May 23, 2018

Julie Spencer


What counsel would you give new and upcoming authors?

Learn all you can about your craft: story structure, genre, tropes, grammar, marketing, the publishing world, etc. Then take everything you learn, set it on the back burner where you can watch it carefully, and tell the story that’s in your heart. Let your characters tell their story and then mold that story into something readers will love.

How much do you write everyday?

As much as I possibly can with a full-time job and teenage children. I don’t set daily word-count goals or try to publish as many books as I can, as fast as I can. But I write really fast and can type almost as fast as I can think, so my stories do come quickly. I’m currently averaging about four or five books a year.

How do you promote your books?

That is probably one of my biggest weaknesses. I’m really busy at work and with my kids and with my writing and reading that I really haven’t done much advertising or promoting. Eventually I will focus more on that, but I currently don’t sell many books. I just write them and publish them and let my readers love them. When I do finally start promoting them I’ll probably focus on Facebook ads and Amazon ads. I’ve heard those work the best. When I do promote my books through blogs and Instafreebie and My Book Cave, it’s usually more as a reader magnet to get people onto my newsletter email list.

What kind of research do you do?

I love YouTube, Google and Google Maps. I’ve stood backstage at rock concerts, toured the world as a groupie, eaten as countless restaurants, and even learned to surf from the comfort of my home in rural Michigan.

How did you get started as an author?

Other than my writing a novel in junior high (which I threw away afterward), and my research papers in high school and college, my first published work was my master’s thesis.

One night a few years ago I had a weird dream that woke me up at three in the morning. I got up and went to my computer and started typing. I barely ate or slept for almost three weeks then sat back and realized I’d written a novel. After countless revisions and edits, that manuscript became my first published novel, The Cove.

After that I wrote The Farmer’s Daughter (which has yet to be published and is sitting in my computer waiting for revisions), then Buxton Peak popped up out of nowhere and has taken over my life. Several side stories have pulled me briefly away from my rockstars, like The Man in the Yellow Jaguar, a couple of short stories, and my works in progress, The Refusal, The Overlook, and my Love Letters series (kind of a spin on the television show The Bachelorette).

If my rockstars would ever shut up and let me finish these other stories I may have a more diverse backlist.

What or whom inspired you?

My earliest memory of reading is the Dick & Jane series, but that’s probably not what you meant. I devoured the Little House on the Prairie series, Anne of Green Gables, Encyclopedia Brown, Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, the Flowers in the Attic series (and everything else V.C. Andrews wrote), then later Danielle Steel, and much later The Work and the Glory series and Kingdom of the Crown series by Gerald N. Lund. Lately I’ve been devouring anything from authors like Victorine Lieske, Michelle Pennington, Elizabeth (E.J.) McKay (and her penname Bree Livingston), Rachel John and Lisa Rector. They are my current inspirations.

What writing projects are you currently working on?

My series called Buxton Peak has consumed me for the past couple of years, but I’ve also written several other stories including my cute little novella called The Man in the Yellow Jaguar. I usually have about five or six works-in-progress at any given time.

Buxton Peak is about a rock band from the UK and was originally a stand-alone novel that turned into a trilogy of novellas. Now, I’ve written a prequel and several spin-off stories highlighting a few of the minor characters from the original trilogy. In that series I’m currently working on a Billionaire Rockstar Romance that features the main two characters in the series, Ian Taylor (the rockstar) and the woman who eventually becomes his wife, Megan. That story is almost complete.

What can you tell us about these projects?

The Buxton Peak series spans a time period from when Ian Taylor was first identified as a child prodigy and began obsessively learning how to play any instrument he could get his hands on.

In high school he forms a rock band with his three best friends, helping them rocket to stardom and all the spoils that come with it. But center stage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and brings its own challenges. Life as a rock star wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be, especially as Ian tries to maintain his Christian values. As the guys grow up, the original dynamic of the band is lost in the distractions of substance abuse and women.

As a young adult, Ian longs to be loved by a woman who is not just after him for his money and his fame, but for who he is on the inside. When he meets Megan, a small town college girl at church in a remote part of Michigan, he figures out pretty quickly that she knows nothing about him. So he makes the decision to hide his fame from her.

His plan backfires when Megan finds out who he really is and decides she doesn’t want to live her life in his spotlight, with all the baggage that comes with it. She just wants to live a quiet life in rural Michigan with a normal husband and family.

While Ian is blinded by love, his band is torn apart by distractions, temptations, and drug abuse. Ian has to decide if he’s going to stand beside his mates, letting their problems become his problems, or walk away. When drugs, betrayal, and tragedy rip the band apart, it takes the guidance of an inner city youth pastor, who happens to be a really good drummer, to pull them back to center stage.

The series includes a lot of passion, a lot of catching a glimpse behind the scenes of life as a rockstar, and a lot of tears. But it ends on a happy note with the promise that the end of the series is only the beginning…

My current WIP, my Billionaire Rockstar Romance, covers the period of time from when Ian meets Megan and ends with her finally agreeing to marry him. It’s my first sweet romance with all the genre’s tropes and structure. It will probably be the most mainstream book I’ve ever written. Most of the rest of the series falls more into the Christian genre with (closed-door) sex, drugs, and rock & roll to throw the reader off into social issues that mainstream genres just don’t touch.

I love the series, I love my rockstars. I’m oddly in love with my guy characters to the point that my husband should probably be jealous… except that he is my romantic inspiration, and he knows it! Ian Taylor and Kai Burton are my favorite guys in the Buxton Peak series, and Todd Ramsey is my favorite from my novel called The Cove. I have lots more books to come. They just keep writing themselves.

When did you write your first novel?

I wrote my first novel in junior high. It was terrible, but my friends passed the pages around as fast as I could scrawl them into a notebook. I would rip out a page and hand it to the person next to me and keep writing. I’m not sure how I passed seventh grade, or why the teachers didn’t put a stop to it. I just kept writing, and writing, and writing. I threw the manuscript away at the end of the school year. What I wouldn’t give to have those pages back.

What do you want readers to take away from reading your novel?

There are a lot of social issues in my stories. I didn’t mean for them to happen that way but my stories have a tendency to address a lot of controversial topics like drug use and pre-marital relationships. There is also a lot of coming-of-age self-reflection, growing into the adults God meant them to be. I want my readers to feel the characters’ emotions and live their lives vicariously. The best compliments I get from my readers are “I cried,” and “I didn’t see that twist coming!”

What hobbies do you enjoy when you are not writing?

I have a full-time job as the Administrator of a local conservation district. I’m very involved in watershed management planning, soil erosion control projects, computer mapping, wildlife habitat restoration, and political diplomacy. Very strange departure from writing stories about rock stars, but I’m very passionate about the work we do at the conservation district and feel a sense of accomplishment when I can take two opposing sides of an issue and bring them together to see common ways to solve environmental problems. I also read a LOT, and love watching my (now grown up) children spread their wings and fly.

Current New Release: Buxton Peak: London Bridges

Social Media Accounts:

Twitter account: @juliespencer98









Email: juliespencer1998@gmail.com


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