Transcript
Speaker: Oh, a spicy question.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
Speaker: You can fix plot holes, but if the writing... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
Speaker: So it's kind of a gamble.
Speaker: Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
Speaker: On today's episode, I am joined by an author writing across multiple genres and under multiple names.
Speaker: I'm very excited to have Katie Ginger.
Speaker: Hello, Katie.
Speaker: Hello, lovely to be here.
Speaker: Thank you for having me on.
Speaker: It's my pleasure.
Speaker: I'm excited to have you on.
Speaker: I've never, I don't think I've ever interviewed an author with so many published names under their belts.
Speaker: Just the way it goes sometimes I think in publishing.
Speaker: Well, usually I always start off with the latest publication, but I feel like we might need a bit of context here.
Speaker: So I think in this case, it might be good to first talk about your pen names and the names that you are published under.
Speaker: So am I right in thinking when you first started publishing, your writing was all under your actual name, which is Katie Ginger?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: I was published originally by HQ Digital, part of HarperCollins.
Speaker: And I had a number of books with them.
Speaker: And then I switched, not last year, the year before, to Avon, still part of HarperCollins.
Speaker: And my books with HQ had been very much kind of romance genre, but kind of
Speaker: community focused.
Speaker: So it was lovely little villages and coastal towns in England.
Speaker: And then when I started writing for Avon, we switched to more sort of dreamy holiday European destinations.
Speaker: And so because of that kind of that slight change in direction with the romances, but with a different focus, we decided to go under the name Annabelle French.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So was that a sort of decision that you kind of came together with the, presumably the marketing team that said this might be better if we do it under a different name?
Speaker: Yeah, it was something that we discussed from, from the beginning and something that I was more than happy to do because they were really understanding and that I didn't want to be running several different social media profiles because it's hard enough to balance a
Speaker: writing and promoting your books and being on the socials and growing your platform.
Speaker: So they were quite happy that it would, you know, that I could say it was me just writing under a different name.
Speaker: So I could just keep the social media channels that I had already.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes sense as well because it's whilst, as you mentioned, one of them's a sort of like within sort of local UK areas, sort of, it's a sort of cozy contemporary thing that that's Katie Ginger.
Speaker: And then even though the other ones like now destination romances, as it were, they're both sort of contemporary cozy-ish romance.
Speaker: You'd imagine there'd be a lot of crossover between the readers.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: But it's still, it's still kind of,
Speaker: designates that they're slightly different so if readers you know they want because I always write slow burn I'm I mean there's there's the ones the Annabelle French are slightly spicier but but really not much I'm really really bad at writing uh sex scenes and things like that I just blush at the idea of doing it so so everything I write is is sort of slow burned
Speaker: But yeah, it was just kind of with the Annabelle Frenchies have a slightly different focus, but more of an international appeal, I suppose.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And then in August of this year, you released your first novel under the name Emma Royal, which is historical fiction.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So I started to branch out into historical fiction and we wanted...
Speaker: a completely different name for that because the books are so different.
Speaker: Like they don't always have romance in them.
Speaker: They're much more drama based.
Speaker: Like if you imagine like a Sunday night drama in a book that is, so it's, it was so, so different that we definitely needed a different name and a different brand.
Speaker: So we went with Emma Royal, which was the name that my editor at my agent, Kate Nash and I,
Speaker: came up with.
Speaker: Emma is my middle name and then Royal because the books are set at Buckingham Palace and we thought that was quite a nice tie in.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's so interesting having so many different, do you ever kind of lose track or forget which name is under which thing or are they so kind of compartmentalised that it's quite easy to know what's going where?
Speaker: Yeah, they are quite easily compartmentalised for me because they feel like two very different parts of my personality in a way.
Speaker: Because the Annabelle Frenches are rom-coms, so there's a lot of humour in them and obviously the romance.
Speaker: And then with the historical fiction, they're just much more serious.
Speaker: They have light moments in them.
Speaker: They're not completely doom and gloom, but they are kind of
Speaker: And they require so much more, the historical fictions.
Speaker: There's so much research in terms of where the royal family are, what they're doing.
Speaker: So they just feel very different sort of personalities in a way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So for everyone listening, just to sort of round that all up, Katie has originally published under her own name, Katie Ginger, and those were sort of local, cozy, contemporary romances.
