Cut Off from Sky and Earth by Melissa F. Miller
TPP EP 22

TPP Episode 22 with Melissa F. Miller

Mark: [00:00:00] Coming up on the Thriller Pitch podcast.

Melissa: A couple years ago, our family rented a spot in the outer banks of North Carolina. The owner’s husband came and was showing my husband where to set up well, I walked our dog and when I came back, my husband said, oh, the owner grew up in the same very small neighborhood that I grew up in. And when she came over I said, Hey, we grew up in the same neighborhood and her face just went white. And she made it a point to get out of there as fast as she could. And so I’m thinking why would somebody, someone’s hiding from their past? And I said, what would happen if somebody rented an Airbnb and someone from their past showed up and brought danger with them?

​Mark: What makes a great thriller tick, and what does it take to write one? Welcome to the Thriller Pitch Podcast, where bestselling award-winning and emerging thriller authors share the craft research and real world experiences that power today’s most gripping stories. [00:01:00] I’m your host, mark p Jay Nadal.

Whether you’re writing thrillers or can’t get enough of reading them, this show takes you inside the minds of the authors, behind the twist. Characters and moments that keep us turning the page.

This week I’m joined by Melissa F. Miller, the powerhouse behind more than 50 novels across legal, medical, and psychological thrillers. We dig into cut off from sky and earth. It’s a story inspired by a real life encounter that sparked the question, what happens when someone from your past suddenly reappears and brings danger with them? Melissa shares how a little known grim tail became the backbone of her. Why she stepped away from legal and medical thrillers for something more intimate and how she balanced three points of view, layered memories, and a book within a book to create a slow burn psychological thriller driven by [00:02:00] resilience, trauma, and self rescue.

If you’re interested in multiple POV structure, subtle tension, writing, emotional stories, or evolving your process after dozens of books, this is a conversation you’ll want to hear.

Melissa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Melissa: Oh, I’m so happy that you’re having me, mark. Thanks.

Mark: I’m very excited to talk about your book Cut Off from Sky and Earth, and the title and the cover and all those good things. But before we get into that, let’s hear that pitch.

Melissa: Okay. Cutoff from sky to earth is the story of a feminist fairytale retelling that becomes a real life nightmare for two women who are trapped in a remote cabin during a storm and they have to face the traumas of their past to survive the danger in their present. And the book is a psychological thriller told from three points of view, and it has [00:03:00] flashbacks and my main character’s an author writing a story, so there’s also her stories woven into my story. So there’s a kind of a lot going on.

Mark: Awesome. So let’s get into what came first. I’m curious if it was made maim the title of your book or the idea for the cabin and the women in the cabin.

Melissa: right? So what came first was the idea I. A couple years ago, our family was, we have an rv and we were doing a trip and we rented a spot, sort of like Airbnb, but it’s for RV spots in the outer banks of North Carolina. And when we got there, the owner’s husband came and was showing my husband where to set up well, I walked our dog and when I came back, my husband said, oh, the owner. Grew up in the same, so I’m from Pittsburgh, but she grew up in the same very small neighborhood that I grew up in. And I said, oh wow, I bet I know her. And when she came over I said, Hey, we grew up in the same neighborhood and her face just went [00:04:00] white. And she just like made it a point to get out of there as fast as she could. And so I’m thinking why would somebody, someone’s hiding from their past? Because you know, a thriller writer, I’m sure you know, like my, that’s where my mind goes. And I said, what would happen if somebody rented an Airbnb and someone from their past showed up and brought danger with them? So that was where the idea came from.

Mark: Awesome. So how did it get mixed with made Moline in the fairytale retelling?

