Show notes
New York Times and USA Today best-selling author, Sharon Sala is a queen of romantic suspense with more than 130 books published in multiple genres, but particularly she concentrates on writing small town romance and thrilling romantic suspense.
Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler. And on Binge Reading today, we’ve got a real treat. Multiple award-winning author Sharon Sala talks about her latest two releases; Don’t Back Down, her new romantic suspense and a new series, and the small town romance The Next Best Day.
She also talks about her remarkable gift for dreaming the stories she writes and the native American heritage from two great grandmothers she is happy to claim as her own.
Our Giveaway this week
Our giveaway this week is free genre fiction on Kobo, a fantastic range of popular genre fiction from top authors. Take your pick, whether you like mystery, romance, sci-fi or audio books, all of them freely available for a limited time.
That includes Poisoned Legacy Book #1 of my Of Gold & Blood mystery series. And we’ve also got a Box Set 30% Off Sale.
Visit the following link(s) to see the promotion: https://www.kobo.com/p/free-ebooks! If you live in a country that isn’t included in this promotion, you may have trouble accessing the download link. If this happens, change the flag at the top of the Kobo homepage to one of the included countries to see the sale link properly.
FREE GENRE FICTION DOWNLOAD
BOXED SET 30% OFF SALE
I’ve got the first three books in Of Gold & Blood included; that’s Poisoned Legacy, Brother Betrayed and Double Jeopardy – all available in a Boxed Set E-book at 30% off
Visit the following link(s) to see the promotion: https://kobo.com/p/august-boxset-sale! The promo code for this campaign is: AUGBOX.
bOXED SET SALE 30% OFF
And remember if you enjoy the show, leave a review so others will find us too.
Links to things mentioned in the episode
Dinah McCall: https://www.fictiondb.com/series/prophecy-dinah-mccall~37613.htm
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/40571.Dinah_McCall
Dreamcatcher: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/71819.Dreamcatcher
The Survivors: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243251.The_Survivors
There’s A Squirrel in the Attic: https://www.amazon.com/Theres-Squirrel-Attic-Sharon-Sala/dp/0989628671
Killers of the Flower Moon: (Books) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon
Killers of the Flower Moon movie: (Due for release later this year) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon_(film)
John Harte: https://www.johnhartebooks.com/
The Last Child: (John Harte): https://www.amazon.com/Last-Child-Novel-John-Hart/dp/031238033X
Where to find Sharon online
Website: www.sharonsalaauthor.com
Blog: https://www.facebook.com/sharonsala
Contact: https://sharonsalaauthor.com/contact/
Introducing Sharon Sala romance author
Sharon Sala – Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award author of romance and romantic suspense
But now here’s Sharon. Hello there, Sharon, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Sharon Sala: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Jenny Wheeler: You’re a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author, you’ve got 132+ plus books published in seven different genres, first published in 1991, and you still have a passion for writing 40 years later. What drives that passion?
Sharon Sala: Oh, I don’t know. I always loved storytelling. I was a reader from a very early age and a dreamer. I just daydreamed. Everything in my sleep was dreams.
It’s like going to the movies when I go to bed.
I just wanted to put them on paper and share them with people who like to read.
Jenny Wheeler: And so, did you start writing at a very young age?
Sharon Sala’s latest books
Sharon Sala: No. I was just an avid reader. It was probably the early 80s when I first thought about it, and I wrote two books and put them under the bed and never did another thing with them until the mid ‘80s. And then I got serious about it.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. We’ll get into that story a little bit later on, but we’ll focus on your most recent books. Although I mentioned the seven genres, you have focused very strongly on romantic suspense and contemporary romance, probably mostly of a sweet and small town nature.
And your latest romantic suspense series is one called Secrets and Shadows. You’ve just started a new series. You’ve got multiple series, I might add.
And it’s set around the Pope family in Jubilee, Kentucky, a small mountain town. Could you introduce us to the Popes and to Jubilee? This is going to be a series. Do you know how many books it’s going to be yet?