Speaker: Then first pen name, Annabelle French, Destination Romances, and the second pen name, Emma Royal, historical fiction, period drama sort of stuff.
Speaker: Is that about summed up?
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: I might have to steal that for the next time I have to write a biography of myself or something.
Speaker: Okay, amazing.
Speaker: Now that we all understand that, we all understand the context, am I right in thinking the most recent publication is actually an Annabelle French novel that came out beginning of October?
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: Christmas at the Chateau, written as Annabelle French, came out on the 12th of October.
Speaker: It was such a lovely book.
Speaker: I love writing Christmas books.
Speaker: You just get to put so much heart into them.
Speaker: And obviously it's, you know, Christmas is just a fantastic time of the year.
Speaker: So you get to include all those wonderful Christmassy tropes, like, you know, snowball fights and decorating the Christmas tree and stuff.
Speaker: They're just such fun to write.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You can get away with a lot of Christmas as well.
Speaker: Like just when you look at how Christmas movies have evolved, where it's almost like the sillier they are, the better, like in quotes, Christmas movie it is.
Speaker: I feel like there's so much leeway you can really, you can really have fun with it.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Like in Christmas at the Chateau, my main character, she can't ski and she's gone to this ski resort in the Swiss Alps that's owned by her best friend and she can't ski at all.
Speaker: And the hero tries to teach her and she's so bad that he takes her to a children's class and she's so humiliated and she thinks that, oh my God, I'm so bad, I've got to learn to ski with the children.
Speaker: But it's not actually the children's class.
Speaker: He just wants the tutor from the children's class.
Speaker: But it's such a lovely moment because there's all this kind of angst and banter and embarrassment.
Speaker: You can get away, like you say, you can get away with so, so much in a Christmas book.
Speaker: You can really play on these tropes and have fun with them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's always a good time.
Speaker: So original releases at HQ digital, as you mentioned, which is one of Harper Collins' imprints.
Speaker: And then you said you moved over to when you went to do the Annabelle French stuff.
Speaker: That's also with Harper.
Speaker: Was that like, was there any connection within that?
Speaker: Like, was it part of a team that sort of moved you over between HQ and Avon or were they sort of separate things?
Speaker: They were kind of separate.
Speaker: It's kind of the way things go in publishing.
Speaker: Sometimes, you know, HQ felt that I'd sort of hit a bit of a ceiling with them and they hadn't managed to break me out as much as they hoped.
Speaker: And then Kate was talking to Avon and then I moved across to them and started with the Annabelle French name.
Speaker: So sometimes it's just the way things go in publishing.
Speaker: Sometimes you get moved about.
Speaker: So were you with, uh, the amazing Kate Nash, who's, who's been on the podcast before, were you with her before you signed with HQ digital?
Speaker: No, I actually started writing for HQ, um, just as just by myself.
Speaker: I didn't have an agent.
Speaker: Um, and I secured my contract through a Twitter pitch.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: It was so weird.
Speaker: I mean, I can actually remember the moment that I saw that they wanted it.
Speaker: I was scrolling through Twitter.
Speaker: My children were quite young.
Speaker: They were both still at primary school.
Speaker: I think they were about five and seven.
Speaker: And I had one under one arm and one under the other as we sat on the sofa in the evening watching like CBeebies.
Speaker: And I was scrolling through my phone and I saw HQ pitch us your story.
Speaker: So I pitched them –
Speaker: the idea that became snowflakes at mistletoe cottage, which is a food technician working for a celebrity chef who gets sacked and ends up moving home and starting her own kind of food blog.
Speaker: And, you know, the, the adventures that happen as she's doing that.
Speaker: And obviously she falls in love back in our hometown.
Speaker: Um, but, and this was when Twitter was, you know, 140 characters.
Speaker: So you had to be really succinct.
Speaker: And, and I thought, well, I've got nothing to lose.
Speaker: You know, I'll just, I'll just do it.
Speaker: And then literally the next day HQ contacted me on Twitter.
Speaker: They DM me and said, we'd love to know more.
Speaker: So I sent them a little bit more of an outline and then they responded and said, we'd love to see this.
Speaker: Can you send us the full manuscript?
Speaker: Which I hadn't actually written.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I think I'd written a really, really bad first draft.
