August 2025 Lopt & Cropt Releases

A paranormal debut, a lush glam contemporary, a sexy MMF, and a sweet small-town opposites-attract romance this month!

Love at the Gates of Hell by Stella Rossi

Gideon would just like to be a normal thief and forger, thank you very much—except his beloved brother Luke has just become a vampire and they’ve been thrown into a whole supernatural world they didn’t know about before. So when Benny’s father hires them to find his kidnapped daughter, Gideon’s expecting a regular day at the office. Except...

Benny just wants a normal life of being a PhD student in folklore. Except she’s also the daughter of a mafia don AND secretly a witch. So, not exactly normal.

Life does not get any more normal from there, because turns out Benny is a rare kind of witch, the only kind that can open the gates of hell. And Gideon is now her protector against the baddies who want to do just that.

Supernatural creatures, a jewel heist, found family, banter—it’s all here! Love at the Gates of Hell by debut author Stella Rossi is out on KU now!

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Lavish by Tinia Montford

What if it goes friends to lovers to enemies to rivals to married-but-still-enemies-and-rivals to lovers?? You get Lavish by Tinia Montford!

We are back in Lush where the Kings rule, and the Whitmores, once their best friends, are clawing their way back to the top after a scandal. Miles Whitmore is determined to reclaim his family’s mantle, but in his way is Serena King, who chose her family over him in that same scandal.

To consolidate power, their families force Serena and Miles to marry—but they have more than family drama going on. Ghosts from both of their pasts have returned and are threatening everything they’ve individually worked for. How do they protect their businesses, their secrets, and their hearts when they can’t trust each other?

Lots of drama and glamour and intrigue in this sizzling contemporary romance. It’s out on KU now!

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All Our Broken Vows by Mya More

Becka and Robert have been married for years and are still happy and in love, but they’re in a slump. So they decide to open up their lives to more sexual exploration. When an old friend comes back into their lives, Robert realizes that he’s maybe not that straight, which puts him in a tailspin because of his religious upbringing.

Becka is cool to support him through this and to bring their friend, who she’s also attracted to, into their relationship, but there’s a lot more for all three of them to deal with. But between family, work, society, and his own issues, Robert is struggling to deal with their polyamorous status, despite being happier than ever.

Lots of found family moments, plus plenty of spice in this MMF romance! It’s out on KU now!

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A Darling Heir by Lark Holiday

Vivian has buried herself in her small town in Alaska after being burned by an ex who stole their restaurant from her. She’s poured her whole life into her family’s grocery, which is being sold out from under them, and she needs to raise enough money to buy it herself.

Thomas is a nepo baby with a trust fund his controlling father won’t let him access if he’s not married by 30. When Vivian hears about this while Thomas is visiting family in Darling, she goes to him to make a deal: she’ll marry him if he can give her enough money to buy the store and he can get his inheritance to keep his own NYC restaurant afloat. But when his father comes to town to see if this relationship is really real, they’ve gotta prove it... and maybe fall in love in the process.

This is a sweet small-town standalone, and Lark is so good at keeping the tension between them! Check out A Darling Heir available everywhere now (and soon to be on KU)!

My course Love at First Sight is here!

I am so incredibly excited to tell you that my course LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT is here!

The purpose of LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT is to help you master your first fifty pages so you get more sales, more page reads, and more fans!

Whether you’re trying to get traditionally published and need to impress potential agents or publishers, OR if you’re self-publishing and just trying to get seen in the oversaturated romance market, these opening pages are absolutely crucial.

They set the first impression for the reader, and if you don’t hook the reader from the jump, it’s much more likely that they’ll lose interest—and we do NOT want that.

This course will take you through five modules:

• The Opening Page

• Character

• Plot

• World Building

• First Fifty Fixes, i.e. all the things you might be doing to inadvertently turn your readers off (my betas told me this was their favourite of the modules)

There are also worksheets and challenges to help you apply everything you learn to your actual manuscript to make this practical and actionable for you!

If you’ve been on my list for any length of time, you know my newsletters tend to be jammed with info. True to form, I packed these modules full of everything you need to know about the first fifty pages. I basically downloaded all my years of editing and coaching into this course so you can nail the opening of your book!

YOU, my lovely newsletter subscribers, are getting access to this course two weeks before anyone else does! I haven’t started promoting it anywhere yet because I wanted you all to have first dibs.

If you are like, “I need this NOW,” yes, you do, and you can get LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT for the low, low price of $39.

