Writing and Selling Stories with Angelique Fawns

The best PAYING NO-FEE open submission short story call list, plus FREE FICTION. Sundays: Market Information & Lists. Wednesdays: The Chronicles of Roxie Vega. Fridays: Free Reprint Fiction and why it sold!

Author: Angelique Fawns

Season 2 of "Read Me A Nightmare" shifts its focus to conversations with writers, editors, and creators working in and around dark fiction about craft, career, and the realities of making stories in the world.Visit www.fawns.ca to learn more. Please --if you enjoy the episode, leave a review! angeliquemfawns.substack.com
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Master Your Marketing for Authors
Sunday, 19 July, 2026

Watch 👀 this interview on Youtube.If you’ve been following along with my writing adventures, you know I’ve been trying to figure out how to market my upcoming novels. I’ve been playing in the short story game since 2018, but now I want to make a little more money, and the only way to do that seems to be going all-in on series. Get readers hooked on what you create, and give them a reason to keep coming back.How do I learn how to do this? Well, you take advice from experts.That’s exactly why I felt so lucky to attend the Spring Writing Retreat in Collingwood with Write Way Escapes last month with Kelley Armstrong, Christine d’Abo, and today’s guest, Lilith Darville.Lilith graciously agreed to join me for this episode, so let me tell you a bit about her. She’s a USA Today and internationally bestselling romance author with novels across dark, paranormal, and contemporary romance, publishing since 2015. Before that, she built a career as a magazine columnist, a textbook writer, and a communications and marketing consultant.She also spent years as a college instructor in English and Communications, and these days she mentors emerging and established authors in craft, branding, and career development. Sitting in Lilith’s classroom reminded me of school in the ‘80s. You behave, listen, and above all… learn.I picked her brain about marketing, about how she’s found success writing in series, and why you need a plan if you want this to actually work.Going back to school has never been more enjoyable than it has been with Lilith Darville.One of the things Lilith was helping me with?My Roxie Vega Kickstarter:Check it out here!If you enjoy this content, please consider joining the next tier! I keep most of my stuff free so every author can access it, but a few $$$ does help.AF: What’s the secret to your success as a spicy author?LD: Continuous hard work and passion for writing, learning my craft, and just write, write, write, and learn, learn, learn. I don’t think I have any big secrets. It’s a lot of hard work. Butt in chair, as we say. Head down, learning and practicing our craft.AF: I know we’re not supposed to say we write for money, but I’d like to earn some money!LD: I’ll disagree with the framing there. Genre authors definitely write for money. Literary folks are the ones who’ll say they don’t. We still have passion for the craft, and writing is in our blood, but so is the desire to make money as genre fiction authors.AF: When you read, is it strictly romance, or do you range wider?LD: If I’m learning craft, I’m not reading fiction--I’m reading things like K.M. Weiland’s books on story structure. All story has the same kind of structure: a beginning, a middle, an end, pinch points, turning points. For market information, I follow people like Jane Friedman, and I subscribe to K-lytics for data and analysis. For fiction, I read every day. If I don’t have my reading fix, I can’t survive. A lot of that’s romance, because I love it, that’s one of the reasons I write it. But I also read things like Lee Child’s Reacher series. For non-fiction, I read a lot of self-help, because I use things like IFS (Internal Family Systems) and Brené Brown’s work on shame in my writing.AF: I’m about to launch my space opera Roxie Vega on Kickstarter, then Amazon. Advertising feels overwhelming. Where do I even start?LD: There’s a checklist of things you want in place while you’re working toward putting five to ten books out. At least five are critical. One is a website, and the big one is your newsletter. We talk about things like BookFunnel and techniques to build your readership while you’re getting content out there, so you have something for readers to read through. Because if you only have one book, you have nothing to market. Once they’ve read that one book, if you don’t have something else for them to buy while they’re looking for the next thing, you’ve basically just lost that sale.Having a Plan (Which I need. Focus? What’s focus? SQUIRREL!)AF: Originally, I was planning to launch Roxy Vega as two novellas, one feeding into the next. But… after some research… I don’t think there’s much of a market for novellas. Am I wrong?LD: There is a market for novellas, but readers look for a fast re-release with them. A lot of the people I know who do novellas do one a month at around 20,000 words. I know an author--I think this is Alyse Anders--who did a sci-fi romance series with twelve women who end up stranded on a planet with aliens. (Authorial note. Aluse Anders writes erotic fiction)Twelve books, one a month for a year, each one a short story about one woman connecting with her alien. One of the things I’d recommend, above everything, is having a plan. How many novels do you plan for your series?(Another Authorial Note. I have no real plan for the series. Roxie keeps flying… ABACUS keeps helping her out. They both keep getting into trouble. I may need more of a plan, lol.)AF: What’s the single best piece of marketing advice you’ve ever gotten?LD: Early in my romance career, I had lunch with Donald Maass at a conference. He asked how many books I had published. One. He said, “You shouldn’t even be talking to me about marketing until you have five books out there.” Build your newsletter. That’s real estate you own, and focus on getting words out. Because if you don’t have a backlist to sell through, you really don’t have anything to sell. His opinion was to have ten books out there, or at least five, before I even thought about marketing.AF: Where do you go for coaching as you’ve grown in your career?LD: Right now, it’s Becca Syme. She’s helped me see where my strengths are and to focus on what works for me as a writer, not somebody else. Take word count: everybody wants to write faster, put out more words. But not everybody can write 3,000 words in an hour. It depends on how your brain works, what your process is. We compare ourselves to somebody who might be nothing like us in personality or skill, and expect to produce as they do.AF: What’s the biggest shift you’re seeing in book marketing right now?LD: Ads aren’t where readers are starting to look for books anymore. Readers are using AI to find books. You can put in “I want a dark romance with kidnapping and shifters in it,” and get a list of exactly the books you want. AF: And you want to make sure Lilith Darville’s name, or Angelique Fawns’, is actually in that list.LD: Exactly. So the question becomes: how do you get found by those readers? What you need to do is bring back the blog. If you don’t have one, start one. That’s on my list right now: publishing an article a week, fueled with the keywords readers are searching for. Want to check out Lilith’s work?https://lilithdarville.comThank you for joining us! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit angeliquemfawns.substack.com/subscribe