Sharon Sala: Yes, I just finished the fifth and last book last week, and I’ve been editing all week and I’ll turn it in.
There are several groups of Popes, but everybody who lives on Pope Mountain is interrelated from being early day settlers. The first Pope that you run into in Book #1. his name is Cameron Pope, and then the second book is about Aaron Pope, and he’s a cousin, and that family has four brothers.
They are Aaron, and Sean, and Wiley, and Brendan,
Don’t Look Back – #1 in Secrets and Shadows
Jenny Wheeler: And that fifth and final book, when will that fifth one actually come out?
Sharon Sala: Oh, golly. I don’t know. Probably let’s see. This is going to be 23 to come out in 2024. I’m guessing unless they cram all 3 of them in the last year. in 2024, I would say the 5th one, from the way Sourcebooks has been stringing them out, will probably be published in the first part of 2025.
Jenny Wheeler: They launched quite a long time after you finished writing them. You probably can barely remember writing them by the time they come out?
Sharon Sala: Sometimes… I keep a very detailed journal in each book I write, even when they’re not connected. And it’s easy for me to go back and thumb through my journals and find details and remember.
Jenny Wheeler: The one that we’ll be talking about a bit today is Don’t Look Back. That is book one. But the second one, Last Rites, has just come out. Now,
Cameron Pope is the kind of foundation person you might call it, for the series.
He has been a Special Forces agent in Afghanistan for 10 years. He’s returned banged up like a lot of those men were by their experiences and relishing being withdrawn from society.
And he meets this woman, Rusty Caldwell, who he had a very fleeting meeting with before he went overseas.
She’s had a pretty remarkable career of her own, parallel to his while he’s been away. Tell us a bit about Rusty and Cameron and their relationship.
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Meet the Jubilee Popes from Kentucky
Sharon Sala: Sure. Cameron was going to his second tour of Afghanistan and Rusty is a undercover FBI agent and she was going to another one of her jobs and they meet by chance in a hotel lobby and find an instant attraction.
And they agreed not to even give each other’s names because they knew it was going to be a one night thing.
And she called him Soldier Boy. And he called her Angel. And they had the one brief night and parted and were sorry that they lost touch with each other.
They both regretted it the minute they were apart that they hadn’t exchanged names.
But here we are, maybe four years later, and they meet again because the FBI -we call them the feds here in America – the FBI has sent Rusty into the town of Jubilee to help investigate what has turned out to be human trafficking.
Cameron has become like one of the heads of the Pope family. He’s the oldest of the Popes still living.
There’s many older Popes, but they’re all women and grandmothers and aunts. So Cameron’s the main guy here and Rusty is the main woman in his life and they reunite and it’s really good, but they’re also working together to solve this big crime wave that is going through this tourist town.
And Cameron has a most remarkable dog. A white giant German shepherd named Ghost, who he connected with in Afghanistan.
It was just a little puppy and the puppy followed him everywhere and every time they moved, Ghost went with him. And he taught himself to sniff out bombs. So Ghost was a soldier with Cameron in Afghanistan and when he came home, he was Cameron’s buddy for life.
They have a really great relationship. My readers love them.
Ghost – a remarkable white German shepherd
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s wonderful. Do you have animals in your books quite often? From the way you wrote about him… it felt like it. I loved Ghost too.
Actually I myself had a white German shepherd many years ago now, but yeah, I loved Ghost. And then in Last Rites, you introduce the second member you talked about, Aaron.
And that’s got terrific reviews. I looked up some of the reviews and people are already raving about it. They use words like ‘emotionally wrenching,’ ‘sensually appealing,’ ‘edgy and suspenseful,’ ‘hopeful, and endearing.’
That you managed to do all of that in one book! Give us an idea of what happens with Aaron in that Book #2 that’s just out.
Sharon Sala: Sure. To start it off their mother, Shirley was a Pope before she married and the boys have not been raised on Pope Mountain,
She has four sons and her husband was very abusive. And then he committed a crime, and wound up in prison for life.
