I like doing things my way. I’m an independent person, and I don’t like seeking acceptance from anyone. Just not in my personality. When I was a kid the only way to get a book published was through a company—one of the heavy hitters that everyone knows about. Query letters, agents, meetings, lots of rejection. Yeah, that shit isn’t for me. Back in the day I wouldn’t have had a choice in the matter, I would have had to eat the same type of shit all struggling artists have to eat in order to have guys in suits hand you a check and get your book in window displays. But the world’s changed, and the huge publishing companies aren’t the only game in town.
Getting into this business was a group effort. Me and my two best friends, Colton and Grayson, got into this together. We met in college and hit it off right away. The original idea to get into publishing was mine, and when I first brought it up I got the skeptical eyes. I remember their faces as we sat over one too many drinks at a bar near NYU. Colt almost spit his beer right in my face because he was laughing so hard. “Romance? Like Fifty Shades kind of shit? You want me to take my very expensive college degree and write about women getting tied up and whipped?”
“There’s more to it,” I told him. “I’ve been doing some research. It’s not all ‘Fifty Shades shit.’”
“Research?” Gray asked, giving me the raised eyebrow. “So what I’m hearing is that you’ve been staring at half naked dudes on book covers every night and whacking off? Is there something you want to tell us? Did you need a few drinks to help you come out of that closet?”
“No, dick,” I said. “I mean I’ve been looking into the industry—into books that aren’t Fifty Shades to see what else is out there in the romance world. It’s not all bondage and whips. There are actually a lot of different sub genres.”
“My sisters read that shit. All the time.”
“Mine too,” I told him. “Not just my sisters, but my mom and about every other woman I know.”
That’s when Gray jumped in with a healthy does of skepticism. “But don’t you think everyone is going to be doing exactly what we’re doing? Trying to jump on the Fifty Shades train and ride it to the bank?”
“No pun,” Colton joked, amusing mostly himself.
“I can’t believe you’re a writer. Do you put those shitty puns in your work?” Colt didn’t answer, just gave me the middle finger.
“Maybe,” I said, ignoring Colt and responding to Gray. “Okay, it’s more than a maybe. It’s probable, but I honestly don’t think that matters as much as you think. I joined a few readers groups on Facebook and found some stuff out.”
“As part of your research?” Colton joked.
“That’s right. And what I noticed is that the women who read romance read a lot of romance. I mean A LOT.”
“Like how many books are we talking about?” Gray asked.
“Some were reading ten a month, some were even as high as twenty to thirty a month.”
“Jesus, I don’t think I’ve read that many books this year.”
“That’s ‘cause you’re a fucking caveman, Colt. But think about it, in a market like that we’re not competing with other authors in the same way as if we were in another business. If there were 10 people who all opened up a pizza place in the same neighborhood, then probably only 1 or 2 of them would stay open. People would have a forced choice because it’s the same product. But if someone’s reading 300 books a year over several years, then they’re not choosing between authors, they’re reading all of them.”
“See,” Grayson said, smiling. “That minor in economics is paying off dividends. No pun.”
“I think it’s a worthwhile experiment. What do we have to lose? If it works, then we can all have great careers. And if it doesn’t, hell, we can always get regular jobs.”
That was how it all started. A longer conversation got Colton on board, and before we knew it we were all on the road to becoming indie romance authors. That seems like forever ago, when we were still in the honeymoon phase of our careers. Everything was potential. The reality has been a little different, at least for me. The God’s honest truth is that Colt and Gray are far from bestselling authors, but they’re definitely more successful than me.
Colton is on the steamier side. He started writing MC, or Motorcycle Club, books but his new series is about an MMA fighter since he used to train himself. Grayson leans towards the dark romance, and he has more books out than either of us. That kid’s always writing and always working on building himself up. Me? I have my own niche. I like to blend mind-blowing sex with characters that are real—guys who are everything men should be: strong but sensitive, tough as hell but kind, gentleman when they need to be, and dominant bastards in the bedroom. I like complexity.
I like to write about real guys who can fuck like women only dream of.
Now if only I can get more people to read them.
Jenny was my first for a few things, but how we met was when she gave me my first five star review on Amazon for my fourth novel. That may not sound like such a big deal, especially now, but trust me, at the time it was a very big deal, the kind of encouragement that the new author I was so desperately needed for some kind of proof of concept. I had already published a few typical romance books before that. Your standard issue sexy, bad boy stories. The hot guys who have their middle fingers up to the world at all times, but who end up hooking up with some hot woman by the mid chapters—not that original, I know, but they were fun to write and got me the small but loyal following that I enjoy now.
I’d never write books like that anymore. I still have the usual checklist of things you need in a romance book: hot guy, hot girl, and, of course, lots of sex, only now I like to tell deeper stories—and no, that’s not a pun.
Jenny was a blogger, which is actually how we met, if talking to someone online without seeing them in person counts as meeting, which I guess it does in our society today. It wasn’t a Catfish kind of situation, which I was worried about when I first asked to see her in person. Before she walked into the bar that night and I got to lay my eyes on her in the flesh, I’d convinced myself that there was a 50/50 chance that she might actually be a he, smiling and holding a copy of my book with his five o’clock shadow showing from across the room.
