Explore Willow Winters's journey in the Book Publishing Industry

Absolutely. It’s rather negative and very burdensome but I came from a very broken and flawed home with divorced parents. I bring it up because I think it’s very relatable. I have realized I still have a lot to things to deal with as I am raising my own children. I now understand how problematic and difficult it was to get through. So, when I think of rootless, I think about letting go of that, unlearning a lot of things that were very negative and knowing that I’m ok now. I can finally absorb all that has happened, learn from it and go the direction I want. – Willow Winters

I was born and raised in Delaware, which is a very small Mid-Atlantic state. My parents weren’t married when I was born, they married because of me, had my sister and immediately divorced. A baby can’t save a relationship and that’s exactly what it was. They both remarried but it was extremely toxic and tenuous going back and forth. I’ve witnessed my father getting arrested multiple times. We grew up in one of the top ten most violent cities in America, in that’s Willington, Delaware. My grandmother helped my father raise me every other weekend which was problematic because my mum was quite vindictive towards him. Unfortunately, it definitely bled into the way I grew up because when my grandmother was dying of cancer, I wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to her because it wasn’t my father’s weekend according to my mother. I think this is something a lot of people have to deal with. A lot of children grow up in that kind of environment. At the time, I just worked my butt off, I was a super nerd, doing school work all the time. It became an excuse and defense. Everything was fine if I was doing well in school and everybody was very happy to know that. I ended up being salutatorian in high school, I went to college for Biology and quickly switched to focus on neuroscience.  We don’t have a choice when we’re children, we don’t have options so we shouldn’t take that burden on ourselves. – Willow Winters

So, I got a double degree. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience and a Bachelor of Science in Biology. Against all odds, I met my husband in college. I was undergrad and he was a graduate student. One day I will write our story with an enemies to lovers to friends to lovers vibe to it. I absolutely fell in love with him and we related on so many different levels. I was getting my PhD; we were getting married and we started the discussion of when are we going to have children. That discussion went hand in hand with “When do you want to destroy your career?” I wanted a career in academia, wanted to be a professor, wanted to do the research I was doing and teach people. Professors don’t usually have children until their mid or late 30s, which was something I didn’t want because research has shown the difficulties of having children at that age. I was literally doing research on cognitive development which showed me that the lifestyle and the career I wanted didn’t add up. My husband was also doing research at that time and was as adamant as me that I should start young. He suggested I get pregnant during my dissertation and try to take as little time off as possible. I wanted a big family and family and career butted up against each other and that wasn’t ever discussed before. I was always told to go to school and do well, go to college, get married and then have children. I had never had the discussion that if you ever want to be anything you dream up, you might not have children because you’re a woman. That discussion is absent when you’re growing up and I came head-to-head with that. I stopped my PhD program. I wasn’t going to dedicate 4 years of my life just to give it up later on. I was having anxiety attacks, has a difficult situation with another member of the lab, my professor at the time was the primary investigator of my work and it was overwhelming. I stopped and soon lost that identity I had when I was working, it vanished. I was Shon’s wife and when I had my son and I was Jack’s mother. I was no longer the smart one in the room, no longer the woman who was going to find a cure for cancer. I had lost my identity. Then “50 shades of grey” came out and like many Americans, I discovered erotic romance for the first time and I found a lot of happiness there. It was wonderful, it enlightened me. I enjoyed it and I thought to binge read all of that while I was pregnant with my second baby, Evelyn. The moment she was born I didn’t want to read anymore, I wanted to write. So, I started to write for myself. I think it was a very good way for me to start this career because I didn’t have Impostor syndrome and didn’t have to worry who was going to publish me, didn’t care what somebody else thought. It was for me, I needed me back and I found it in romance novels. So, I just started publishing without knowing anything and having to learn it from the ground up. – Willow Winters

I didn’t know. The only C I ever got in high school was in English. I only took one English class in college because I had previously taken the AP program in high school. I did that because I hated English and history. I don’t remember anything from English classes. It’s more about whether you have a story to tell, put it down in the page so it looks like what’s in your head. If you can’t do it, find an editor to help you do it. I remember writing this action scene for the first time. There were werewolves and they were going to get hit by a silver bullet and I waited to write it until I was completely done with this book because I didn’t think I could do it. I am now well-known for action, dark romance, violence and I didn’t have the faith I could do it back then. I thought I was just going to give it a go when the book was all done because I didn’t want to bother with it at the moment. That’s an obstacle I think everyone goes through. You think you don’t know how to do it or feel like your work is not good enough. You can’t edit a blank page so, write it down and edit it later. – Willow Winters