Melissa: Okay, so I decided that my main character was going to be an author dealing with writer’s block. Is that autobiographical maybe? So she went on a retreat, and I have done this a couple times when I really needed to write, I go somewhere where my kids and my dog and my husband aren’t there. So I thought, okay, she’s going to this remote location and so I knew she was a writer, and I thought, wow, if her story somehow thematically was tied to my story, that would be really [00:05:00] kind of interesting. And I knew she was gonna have to rescue herself. So there’s a whole theme of sort of self rescue and resilience and relying on other women in my story. So I thought, okay, well, she could be writing a fairytale retelling.

And then I just looked for fairytales that. So there are different, not tropes, but there’s, there’s one called the Entombed Princess and there are fairytales that fit that sort of, or I’m just gonna call it a trope. So I found, made me lean, which is not a very well known, well, not well known to me fairytale. And I read it and then I read some academic papers about it, and it just completely fit my story. And then it also informed my story because I didn’t originally have my two main characters sort of working together, but they ended up because of the way the fairytale and my story, kind of intertwined. [00:06:00] My, Alex is another one of my viewpoint characters. She took on a bigger role than I had initially thought

Mark: Okay,

Melissa: have.

Mark: So when it comes to the cover and the title, where did those come from? Because when I first saw the cover, which was cut off from Sky and Earth, I was like, huh, that’s an interesting psychological thriller title. Once I read the book, I very much got where it came from and it’s like a brilliant idea.

Where did it come from? How did it come about?

Melissa: so there is actually part of a line in the original fairytale when the princess and her lady in waiting get put in the tower, they are cut off and it’s not exactly cut off from sky and earth, but it’s something similar. And I really, for me, this was very different. I normally write legal thrillers or medical thrillers, and this was a psychological thriller, but also like a little more [00:07:00] literary for me. I wanted it to have a ton of French feel like the hunter or the searcher, if you’re familiar with those books.

Mark: not, no.

Melissa: And so they’re more atmospheric than pulse pounding, I guess.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Very Dr. Character driven.

Melissa: Yeah. And the cover I really because it it doesn’t deliver sort of a, like a Freedom McFadden experience or it’s not like an Alice Feeney. It, it’s just not that kind of thriller. I didn’t want readers who are expecting sort of really fast paced adrenaline thriller to be disappointed. So I wanted to lean toward a more, I don’t wanna say literary because I’m a genre writer, but. More atmospheric cover. And,

Mark: sense.

Melissa: And so I, you know, the front, I, I [00:08:00] like plenty, but I really like the back because it’s got the tower in the back.

But my designer told me that it didn’t really work with the text on the front, and I trust him so.

Mark: Oh, I haven’t seen the full cover. So seeing that wrapped around. Yeah, it’s a, I mean, it is a beautiful looking cover. Oh, yeah, that

Melissa: Oh, that’s right. You have the ebook. So,

Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So at its core, what kind of story would you say this is, and what kind of challenge did it present to you as a writer?

Melissa: I think at its core it’s a story about resilience and dealing with your past and not letting it impact your present. So it is a very psychological thriller, more psychological maybe than thriller. Although there’s, my readers are used to a certain kind of story for me. So the challenge was to write what I wanted to write and make it accessible to the people who read my work.

[00:09:00] If that makes sense. So I, I knew I wanted to write about these women, ’cause I, most of all of my series books except for one series have female main characters. I have one series with a Buddhist pathologist who is a man. But usually I’ve got women and I wanted these women to be sort of the natural evolution of those women, but they’re sort of, it’s a little darker, it’s a little more raw.

They both have some trauma in their past, a lot of trauma. And that ultimately, and this is what I always struggle with writing thrillers I want them to feel hopeful and optimistic because I think like hope is a weapon and I really believe that. So I always try for my books to be affirming, which kind of sounds strange for someone who writes thrillers maybe ’cause they can be about justice, but they’re not usually supposed to be about feeling optimistic, I guess. So that was a challenge. And then [00:10:00] also, I do not personally like an un unlikeable narrator or an unreliable narrator, and I do have unreliable narrators because of their own trauma and their forgetfulness and their anxiety but as a reader, when the main character lies to me, I get so mad and I, some people love it,

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: but I chose to write in a genre where there was a lot of unreliable, narrators, a lot.