Speaker: And my first drafts tend to come in quite short generally.
Speaker: So I think it was only about 50,000 words or something like that.
Speaker: And I thought, oh my God, I've got so much work to do because obviously you don't want to leave it too long to send them the full manuscript in case they forget who you are and that they've even asked for it.
Speaker: And I then was like madly working on this draft and I managed to send it about, I think about three weeks later.
Speaker: But then I didn't hear anything.
Speaker: I didn't hear anything at all.
Speaker: So that was like September.
Speaker: And then I didn't hear anything.
Speaker: And like January, I thought, I'll be brave enough and prod them.
Speaker: And it just turned out it got lost in an inbox somewhere.
Speaker: And they asked me to resend it, which I did.
Speaker: And then literally like a few days later, I had an email somewhere, Hannah, who worked at HQ at the time, Hannah Smith.
Speaker: saying, can I give you a call at three o'clock this afternoon?
Speaker: And I was like, oh my God, oh my God, what's this?
Speaker: It was just absolutely bonkers.
Speaker: And then she rang me and offered me a two book deal.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: There was you panicking, thinking you had to send it off as quick as possible.
Speaker: It turns out you could have just spent a few months doing it.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then, and then, you know, once I got the email, can I give you a call?
Speaker: And it just sort of all seemed to happen really super quickly.
Speaker: Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker: Also, you see a lot of the, obviously the Twitter pitching competitions happen every now and again, and I see a lot of them, but it's one of those things that sort of seems like a lottery.
Speaker: It's like, you think, oh, I've seen a thousand pitches.
Speaker: It's like, no one ever really wins these.
Speaker: It's great to hear that people do actually find great success off the back of those and that sort of launched and started your career in publishing.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, I think you just have to take your chances.
Speaker: I think, I think there's that famous quote, isn't there, that like a successful author or, you know, a successful author is one who doesn't quit, basically.
Speaker: And I think that's really, really true.
Speaker: You just have to find every opportunity you can and grab it with both hands because you never know, you know, it might, it might work.
Speaker: It might not, you know, you never know where it's going to take you.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: I mean, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, right?
Speaker: Yes, I love that quote.
Speaker: I love that quote.
Speaker: Also, what a great test of, they've changed it now, Twitter's, I mean, it's X or whatever you want to call it, whatever they're calling it next week.
Speaker: Back when it was 140 characters, when it had that limit, what a great way to kind of shore up your concept.
Speaker: Like if, when you're forced to have such a small word count to, to be able to put your concepts so succinctly, that's such a great test for how kind of quick and, and, and smart you can, you can do your, you can deliver that idea.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: It's like, you know, it's like the tightest log line ever.
Speaker: And actually, it's something that I still try and do for my books before I start writing them.
Speaker: Because like you say, you have to nail what the core of the story is in one very short sentence.
Speaker: And I try and do that before I start writing because then I can always come back to it when I feel like I'm writing the first draft and it's maybe going off piste a little bit.
Speaker: then I can go back to that one line, that one statement and draw myself back to the core of the story.
Speaker: It can be a really, really useful exercise.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a really good idea.
Speaker: Keep it so tight and then just refer back to it and think, oh yeah, I need to get back on course because I've veered wildly away in a strange direction here.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So you actually, you released, was it nine books with HQ?
Speaker: Yeah, it was, yeah.
Speaker: At what point in that period
Speaker: you know, writing and releasing all of those books.
Speaker: Was it during that time that you teamed up with Kate Nash or was it after that?
Speaker: Uh, it was, no, it was, uh, after I think I'd had about six books out with HQ.
Speaker: I kind of, I started to feel like an agent would be really useful.
Speaker: I know agents aren't for everybody, you know, some people self publish, some people traditionally publish, some people want agents, some people don't.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: I'm quite a forward person.
Speaker: I'm quite happy to say when I'm not happy about something.
Speaker: But even then, I do think it's really useful to have an agent in your corner.
Speaker: Because what I found was I was in my own little bubble with HQ because I'd gone in through the Twitter pitch and I'd been really lucky and got with HQ, but I didn't know anything about any other publishers.
Speaker: So I felt like there was this massive sea out there and I was just on a tiny, my little raft.
Speaker: And I, you know, I didn't know what else was out there, what else was happening.