I was having a discussion with one of my husband’s friends and he introduced me to Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP is Amazon, is not Kindle Unlimited even though you do have an option to enroll on Kindle Unlimited with this. I had written a story at that time and didn’t know there were wide platforms and you could also publish on other bookstores like Barnes & Nobles or iBooks. I had no idea; I was informed that I could publish on Kindle Direct Publishing and I googled everything I didn’t know. I made the cover using my non photoshopped face, used the Kindle’s Cover Maker and had it published. So, I really published for the first time without having an editor or knowing a thing. It didn’t sell very well and at the time we didn’t have strong income. My husband was working, we had both graduated in Science in Delaware. The year I graduated with my undergrad was the year DuPont stopped and a lot of federal laws changed and they moved to an international factory and research. Our job potential was gone. We were rooted where we were because we literally just bought a house. My husband was away for extended periods of time, sometimes up to 12 hours a day. We were a single income household, had two children and I had to spend our money wisely. All of our savings were spent whenever our car broke down. So, the money I got from the book was a life saver. I saw potential at writing. At the time I had published a very short chapter but people were interested. At the time I didn’t know about Facebook Groups, all I saw was potential and that I could make more of it. – Willow Winters

Write whatever comes to you, what speaks to you. One of the most important things I’ve learned from a book titled “Tribes”, is that your voice has a uniqueness to it and there are people that will be drawn to that uniqueness. A lot of people write books that seem like they follow the same flow as other books and people think they’re alike. There’s someone who gives lectures on the addiction of fiction and calls it your ID. When you write your first book that has your name attached to it and the author gets known for. That book has that uniqueness your tribe is looking for. So, if you can find that, hold on to that and write for yourself. Your voice is going to do much better if you choose to do that instead of picking a genre and writing about it. You just need to be true to your voice and your tribe will eventually find you. – Willow Winters

I haven’t taken a single course. You’re going to get hate throughout your entire career. There are people who are your people and people who are not. Not every book is for every person and you have to absorb that. You can’t please any one person all the time and you can’t please all the people at one time. You just have to embrace the fact that the criticism is going to come. The way I deal with that is by reading one-star reviews of books I love and thinking they’re wrong. That’s the same way some people will feel about your books too. I love my books just the way they are. – Willow Winters

So, procrastination is rooted in fear. In the beginning, I would have six books all started and have the compulsion to start another book because I had a new idea. This is the first year I don’t do that. I realize that I’m not finishing these books because I think I can’t do them justice, can’t finish them and that someone reading it can’t see the same thing that I can see. I didn’t feel confident. I was afraid it wouldn’t sell well. Those kinds of fears will keep you from starting to write your stories. So many people come at me with story ideas asking me to write about them and I always tell them that it’s their story and they should be the ones to write it. They don’t want to because they think it won’t do well. You need to realize that fear is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter is you think it won’t do well; it matters if you write it because there are people who’ll want to read it. – Willow Winters

Editing. Write for yourself, edit for the masses, market for the many. You’ve written a story, told yourself it doesn’t matter what people think but you need an editor for spelling and grammar. That’s called a copy editor. Before that you need a line editor who will go over your voice, tone, characters development, etc. He is going to point out weaknesses that you may not have realized. A line editor once told me to search for when I wrote “I can” and replace it with something that strengthen the writing. A lot of people will go over a book and keep trying to strengthen it and this happens because of fear, because they’re not ready to release it. They need to realize their writing is stronger and they need to utilize it in their next story and make it better. Let yourself see what your natural weaknesses are so that you can strengthen them while writing. – Willow Winters