Mark: Yeah. Why did you make the switch from having done so many others in the legal and taking a chance to tell this one?

Melissa: So I write all different genres and I have on occasion, like I’ve started a rom-com series when I just needed something lighter and, I needed something darker. I was just in a place where I, was feeling a lot of, of sort of more just, it was a little raw and I’m very much like, there are [00:11:00] mood readers.

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: I’m a mood writer, so I needed to write something darker and I thought about trying to shoehorn it into one of my existing series, but it just didn’t have the right feeling like it, it was just different.

Mark: Yeah. Okay. And so when readers put down this book, what do you hope they’re still thinking or feeling?

Melissa: That really, really terribly bad things can happen, but they don’t have to define you and that you, like my characters really can sort of, if you’re willing to face reality save yourself or thrive, I guess.

Mark: Yeah, that’s great. So after 40 books. What has changed in your process, if anything, when you started writing this book. [00:12:00] I know for a lot of authors, the first few books are very, can go all over the place because you’re sort of learning what your own process is. 40 books later are you still learning your process or do you have that process kind of pinned down?

Melissa: So I’m still learning and I think I’m actually now up to 50 books. And the last, the, no, no, I mean, that’s, you used what I have on the back, but the last book I wrote that just came out last week, I wrote the whole entire book then scrapped it. That was book 50. So obviously I’m still learning, but every book is different for me.

Some of them are easy to write and some of them take longer and some of them are shorter. But this book that I rewrote is the third book ever. I’ve just start like, stop. I wrote the whole thing and, and scrapped it. The first time I did that was my second book. [00:13:00] Because I had written the first book and I just wrote the book. I didn’t have any expectations. I didn’t have any readers. I was just writing a book and it was really fun. And so that book was easy. It wasn’t the first book I wrote. The first book I wrote we will never talk about, it’s like in a drawer, but the first book I published and then I had expectations for book two. So I thought, oh, I should be a real writer and I should plot this book. I should outline this book. So I did that and I got all the way to the end and it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. So, I scrapped it. And some books, I completely am a discovery writer and some books I know the end. Some books I know key pieces, but I have never successfully plotted a book like the way you’re supposed to if you’re a plotter. [00:14:00] long answer to the question, my process is always evolving.

Mark: Okay. What was the process like for this book? How long did it take you to write it?

Melissa: Okay? So this book took longer than any book for me, but in part that was because this was my guilty pleasure. My side project, right? I had pre-orders for my series books up that I had to work on, and so sometimes in between books, when I was waiting for edits to get back, I would write part of this book and then I put it down. And so this book probably, might have taken me two years in between projects. And really the only reason it ever got done was that I am. I give my family a book as a gift on Christmas Eve, we, we stole it from Iceland. We celebrate yellow, Buca flat. And my husband said to me, I don’t want a book from the bookstore this Christmas, [00:15:00] last Christmas. I want to read your book. So after I finished my last book last year, I just locked in and finished it. So that book, my last book last year came out. Well, it came out in December, but I started writing this probably in October, November, and it was a perfect time to write a dark book because my mother had just died. She died on Halloween, and so I was in the right place to write my dark book, and I had a looming deadline of Christmas Eve. Otherwise, it still probably wouldn’t be finished. Mark.

Mark: A looming deadline for a first draft, or did you feel pressure to put something together that was better than a first draft?

Melissa: no, it was the first draft. He’s my first reader before he goes outside. So he knows

Mark: Okay. So you

Melissa: he knew what he was

Mark: draft. That’s, that says a lot. Yeah, I find it very hard to trust anyone with the first draft. It’s like no one can see how bad [00:16:00] this first version.

Melissa: No one but him could ever read my first draft. He’s the only one.

