We know the big names, the ones who win the Ockhams or other major awards. We know Eleanor Catton and Maurice Gee, Becky Manawatu, CK Stead and Emily Perkins. Fewer of us know Sarah A Parker, Kate O’Keeffe or Jayne Castel, yet all three are among a small handful of New Zealand-born authors who make a better-than-good living solely from their books.
Kiwis are readers – more than 85,000 people attended ticketed events at the recent Auckland Writers Festival, and between them bought 11,000 books – but there just aren’t enough of us to support our own fiction writers.
For Aotearoa-based authors to be commercially successful, they must look internationally: Stacy Gregg signed early on with HarperCollins UK for what would become multiple series of pony-themed books for tweens; Nicky Pellegrino is represented by Hachette UK for her novels, often set in Italy.
Genre romance writer Nalini Singh sells multitudes internationally for the Harlequin imprint; crime writer Ben Sanders has a deal with HarperCollins and has been shortlisted five times for crime fiction’s Ngaio Marsh Awards. His 2015 novel, American Blood, was optioned by Warner Bros, but Sanders still earns his main crust as a structural engineer.
Over the past decade, other writers have turned to self-publishing online, writing to market and maintaining a ferocious output that keeps readers wanting more. In most cases, those readers want more romance books, and Parker (fantasy), O’Keeffe (comedy) and Castel (historical) all offer variations on a theme of love.
“Romance writers are our most professional and best-earning writers,” says Jenny Nagle, CEO of the New Zealand Society of Authors. “In some ways, the book world is sniffy about genre fiction, but I’ve spoken at the romance writers conference and they are such glitzy, professional affairs. They’re incredibly well organised and always have international speakers and publishers who come in looking for new talent. They’re the most sophisticated book marketers we have, probably 10 or 15 years ahead of everyone else.”
Three of our most successful, Parker, O’Keeffe and Castel, interrupted their schedules to talk to the Listener.
Sarah A Parker
‘Sorry if you can hear honking and stuff,” says Sarah A Parker from the other end of a Zoom call. “We’re in Beverly Hills and it’s very rowdy. And I’m so sorry about my voice. I had a big signing and it was a four-day event; by day two my voice was gone.”
It’s an unselfconscious flex from the author, whose latest novel, When the Moon Hatched, has just been picked up by Harper Voyager. The book is why she’s in the US. After Beverly Hills, she’s off to Huntington Beach then New York, before heading home to Australia with husband Josh and their three kids.
If the frog-throated glamour of an international book tour seems a long way from the south Wairarapa farm where Parker grew up, it isn’t, really. There’s a direct link between that rural childhood and the epic fantasy romance books she writes as an adult. “My earliest memories of fantasy are going to my nana’s place,” Parker recalls. “She had a flat on the farm and I’d trudge over in my gumboots and kneel before her coffee table, where she’d have a stack of fairy books. I’d go through them for hours and hours.”
It changed the way Parker experienced the world, transporting her imagination beyond the wishful Narnian glances at wardrobes many of us remember. “I couldn’t look at a fairy ring without feeling like I was going to step in and go somewhere different,” she says. “I’d see bluebells and think a fairy might be sleeping there. I’ve taken a lot of that into my adult life.”
The result has been a hugely successful career as a self-published author, with her Spawn of Darkness series and the Crystal Bloom trilogy enabling her to write full-time. She is now the sole family breadwinner, doing well enough for Josh to have quit his job as a commercial lawyer to look after the household. “I needed help at home,” Parker says. “So, after I published To Flame a Wild Flower [2023, the final Crystal Bloom book], Josh was like, ‘You can carry us. I’ll look after the kids and you can have more time to do what you love.’”
When the Moon Hatched is the first book to emerge from that arrangement. It’s the start of a trilogy and was a bestseller even before Harper Voyager got involved. The self-published ebook was already an international hit with more than 40 million page flips recorded on Amazon’s all-you-can-eat Kindle Unlimited subscription service. #whenthemoonhatched trended on TikTok with more than four million views. Parker found herself turning down meetings with traditional publishers before choosing Harper Voyager, the fantasy and science fiction arm of HarperCollins.
