Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:44 — 32.7MB) | Embed
Don't miss out on the latest episodes. Subscribe now! Spotify | More
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Kaira talks about her latest spine-tingling story, Somebody’s Home. Julie Jones has left her suffocating marriage. With her teenage daughter, Jess, she’s starting over. Their new house in Oceanside is the first step towards a new life. But in a heartbeat, everything can change…
We’ve got ten copies of my latest book just published, Dangerous Desires, Book #10 in the Of Gold and Blood old California mystery series, to give away to ten lucky readers. Enter the draw on the website or on our Binge Reading Facebook page. Offer closes March 28, 2022.
Just a reminder, the show notes for this episode can be found on The Joys of Binge Reading website www.thejoysofbingereading.com And don’t forget, you can also get exclusive bonus content–like hearing Kaira’s answers to the Getting-to-Know-You Five Quickfire Questions–by becoming a Binge Reading on Patreon supporter. For the cost of less than a cup of coffee a month, you can enjoy exclusive bonus content and have the satisfaction of knowing you are helping to keep the show alive. Details at www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading
Links for this episode:
Kaira’s Best-Selling Entrepreneurial book: https://www.amazon.com/Real-You-Incorporated-Essentials-Entrepreneurs-ebook/dp/B004I6DD7Y
Here, Home, Hope: https://kairarouda.com/here-home-hope
Somebody’s Home: https://kairarouda.com/somebodys-home/
The Favorite Daughter: https://kairarouda.com/the-favorite-daughter/
The Next Wife: https://kairarouda.com/the-next-wife/
Jane Porter, Romance novelist: https://janeporter.com/
In The Mirror: https://kairarouda.com/in-the-mirror/
Best Day Ever: https://kairarouda.com/best-day-ever/
Kaira’s contemporary romance: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/24981728-the-billionaire-s-bid
And Indigo Island Series: series/135275-indigo-island
Stanley Steemer: www.stanleysteemer.com
Real Living and Warren Buffet sale: https://therealdeal.com/2018/05/08/warren-buffet-pays-130m-to-buy-brookfield-out-of-brokerage/
Susan Isaacs: https://www.susanisaacs.com/
Nancy Drew: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Drew
Sue Grafton: https://www.suegrafton.com/
Shirley Jackson The Lottery: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6219656-the-lottery
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery
Where to find Kaira Rouda:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kairarouda/
Facebook: https://twitter.com/KairaRouda
Twitter: https://www.facebook.com/KairaRoudaBooks/
Website: https://kairarouda.com/
The Killer Author Blub on Facebook and YouTube: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=784340975878871
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to the show notes in The Joys of Binge Reading.com for important mentions.
But now, here’s Kaira.
Introducing domestic thriller author Kaira Rouda
Jenny Wheeler: Hello Kaira, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Kaira Rouda: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Jenny Wheeler: You are a USA Today, Amazon and international bestselling author. You’ve got eight novels to your credit, but before you started writing you had an amazing life. You are the mother of four children, and you had a highly successful career as an entrepreneur.
You wrote an advice book for women entrepreneurs. You would almost think that you had done it all before you even started writing. What made you feel as if there was something left for you to do?
Kaira Rouda: I love that question because I did have a pretty hefty career in marketing and business, but since third grade I knew I wanted to be a writer. That was my dream. I wanted to write a novel, and so even from third grade on that had been in the back of my mind. Then when I ended up writing, my first book was a non-fiction book, which was never in the plans at all.
When I wrote that book, I was kind of encapsulating everything I had learned from helping, mostly women, create personal brands and then use those brands to make a great business. One of the things I would tell people was, you need to live the life of your dreams. You only have one life, and if there’s something you’ve been dreaming about doing, don’t wait, even if it’s a side hustle. I realized when I was going around the country speaking to all these groups of women, that I still hadn’t done the one thing I’d always dreamed of doing.