Mark: Okay. How many books do you typically write in a year when you’re talking about squeezing in books? Between books?

Melissa: So it depends between four and seven. Usually but this year, this year, it’s only gonna be three. No, well, four. ’cause I didn’t count this one. Four. And part of it is I am, keeps me outta trouble, but I was a lawyer for 15 years and I am really good at writing to deadlines, so I just give myself a lot of deadlines.

Mark: Okay. Still super impressive though, even with those have gotta be crazy deadlines. ’cause with your editor, I mean, editor readers gone, coming back, gone, coming back. Do you always have a project in between projects?

Melissa: [00:17:00] no. I like to, but I don’t like, sometimes I don’t. But also, well, I guess, do you mean am I writing something while it’s with the editor?

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: Yeah. Yes.

Mark: Okay.

Melissa: But so this was between those things, you know,

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: dribs and drabs.

Mark: Yeah. I’m just trying to understand how you can put out so many books, like that’s incredible to have to write four to seven books in a year. What does your day look like? Is it like a lawyer day from, well, I guess I don’t really know what a lawyer’s day is. Typical. Depends what kind of lawyer you are, but is it like early morning you’re just writing 5,000 words a day kind of thing?

Melissa: So my lawyer days were sort of like, you know, 18 hour days and they kind of every day was a very long day. So I can, I do have the muscle memory to do those sorts of days. But the thing is, and I really wish that I could be a person who wrote every day and wrote a reasonable number of words every day, [00:18:00] but I’m not, in part because I don’t plot.

So at the beginnings of my books are slow, I might get up, I sometimes get up especially when my kids were little, I would get up before the sun rose and I would start writing, and I would write for several hours, like before anyone else in the house was awake. But now I have two at college and one in high school so I sleep a little later, but I can write, I can write all day long. I don’t until, so particularly in the beginning of the book, I might write two, two or 3000 words a day. Like for me that’s a good day. In the beginning of a book, and then the middle of a book is kind of a slog. But at that point, I am putting in longer hours just to get some momentum. And then the last quarter of my books, I mean, I, I’ve written 13,000 words in a day. Like I just, that I pick up speed, right? And at the end it just all comes out fast. Then I have to put it aside [00:19:00] like, well, my hus I’ll, I’ll spell check it. My husband reads it and then it sits, but while it’s sitting and I’m thinking about it, I’m probably doing edits on another book, right? So there’s always something moving. But also in this process, which I said I don’t have a process, but it normally works out that way. It’s slow in the beginning I have longer days in the end, in the middle, and then the end it’s just like, I just can’t write fast enough to keep up with this story.

Mark: Wow.

Melissa: That’s how it, and I think in part because it’s, I’m learning the story as I go along. And once I get to that end, I know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know who the killer was when I started the book necessarily.

Mark: Yeah. Do you find yourself having to go back and insert more clues during second or third drafts?

Melissa: Not usually. And that’s the part, this is the part of my process that I really kind of love. [00:20:00] And the example I always use is I have a book in my legal thriller series that I wrote during COVI and I did not wanna set it during COVID. So it goes back 20 years and then it’s 19, or it’s 2019, so it’s 19, 10 years, 1999 and 2019. And the flashback in 1999 my main character’s roommate is sick. Like she’s getting sick. And when I’m writing it, I think, oh, well they’re in college. They must have been out partying. And then I was in the middle, and this is a spoiler if anybody reads this book, but I’m writing it, and there was something else that happened with her friend and her roommate, and I didn’t know why it was happening as I wrote it, and then when I got a little further, I’m like, oh, that’s because she’s pregnant and that is really important to this plot. And I did not know that when I wrote it. So I wrote the clue that I needed. But I [00:21:00] didn’t know I needed it and I know how crazy I sound. And that happens a lot. When I go back and I read it I think that is why that happened. In this book, this book, I did go back. I changed the beginning to be from Tristan’s point of view instead of his wife’s. And when I did that, I said something in that scene that made me realize the person I thought was the killer was in fact not the killer.

