I often say The Odds of You, my debut contemporary romance, is a book that snuck up on me. But for you to really get it, I need to set the scene. 

It’s 2023. My debut book, The Curse of Saints, has just released in the UK and become an instant Sunday Times Bestseller. I’ve just turned in book two of the trilogy, The Curse of Sins. My career has got off to a stellar start in the romantasy genre. 

Enter The Odds of You. A book that’s not only in a different genre, but has an incredibly different voice and style from my romantasy trilogy. 

If you’re in the industry, you’re likely scratching your head and wondering why, with a romantasy trilogy that’s "doing well", would I ever decide to change genres so early on in my career. 

Here’s the truth, in all its unflashy glory: it just happened. 

The idea for The Odds of You came to me on a plane ride to Comic Con (where, like our main character, Sage, I was mainlining horrible airline coffee, but was not, unfortunately, flirting with a hottie across the aisle). What started as a fun writing exercise while avoiding my edits (I was ahead of schedule!) became something all consuming. By the time I landed in San Diego four hours later, I realised that this wasn’t just a scene I was writing… It was a whole book. 

And that book poured out of me faster and more smoothly than anything I’d ever written before. It was raw, and fun, and achy, and… it honestly never crossed my mind not to publish it. That is, until I had already decided I would. 

There’s a certain level of industry friction that comes when the genre-switching conversation comes up. I’m incredibly privileged to have an agent that said: "Let’s go for it." My fantasy work sits in one house, and my contemporary in another, and it works really well for me, because both teams can focus on their respective genres. 

But there were some cautionary conversations before I ended up here that had me wondering if I was tanking my career before I ever really got it started. 

I know I’m certainly not the only author expanding into new genres, and my hope is that more of us who want to continue to do so

On its surface, it makes a lot of sense, especially with where I was in my career. I was a new author with a trilogy that was, for all intents and purposes, incredibly successful for a debut. I’m still in build mode, and there were concerns that me stepping into a new genre might detract from my growth in romantasy or isolate some of my readership. 

Publishing loves predictability, and anything that threatens that predictability is usually advised against. And again, it makes sense. There’s data that I can’t even imagine getting my hands on that publishers are using to guide these decisions. 

But here’s the interesting part – the data I was seeing from sharing snippets of The Odds of You on social media was telling an entirely different story. One that painted a picture of a readership that wasn’t just willing to explore a new genre with me: they were eager for it. 

Of all the content I was sharing, of all the search terms on Google related to my name, The Odds of You was the highest demanded work of anything I’d ever created, and it didn’t even have a publisher yet. And that’s with me having an incredibly engaged and vocal "romantasy" audience. 

Whenever I raise this, I often get questions around "how I did it". People want social media strategies and tips, but again, the truth is far simpler. I trusted my readership and their willingness to read outside the genre they met me in (and to handle me talking about multiple books), and I believed in the fact that The Odds of You is a book that is so fundamental to my heart that I refused to let the industry’s cautionary tales dissuade me. 

There’s obviously something to be said for authors knowing the market and the industry. But I’d argue there’s something equally important, if not more so, about knowing what fuels us creatively. For me, that’s story over genre, every single time. 

I’m far more interested in what story is calling to me than I am in carving out a place within a certain genre. It’s the only way I can keep my creativity going – and isn’t that the whole point? To tell the stories that fuel us? To keep creating? 

I know I’m certainly not the only author expanding into new genres, and my hope is that more of us continue to do so – and that publishers support the longevity of an author’s career instead of shoehorning them into a genre because the market for it is hot right now. 

With so many routes available to authors to market (traditional, independent, hybrid), I think it’s easier than ever for us creatives to hold our ground and write what calls to us, in a way that fuels both our creativity and careers. 

And I love that for us.