Romance Writers of New Zealand is the conference and the association that you’re a member of?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yes I am, I’m actually on the conference committee this year, organizing the 2018 conference, and it’s just an amazing group of women and really so supportive of each other and we just have a blast at conference, given me who’s a wall flower.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I mean last year was the first time I took a panel workshop on self-publishing, I was absolutely petrified, I made myself get out of my comfort zone and do it, it was just really neat, you know having someone like Nalini Singh, because I kind of know her from conferences about talking to her beforehand, having her go to my workshop, I was like, ‘Oh my god Nalini Singh’s doing my workshop’ But it was fine, everyone was juts so lovely. [crosstalk 00:15:24]

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent, so you’re not doing another workshop this year?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Not this year, no.

Sarah Williams:                  Not this year.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I think we are because we’ve got Bella Andre coming over, but I won’t be taking any workshops this year.

Sarah Williams:                  I’m really excited, I’m going to be there for WMC conference this year, it’s my first time.

Tracey Alvarez:                 Oh are you?

Sarah Williams:                  Yes I am [crosstalk 00:15:47] as soon as they said I’m like, ‘I’m there dude.’

Tracey Alvarez:                 You’ll have to do a live broadcast or something,

Sarah Williams:                  Yes, I have lots of things planned, I’m going to be in Auckland for a week preparing and doing things. It will be a very big and thankfully child-free week for me, so it’ll be brilliant.

Sarah Williams:                  Have you ever gone abroad to any of the other conferences? WA America, or anything in Europe?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yeah I went to RWA 2016 in San Diego, that was my first WA and I was completely overwhelmed, I’ve never been to the Aussie one, but you know having been to a few New Zealand ones. I was totally unprepared for how many people there were, I mean I don’t particularly like crowds, it wasn’t quite Comic-Con, which was happening a few doors down later. But for me it was like Comic-Con with just people, but yeah amazing speakers, and learned heaps. It was really cool, and then we did a road trip afterwards so that was even better.

Sarah Williams:                  Yeah of course, you’ve got to tie an end with a nice trip around. So what are you working on at the moment?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Right now I’m working on the Stewart Island book number ten, which is called Bending the rules, it’s my cop, Noah’s story and very quick  and interesting heroine who’s got to drive him nuts called Tilly, so that’s what I’m currently writing. I’m also getting Break Your Heart which is the Bounty Bay book five, getting that ready to go. I’m just getting new covers done for that series actually and I’m so excited about them. So really distracting this last few days getting new covers done, I just want to stare at them, and not actually do any work.

Tracey Alvarez:                 So that’s coming out June 15th, I’ll be releasing it and giving that [inaudible 00:17:56] out in a few weeks and, yeah, so that’s currently what I’m working on.

Sarah Williams:                  Oh that’s brilliant. What are the things, so you write these, it’s really just these two series that you are concentrating on at the moment, so are they generally just, the Stewart Island ones I know it’s basically the same people that keep reoccurring in the books, but they all have their own different stories? Yup? So their kind-

Tracey Alvarez:                 Yeah, I’m kind of running out of couples now, there’s a few left who have got this story and then I’ve got to decide whether I want to introduce a bunch of new characters or, I’m thinking more likely do some spin-off, a spinoff series. I’ve already started a-spin off series from these and [inaudible 00:18:33] Sorry, but if you knew [inaudible 00:18:40] it’s a gorgeous little country town. [crosstalk 00:18:49]

Sarah Williams:                  It is. Yeah, excellent, I was going to say, yeah how many books can you write based on Stewart Island, there must be-

Tracey Alvarez:                 I mean there’s only a population of 400 people that live there so it’s a small area, so there’s a little bit more scope with Bounty Bay, so they’ve had a couple of different sort of families and characters keep coming in, and originally I was going to stop at this book but I think I might actually do, I can see readers screaming for our little sister’s story after this one. So at least one more and possibly more.

Sarah Williams:                  And so your heat level, you’re sweet?

Tracey Alvarez:                 Oh no, no.

Sarah Williams:                  No you’re not.

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’m quite steamy, I would say sexy to steamy, but also heartwarming and sweet as well but definitely [inaudible 00:19:39]. Not that the sex is dirty, I’m not a sweet writer.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent, put a warning on that one.

Tracey Alvarez:                 [inaudible 00:19:52]

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent, well, where can we find you online Tracey?

Tracey Alvarez:                 I’m online at my website which is traceyalvarez.com and all over Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and that’s about it really ’cause I spend far too much time on social media as it is, or my newsletter which I send out once a month, that’s a good way to keep up with me too, and I like replying to emails and stuff.

Sarah Williams:                  Excellent well thank you so much for that, that was really fun.

Sarah Williams:                  Thanks for joining me today, I hope you enjoyed the show, jump on to my website, sarahwilliamsauthor.com and join my mailing list to receive a free preview of my book and lots of inspiration.

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Sarah Williams:                  I’ll be back next week with another Loved Up episode. Bye.