By this point, I have had these stories in my head for years before I am actually to write them. I stopped writing down synopsis and sketching things out until I’m ready to write it. Right now, I write a line or two and those will trigger the entire story. Once I’m ready, I’ll word-vomit an entire outline and are there any places where it goes from A to C and see what happened in between. I write it very roughly. I am also really open to completely change direction once I start writing. Sometimes I will get 70% of the way and I’ll change it and let whatever is flowing come to me. It used to take me a couple of weeks to write a novel, a 50,000-word book. I would write obsessively and fast. I used to call it easy fruit because I was new, the stories were vibrant and came more easily. Now it takes me a lot more time, especially because I also have a newborn. My stories are a bit more complex, I do a lot of world building and put easter eggs in. It takes me much longer, a month or two to finish it. Once I’m finished, I immediately run it by my editor because I don’t want to forget details. I want it to be fresh and vibrant. I pay the rush fee for my line editor, sometimes I share betas as I’m writing which is difficult. I occasionally send the chapter for editing without even reading it. So, there are a lot of little steps afterwards. – Willow Winters

A lot of people have this idea in their heads that traditional publishing is the way to go, you’ll make more money or be more successful. Every traditional author I know self-publishes too so that they’ll have income or they have another job because they don’t generate much income from their published books. I’m not saying it can’t be done, it absolutely can. It’s difficult to talk about this because I don’t want to imply it’s a negative choice but if you can do it yourself, why shouldn’t you? The established traditional publishing houses have merged with each other, they have tried to compete with self-published authors, especially in the romance genre and have failed. I have received traditional publishing offer and have turned them down because the contracts themselves are difficult for authors. I asked my financial manager about a contract I was sent. I didn’t understand why they had sent it to me because they would price my book lower, even though they wanted it to be longer and would be giving me less money than I would be making had I published it myself. It’s all around a bad idea even if it’s one of the top publishing houses. It would’ve been great for me to say that I was published by them. My financial manager told me that if I wanted to go through publishing, I had to look at the contracts as a business person would. I also took a lot of advice from people who had never published a book in their life. My stepdad told me that if my book is good, it will sell. That is a terrible advice. When it didn’t sell, I thought my book was bad. That’s when I learned that I shouldn’t take advice from people who haven’t done what I mean to do. If someone’s new and wants to learn, capitalize the potential out there I would suggest to get started on Kindle Unlimited. It is gentle to authors, especially if you’re writing romance. If you publish there, readers are able to take a chance on you without having to spend money. They can read, give you feedback, you can develop a fanbase until you have all your ducks in a row and realize you had to change for the better. You can always fix things but as you’re new, that company is very kind and you’ll actually generate income. You can make mistakes like having a weak cover that doesn’t convey what your book actually is about. It will be hard to sell a book with that kind of cover. If you’re on Kindle Unlimited, it’s going to be no harm, no foul. It costs nothing to check a book you haven’t read just because of the cover. – Willow Winters

I think one of the most important things is A) it’s not about the launch and B) your books will have one thousand lives. I am known for ‘Merciless’, a dark romance. It was a flop when it was originally released. It was polarizing so I received a lot of negativity for writing that book. So, it would’ve been easier if I had just dropped it but I had to keep going, to keep writing it. I later realized, the cover I chose of a tattooed man, all abs, and a font with a ghostly effect made it rather confusing, it didn’t speak of a powerful deadly man. It gave you the impression of a paranormal boy, it wasn’t defined very well. The moment I changed that; things took off. The tribe I was looking for, finally found me. They saw that cover, they opened it up and it was what they had expected. Everything changed, doubled in a snap of a finger. So, I think the most important thing to have people get going is realizing you’ve messed up. Even if you don’t know where you’ve messed up, you need to keep going, keep fighting and one day, in a blink it will all make sense. A lot of people tell authors when they have a book that doesn’t launch well that it was a really hard release week. That’s commonly said in the community. You did something that made the book not launch the way you intended to. You may not see it now and it’s totally fine because the launch doesn’t matter. See where you can stitch, see where you messed up, where can you improve. Just like the writing, what can you strengthen your marketing too. There’s your author hat and business hat. Sometimes your writer hat doesn’t like what your business hat it doing and vice versa. You just have to know when to put one off and you’ll figure it out. – Willow Winters

It’s a lot of work. You’ll mess up, you’ll fail, something won’t be going as planned and you won’t know what’s y6our mistake. That’s where you find your branding. Once you see it, you’ll realize what doesn’t fit what you want to show people and fix it, your brand will evolve that way. It took me years, I’ve rebranded multiple times. When I realize I don’t like something, I will unapologetically and shamelessly change it. I will fix it because I owe it to myself and my tribe that what I’m presenting is exactly true to that branding and marketing. A really good example of this is the W Winters compared to Willow Winters. Willow Winters is more contemporary and emotional while W Winters is quite dark. If you look between the two brandings, you can see that, it’s visually apparent. it’s important that the reader gets what they expect to so it was vital for me to create a differentiation between the two. – Willow Winters