My best friends and fellow authors, Grayson and Colton, told me that I was batshit crazy for agreeing to meet some reader at a bar, but I ignored their pleas for my sanity. What if she’s nuts? What if she’s a stalker? Yeah, Yeah, I told them, I’ll be fine. Jenny lived in New York also, so it seemed easy enough of a hypothesis to test, even though it wasn’t my style to meet up with a female fan or reader. There was just something about the way she described my work that made it a necessity to meet and talk to her. It was a just supposed to be a meeting at a bar, something friendly, something without any further intentions on my part.
As they say, one thing led to another. First, Jenny was all woman. No buff dude with a beard looking to hook up. She was beautiful, and loved my work almost as much as I did. Drinks led to me asking her out. One date led to another. And before I knew it we were in a full fledged relationship. Dating became an engagement, and the rest is history. For a while there we were really happy.
At least that’s what I thought at the time.
By the time I DM’d Jenny I’d written four romance novels. Each of my other three had done just okay. I was hardly E.L. James. Hollywood wasn’t exactly calling to try and cast the lead in the movie adaptation of any of my books. My sales were nothing special, nothing groundbreaking, and sure as hell nothing anyone would describe as lucrative. I don’t know why I’m using euphemisms to describe the situation—my sales sucked. By the time I met Jenny I’d done a pretty good job of burning through all of my savings trying to make it as a full time author. At that point the glitz and glamour fantasies about writing the hit novel that made me millions had long since passed, and I was facing the harsh reality of the indie book world. Going to events, buying my own books to give away, and spending unt
old fortunes on swag drained the little bit of profit I made off of each book, and the bills were piling up way faster than the royalties were coming in. And then, at a certain point, they weren’t coming in at all.
I almost gave it up on the entire idea of being a professional author, but it was my fourth book, Into Your Eyes, that helped me turn the corner. Not only did it bring Jenny into my life, but it was easily the most successful of the four—and when I say successful I don’t mean that I was balling, but it did help me build my confidence and make a little profit. I gained more newsletter subscribers, more friends and followers on social media, and my Facebook reader group was getting more and more joins from readers by the day. Things were going well.
But back to how I met Jenny.
I’m an indie author, which means that I release my own books, and that I’m not contracted with any major publishing company. Authors like me, especially ones trying to get their careers off the ground, don’t just need readers, we also need the writing community. The bloggers, the advanced readers, the PA’s. All of them are an absolute requirement to help get our work out to a larger audience. You can only have so many friends and followers on social media. That’s not enough to make it big. You need help to get your books seen—word of mouth—people who couldn’t get enough of your book and would tell all of their friends about how hot and steamy it was.
That’s where the bloggers come in, especially.
I’d sent out advanced copies to about 100 of them, hoping that the women who ran the blogs didn’t think I was a terrible writer, and that they would give me a decent review to however many followers they had on their sites. I didn’t care how many. No blog was too small for me. 10 followers or 10,000, anything that helped get my work out to readers was fine by me.
Jenny was one of those bloggers, and she loved Into Your Eyes more than any of the other ninety-nine women did, even though the majority of them gave me good reviews. But Jenny was extra excited about it. She spoke about it like I was the second coming of Shakespeare, like my words touched her in ways that no other author’s possibly could. Not only did she give it three stars on her blog—the best rating she gave to anything—but she was the first to post her review of the book once it was live on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the other digital platforms that were available. Five Stars. And, more than that, it was how she wrote it.
A Wordsmith.
That’s what she called me.
“. . .Knight, who many of you know from his previous books, is truly a master wordsmith, someone who can make you feel things that you’ve only ever fantasized about. . .”
That review was everything. My confidence boost. The cause of my smiling face when I woke up on release day to read it. The reason I reached out to her and asked her to get a drink at the bar.
Those were the good times.
Until Jenny called me a wordsmith I’d never thought of myself in those terms. I was a writer, an author, a storyteller. But never a wordsmith. It’s not something I ever would have called myself, of course, but I was happy that she bestowed that title on me. What’s the difference, I asked her on our first real date after our introduction at the bar. “The feelings,” she said, sitting next to me at the bar. “There are thousands of authors, and ten times as many readers. Those are too common. You’re a wordsmith, and wordsmiths know how to manipulate language in ways authors can only dream of. They know how to make people feel things.”
Manipulate.
In hindsight, it’s interesting that she chose that word specifically. They say that hindsight is 20/20, right, so I guess that I can look back and see all the little things that I should have picked up on as red flags leading up to the end of our brief marriage, but life isn’t like a movie that you can rewatch and catch things you missed the first time around. Life is a single screening of events, and apparently I missed all kinds of shit I should have been paying very close attention to.