8 Essentials For Women Entrepreneurs – Kaira Rouda
Jenny Wheeler: That book, in case anybody’s interested in looking it up, is called Real You Incorporated: 8 Essentials for Women Entrepreneurs. It is, as you say, focused on realizing your dreams. Your very first book, which was called Here, Home, Hope won awards, so you started off with a hiss and a roar–the Indie Excellence award for starters, and the Writer’s Digest award.
That theme very much reflected where you’d come from. It was about an achieving woman who examines her life at 39 and finds it wanting. The tagline on your website is “beneath the surface of seemingly perfect lives”, and I think if you look through your work, you see that theme being repeated in different ways in your novels. Would it be fair to say they all echo that idea?
Kaira Rouda: Yes, I think you hit it right on the money. When you start writing as a novelist, back with Here, Home, Hope, for example, because I’d had that non-fiction book out in the world, people saw me as a person who would write something like a reference to that book in a fictional way.
That character Kelly popped into my head and she had a lot of things she wanted to change about her life. She keeps a list on post-it notes all the way through the story. Actually, back then my tagline was “sparkling with humor and heart”, because my women’s fiction tended to be a bit lighter and happier.
Beneath the surface of seemingly perfect lives
Then I became progressively darker in my stories, but I’ve always been fascinated with what’s beneath the surface, the seemingly perfect lives. If you peel back the layers of what’s happening, that’s what my books are doing. They get progressively deeper beneath the surface.
Jenny Wheeler: Did that reflect you? Were you a person who left post-it notes everywhere?
Kaira Rouda: Oh, my gosh, yes. If you saw me, or even anybody in my family was up here, they would be laughing. Even my cleaning lady said to me today, I saw an advertisement for a note system that’s digital. You just write on it. I’m like, no, I cannot live without post-it notes. There’s no way. So, yes, I have post-it notes.
When my husband and I were dating, he was like; you are so messy. But I have piles and I know what’s in the piles and I know where to find the piles, and so I said, love me, love my piles. That’s how I am. And I’m still like that.
Jenny Wheeler: I think it’s true no matter how perfect life might seem. I had years in journalism and the thing that amazed me about the interviews I did in those years was that you could almost bet that every single woman, no matter how beautiful she might be–an international model–she would be able to tell you immediately what was wrong about her or what she didn’t do very well.
We can make up an identity for ourselves with social media
It’s something we all feel inside so you started off at a good place in the sense of women identifying. What was the attraction of that theme to you?
Kaira Rouda: I guess it’s the notion that we can all, especially with social media now, pretty much make up what our identity is. You can pretend your life into existence in some ways, and in many cases, it isn’t real. Then you can also start feeling bad about yourself by comparing yourself to people who are making a pretend existence.
All of that is in the zeitgeist, and then when you add a global pandemic to the angst and all of us being trapped in our houses not knowing what’s outside. Probably the environment itself is also adding to why I think it is important to examine beneath the surface, and also maybe why my stories are getting a little darker right now too.
Jenny Wheeler: Somebody’s Home is particularly the book we’re talking about because that’s the most recently published one, and several of the main characters in that story are leading lives that nowhere match up to their public persona. The perfect façade they present to the world is so not true of their lives.
Was there anything in particular that drew you to that story? You’ve got a politician and a church leader, both of whom are failing badly privately while they’re presenting this shiny front. Was there anything in particular that drew you to that story?
The Question: What if you didn’t have a safe home to go to?
Kaira Rouda: That story, Somebody’s Home, started in my mind with the character, Tom. I wrote it during the lockdown part of the pandemic. When my four kids came back home and we were all hunkered down, the notion came to me. What if you didn’t have a safe home to go to, and what if home wasn’t safe anymore?
Tom is a character who has always lived in the same home. He grew up in this home. He’s a 20-something guy now, but the only thing he really feels attached to is this home. He is living back in the carriage house when his parents need to move. They’ve sold it. The new owner said he could stay for the weekend to pack up, but then he had to go.