“My agent said there was a lot of interest, and I always told her I’d only go down that route if I find a team that will love the story and give it the same amount of trust and appreciation that I would as my own publisher. If they can do better for my readers than I’m doing, then I will [sign with a publisher].”
Can Harper Voyager do that, though? Harper is one of the world’s biggest publishers, but with the best will in the world, can the company reach four million fantasy-romance-loving TikTok users? For Parker, it comes down to distribution.
Before Harper Voyager, she says, “I could not get [physical copies of] Moon … into Canada; I couldn’t get it into Australian bookstores, into New Zealand bookstores. Based on my feedback, this is a story where you read the Kindle version and then you want the physical copy in your hand, so you can flick back to the index and stuff.” (There’s also a map, glossary, pronunciation guide and a full page of trigger warnings to refer to.) “The story got too big for me to handle,” Parker admits.
She also had to contend with unauthorised versions being uploaded to Apple and other sites, where readers were charged three times what Parker sold the digital book for.
“I couldn’t deal with it as well as focus on doing what I needed to be doing, which was writing. Now I’ve got the right people around me to help give [Moon] the best chance possible.”
Kate O’Keeffe
By her own admission, Kate O’Keeffe was a literary snob. “I read literature at university,” she says, “and I felt I had to read either the classics or big, prize-winning books that would make me think.”
It wasn’t until a friend handed her a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary that O’Keeffe accepted it was okay to read for fun, too.
“I fell in love with what at the time was called chick lit – and is generally called romantic comedy now – and decided to try writing it because I enjoyed it so much and had so many of my own ideas.”
The Hawke’s Bay writer has so far self-published 26 books. She started in 2014 and got properly serious two years later, after being named a finalist in a US writing competition. The awards ceremony in Los Angeles was a turning point.
“I met all these authors I’d only met online, and I realised that I could write to market, and could write something I wanted to write. They were inspirational women who were doing very well, and I knew I wanted to make this more than a hobby. At that point I did a lot of research.”
O’Keeffe’s next book was One Last First Date, the first in the Flirting With Forever quadrilogy. At one stage, the Flirting books occupied the top four spots on Amazon’s Australia and Oceania bestseller chart.
“One Last First Date is the book that did it for me and it will always be close to my heart. It was the first time I made over $1000 in a month and it was a huge thing. I literally danced around the living room. Now, if I made $1000 in a month on my books I’d be really depressed.”
O’Keeffe has sold more than 750,000 books and racked up millions of page turns on Kindle Unlimited –”Each page read is a minute amount but it adds up” – and tries to publish four books annually. She is coy when asked what that translates to as an annual income but admits to earning a solid six figures.
Her books are mostly coy, too. She has a couple of racy titles out under the nom de plume Lacey Sinclair, but of the stories under O’Keeffe’s name, her website states that “the bedroom door is firmly shut”. Is that usual for a romance writer?
“All the books I loved early on – Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella, Helen Fielding – they don’t have sex scenes,” O’Keeffe says. “They focus on the emotional and the funny. When I read and write, I want humour and I’m not overly interested in the sexy times.” Her readers aren’t, either. “Most of my reader base is in the US, and a lot of it is religious. They don’t want to read sex scenes.”
One of the miracles of publishing in the digital age is that authors have that kind of transparency about who reads their books, which is how O’Keeffe knows it’s worthwhile offering physical copies through Amazon’s Print On Demand service. Someone in the US could order a copy today and have it printed and delivered tomorrow. Print books, though? In 2024? Of course, social media’s involved. Book influencers on Instagram and TikTok – known as Bookstagrammers and BookTokkers – love to be photographed and filmed holding and reading their books.
“I really get it,” says O’Keeffe. “A book feels special and I can’t imagine not having my books in print.”
Not that you’ll easily find them on shelves here. Paper Plus has a BookTok section on its website but O’Keeffe’s books are absent, and they aren’t in Whitcoulls. Copies are available at indie bookshop Wardini, in Havelock North and Napier.
“If retailers want to stock my books, I’m more than happy to provide them. But as an indie author, I think it would be extremely hard to make money from them.”