Speaker: And I think that's one thing that you get from an agent, from a great agent like Kate, you get that understanding of the industry, that knowing, you know, all the different things, the ins and outs of, you know, translation rights and TV rights and all these sorts of things.
Speaker: There's that aspect, but also just that general understanding of the publishing industry, which is something that at the time I lacked.
Speaker: So then, again, it was through Twitter.
Speaker: Twitter has been my friend, or X as it is now.
Speaker: They were doing an Ask Agent thing, the Kate Nash Literary Agency.
Speaker: And I asked the question, if you're an established author or if you're already published, do you need a new book?
Speaker: to try and attract an agent or will they take you based on your backlist?
Speaker: And they said, you know, it can be useful to have a new book because that's what they can take out and sell.
Speaker: But likewise, to get in touch if I was looking for representation.
Speaker: So I did.
Speaker: And I was very lucky that they took me on.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's an interesting way of putting it too, I think.
Speaker: You were sort of already in the industry at that point and there's a sort of vastness to it where it's like, oh, you have all of these options, but it's scary to kind of try and go in any one direction.
Speaker: But agents with all the kind of experience and knowledge that they have,
Speaker: The great thing that I think that agents offer to authors is that ability to sort of scoop up all the vastness and then say, okay, so here are your options and just lay it out quite simply in front of you and be like, here's what we can do and here's why we can do it.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And just knowing that, you know, this is selling, this isn't, you know, all that knowledge, which then can play into how you choose to steer your career going forwards.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So once Kate was on board, I'm assuming that Kate was very much involved with the Annabelle French submissions and working with Avon on that.
Speaker: Yeah, she was.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And then with the Emma Royal book, which is actually out with Penguin, that's obviously something that you and Kate worked on together.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that was...
Speaker: That was really mad because I'd never been a huge follower of the royal family, really.
Speaker: I've got a history degree and a history master.
Speaker: So if I'd read anything about the royal family, it was like Henry VIII, you know, and it was the big kings and stuff like that, and queens, and not sort of the modern royal family.
Speaker: But then I was absolutely gripped to the TV when that day –
Speaker: they were reporting that Queen Elizabeth was poorly.
Speaker: And then they announced that she died.
Speaker: And I was like, I was literally sobbing in the corner watching.
Speaker: Like I had it on my husband's computer.
Speaker: I was watching it.
Speaker: And my kids were looking at me like, mum, what is wrong with you?
Speaker: And I was like, oh my God, the Queen's died.
Speaker: This is so sad.
Speaker: And then I was talking to Kate a few times.
Speaker: I think about a week or so afterwards, it was after the funeral and I had literally sobbed through the entire funeral as well because I'm a great big wimp and just a very emotional person.
Speaker: And we were talking about the royal family and Queen Elizabeth and the funeral and watching history be made.
Speaker: And we kind of then came up with this idea of working class people at Buckingham Palace and
Speaker: Millie, who's the main character in The Palace Girls.
Speaker: She's a cleaner at Buckingham Palace.
Speaker: Her story started to percolate in my mind.
Speaker: Kate nailed it when she said to me something like, The Crown meets Downton Abbey.
Speaker: I was like, oh my God, yes.
Speaker: Oh my God, yes.
Speaker: We came up with a synopsis.
Speaker: She said, how quickly can you write
Speaker: 10,000 words because I want to get this sent out as soon as possible and I said give me a week so I wrote sort of 10,000 words the first three chapters which I always I always find the first three chapters kind of the easiest anyway in any book that I'm writing because you're setting the scene and you know you're kind of just introducing the characters to the readers so I always find those the easiest anyway but I wrote these
Speaker: first three chapters, sent it to Kate and she sent it out on, I think it was a Thursday afternoon.
Speaker: And she emailed me the list of editors that she'd sent it to.
Speaker: And then she rang me the next day, Friday lunchtime, asking me if I was sat down because we already had an offer.
Speaker: So it was incredibly quick.
Speaker: It was incredibly quick and just blew my mind.
Speaker: Absolutely blew my mind.
Speaker: That's such a good pitch though.
Speaker: Downton Abbey meets The Crown.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, it sells itself in many ways, isn't it?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you think of that kind of Sunday night drama, kind of episodic drama, which I wanted to capture.