Mark: Wow. Did you have to go back and change the end?

Melissa: I hadn’t gotten to the end yet. ‘Cause I, because I wrote this, because I wrote this one, so, choppy, like putting it down, picking it up, I would often, I’d have to go back and remind myself where I was. I don’t normally do that ’cause I’m writing straight through, but since this one took two years, it was one of the times I went back to read the beginning. I thought, no, it needs to start from a different point of view. And then when I did that, I was like, I know who [00:22:00] the killer is now.

Mark: Well off air i’m gonna have to ask you who you, who was the original killer,

Melissa: Okay. Yeah. I’ll tell you when we’re done.

Mark: because I would love to know. How do you keep all these characters in your head between when you have all these stories going on who this person is, as a person.

Melissa: So when I am, when I’m writing my series books, I have an amazing brother who made a wiki for me that has. He’ll, he reads all of my books last. My husband reads ’em all first, and then after everyone who’s been paid to touch them is done. My brother reads ’em and he makes a series bible for me, and so he’ll tell me this person is afraid of this, and this person’s allergic to that. And so in my series books, I can just say she left-handed. And then I go and I search for it. And then when I’m writing a new book, usually I’m just living with the characters. So much that I [00:23:00] remember them, but again, for this one, since I was putting it down, they weren’t in the Wiki yet, so I kept notes. I don’t normally keep like a character sheet while I’m writing, but I did for this.

Mark: Wow, that’s impressive to keep, to keep those in your head. Is your brother available for, for work or,

Melissa: I don’t know. He really likes doing it. I could ask him, but it’s, it’s so helpful because you know, especially my legal thrillers, there are 16 novels and six novellas, and so he’ll read it and he’ll send me a note and he’ll say, did Sasha get a new car? Because she had a passade in book eight.

Mark: Wow. There you go. So have you had to go back and change things because he was, he was able to point things out for you.

Melissa: I’ve never changed anything, but I will tell, I will tell you. This is kind of a funny story. I have a series where I have a podcaster. She’s a true crime podcaster and her name is Maisie. [00:24:00] But my most of my thrillers are in the same universe. So Maisie appears in my legal thrillers and she appears in some of my medical thrillers ’cause she knows those characters. And when Maisie got her own book, I started to write it and I pulled up the Wiki and I said, okay, what color are Maisie’s eyes? And because it was in different series, we didn’t notice that she had green eyes and she had blue eyes and she had violet eyes. And I was like so in Maisie’s first book she started out, she was an on air TV reporter and investigative journalist, and she lost her job and that’s why she started the True Crime Podcast. But she’s starting the opening scene, she’s losing her job and she’s putting in her context. Her producer comes in and he says, wait, I thought your eyes were blue. And she said, color contacts there any there any color I want them to be, but my eyes are really brown. So I rec conned that one because I was like, I can, I can’t [00:25:00] go change all these different books, but

Yeah,

Mark: That’s a great story. How do you keep tension throughout this book? Given the type of story that it was? I mean, you’re, you said you’re a pants, so do you think about pacing in tension as you’re writing it, or is it just playing out as a movie?

Melissa: A little column A, a little column BI think I, I tend to write almost, I think all of my thrillers are multiple point of view. And this one only had three. A lot of times I have more, and so one of the things I always do is I end a chapter from one character’s point of view with an unresolved question, and then go to another character’s point of view. So that, like you wanna know what’s gonna happen, but now you’ve got this other person having an issue and then I leave that. Right. And so then by [00:26:00] following the different characters, you’re always kind of, wait, what’s going on with this other person? I don’t know if I’m explaining this well.

Mark: Yeah.