Shirley and her sons were having a very difficult time existing in this town where they had grown up because of his reputation, so they decided to move home and change their name to her maiden name again.
So, here comes Shirley Pope and four new Popes back to Pope Mountain. Aaron was a police officer in Conway, Arkansas, where they lived before and after their father committed such atrocious crimes, they were ostracized and Aaron lost his job.
He finally goes back to work again as a policeman in Jubilee and finds his place there.
Sharon Sala – an action adventure junkie
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. What do you enjoy about romantic suspense?
Sharon Sala: I’m an action adventure junkie. I would watch Terminator 20 before I’d watch one more Bridget Jones Diary. I like the action. I like the drama. I like that there’s justice.
I always have to have good winning out over evil. I never let the bad guys get away with anything. I have no problem killing them. None whatsoever. It’s really good work.
I don’t never have to see a psychiatrist because I just get it all out in the books. Get rid of them that way.
Aaron meets a really sweet woman who helps them solve an almost 200-year-old mystery in their family.
When she finds a journal that belonged to the first Brendan the tragedy in that story, I won’t tell it all because I don’t want to give it away, is that they didn’t know until they found the journal that Brendan’s little Chickasaw wife had gone up a mountain to pick berries one day and never came back down.
They never knew what happened to her. She disappeared. And so that journal helps the family in this day and time solve the mystery and find her remains. And Last Rites is putting her to rest.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s fantastic. Now you change gears when you move to the other solid stream of your career and that’s the romance. The most recent book in your romance stream is The Next Best Day.
That’s a warm hearted second chance romance about a school teacher who has a very tough beginning in life and a solo dad police officer.
They both had their wounds in life and they meet in a small town in the South. I wondered if writing those books gave you a great, like almost a holiday going to the beach, after the romantic suspense.
Sharon’s romance always has drama
Sharon Sala: I do like to switch up genres. It’s relaxing to do that. And it gives me a fresh aspect to start from.
My daughter is the school teacher. She’s the 4th generation school teacher in my family. I skipped it. I’m the one who didn’t become a teacher, but I patterned the heroine in that book after my daughter’s life.
And after the things that they go through, like there is a lockdown.
There’s a school shooting in that book. There’s tragedy in that book. There’s betrayal in that book. I can’t write just a romance.
My stuff will have drama in it regardless, even no matter what they call it, I’m going to have drama in a story.
I just can’t not.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fabulous. There’s lots of dialogue, both Sam Youngblood’s girls, the police officer’s two young girls, plus the children in the classroom.
Terrific dialogue with the kids, really snappy, smart dialogue from these kids. And it has got a real ring of truth to it. I wondered if you saw a lot of children in your life or whether you’ve observed your daughter, but that comes through very strongly.
The truths that come from children
Sharon Sala: I’m a mother and a grandmother of four, and I helped raise my niece after my sister died. I’ve been surrounded by children all my life.
I worked at a public school for eight years. And my daughter has been a kindergarten and pre K teacher – that’s four year olds, five year olds, six year olds for her entire teaching existence, a little over 25 years,.
I hear her stories all the time. I know these kids forwards and backwards, and this is just true of their innocence in answering, they don’t lie, the truth comes out whether you’re ready to hear it or not.
That I know.
Jenny Wheeler: No filter, as they say,
Sharon Sala: Absolutely none. Sure,
Jenny Wheeler: And Sam Youngblood? obviously the name indicates that he’s got Native American descent, although the story doesn’t really go into that in a long, big way.
And I noticed that you mentioned with Last Rites that a Chickasaw wife is involved and you’ve got some Native American background yourself. Do you like to include Native Americans in your stories?
Sharon’s Native American heritage
Sharon Sala: Back in the day if there was a Native American in a romance book, then it was within a tribe, and in this day and time, they’re everywhere.
It stands to reason that a policeman could be a Native American just like he could be an Italian, or a or a Jewish person, or a Baptist preacher, you just don’t know, and it shouldn’t matter, you know what an ethnicity is for a character, at least not to me, and I’m very proud of my Native American heritage.