And for my fellow Canadians 🇨🇦: because we have to deal with tariffs and exchange rates and all of that lately, I made a special cart for you to buy in Canadian dollars.

Lots more information about the course here. I’m always here to answer any questions you have about it that I didn’t cover!

I hope you love this course, and I hope it helps you nail those first fifty pages! 

July 2025 Lopt & Cropt Releases

Love’s a Script by Mimi Grace

Hearts Collide is the matchmaking agency where our FMC Mary works and is trying to prove herself for a promotion. But while being interviewed for a news show, she accidentally goes off on the host, and their battle of wits leads to the show doing a story on modern dating.

The host, Ruben, is assigned the job of going through the matchmaking process himself, and of course he and Mary have to work together to find him his perfect match. But when they start falling for each other, his journalistic ethics and her chances at a promotion are in danger.

We get some excellent banter, some snowed-in forced proximity, and a romantic polar plunge (who knew freezing water in the middle of winter could be so swoony?). Love's a Script is out now!

June 2025 Lopt & Cropt Releases

The Slipper Scandal by Melanie Rachel

Cinderella x Pride and Prejudice? Sign me up!

When Elizabeth loses her slipper running away from a creep (I was going to call him a "determined suitor" but let's call a spade a spade, yeah?) at a ball, Darcy is the one who picks it up...which leads to gossip about compromise, and then all of the sudden they're ENGAGED??

Elizabeth is NOT having that—she doesn't want to get married, and she'll do anything she can to get out of it, using her wit and her words to try to put Darcy off. But Darcy is enamoured, and he wants to protect his and Elizabeth's reputations.

And between accidental food dumping, a war of words, and family meddling, Elizabeth is kinda accidentally falling for him too...but she has reasons for not wanting to marry. Can she overcome them and fight for the love between her and Darcy?

Funny, fast-paced, fabulous—The Slipper Scandal is out in KU now!

THIS is the #1 thing that trips up writers

Do you know what the #1 thing is that trips authors up when they’re writing?

I’m talking even authors with a great voice.

Authors with an incredible premise for their book.

Authors with all the talent in the world.

It’s TIME.

And specifically it’s time management.

I can’t tell you how often I see writers coming down to the wire of a deadline and not being able to accomplish all they wanted to with their story because time caught up with them. Or they had to extend the deadline and then got stressed because it still wasn’t enough time. (For all of my clients who are reading this and going "is this about ME?" it's not! I know how you all think.)

Obviously, none of us have as much time as we would like, with so many responsibilities and goals and desires pulling us in different directions. (I promise, this will not turn into a “just wake up early and write!” kind of email. First of all, I would never tell you anyone to wake up at 5 a.m.—5 a.m. does not EXIST to me—and I also get that for many people, there is literally not enough time in your day to stretch any further.)

As a romance writer, especially if you’ve already written at least a book or more, it feels like there’s a very loud ticking clock to release the next book and the next book and the next, and there’s not a lot of time to breathe in between. I could go on and on about how this is a function of capitalism, and of an oversaturated publishing market that requires romance writers to produce at a rate that will eventually burn most people out if you don’t put your foot down—but you have probably heard this from me before.

I cannot magic you more time to write, but I can offer you some ideas to help you give yourself enough time to write a great book: 

Be realistic 

There are a lot of timelines pressing on you as you write a draft: your own internal deadline, the deadline to get it to your editor (the latter two often end up being one and the same), scheduling betas/ARC readers/proofreader/cover artist/etc. Lots of people are counting on you to make those deadlines, so you need to be so for real about how long this is actually going to take you. 

Consider the complexity of the story you’ve set out to write, what else you’ve got going on in that time (is there a holiday? is it a busy time at work? are your kids doing multiple extracurriculars that you have to ferry them to and from?), and how much you can write in a day/week/month. 

So, if you’ve never written a book in less than four months, but you haven’t started yet and you want to release in September? Let’s not do that to yourself or to everyone else involved in the production of the book. You might not get it out in the insanely short timeline publishing experts “say” you should get it out in, but you have to give yourself the liberty to take a little longer and let your creativity have room to breathe and not feel so stressed out. Do NOT burn yourself out for the sake of a completely arbitrary deadline.