Melissa: By switching points of view, I try to keep the tension up, but also I write short chapters. And I think that keeps them pacey even when it’s sort of a more slow burn kind of book. And in this book in particular, I had three point of views. I had three people having flashbacks in memories. I had the Made May Lean Fairy tale, and I had Emily’s book that she was writing called The Tower. So I. I didn’t like have a system for when I would put one, but they were all getting woven in, so I felt like they were all moving the story along, but keeping it sort of open questions the whole time.

Mark: Do you think as you’re writing about, here I’m gonna tell a lie or, when Tristan is questioning he knows [00:27:00] he’s lying or hiding things and then we go to her point of view, we know she is, are you thinking about that and their history and how that is gonna carry a reader onto the next chapter as well?

Melissa: Yes. Because, because my role for myself when I started this book was they can lie to each other and they can lie to themselves, but they can’t lie to the reader. And so because the reader knew Tristan was lying and that Emily didn’t know, I knew that that was. I knew that right was going to be on their mind. So then the next scene I thought, well, well, she’s gotta lie, and then Alex has to lie. And so we know everybody’s lying and eventually it’s gonna catch up to them. So I did think about that as I was writing.

Mark: I thought it played out very well. I mean, it was a very good book. This one really kept hold because of that tension where I was always like, oh, when are they gonna find out everybody’s [00:28:00] lying? And when are they gonna find out what did happen all those years ago and who was responsible? And that really held me right to the end. So it was a, it was a really good read. I liked it a

Melissa: Well, I’m glad to hear it ’cause it’s not the kind of book I usually write either. And I just I felt like I just wanted to do it. So I’m glad that, I mean, some of my readers, my readers are funny. Some of them were like, it was so scary. It was so scary. But I finished it ’cause I knew I could trust you. And then I think people who read darker thrillers would be like, hardly any body count, right?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Do you find yourself processing trauma in your stories? Kind of as your characters are processing trauma in their stories.

Melissa: Uh,

Mark: You have, you have Emily who is writing a story, but she’s also using the maid Moline story as a way to process her own thoughts, just like, because there’s moments where she pulls from that made million fairytale [00:29:00] to be like, I can do this too. I’m strong too. Do you find when you’re writing it does that process things for you as well?

Melissa: It does. And I think that’s why I hope that it does for my readers because when I’m reading, I process things too. And so this book like I finally finished it because well, Emily has anxiety and so do I, but I finally got on medication and I felt like I could, I could see the difference between living in my anxiety and living with it, and I wanted that for her. So in that way I process that for her. But even my rom-coms, I process emotion through my characters. Definitely. And it’s not like every character, but I have my, Buddhist coroner. He’s very centered and he’s very calm, and sometimes when there’s a lot going on outside, I’ll say, I need to write a Bodhi book right now so [00:30:00] that I can feel centered and calm.

Mark: Oh, I love that. How do you make people care about characters when you’re writing them? You said you don’t write unlikable characters. How do you make sure that they are likable or at least people can relate to them, I guess would be another way of looking at it.

Melissa: Right. I think that I try to make my characters empathetic. You might not like them, but you understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Because I try to have them be open about it. If I have a character who’s burnt out, like she’s tired and she doesn’t feel like going to work, and like she doesn’t even really wanna make breakfast for her kids. She’s honest and you might be like, that’s not good, but you understand why she’s doing it. And for my antagonists a lot of them are fairly nasty people, like my thrillers usually have a killer and sometimes [00:31:00] psychopath. And in their point of view scenes, I just think why is, is this person like this. what is causing this pain? I don’t even know who said it every, everyone’s the hero of their own story. So if I were telling this story from my killer’s point of view, what would his story be? So I just try to make them understandable. Even if you can’t, like, they might not be huggable, but they’re palatable. I don’t know.

Mark: Do you

Melissa: So much this book.

Mark: Do you sometimes write from the point of view of the killer in a hidden way? Where we don’t know who it is, but they’re feeling or thinking. I don’t, you didn’t in this book,

Melissa: No. I yes, I nor not normally. I often do, and I sometimes a thriller where we know from the very beginning who the bad guy is.

