New Adult Contemporary is a vastly expanding genre every day. Picking through the chaos is a hard task, but with India Lee’s HDU we find a new story – a gossip website moderator who ends up becoming the fake girlfriend to a Hollywood celebrity. India Lee is no stranger to celebrity fiction – she’s also the author of the Hidden Gem series, about a pop star trying to fit in at a new school without getting found out. Today we’re super excited to have her for an interview and share her new book! Thanks so much to India for stopping by! Enjoy the interview.
Amanda Nathan just lost everything – her first real boyfriend to her lifelong best friend, her half of their shared apartment in St. Louis and her first post-grad job as a receptionist. Forced back under her parents’ roof in Merit, Missouri, the gossipy town she’d spent her life trying to escape, Amanda has but one saving grace – being an anonymous moderator on HDU, the Internet’s largest celebrity gossip community. Unemployed and alone, Amanda relishes in the one thing she has control over – Hollywood gossip. Now, her idea of fun is getting lost in the glamorous lives of others and posting nasty rumors about her former bestie’s favorite actor, Liam Brody, a playboy notorious for dumping his model girlfriends on a monthly basis.
So who would’ve thought that Liam Brody would be Amanda’s answer to escaping Merit? When the controversial womanizer needs an image boost to land a new role, he turns to none other than HDU for some good press. As it turns out, Liam is as eager to shed his playboy image as Amanda is desperate to move out of Merit. The solution to both problems? Fake a romance in which Hollywood’s biggest playboy falls for an unknown, sweet and shockingly plain Jane.
With the help of Ian, a fellow HDU moderator and self-developed expert on stardom, Amanda packs her bags for her new life in New York, where the overnight fame and glamour of being a celebrity girlfriend awaits. But Amanda soon discovers that their little ploy is a lot more emotionally complicated than she imagined. And while she finds that life works a thousand times better in her Hollywood circle, so does manipulation.
Was Oh No They Didn’t (ONTD) an inspiration for your fictional How Dare You (HDU)?
ONTD was definitely an inspiration. I think it’s interesting how gossip sites like ONTD are the types of places that can help make or break an image. The comments are bigger than the actual stories because the draw is more so the community response than the actual news.
Did any real life celebrities inspire any of the colorful characters in HDU or the Hidden Gem series?
There were a lot of real life celebrities and incidents that inspired the characters in HDU, though no one celebrity for any individual character. They’re all kind of a blend of things that stuck out to me in pop culture over the past few years. But as I was writing, there were definitely times when I started seeing someone’s face in my head (more often actors but sometimes friends), and then that person just becomes the character to me. There is definitely an actress I imagine as Amanda and an actor I imagine for Liam — though none of my friends who have read the book agree with me on that pick (lol). I might have weird taste.
Why did you decide to self-publish your books instead of going the traditional route?
I never really made a choice of self-publishing over traditional, I just kind of fell into self-publishing. I didn’t know it was a thing that existed until two years ago when one of my friends revealed that she had a book she wanted me to buy because she’d actually written it and had been dabbling for awhile in this thing called self-pub. At the time, it sounded like a really foreign and strange concept to me but I was intrigued by the immediacy of it. And I had a completed novel that I had written for fun in high school. So I figured if anyone can do this, why not give it a try with what I’ve got?
I had friends help me handle all the logistics for Suburban Girl’s Rebellion under a pen name to avoid conflicts with my job at the time. Because I was keeping it all a secret, I didn’t have the option of asking my friends and family to buy so there were almost no sales in the first week. So I forgot about the book and figured it would die a quiet death on Amazon and I’d have a laugh every few months when it sold a random copy. But then a couple months later, I found out that it sold a few hundred and I had readers who were interested in the excerpt I had put in the back, which was from the first book of Hidden Gem. Because of that, I finished up Hidden Gem and published it, and that became a series that gave me more readers than I had ever imagined from this experience. And since I was working in entertainment at the time and my fans seemed to like the entertainment aspect, I decided to write more involving the topic. Which was how HDU came about.
What is your marketing strategy like for your various books?
I contacted bloggers who accept and review independently published books. I posted about the book in appropriate forums. I have a Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads page where I make announcements about new books. I occasionally blog about the things in my life that I think my readers might enjoy or find relevant to my writing. And occasionally, I’ll gift new books to old fans and randomly picked readers directly.
Do you have any peculiar writing quirks or habits?
I catch myself making facial expressions that I’m describing. If I’m home while writing, I’m usually standing at my kitchen counter instead of sitting down somewhere. And for background noise, I go back and forth between playing Adele radio on Pandora or streaming Archer on Netflix.
What books are currently on your nightstand?
I have Peace, They Say on my nightstand, which is a history of the Nobel Peace Prize. I bought it for $1 at The Strand and I haven’t read a single page yet. But it looks good on my nightstand.
Is there any advice that you might give to writers looking at self-publishing?
If you have something ready to go, just go for it. The experience is tons of fun and incredibly rewarding. If you’re not sure where to start, ask for help or research — there are plenty of resources online to help people with self-publishing. If you love writing but have qualms over the stigma that’s attached to self-publishing, then maybe test the waters under a pen name with a novel that isn’t The Novel in your life (but do respect your readers and do your best editing, formatting, and writing of a story that people will enjoy). There’s nothing to lose and everything to gain. You don’t know where your project might go or what its readership might end up being. When I started this, I had no idea that Hidden Gem would be what allowed me to quit my job, write fulltime, and still live in Manhattan.
And the absolute best thing about self-pub is having total creative control of what you put out and when. That schedule can allow for whatever other projects you may have going on. Choosing self-publishing now doesn’t mean you’re closing the door on everything else.
Just throwing this one out there, but is there any chance that maybe HDU was autobiographical (*wink*)?
I’ve never been a website moderator and I’ve never dated a womanizing movie star, so unfortunately, no!
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