Speaker: in the books and we were lucky enough to get, um, three books to get a three book contract.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As someone who, so all of your kind of previous stuff up to this has been, um, contemporary romance as someone who, uh, you have a master's degree in history.
Speaker: Was it, was it fun to sort of get back into a sort of, uh, doing a bit of research, doing something from, you know, a long time ago?
Speaker: Yeah, I absolutely, absolutely loved it.
Speaker: We, um,
Speaker: We'd said when we were talking, Kate and I were talking and we were thinking about the pitch, we thought taking it back to when Queen Elizabeth came to the throne would be a great place to start.
Speaker: And I've got a massive love of the 50s anyway.
Speaker: I just think it's a really interesting period in history because you still have all the fallout from the Second World War, but also...
Speaker: you're really heading towards the swinging sixties and you know, it was just a period of quite intense change.
Speaker: So we wanted to set it in the fifties.
Speaker: And then I started researching, um, King George, the sixth and sort of how Elizabeth came to the throne because I didn't really know an awful lot about it.
Speaker: Um, and then through my research, I just had such a soft spot for King George, the sixth queen Elizabeth's father.
Speaker: So we decided to set the book.
Speaker: King George VI had a lung removed in September 1951.
Speaker: And he took a long time to recover from that.
Speaker: And he was really, really poorly.
Speaker: And that Christmas was the first time that the Christmas Day address had been pre-recorded.
Speaker: They'd never done that before.
Speaker: It had always been live.
Speaker: But because he was so weak and he couldn't speak for long periods of time, they pre-recorded it.
Speaker: which, you know, that's such an interesting fact in itself.
Speaker: And then he died in February 1952.
Speaker: So it's quite a short period of time where obviously they must have just been terrified.
Speaker: You know, this is, he was loved by the nation, King George VI, because he took over when his brother abdicated to marry Wallace Simpson.
Speaker: And then he steered the country through the wall and he was loved.
Speaker: So it was quite a hard act for Elizabeth to follow.
Speaker: And she was really young.
Speaker: She was only, I think, 25.
Speaker: So we just decided that would be the place to start the series with her actually
Speaker: coming to the throne and then the pressures that that brings.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's especially given that you did this in the wake of her death as well.
Speaker: So you kind of balancing out two sides of that coin.
Speaker: I think my, my, most of my knowledge about that period comes from the King's speech and then the crown.
Speaker: So I'm not too knowledgeable about it either.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I I've been watching, obviously I loved the crown anyway.
Speaker: And to see, to see these figures, you know,
Speaker: represented on the telly and stuff and dramatized.
Speaker: It was quite strange, wasn't it?
Speaker: Like when the queen was alive, you were watching her, a character of her in The Crown.
Speaker: And actually when I was writing the book, I had to keep sort of reminding myself that this is fiction and that I'm okay to kind of put words in the queen's mouth.
Speaker: That she can treat her like a character because I wanted it to be respectful.
Speaker: of the royal family, but still to be, you know, to have all those moments of drama that you do in a book.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: I've seen some of the, there's some sort of leaked footage of them filming the latest season of The Crown.
Speaker: And I think it's going to be even more bizarre to see they're doing like grown up William and Harry.
Speaker: And I was thinking like, they're not much older than what you're showing them.
Speaker: It's sort of bizarre to see.
Speaker: It's going to be so weird.
Speaker: It's going to be so weird.
Speaker: But those early seasons of The Crown, I particularly love.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: They're brilliant.
Speaker: And that original cast, the cast has always been good as they've changed it, but that original cast were something special, I think.
Speaker: Getting back onto you, going forwards, are you going to sort of stop producing books under Katie Ginger?
Speaker: Is the plan to stick very much with Annabelle French and Emma Royal as your two kind of brands?
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: What would my absolute dream be?
Speaker: would be to write screenplays as romantic comedy screenplays as Katie Ginger.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You know, because it's good to have a dream.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, definitely focusing on Annabelle French and Emma Royal going forwards because I've still got,
Speaker: There's one more Chateau book.
Speaker: So one more book is Annabelle French to come out in April next year.
Speaker: And then I've got two more Emma Royal books, August 2024 and August 2025.
Speaker: Okay, great.
Speaker: Lots coming out.
Speaker: Yeah, it's exciting.
Speaker: I've just got edits for the second Palace Girls book.