We know, I don’t hide it. [00:32:00] Right? In my, my very first legal thriller, there’s a man who has, is selling the technology to blow up a plane from an app on your phone, and he does a demonstration for buyers.

That’s all on the back cover. That’s not a spoiler. We know who he is from his first time on page, we don’t know who he’s working with. We don’t know what his next move is gonna be. We don’t know how my character’s gonna outsmart him, but we know who he is. And then sometimes I do the thing you talk about, like we don’t know who this person is this killer and like we don’t know, but, and then sometimes I don’t, but this I think is the only thriller that doesn’t have anything from that person’s point of view.

Mark: Do you find it when you’re doing that? It’s like a icky feeling as you’re writing these terrible feelings from their point of view. ’cause you’re trying to justify whatever insanity that they’re performing.[00:33:00]

Melissa: Right. And that’s probably why um, I have sort of, since I’m trying to be empathetic to them, I sort of have some limits. I don’t write any like I wanna say I don’t have any serial killers, but I don’t have any traditional serial killers. They don’t have a Hannibal Lecter character who I’m following around. Right. In detail while he’s killing people. ’cause I couldn’t,

Mark: mm-hmm.

Melissa: I don’t have any sexual assaults or rapes of my characters. Because I don’t wanna write from a rapist point of view. Right. So I don’t necessarily wanna write from, you know sociopath’s point of view either, but I, there, I guess for me there are just limits to what I can write,

Mark: Yeah, That’s fair.

Melissa: Not what I can read so much, but like what I can I, ’cause I don’t wanna embody it,

Mark: Yeah. That makes sense. What advice would you give someone who just published their first or second book,

Melissa: Self-published or [00:34:00] traditionally

Mark: Let’s say self-published.

Melissa: Write the next book. I think although self-publishing has changed so much since I published my first book, which was in 2011 for a really long time I really think just writing in series was the way for a self-published author to build an audience. I mean, I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of energy on promoting my first book. Like you want it, right? You want your first book outta the gate to just take fire. But there’s, it’s a lot of, if particularly if you’re self-publishing, it’s a lot of money. You’ve already spent the money to get a cover and get it edited and get everything in place to then spend a lot of money to promote it particularly now it’s hard ’cause I’m a dinosaur like in 2011 there weren’t all these services, so you couldn’t spend that much money to promote your book. Oh. [00:35:00] Oh wait. I have one more piece of advice. Start a newsletter. Start a newsletter when you write your first book.

Mark: Okay.

Melissa: That would be my advice.

Mark: How did you get people to join the newsletter when you started your book?

Melissa: So I didn’t have a newsletter yet, but I had an email address in the back of my book. And the, I had a reader who I’ll never forget, like his mind is, his name is etched in my mind, and he emailed me just like an email and said, well, when’s the next book in the series? And I thought, there’s no next book. I wrote a book, yay me. And then I thought about it and I said I could write another book. So I started, I think I had at that point i’ve gone through so many mail providers. Let’s just say it was MailChimp. I don’t know what it was. I got on the free plan and I said, put, and then I upped. And this is a thing as a self-published author that you can do, you can update your file. So I updated my file to say if you wanna connect and know when the next book comes out, join my newsletter here. And [00:36:00] I’ll only email you when you have, when I have book news. And I just started collecting names.

Mark: Okay, so, it was like organically they found your book and then when it got to the end, we assume that they want to read more of from you, and then they follow that link and go to

Melissa: Right. And again, it was, it was a, it was a different time, it was a different age. So now I have, I will have a free book. If you sign up for my newsletter, you get a free book. I do that now. I’ll put it on social media, but in the beginning it was just at the end of my book, there was this link and if you wanted to sign up, you could.

Mark: Okay. If you can pick one thing that led to your success so far, what would it be?

