Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
It was fun. Meeting the fans was so cool—still is the best part, even though I have to hear about it second-hand because I make a point of not hanging around Essie’s signing table during the event.
And the authors were closer back then. We were a smaller group, I guess. We all came up together. I actually wasn’t the first to break out so big. That was Leslie Munch, pen name Raylen Star.
For more than a year, Raylen Star was my idol. I looked up to her in my early days. I stalked her socials, entered all her giveaways, and read her books. I read them. They were… well, not good. Let’s just say they were better than most at the time. Indie authors have upped their game in an incredible way. But back then, we were making it up as we went.
I used her as a role model. I paid close attention to her publishing strategy. How long she went between releases, how many ads she ran, how many signings she went to. And I just tried to do everything better.
Oh, man, did she ever notice. She has accused Essie—i.e. me—of stealing her ideas at least a dozen times. And when my seventh book—Choke the Sugar Outta Me—made it all the way to number one in the Nile store, she accused me of plagiarizing. Lawyers and everything.
She lost in court—because let’s be real here, OK? You don’t get to be the number one romance writer in the entire world by copying the words of Leslie fucking Munch. She had to pay my attorney’s fees and issue a public apology—that was Essie’s idea. Essie made a Facebook Live asking for it in lieu of us suing her back for defamation, and this whole thing split the romance world in half. One group on Leslie’s side, one on Essie’s.
So yeah. Leslie Munch had to eat crow. And she kinda faded away after that. Not entirely—every once in a while, she manages to pull together enough words to make a book. OK, I’m just getting snooty now, but she was a bitch to me and I seriously idolized her. But more importantly, she was a bitch to Essie. Sweet, fair, honest (mostly—it’s me who makes her a liar) hardworking Essie.
You can call me out all you want, but do not fuck with my sister. I will go all alpha big-brother on you. Even though technically she was born three minutes before I was, so I’m the little brother in real life.
The point is—Leslie Munch burned this bridge to the fucking water. There’s not a splinter of that bridge left.
She became our mortal enemy.
But losing that lawsuit did shut her up. At least in public. I’ve heard rumors that she’s got some private fan forum where she talks all kinds of shit about other authors, but those fans of hers must sign NDAs in blood, because no one will admit to it. Maybe it doesn’t even exist. It takes a special kind of psycho superfan to not screenshot that shit and blast it all over socials.
Anyway…
The Sin With Us Romance Con started that same year. It was kind of a shit show. Let’s just put it this way—we didn’t have it at the Aria. It was at Circus Island. There were cockroaches in the ice cream machines at the buffet.
But no one really cared back then. It was all so different. We felt lucky to be there. It was like a dream come true. I mean, yeah, cockroaches in ice cream is gross, but pretty much every author there—and there were only about fifty back then, this year we have three hundred coming—pretty much all of us just walked around like we were living a fever dream. Like it wasn’t real. None of what was happening to us as a group had sunk in yet. I mean, people were cheering for us. They would line up at our tables and wait there for hours just to get a signed book. Our bank accounts were filling up, our socials were growing, and there were deals being made.
Movie deals, publishing deals. Not just me, either. Lots of us got deals like that back then.
Even Essie was enthralled with it all, and she didn’t even write the books. This was before Mike, so I had to participate more, and that first year I sat at the signing table with her as her twin-brother assistant.
We only did that once. The ladies were kind of obsessed with me. Started asking for my picture. A few of them even asked if I was her boyfriend.
That’s when I bowed out and never sat at that table again. It’s bad enough that I have to write sex scenes for a living, but my sister has to read them all so she knows what the hell the fans are talking about when she interacts with them.