I don’t think it’s true. I think that part of that mentality is due to the algorithms in book stores. You want to be on top, and as soon as something else falls, something will keep up and rotate. In Kindle Unlimited prevails the mentality of keeping it going and publish regularly. If you’re going for that reader who constantly want that content day in and night, there’s this competition and you want to consistently keep that competitive state. There are so many readers and the majority of them only read a couple of books of months. You don’t need to be that couple of books. What you need is a “back catalogue”. You may release once a year or season or some writers who write very short will publish monthly. Regardless of how often you’re publishing, your “back catalogue” should be on point. Whatever you’re publishing, make sure it looks like other books in your catalogue so that your reader can binge read those if they want to. Having everything organized, tight, identifiable is far more important than how often you’re writing. You can always do a sale. If you have a book series, don’t even think about the money until the series is done and then implement a good marketing strategy. That’s what I think. The launch doesn’t matter. What matters is what I can do with these books so that they’ll get in the hands of the people that are going to love them and it doesn’t have to be rushed. – Willow Winters

I love Barnes and Noble. I will never forget walking in the store at the biggest mall here in Delaware and saw my book there. If you want to get on bookstores, you need to publish on Ingram and you can make it available there. You can make the option of offering a refund. People will be far more willing to put them in stores and they will sell. So, I’ll talk about the day I saw my book on Barnes and Noble. I walked into the store, I said hi and that I was looking for the romance section and a woman got her head up and she asked what was I looking for. I told her I was looking for “Forget me not” and that I was the author. I didn’t say my name but the woman said “You’re Willow Winters”. I cried in the car, not in the store. Her name is Heather, she’s the manager and loves indie romance. I think that is why that particular Barnes and Nobles has such an amazing variety of romance, it’s huge. – Willow Winters

It’s a bit for a selfish reason. When my friend suggested that idea, I was scared because I feared people wouldn’t like me which was very genuine. Also, I am not the kind of person you think would write the ‘Merciless’ series. People often meet me and say they expected me to be goth. I’m not exactly my branding for “W Winters” at all. In the beginning, I didn’t want my pic out there so I had a photo of me holding a mug. At a certain point, I wanted to meet my readers, I was looking for a piece of me and that goes beyond marketing my book or sale or teaser. I wanted to interact with people and it is so motivating. It’s so inspiring to wake up and look at messages on social media. They usually start by saying my baby is so cute and talk about my books. It makes me so happy and motivates me to keep going. I think authors should get past their initial fear of not being liked or saying something wrong. It’s not about being liked, it’s about finding your tribe and it is really uplifting. There used to be a stigma about the kind of person who would like a certain type of book and those stereotypes are being eliminated. – Willow Winters

I think consistency is a huge part of it. Nobody wants to be associated with someone who is a scammer. There are a lot of authors who pretend to be writers but actually use ghost writers. You may talk to them with a sense of comradery, doing sprints with them when they’re not actually writing. It feels like a betrayal. There is the stigma of a ghost writer, somebody who is only using this to take advantage of the KU system which is why it usually looked down upon. It sucks because there are plenty of fabulous authors who know how it works, have accountability with it and don’t want to go wide because they have stability. They know they can handle what they’re dealing with. Instead, there is this stigma that you can’t trust an author because they may not be who they say they are. So, I think that consistency is the key, absolutely. I’m often asked by new authors I’ve never read if I can help them with something. I always answer that I can help them with business but I will not promote their book. I don’t know what their book is about, I haven’t read it and I can’t put my name behind the book because I don’t know what is written in it. I will help them via my Facebook Group, I will answer questions about how to do something but I won’t put my name behind somebody who hasn’t shown consistency in writing and being present. If you look right and left, neither of these people will be there in a year and there’s a good reason for that. So, what matters is consistency and powering through. One of the reasons I’ve learned to not put my name behind a new author is because I have been taken advantage of. I have removed authors from my group for plagiarizing. They came back the next day with a different name and I didn’t know that until a reader pointed that out to me. A lot of these authors who might feel guarded feel that way because they’ve been screwed. – Willow Winters