Melissa: I think. I was going to say not staying in my lane, but I think I write the book. I don’t write to market. I write the book I wanna write and then find a market for it. And I think because of that I’m able to really, I’m able to love my book and I, I’m sure [00:37:00] people who write to market love their books, but it feels so intimate with the reader, like this story is very personal to me. So I think, I write a very personal story and the readers who it resonates with that resonate with it, they can tell. And there’s sort of a, a mutual understanding there, I guess, that I’m gonna tell a story that might speak to them if they read another one. So I guess my success comes from not always obeying genre convention and not always like I just find the market for it. I don’t think traditional publishers would publish most of my books. Be like, oh, there’s not a market for that.

Mark: Use your same name for all of them, right? You haven’t

Melissa: I do, I haven’t.

Mark: [00:38:00] Mm-hmm. Okay.

Melissa: All my babies. So I didn’t wanna make any of them feel like second class citizens by not, not claiming them.

Mark: But your readership carried through. So the what you’re writing and what, yeah. I think it resonates with people, obviously, if they’re still following you from the different genres.

Melissa: Yeah. I guess my voice is my voice no matter what I’m writing, right? So.

Mark: Yeah, that’s great. So I had a question from Andrew Warren, which technically we already answered. If you’re a blog or a dancer, how do you think it impacts your writing? I think we may have already answered that, but if there’s anything else you want to add.

Melissa: I mean it clearly impacts it on the speed, right? Like slow in the beginning. And I think it also gives me a little more freedom to because the three books that I had to scrap that I tried to plot [00:39:00] well two of them. I tried to plot the last one. It was just I didn’t plot, but I had this idea like what it was gonna be and I stuck to it. And I don’t normally do that. And I think being a discovery writer or a Panther, if you really embrace it and you just go where the story takes you and you listen to your characters. But just, you can’t fight it. Trying to grab the story and bring it back onto the track that I thought it was on never works well. So I just have to follow the story.

Mark: That makes sense. I outline a lot I have the book blurb ahead of time. I have the summary when I’m writing and I know what my book’s gonna be, but often I go right off the rails. I don’t do chapter by chapter or, very much at all in the actual story because I do that all the time. It goes off the rails. And when I’ve tried to stick to a firm outline, it’s the same thing i’m like, I had, I end up either pulling the story where it’s not meant to go or I just give up on the story. ’cause I’m like, this isn’t, isn’t working.

Melissa: Because it’s not the story. It’s not what the story wants to tell you. Yeah. So you [00:40:00] just, yeah. Yeah, resting one, one back on the rails is, I think possibly the worst thing I can do for, it’s clearly, for me, the worst thing I can do.

Mark: yeah. Where can listeners find your book or any of your books?

Melissa: All of my books are available on all of the retail sites. And they are in Cobo Plus, and I sell them direct through my website too, so pretty much can find me everywhere except brick and mortar bookstores except for a couple of indies. But amazon Burns renewable, Cobo, apple Google, melissa miller.com.

Mark: All right, I’ll drop that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. This has been great. I love learning about this book. I really enjoyed the book. So thank you for provid me a copy and I will have to read more of your books and get into those medical legal thrillers that you’re writing. So thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. If you don’t mind sticking around for the after show. We will can get [00:41:00] right to those rapid fire questions.

Melissa: All right.

Mark: Thanks for listening, and make sure you follow the show so you don’t miss next week’s episode with Adam Roach. We talk about the Ritualist, the flash fiction story that sparked his debut thriller and how he built smart antagonists, tight timelines in the twist driven plots while writing a series design for long-term escalation.

If you want the after show with the rapid fire questions, it’s free right now on Patreon. That’s where authors open up about their writing rituals. The strangest research rabbit holes They’ve fallen into the thriller scenes that stuck with them, and the moments from their own books that they’d least wanna survive.

The lengths in the show notes, ​