Budget your time

When I was a TA in grad school, I often left my grading until the last minute, which meant I was marking a stack of undergrad English essays in a two-day frenzy. After too many late nights of essays beginning with “Since the dawn of time…”, I finally decided I would divide up the essays so I had X number to grade per day over the week or so that I had before I had to hand them back. Total common sense, and yet it took me years to figure it out.

Do the same with your writing. How many words can you write in a session? How many words do you expect the book to be? When do you want to be done by? From there, work out how many days you need to finish the book.  

You definitely do not have to write every day without fail (I actually think it’s better for most writers to not write every single day), but again be realistic about how many days you can write per week and for how long per day. Build in extra time for the days when things come up and you can’t write at all or as much as you’d like, or in case the book gets longer than you anticipated. 

Do not fall victim to the pressures of publishing

One of the reasons why there’s a push to get books released multiple times a year is because the market is so saturated that readers will forget about you if you’re not feeding them books regularly. And apparently the Amazon algorithm responds better and pushes you out more when you’re publishing at regular intervals, but it’s not at a pace that most writers can easily maintain. If it’s every four months, that’s three books a year, which maybe you can do once or twice (and that’s not possible for most people), but imagine doing that nonstop, forever. You’d get bored or frustrated or burnt out trying to keep that consistency.

I’m a fan of consistency, but consistency that actually works for you. If your goal is to be a best-selling author or to write full-time, yes, you have to put out a lot of books quickly to start getting momentum—and then you can let off the gas once you’ve got enough of a backlist and a fanbase that you can make money regularly. 

But if your goal is simply to write your books, put them out into the world, and hopefully make some money off of them as a part-time gig, there is much less stress on you to release books at an unsustainable clip—a book or two a year is going to be enough for you.

And if you don’t want your readers to forget about you, make sure you give them lots of incentive to sign up for your newsletter (have a really good lead magnet) and to follow you on social media so they know what’s going on with you and can get hyped for your next book.

Don't let time steal away just how good your book can be!

This was originally published in my newsletter. If you want more on what’s new and important in romance writing, marketing, and the romance industry at large, join my newsletter and get my Romance Resource Roundup, a collection of the BEST romance books/websites/podcasts you should be consuming as a romance writer.

May 2025 Lopt & Cropt Releases

All Her Broken Pieces by Mya More

PLOT TWIST INCOMING

Bridget has exactly one (1) use for men, and then she's done with them. She definitely has no desire to fall in love--and certainly not with the 23-year-old cinnamon roll of a man she took home from the club one night.

But Ethan is not easily deterred. He knows there's more behind Bridget's ice queen exterior, and he's determined to make her melt. When she needs help following a surprise medical event, he's going to be there for her and show her that love is worth falling.

Then there is a crazy plot twist that even I didn't see coming (do you know how much it takes to surprise me in a romance novel?? A LOT), and whoa! Check it out—All Her Broken Pieces by debut author Mya More is available on KU now!

Can you be a romance author without being on social media?

Honestly, does anyone want to be on social media anymore?

If I didn’t have to be, I probably wouldn’t be. (I would probably have an account so I could lurk, but my real life is way too boring for anyone to be interested in what I take pictures of.) And I think most authors don’t want to be on social media either, or at least don’t want to be spending their time promoting themselves there.

So, what if you could just… get rid of it entirely? Do you NEED to be on social media as a romance author, especially an indie one?

Well…no.

Wait, wait, wait—I don’t want to get your hopes too high.

I mean, if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to. There are lots of other avenues open to you. Unfortunately, they will probably cost you a lot more money than free social media (but then, how free is it when it’s costing you time and energy that you could spend on other things?). Here are some of those other avenues:

• Amazon ads, which if you can figure them out can be fruitful—but the learning curve is steep, from what I’ve heard. And you can pour a ton of money into them before you can figure out how to most effectively use them

• Book promo sites, like BookBub and many, many others (David Gaughran is my go-to guy for everything book promotion, and he has a big list of them and how to use them here)

• Hiring a company to distribute your book to book influencers to create posts for virtual book tours (e.g. cover reveals, release date blitzes, reviews, etc.)