NZ Society of Authors’ Jenny Nagle agrees. A first-time author can expect a print run of 500 copies; even established, lauded writers such as Fiona Kidman or Witi Ihimaera will have only a couple of thousand printed. Authors earn 10% royalties on the retail price of each copy sold, so even a hit book at $30 a pop isn’t making anyone a living wage, and most writers selling in this country almost certainly have other sources of income.
With her international focus, that’s not something O’Keeffe has to worry about. Her current series is a royal romcom, and book two is due out soon. In the first instalment, a Texan gal meets her European prince. You’ll need to read it to find out if he’s charming or not. O’Keeffe’s books are clearly not autobiographical. Do they, though, represent the type of life she wished she lived?
“In some ways, yes,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of characters in their late 20s, pushing 30, and they’re at that point where they want to get serious. They want to settle down, they want to find ‘the one’, the clock’s ticking, all those things. Some of my characters certainly found their calling earlier than I did, and I would like to have been like that. I think I would love to have avoided all the drama of dating in my 20s.”
Jayne Castel
‘Scotland isn’t something I really started with,” says Jayne Castel, who moved from Dunedin to Edinburgh and writes historical romance novels about places like Skye and the Highlands. “I started out writing fantasy but I couldn’t get published. After that, I wrote historical fiction set in Anglo-Saxon England, which I self-published. They didn’t sell very well.”
Things changed when Castel attended the 2016 Romance Writers of New Zealand conference and spoke to an agent. “She didn’t want anything I had, but she said, ‘Since you write historical [fiction], why don’t you try setting your novels in Scotland? It’s really popular.’”
Thank Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books, and the TV series populated by feisty lasses and kilted hunks. Castel’s hunks don’t wear kilts. She’s a stickler for period accuracy and kilts didn’t appear until the 18th century, well after the dark ages and medieval eras in which she sets her stories.
She takes a lot of time and care with her research, which means spending one month on and one month off writing. The “off” months are for fact-finding, editing and all the admin stuff that has enabled her to produce almost 50 books since 2012. To those unused to the rhythms of self-published genre fiction, Castel’s output sounds exhausting. She writes 3000 words each morning – down from a peak of 4000 – and publishes six books a year.
Despite doing no advertising, Castel’s books have sold just under 500,000 digital and physical copies, which doesn’t include Kindle Unlimited subscribers who push her readership closer to 1 million.
“It’s taken a long time to build up readers organically. I have a background in marketing and that was useful, but I find marketing my own work hard, in terms of, ‘Buy my book, buy my book!’ It’s horrible, and when you start, nobody knows who you are, so there’s this sense of writing into the void.”
Castel is on Instagram and Facebook but says her most effective marketing tool is her fortnightly newsletter. “I do things like competitions to build my subscriber group. And because I put them out every two weeks, I don’t make them too sales-y; it’s more about what I’m doing in my life, so you build personal relationships with your readers over time. It’s easy to say in retrospect, but if you write what readers want and build a readership of people who love your books, then it’s so much easier. There’s a critical mass. It’s hard to earn your first US$1000 a month, but once you reach that point, it’s much easier to earn more.”
As well as supporting herself, she employs her husband as her editor and administrator, and the pair run their own publishing imprint, Winter Mist Press. To fund all that, she must earn, what, around $300,000 annually? “That’s reasonably close,” Castel says. “Maybe slightly under there, but it’s done really well. The exchange rate makes a huge difference, because you’re getting US dollars and pounds coming into New Zealand bank accounts, but yeah, it’s a good income.”
Castel is, by most standards, a success. She no longer worries about getting a publishing deal with a major. “If one day I do get contacted, wonderful, but I make a living and I like being in control.”
Is there anything she’s had to give up to get where she is? “I wouldn’t say I’ve sacrificed much, really. I don’t watch TV; haven’t had a TV for years. We don’t have kids. I would say I’m quite disciplined. But I didn’t want it to be hard. I didn’t want it to feel like a slog. You’ve got to respect the creative process, and you’ve still got to be excited to get up and write those books.”