Gabriela’s her name. A friend, right? Just a friend. Another blogger who she’d met through social media. A fellow New Yorker, what a coincidence? Just like Jenny and I, right? Indie romance is a woman’s world, so I didn’t think anything of it when Jenny made some close friends in that tight-knit online community. So what that Gabriela lived only ten minutes from us? Isn’t that cool, Jenny would ask me? We have friends in the community who can be our actual friends. So what that she didn’t seem to like me, or that her and Jenny were spending more time together than Jenny and I were. Nothing to worry about. No need for paranoia.
It was last Monday—a week ago today—when I came home to find them in bed together.
It’s still so fresh in my memory that it feels sore, like a wound that still bleeds through the band-aid. I had been out that afternoon trying to pitch the owners of some local bookstores to carry a few paperback copies of each of my books, and I’d gotten home earlier than expected. I remember being so thrilled to tell Jenny all about how the biggest bookstore in town had passed on the other three, but had agreed to sell Into Your Eyes right in their front display. My heart was racing as I drove home, and I’d rehearsed just how I was going to tell her. I even stopped at a wine store and bought the most expensive bottle of Champagne that they had, even though we couldn’t really afford it.
I saw the car parked in front of our house when I pulled into the driveway, but I didn’t think anything of it. When I went in I didn’t call out to Jenny like I usually did because I heard something from upstairs. It seems idiotic now, but my first thought was that someone had broken in because I heard what sounded like muffled cries coming from upstairs. As I rushed up to see what the hell was going on I was thinking the worst. Once I got up to the top I saw that the bedroom door was closed, but slightly ajar. The sounds got more and more intense the closer I got, and once I pushed the door open I realized that things were wrong in a completely different way than I had anticipated.
That visual will never leave me.
It’s supposed to be a fantasy for every guy, right? Two women together, naked in your bed, rolling around. Bullshit. That sounds great in a porno, but it’s only a fantasy if it isn’t your wife cheating on you during what you thought was one of the happiest days of your life. When that happens, it isn’t a fantasy, it’s a complete nightmare.
We broke up the next day. Well, technically it was the next day. We had been screaming at each other through the early morning hours. It was about 3:00 am when I threw her cheating ass out of my house. Maybe that seems cold, but there was no way she was going to live in the home I worked tirelessly to pay for while she was screwing her new girlfriend in the upstairs bedroom. If you need a place to stay, I yelled, the tears still swelling my eyes, go stay with Gabriella. She’s local.
Now I’m sitting on my couch, staring at the TV, with a half empty bottle of Grey Goose sitting only a few inches away. Funny, it was full not that long ago. I shouldn’t be sitting here, falling to pieces inside and feeling sorry for myself. I should be writing. I should be working on things.
But I can’t. . .I just can’t right now.
Jesus, what has my life become?
2
Knight
Six Months Ago
The phone rings and wakes me out of yet another shitty nap. I’ve been taking a lot of them lately. I wipe my eyes and look around a room that used to bring me comfort, but now only serves as a reminder of what a mess my life’s become. Empty beer and liquor bottles, too many to count, line my countertops, a reminder of the lengths I’ll go to self-destruct. My laundry is all over the damn floor, and my face hasn’t see a razor for a while now.
Lucky me, I got to keep the house in the divorce proceedings, but that’s not saying much since it was mine to begin with. I’ve been sleeping on the couch a lot lately because the bedroom brings back too many bad memories. I can’t walk in the room without seeing what I saw that day with Jenny and Gabriela, and that’s about the last visual I need these days. I guess it’s some kind of bizarre silver lining that Jenny moved out an
d didn’t contest much in the divorce. I’m fucked up enough as is, the last thing I needed was a long, drawn out fight over every knickknack in the place. At the very least I take her lack of a fight as a concession that the end of our marriage is pretty much a one sided thing. I’ll relish the small victories. Sometimes it’s all I’ve got.
I’ve been going out a lot, drinking a little too much—okay, more than a little—and usually when I get home I either try to write in the study—my version of a man cave—or I pass out drunk on my couch. Usually it’s more of the latter than the former. I’ve gotten so used to waking up hung over that it doesn’t even bother me anymore. It bothers me that it doesn’t bother me. “Hello,” I say, answering my cell without even looking at who it is. Not that I need to. I don’t get many actual calls these days except for my agent, my attorney, or. . . “Oh, hey Colt, what’s up? Shit, that’s right. Okay, can you guys give me like a half hour. Thanks.”
Colt and Gray are writers also, only they’re the more successful versions of me. The three of us met when we were all college students taking the same creative writing classes at NYU, and now we all have degrees in either writing or literature. I don’t think this is the kind of writing that our professors thought their students would be doing one day, but, oh well. Right after we graduated Fifty Shades of Grey blew up and took the world by storm, bringing romance and erotica into the mainstream like no other time in history. Simultaneously, self-publishing was becoming more and more of a valid way to get content out to people, so the three of us made a decision one night over drinks. We decided that we were each going to take two years, write the best romance novels the world had ever known, and try to ride the wave of success.
Knight: The Wordsmiths Book One Page 2