I don’t have enough blood to belong to tribal stuff anymore, but I have a great grandmother who was three quarter Cherokee and another great grandmother -both on my daddy’s side, who’s Cree.
She was from the Canadian, from the northern tribes. So those are my ancestors. And then my daughter, my granddaughters all belong to the Muskogee tribe.
So here in Oklahoma, to be Indian is normal. There’s way more sometimes and than people know, and we’re just milling around and walking around and everybody just sees what they see, and I just want them to know that. Indians are regular people. They don’t live on reservations here.
We don’t have teepees and whatever, we’re just people. And I want them to just be people in my stories and honor them.
Jenny Wheeler: You have honored that tradition yourself in several non-fiction books you’ve written, and I’d just like to ask you about how that heritage might have influenced your writing and the way you approach it.
Sharon Sala: I know that my daddy was the storyteller of the family. He was one of six brothers, and our family was huge, it was like a clan.
Every time we’d get together, he was the one who was telling the jokes and telling the stories. And his brother would say, ‘Doc, tell about the time…’ and daddy would start a story over again.
I know that storytelling is a traditional part of Native American tribes, oral history is how history is kept. And so I like to think that’s me continuing the bloodline of storytelling.
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Dreaming the stories before writing them
Jenny Wheeler: And you’re very much influenced by dreams too, aren’t you? I saw somewhere that a lot of your stories, you dream them first. Do you think that’s part of also the same heritage giving weight to dreams perhaps?
Sharon Sala: Yeah, I can’t speak to how it happens. It’s just I was born this way.
I’ve always dreamed and it’s always been a whole entire, like a movie. I don’t just dream a little bit here and a little bit there and then wake up.
And I usually remember the dreams that matter and my dreams become books. A whole lot of my books are dreams and sometimes they’re waking dreams like a vision.
And sometimes they’re sleeping dreams, just like at night.
Jenny Wheeler: Wow. I mentioned you’ve written some inspirational non-fiction.
Sharon Sala: Yes.
Jenny Wheeler: I’d love you to talk a little bit more about that because it sounds like it’s very much part of your whole life.
Sharon Sala:. It started because every time I blog on Facebook. I don’t have a regular blog, but I post daily blogs on Facebook and they’re about my life and what’s going on and what I believe and just funny stuff and sad stuff and all kinds of things. And people, my readers and the Facebook friends started saying, ‘I wish you would put these all in a book. Your stories are so wonderful. I wish you would put them in a book.’
And so that’s how the first one came about and it’s called Steering From The Backseat. And it’s a cutest cover. It’s my daughter driving me.
It looks like driving Miss Daisy, it’s my redheaded daughter in the front seat of a little Volkswagen convertible and I’m in the back seat waving.
Sharon Sala’s inspirational non-fiction
And then there was another one called The Light Within. And then When The Spirit Speaks. I know some people freak out about this, but I’m just up front about it.
I have seen angels, and I get messages in my dreams, and I pass them on, and a lot of that’s where that came from.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Turning a little bit more to the professional side of your career, you’ve won endless awards. There’s a great list of them on your website. Lots of RITAs from the Romance Writers of America. Is there one amongst those many awards that stands out for you that you were particularly delighted to receive?
Sharon Sala: Yes, of course. That would be the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award. I mean you can’t in our industry, you can’t get any better than that.
That’s our Oscar, the lifetime. Oscar Achievement. I also received a Centennial Award from RWA for a hundred books, having a hundred books published.
I’m at 137 now. I think the things that have stuck with me the longest though, are the readers that I met that are now my friends and the booksellers I made friends with when I first started.
Those friendships have lasted for 32 years, and they are most precious to me.
Jenny Wheeler: Before we move away from The Next Best Day, I thought you had a funny little joke, a private joke there that you have your heroine Kate, she’s reading this author called Dinah McCall.
Several times it’s referred to how she’s reading a Dinah McCall book and I’d like you to tell us a little bit about Dinah McCall.
