Romance Authors

The only thing we love more than our book boyfriends & girlfriends is ourselves!

The urge to write what you know super literally (about writers) is a tough one to overcome. I understand. It is endearing and also extremely boring if you do it wrong. The line is so razor thin between “naval-gazing garbage” and “a good piece of media about the people who make media like what you’re about to consume” that in most cases, it’s best to avoid the attempt altogether. However, just because I’m surrounded by other writers and filmmakers and artists doesn’t mean everyone is, so I understand why this subgenre exists! And I do find these three books, where the heroines are themselves romance authors, very good examples of Doing It Right.

The American Roommate Experiment by Elena Armas. Now available on KU with the rest of Elena Armas’ backlist! In this follow up to The Spanish Love Deception, we have Rosie, a debut romance author who just quit her job to focus on writing full-time, RIGHT as her apartment becomes unlivable (ceiling collapse) and she’s hit with massive writer’s block. It doesn’t help that despite being a lover of romance, she doesn’t have a whole lot of personal experience in it. She’s got her best friend Lina’s apartment key for the living situation, since Lina’s out of town, and when it turns out Lina already offered her apartment to her cousin Lucas, he presents a potential solution to her other issue. That is, getting love experience.

Lucas is a nomad who, despite an awkward meet cute with a girl who has secretly been Instagram-stalking him for months, is down to help both with Rosie’s need for a roof over her head AND some romance experience. He’ll take her on dates to kickstart her muse again, and if it helps distract him from his own stuff, well, all the better!

If you click to my review of TSLD above, you’ll see I lowkey already gave a bit of a review for this book, and I stand by that initial review. “I do think [Armas] tends to overwrite her intros, and some of the spiraling of her POV heroines. Like, at a certain point, we’re just delaying moving forward in the narrative for the sake of redundant characterization. We get it, these girls are sassy and sarcastic and disbelieving of their own bad luck! Once you get past the first chapter or two, though, it’s smooth, sexy sailing.”

Rating: 4.5/5

How hot? 🔥🔥🔥

My So-Called Sex Life by Lauren Blakely. Axel and Hazel USED to be best friends and co-writers. Several years after they leave their famous series unfinished, though, they’re bitter, solo romance authors and forced back together on a romantic train trip book tour through Europe by their shared publisher. Like you do. And of course, due to a mistake in the manifest (I don’t know if it was a manifest mistake specifically but the alliteration pleased me), they’re sharing a compartment the whole trip… AND THERE’S ONLY ONE BED!

The tropes just keep on comin’- second chance, forced proximity, road trip (but trains), only one bed, friends to rivals and enemies to lovers, a colorful supporting cast of fans of their books scheming and helping them get their shit together, several romantic European locales… this book truly has it all. If you’re looking for a sexy travel story with banter and arguments and forced proximity that isn’t TOO fluffy but also isn’t all that challenging, this is an easy breezy read perfect for an armchair and a hot cocoa on a winter evening.

Rating: 4.25/5

How hot? 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren. The follow up to The Soulmate Equation finally sees Felicity “Fizzy” Chen falling for real in love after all her awful false starts! I loved Fizzy in The Soulmate Equation, so much so that she inspired the best friend character in my first novel (Pulling Focus, contemporary celebrity romance on an indie movie set, seeking representation please and thank youuuu) on several levels. If the slightly overcomplicated shenanigans from book 1 worked for you, this book delivers in much the same vein.

Similarly to Rosie in The American Roommate Experiment, Fizzy’s a romance author who’s never been in love (though she’s trying way harder than Rosie ever was). She’s starting to feel like a fraud, and an uninspired one at that, when a chance run-in with documentary filmmaker and single dad Connor Prince, who just so happens to have been given an assignment to produce a reality show to help the company make bank. The layers of revulsion I felt in poor Connor’s meeting having to watch the very realistic “we can make good important and interesting things or we can make money and NEVER the two shall cross” conversation were palpable. 

Connor thinks Fizzy’s fascinating, so they develop a show where she’s the star and they cast archetypes for her potential boyfriend to compete for her love; the vampire (a goth guy), the cinnamon roll (nice guy), etc. Of course, the real chemistry is between the producer and the star, so much so that their post-date interviews together are the real draw of the show.

The shenanigans of why they couldn’t be together and the set up were a little much for me, despite my long-term love of Christina Lauren and everything they write. By the end, as a producer myself, I was so frustrated by their flagrant disregard for the cast/crew and the project as a whole that it was tough for me to really get invested in them as a couple. The premise was fun, the characters were great individually, but they made for such a dysfunctional workplace (which I have sadly had lots of experience with) during their love story that I mostly wanted to shake them and send them to HR.

If you like reality show romance, meta romance, and Christina Lauren, though, this book is a complete winner. I think I might just have slightly too much personal baggage to truly connect the way I wanted to.

Rating: 4.25/5

How hot? 🔥🔥🔥🔥

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Next week, I’ll be recommending books where the hero is the heroine’s brother’s best friend!

What should I be reading next? Let me know in the comments!

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P.S. I’m looking for (not right away, but eventually) beta readers for the romance novels I’VE been writing. Are you interested? Reply to this newsletter with your fave tropes/sub-genres and let’s chat!