• Giveaways of print or ebook copies

• Accessing NetGalley or other paid sites to reach ARC readers to review your book

• Book influencer friends or fellow authors shouting out your book (this one is free, but you have to cultivate these relationships—which might be hard to do without social media, especially for the introverts)

• Word of mouth (also free, but this one is mostly just luck of the draw and can take a long time—one of my clients’ books was mentioned on a busy romance subreddit, and she saw a huge spike in sales just from that)

• In-person events: romance conventions (which may include travel, hotel, and con costs); talks at local libraries, bookstores, book clubs, etc.; an in-person book tour (if you’ve really got money to travel)

• Your own newsletter, Substack, Patreon, etc. (links to all of those should be in the back matter of every book you write)—and yes, a newsletter is a non-negotiable for every author, whether you use social media or not

This guy seems to think that authors don’t need social media in 2025, but he doesn’t really give a lot of alternatives. Apparently all you need to do is just be successful as an author and then you don’t need to use social media at all!

But realistically, what do you as an indie author really have to do to sell your book?

As much as I’d love to say that all you need to do is write a great book, that’s just not the case for even the greatest author out there. Trust me, I’ve seen so many books from my own clients that I think are stellar and are beautifully written and deserve all the hype and sales—and they don’t have them.

So: you absolutely do have to promote. If you’re indie—and even if you’re trad, and especially a trad BIPOC author—you will probably be doing that legwork all on your own, unless you can afford to throw money at the problem. And you will have to throw some money at it in order to look professional. (Your cover counts as promo, and please do not skimp on that—we can all tell when a cover has been made by someone who doesn’t have experience designing romance covers specifically.)

You need a promotional strategy that includes some paid methods (like a virtual book tour, for example) and some free ones. So I really don’t think it’s a good idea to abandon social media entirely, unless you are indeed SO big that you don’t need it. There’s so much noise on social media, but if you can carve out your own little niche, it’s a great way to talk to your readers and to find more. Also, I am someone who lovesa deal—and social media is free, and I love free.

That said, social media is hard work. I’ve said this a million times here, you have to promote way more than you’re doing right now, whether that is on social media or elsewhere. With the way algorithms work, people aren’t seeing your posts enough, so you have to just go hard with quantity and put out a ton of posts to get visibility.

And yes, promo as an indie author SUCKS. It’s probably not something you’ve been trained to do so it’s hard and exhausting, and it takes time and energy away from doing the thing you’re here to do, which is write the books. I get it—all I want to do is edit and book coach, and making silly Reels is not something I super love. But I do it because it supports the things I actually want to do by getting me in front of potential clients who will hopefully follow and then hire me.

Listen, I am rooting for you to get so big that you don’t have to have social media. In the meantime, though, use it to your best advantage as a tool in your promo arsenal!

This was originally published in my newsletter. If you want more on what’s new and important in romance writing, marketing, and the romance industry at large, join my newsletter and get my Romance Resource Roundup, a collection of the BEST romance books/websites/podcasts you should be consuming as a romance writer.

April 2025 Lopt & Cropt Releases

Jump into spring with two new releases: a contemporary romance where the FMC is healing from her trauma with the help of her best friend’s brother, and an Austen variation in which Darcy and Lizzy realize their folly…while in a folly.

The ABCs of You & Me by Megan McSpadden

Sophie is coming off a bad relationship and starting fresh with a new job—and happens to be working with her bestie’s brother Foster, who she’s always had a crush on. For an upcoming event where she’s going to revenge-dress her ex, she needs a date—and she and Foster agree that they’ll fake-date for her event, and then for one of his to get his matchmaking friends off his back.

And then suddenly they’re going on friend-dates to help Sophie get back into the swing of things, and the dates become alphabetical—and also more real than either of them are expecting. But Sophie is still healing from her past—will Foster help or hinder that?

Friends to lovers, best friend’s brother, fake relationship—all that trope-y goodness in The ABCs of You & Me, out now on KU!

Mr. Darcy’s Folly by Melanie Rachel

Darcy and Lizzy get trapped inside Rosings's crumbling folly--and you know what that means? FORCED PROXIMITY, BABY.

Elizabeth maybe changes her mind about snobby Darcy after they're in a life-and-death situation together, but can love flourish outside the folly? Find out on KU today!

The question all romance writers are asking right now: to KU or not to KU?

You may have seen a lot of people lately talking about how they’re going to stop buying from Amazon, and as a consequence will be getting rid of their Kindle Unlimited subscription. If you’re a romance author on KU, you may have seen a downturn in your page reads since January. If you are on social media, you may have seen lots of book influencers and authors and others (me included!) imploring people to keep their KU because it helps authors, who are essentially small businesses who happen to need Amazon in order to run said business.

So as an author, what do you do right now when a huge income source is being boycotted and affecting your take-home pay? Do you stay on KU, or is it time to jump ship?