Dinah McCall – Sharon’s alter ego
Sharon Sala: Sure, Dinah is my alter ego. My publisher – it was Mira at the time – I turned in a book that was paranormal. It was called Dreamcatcher.
And they wanted to release it separately from the regular romantic suspense. And they said, we need to release this under another name.
And I said, no, I want this to be my name. And they said, no, we want you to have a pen name.
So that’s how Dinah McCall came about. And Dinah was my sister’s nickname.
Her name was Diane and Diane passed away. She died in 1985.
So that was about six years before my first book was published. If I had to go along and be called something besides Sharon, I chose the name that my mother called to me half the time.
You know how a mother will call her children by the wrong name? I answered to Dinah about half my life anyway, so I thought Dinah McCall would be good. And that’s how she came to be born.
Jenny Wheeler: Gorgeous. And is she still writing as well?
Sharon Sala: Sometimes. I wrote a Native American reincarnation time travel series a few years ago.
It was Wind Walker and The Dove and The Gathering. I wrote those under Dinah McCall, but the last romantic suspense Dinah McCall, I wrote, my fiancé and my childhood sweetheart died of cancer in the middle of me writing that and I had the worst time of my life trying to finish that book.
It was called The Survivors and that was technically the last Dinah McCall book, and that was in 2005, 2006 when it was published.
Dinah hasn’t done romantic suspense since, just me. Dinah’s still alive in my heart and once in a while I think I’m going to publish something of her’s ’cause I do some self publishing too.
And I think I’m going to maybe use her name again.
Dinah beat Sharon in best -seller stakes
Jenny Wheeler: Great.
Sharon Sala: I will tell you a funny Dinah story. She beat me, she beat Sharon to the New York Times best-seller list. So I was perturbed bout that!.
Jenny Wheeler: What book was that for? Do you remember?
Sharon Sala: Dark water. It was like, dang it.
Jenny Wheeler: Your sister was probably laughing from heaven.
Sharon Sala: Oh, I knew it. The minute it happened, I said ‘it figures. She was so competitive.
She was a little bit younger than me, but she was the boss and I didn’t care. And I said that ‘figures she beat me to the New York Times bestseller list and I know she’s laughing her ass off.’ I just knew it.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning away from the specific books to talk a little bit about your wider career.
What kind of work and life experience did you have before you got around to writing? Did that affect your writing in any way?
Sharon Sala: Probably just because it was life experience. I was a farmer’s daughter. And I worked for a couple of years at an Air Force base when I was out of college.
I didn’t graduate, but I was out of college. And then after that, I worked off and on after I married a farmer, so I was a farmer’s daughter and married a farmer and I worked at all kinds of funky little jobs.
But for the most part, full time on the farm, driving wheat trucks, hauling hay, building fence, planting gardens, raising babies, mowing yards, everything you can think, chasing cows that get out on the road, everything you can think of.
I worked in a grocery store once, checking groceries, checking them out, and I worked in a floor shop for a while, and I worked at a sale barn in the restaurant, serving hamburgers to the old guys who came in there to buy and sell their cattle.
I just had a varied life, and it’s been hard, but it’s a blessed one. It’s a blessed one.
Chickens led to Sharon starting to write
Jenny Wheeler: And how did you make that switch to writing? Was there something that triggered that?
Sharon Sala: Yeah. Chickens
Jenny Wheeler: Chickens?
Sharon Sala:. Every week, chickens would go – chickens from the butcher shop in our meat department – Chickens would go on sale. I lived in a rural community. I said every week, it was sorry, once a month, chickens would go on sale.
And I lived in a rural community and half the people raised chickens and had their own eggs and butchered their own chickens.
But you’d think there was never going to be another chicken sold as long as they lived because they swarmed the supermarket for chickens.
And I was checking groceries and chickens, and that juice was running on the conveyor belt and they stuck and that was the messiest, messiest mess.
Sometimes I would check out 15 chickens for one person, just they were packaged, but they were messy.