I would advise especially pat attention to the book covers. I see a lot of times the covers aren’t up to par. There’s a trick to doing it. Look at best seller books, put them into a cube and put yours in the center. A lot of times, the titles aren’t legible compared to the others because the font may be very thin, the cover may be overloaded and having too many details in the background won’t sell your book. You’re looking at romance tropes, it should go to your title, abs or a kissing couple. It should be about something that has to do about the genre, not your book’s specific story. Specific things can make it overloaded, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it, you should figure out where your eye is drawn to, whether it is legible and how does it compare. If your eye easily skims over your own cover, in that collage, you know you have a problem. I started with nothing. My covers were horrible but I invested in myself. A lot of times, someone may say that they don’t have the time or can’t afford it. You may not be able to do that just yet but know that it’s something you need to consider and be able to do later on. Wait until you can invest on yourself. – Willow Winters

In the beginning, I realized Facebook Groups were a good way for authors to interact with readers. I joined a lot of groups but they were very closed off and focused on only one or a few authors. I didn’t find any group I could post for myself or about books I loved so I created a Facebook Group called “Begging for book boyfriends”. Anybody can join it. It was modelled after a paranormal group that calls the wolf pack for readers who like a good howl and, in this group, anybody can post. You can post about yourself but an important thing is to not post ads. Your Facebook page is not for that, it’s about finding your people. I think that if you can switch that mentality, you can find names of people commenting on the same things as you. However, when you meet these people in person, everything changes. This is actually difficult to do, I remember I was terrified at my first RDA. I had met Mikey Miller and few people online and he asked to meet up when we got there and I did. He was like a social butterfly. Once you start meeting people in real life, everything becomes more comfortable, you want to help them and they want to help you. You develop your tribe like that. Putting yourself out there is step one. Afterwards you have to pay attention in order to recognize who is interacting with you at that level. – Willow Winters

I am so grateful. I constantly remind myself to feel gratitude. As of 2020 and 2021, there are so many unfortunate conversations happening and shedding light on so many things I was unaware of. I say to myself that it’s so upsetting because I don’t see change moving as quickly as it could. When I told that to my husband, he jokingly welcomed me to the mindset of everybody else. I didn’t realize a lot of these things. I am grateful that I got into this career, this support system, for my children and that my children are happy. There are a million reasons for me to be grateful and it’s easy for me to remind myself because I try to constantly focus on the positives. Even though we are constantly hit with negativity and I’m doing my best to make effective change so that my children go up in a better world. So, it’s going back and forth. – Willow Winters

“If it’s a good book. It will sell”. That advice is the worst advice to give to anyone who writes because of the impostor syndrome. Also, people maybe be offended by this but often a new author will post about something and the readers tell them what they’re doing wrong and the author replies by saying they will change what they’re doing. Readers don’t know business; they’re making assumptions based of things they see. They will oppose and if you’re trying to go back and forth, it won’t end well. What I’m trying to stress out is to not take advice on dating from your aunt that has been divorced for twelve years and hates men. If the other person doesn’t know what they’re talking about or isn’t successful in that field they’re giving you advice on, just nod your head and be polite. Know that you’re doing the best you can and live up to your own expectations. Other people’s expectations are theirs, whether they put them on you or not. You are not responsible for them. – Willow Winters

I think it has a lot of validity when people say that they hate cliffhangers and I think that happens because some authors have taken advantage of it and don’t actually deliver at the end. You may have invested in the story but the ending never comes or seems to be drawn out. Another thing I’ve repeatedly told other authors when it comes to bad reviews is that those reviews sell my book the best. My bestselling books are the ones with the worst reviews. Don’t be afraid of polarizing reviews whether it’s cliffhangers or your content. It’s not going to please everybody. some people are going to be mad and have legitimate reasons to. It doesn’t make a difference. It’s still your voice and there are people who need it. For every one star, there are going to be five stars. – Willow Winters

Just do it. stop being afraid. You don’t have to do all at once, you can do a little bit at a time. You may not feel like you can’t write at the moment, just put your fingers to the keys and write one sentence. It’s like a potato chip, you can’t have just one. Put yourself in that environment where you’re not afraid, you are just going to sit down and write a sentence and eventually your book will get written. – Willow Winters