As a reader, I love KU. I get my money’s worth every month with the way I read—like many romance readers, I go through a ton of books in a month between KU, the library, and actual purchases (though I have shifted from buying ebooks on Amazon to buying on Kobo). KU is not only an economical way for me to read a lot, but I’ve found some of my favourite writers on KU, and KU gives me a ton of flexibility in my reading tastes (just this weekend, I was like, “I need to read something UNHINGED”—there’s no better place for KU than that).

But as someone who supports authors, I’ve long been wary of KU and its practices (peep this blog post from 2018! Who remembers Cockygate?), which tend to be not at all transparent and can seem almost indiscriminate in the way it applies its rules and exercises its authority. And now in 2025, the KU romance market, which was alwaysoversaturated, is even more so, which means there’s less money in the pot and more competition for eyeballs and page views.

Still, KU remains one of the best places for discoverability if you’re able to cut through the noise and carve out your own niche there. And for readers like me who are willing to try a new-to-them author based on a gorgeous cover or a great blurb or an enthusiastic recommendation, it’s a way to discover a new favourite author.

KU’s exclusivity requirements have always been a headache for authors. You cannot put your books for sale anywhere but Amazon while your books are in KU, which obviously narrows your potential sales, and Amazon can get very punitive if you’ve forgotten to take down one book on one other platform. Basically, they very much encourage putting all your eggs in their Amazon basket—but now that Amazon is facing backlash, is it still worth it to stay?

I still think it's worth being on KU because it's still where the readers are. There hasn't been enough of a mass exodus yet to warrant jumping the ship. BUT...there are more options now for authors going wide, so maybe it's time to reconsider your strategy?

Going wide (i.e. not being on KU) is an uphill battle—you need to convince people to pay money to take a chance on an unknown quantity. But you have a lot more freedom and a lot of places to experiment and find your niche. (This can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how much work you want to put into your strategy and how much time you have for experimentation.)

But if you're hoping to divest yourself from Amazon entirely, being wide won't necessarily do that. You probably still want to sell your books there (it controls the majority of the market). And having your books wide is more work for you to keep track of them on all platforms, which will not have nearly as many sales as Amazon. Amazon has so ingrained itself in the book market that trying to extricate yourself from it—as a reader or as an author—has become very, very difficult. So, unfortunately, a strong ethical position against Amazon is not really for your author business—but of course that's your decision to make.

If you do want to go wide, I’d suggest experimenting a bit when you have a few books under your belt—can you put some in KU and some wide, and see how they do and determine where the best place for you to be is?

If you’re wide, you also might consider putting your book in Kobo Plus, which is Kobo’s version of KU. Unlike KU, it does NOT require exclusivity, so you can sell your books on other platforms too. It’s not nearly as saturated with romance as KU is, but there are also way fewer readers there than there are in KU. The royalties aren’t a ton more than KU (here’s a nice comparison of KU vs Kobo for authors), but if readers are jumping ship from Amazon, they’ll probably head over to Kobo for book sales and to Kobo Plus, which gives readers unlimited borrows per month and includes audiobooks in one of the plans. 

If you remember the heyday of KU in the mid-teens when people were making big money on there, Kobo Plus hasn't gotten to that heyday yet, as it's still in its relatively early days. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for authors to find their niche and their audience on Kobo Plus, especially as it grows—you’d basically be getting in at the ground floor now. And if readers are leaving KU, Kobo Plus, with its similar format, is probably where they'll go. But to be on Kobo Plus right now means you can't be on KU because of their exclusivity clause, and there are more readers (and money) on KU than on Kobo Plus.

I don’t want to say “yes, everyone should be on KU!” or “no, get off of KU ASAP!”—it really depends on a variety of factors: how many books you have out, what kind of romance you write, where your ideal audience is and how they read, how quickly the market changes, the concerns of your particular business, your ethical stance, etc. etc. I want you to make the choices that are best for your creativity and your author business so you can continue to grow. Don’t be afraid to experiment and see where you’re actually doing really well—maybe it’ll surprise you?

Where are you at right now? To KU or not KU? If you’ve always been wide, have you considered KU or Kobo Plus?

This was originally published in my newsletter. If you want more on what’s new and important in romance writing, marketing, and the romance industry at large, join my newsletter and get my Romance Resource Roundup, a collection of the BEST romance books/websites/podcasts you should be consuming as a romance writer.