I would go home with it running down my elbows and all over my shirt. I hated when chickens went on sale.
I went home one night I had to check out And it was 10:30 when I got home and there sat my husband and two teenage children and they looked up at me as I came in the door and I’m just a mess.
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‘A job I hated’ started it all – Sharon Sala
And they go, ‘Mom, what’s for dinner?’ And I went, ‘what?’ And I made them eat bologna sandwiches and got a typewriter out of the closet and sat down and started writing.
Literally, it was that impulsive. I just thought, I cannot do this anymore. I have to tell myself something besides this life.
And that’s what started it, a job I hated.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s wonderful. And was that book published?
Sharon Sala: No, it was a book that it took me a year to finish because I wrote after work and before I went to work and when it was finished, I knew it was terrible, and I stuck it under the bed, but I was hooked on the process.
And I wrote another book, and I stuck it under the bed and it wasn’t any better.
And I let it slide, and then four years later, my dad died and two months after that, my sister and I thought, okay, if I’ve got a dream, I’m going to have to go for it myself because in a heartbeat, all of their tomorrows were over.
I wasn’t going to wait until I was on my deathbed and say, ‘I wish I’d tried one more book.’
And the next book I wrote, I sold. And that was Sarah’s Angel.
What is the ‘secret of Sharon’s success?’
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s fantastic. If there’s one thing that you see as the quote “the secret of your career,” what would it be
Sharon Sala: The refusal to take no for an answer.
It’s the hardest job in the world. You’re criticized for everything, and they want to control everything.
Publishers want to control every aspect of what you turn in. They agree on something and then it doesn’t happen if you don’t have it in writing,
By the time something is due to happen the person who promised it is working somewhere else or been fired, or the publishing house sold out to another one.
It is the most crazy, unpredictable job. It’s as bad as being a farmer, because you live for hoping the weather’s okay. As a writer, you live for hoping you live to write another day.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s great that you can self publish as well, though, that you know
Sharon Sala: It is now.
Jenny Wheeler: You can retain some control if you want to that way.
Sharon Sala: And I love it. I actually had my first children’s book come out about three weeks ago.
It’s a little illustrated book for one of those little ‘read to me books,’ for two to eight year old kids who can’t read and maybe their mama still and daddy still read nighttime stories to him and everything.
And it is already a big hit at my daughter’s school and it’s up for sale on Amazon. It’s called There’s A Squirrel In The Attic. It’s a cute little illustrated book, hardback, paperback.
Self publishing a children’s book
Jenny Wheeler: And you’ve self published that one?
Sharon Sala: I did because I could.
Jenny Wheeler: Great. We’ll put a links to all of these things that you’re mentioning in the show notes for this episode, so people will be able to find them if they go online and look at the transcript of this chat we’re having so they can look for it there.
Turning to Sharon as reader, because we always like to ask our authors about what they read. And if they’ve got any recommendations for our listeners, what do you like to read? And what lately have you read that you’d like to recommend?
Sharon Sala: I don’t get a lot of reading time and especially now, like I said, I was on a deadline and I don’t read in my genre when I’m writing.
Some of my favorite authors, of course, are going to be the mystery suspense authors because that’s the kind of movies I like to see and the books I like to read.
I like Lee Childs, Harlan Coben, Elmore Leonard. I could go on and on. There was a writer a few years ago that I stumbled upon. His name’s John Harte, and that’s H A R T E, John Harte. In my mind, when I read that first book of his that I read was called The Last Child, I was so struck by the perfection of his storytelling and imagery that I wished I was him.
It still gives me chills to think about how that story was for me personally. I enjoy stories like that. And of course, I read my friends’ work, all of my friends, but I don’t get as much chance as I’d like.
I’m going to read a little bit now that I’ve finished this book.
I’ve got a book waiting for me to read. It’s called Killers Of The Flower Moon, and it’s about it the Osage tribe and it’s a true story. They made a movie about that, but it’s about the Osage tribe and the big oil boom they got caught up in an Oklahoma,
Looking back down the tunnel of time…
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Looking back down the tunnel of time, if there was one thing about your creative career that you’d change, what would it be?