Speaker: So I'm diving into those at the moment.
Speaker: Okay, very exciting.
Speaker: You must be very busy with this.
Speaker: This writing schedule seems pretty intense.
Speaker: Is that three books next year?
Speaker: Well, so it's been intense this last year with the first Chateau book, then the first Palace Girls book, then the second Chateau.
Speaker: Chateau book and then the second Palace Girls book.
Speaker: So I have been writing sort of back to back, but I've been very lucky that the way it's fallen, they've kind of dovetailed one after the other.
Speaker: So I've not had, I've not been, what I find difficult is writing two first drafts at the same time that I find really difficult, but I've been lucky that I've been writing a first draft while editing something else.
Speaker: And they're just such different stages in the process that sort of mentally I can cope with that.
Speaker: I can switch between one thing and the other.
Speaker: I bet that's even helpful as well, sort of being able to escape one thing and jumping into another and then going back to the other thing.
Speaker: So like before you kind of get bogged too much down in one thing, you're already moving on to something else.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So I like to write in the morning and then edit in the afternoons because I find that I'm more creative in the morning and can sit down and just let my imagination go.
Speaker: Oh yeah, I'm the same.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then by the afternoon editing is, I find editing better because you have to be a bit more analytical, don't you?
Speaker: So, um, yeah, so it's worked out really well, actually, whether it carries on doing that, I'm not sure, but, um,
Speaker: Both my editors, Katie Lownden at Penguin and the lovely Alicia London at Avon, know that I have the other pen name and they're always really fantastic.
Speaker: And I know that if I did have a problem with a deadline, obviously Kate would help me negotiate it all.
Speaker: But my editors have been fantastic.
Speaker: So luckily, touch wood, no problems yet.
Speaker: So far, so good.
Speaker: Do you have emails which are Kate, Kate and Katie or CC do?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, we do.
Speaker: We were like team Kate for Penguin.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So Katie Lowne and me, Katie Ginger and then Kate Nash.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's yeah.
Speaker: Reading an email from from my editor, Katie and seeing a Katie at the top and a Katie at the bottom.
Speaker: It's it's just it is a little bit bizarre sometimes.
Speaker: Yeah, I imagine.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: Well, it sounds like it's, as I said, so far so good, all working out nicely for you.
Speaker: And that brings us to what is always the final question of every episode.
Speaker: And that is, Katie, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book would you want it to be?
Speaker: It's going to have to be Pride and Prejudice.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Jane Austen, because, you know, she just invented every single romance trope.
Speaker: She did, yeah.
Speaker: It's just the best book in the world.
Speaker: Yeah, she really made enemies to lovers the thing as well.
Speaker: She did.
Speaker: Every single one of her books covers a romance trope.
Speaker: It's the basis of all romantic fiction.
Speaker: If I took anything other than a Jane Austen, I think the romance community would throw me out.
Speaker: Yeah, she's the original gangster of romance and rom-com tropes.
Speaker: She is the OG.
Speaker: She's also hilarious.
Speaker: She is.
Speaker: She, she just, she is the rom-com queen.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: She, yeah.
Speaker: We have, we have a lot to thank Jane Austen for.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: Well, a great choice.
Speaker: Another Austen.
Speaker: Austen proves to be the most popular and relatable book to choose to take on the desert island once again.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much, Katie, for coming on the podcast and telling us all about your various different names, your various different projects that you're working on, all the different books and series.
Speaker: It all sounds great.
Speaker: It all sounds exciting.
Speaker: I hope one day to watch a movie or television show by screenwriter Katie Ginger.
Speaker: That would be great.
Speaker: But yeah, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker: It's been great chatting with you.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: It's been brilliant.
Speaker: And for anyone wanting to keep up with what Katie is doing, you can follow her stuff, which is with Katie Ginger or Annabelle French on Instagram at Katie underscore Ginger underscore author or on Twitter at Katie G author to follow the Emma Royal stuff.
Speaker: All socials, you can find her at author Emma Royal.
Speaker: And to make sure you don't miss an episode of this podcast, follow along on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
Speaker: You can support the show on Patreon.
Speaker: And for more focus chat, check out my other podcast, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
Speaker: Thanks again to Katie and thanks to everyone listening.
Speaker: We'll catch you on the next episode.