Sharon Sala: Probably just stand up for myself sooner with editors, to just stand up for myself sooner and not let myself be run over. It was also new and I fell into a box, a niche, and that’s where I wound up,
Jenny Wheeler: And what was the box?
Sharon Sala: The little box was I write romantic suspense and they wouldn’t let me out.
Jenny Wheeler: What else did you want to do that at that time?
Sharon Sala: At that time? Gosh, half of my backlist was paranormal. And when one editor that I had left and they took me another I was told I cannot ever write another paranormal romance for them. They didn’t want it.
They wanted what I used to write five years ago, and it tanked my sales because half my readers were looking for paranormal and couldn’t get it.
Like I said, it’s a hard business, but I learned to bounce, and like I said before, I don’t take no for an answer. If somebody doesn’t want it, I’ll find somebody else who does.
What’s next for Sharon the author?
Jenny Wheeler: So hopefully you’ve picked up since then and got back right, where we should be?
Sharon Sala: Good enough. It’s keeping a roof over my head.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. What’s next for Sharon as author? What have you got on your desk for the next 12 months or example?
Sharon Sala: I have a book to write before Christmas. I have a Christmas book for Sourcebooks to write. It’s called, I think, A Snowy Mountain Christmas.
It wasn’t the title I wanted, but they changed it, and I have to live with that. I also have another series that I’m going to be starting after I write this Christmas book.
I have another Children’s illustrated book that that I’ll be working with an illustrator on beginning in September, and I have one more book to write in that one Walker trilogy that I was telling you about the Native American one. I have one more book to write for that, long overdue.
Jenny Wheeler: How long does it take you to write a book? How many do you produce say in a year?
Sharon Sala: I am my sole support and I lost my house and all my savings taking care of my mother when she had dementia for 14 years.
So I write every day and sell everything I can because that’s what’s keeping me afloat. I write a minimum of three big romantic suspenses a year, and maybe a short story or a novella in between.
So three to four books a year, and that’s normal. That’s not a stress. I write as fast as I read.
Where to find Sharon Sala online
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Do you enjoy interacting with your readers and where can they find you online?
Sharon Sala: I love talking to them. I miss going to conferences, because I used to give workshops all the time and that just fills your soul as a writer, being around your people, your tribe.
I’m on Facebook and I have an Instagram account, but I don’t do anything on it. So don’t even try to find me there.
I have two Facebook pages, an author page and my personal page. But they’re both public, so you don’t have to be my friend. You can just follow me and read what you want to.
And the blog is always on my personal page.
Jenny Wheeler: We’ll put our links to all of those things in the show notes.
Sharon Sala: Thank you.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. It’s been great talking Sharon. It really has been a lot of fun and it’s lovely to meet such a real person.
Sharon Sala: A pleasure to meet you and I hope you get all your roofing over with.
(Editor’s note: I was having my roof replaced and we had to find a time to record the interview when the roofers weren’t here banging overhead,)
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much, Sharon. Bye.
If you enjoyed Sharon you might also like…
Barbara Freethy’s chart topping romantic suspense…
Contemporary romance author Barbara Freethy is an Amazon KDP Bestselling Author of All Time with a total now of 12 million books sold in multiple languages. She’s a master of thrilling mysteries, romantic suspense and heart-warming romance.
LISTEN TO BARBARA FREETHY
Next Week on Binge Reading
Escapist romance and mysteries from T. A. Williams,,.
Next Week on Binge Reading. Romance written by a man. T. A (Trevor) Williams and also some fantastic cozy mysteries. This man does two things, two great romance and great cozy mysteries.
They’re wonderfully escapist stories set in exotic locations with a remarkable black Labrador named Oscar.
That’s next week on the Joys of Binge Reading.
And once again, a quick reminder, if you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for people to discover the show and great books they will love to read. That’s it for today.
See you next time and happy reading.