The notion of this man who hasn’t grown up, and he doesn’t feel love from anywhere, and he’s holding onto this sense of place – that’s where it started. If you looked at the house from the outside, you wouldn’t know that there’s a seething somebody in the carriage house.
Jenny Wheeler: I see that you have been very involved with charitable agencies, like helping with homelessness and things. When I was reading about Tom’s story, I felt you had a real empathy for how he was feeling. He feels as if his father sees him as a loser, and I guess his father really sees him as somebody who hasn’t made it up to his expectations.
Giving back always pays you back more than you expect
Do you think your charitable work helped you to become more empathetic to someone like Tom?
Kaira Rouda: Yes. I think giving back to your community, however you do it, makes everything better in your life. You always get back more than you put into it. Working with homeless people, and I do a lot of work at the food pantry now here too, makes you realize that people need help but also that they are helpable.
With this character, his first mother ran away from his father when he was six years old, and he watched her leave from the driveway. Everybody’s got something good about them. If you think about Tom, who when we meet him is a very despicable character from the outside and hard to love, I think it is important to see something good in everybody.
Of course, it’s hard to stick with the story all the way through if you absolutely despise him–although some people really absolutely despise Tom from the beginning and don’t give him any benefit of the doubt. But I think as an author, it’s important to see something good in all of your characters.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. He obviously is incredibly misguided in the way his thinking has evolved, but that isn’t so unusual in the world we’re living in with all the social media input. People seem to get some fairly screwy ideas and get really convinced about them.
A young man who became a target
Kaira Rouda: Yes, totally. He is very much a target of people who like to lure people like him into some kind of belief system or group. He is loosely sucked into a kind of paramilitary type situation. If you are lonely and you’re online, there are people who are going to take advantage of that.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s quite touching that his sense of identity, which is probably very fragile, becomes quite inflated by these guys telling him what a great guy he is. It’s something that becomes a bit of a lifeline for him.
Julie Jones, the main character, is leaving a suffocating marriage and starting over again. She has bought this new house, not at all aware of the situation she’s walking into. It is quite creepy, because she comes back to her new house and realizes that somebody is there and she does not know who he is or why he’s there. It’s quite creepy right from the beginning. You are very good at spinning the suspense side of it.
‘The perfect home, the perfect family, the perfect lie’
Kaira Rouda: Thank you. Yes, she is trying to be a good person to do a nice thing by giving him two days to move out. It’s her chance at a fresh start and she’s so gung-ho, and her teenage daughter moving across town with her is convinced her mom is having a nervous breakdown. They can’t believe this is happening to her. She has already got an angst-y teenager, and then she realizes what she’s allowed to stay in the carriage house. Poor Julie.
Jenny Wheeler: You have had another bestseller, The Favorite Daughter, and it frames that idea in a slightly different way.
The tagline for that one is “the perfect home, the perfect family, the perfect lie”. We have referred to the aspect of social media and the power it’s got now. Our fascination with other people’s dirty linen–what does it say to us as people? Everything that’s been trawling out in the media about the Epstein case, for example, is really horrible and yet fascinating at the same time.
Kaira Rouda: As a society, I don’t know why, but we like to build people up. We love celebrity and then we love it when people fall too. Maybe it’s about making you feel better with your own life if you can pick on other people’s lives.
Hard to turn away from a monster like Jeffrey Epstein
Epstein is fascinating to me too in many ways. It is hard to turn away sometimes because you see that this monster, in that case Epstein, was living this huge life right in front of all of us and getting away with it. He is a fascinating case study.
But even if it’s just somebody that lives down the street from you in your suburb, and they have the best car and the hottest wife, whatever it is, they seem to have it all, and finding out that they were part of the college cheating scandal or something like that. That is fascinating to us because what we see is not at all what we’ve got.
Jenny Wheeler: Your books sound like they’d be perfect stories for this environment for TV or film, and I wonder if you’ve had any nibbles yet in that regard.
Kaira Rouda: I have had nibbles, but there are no fish on the line. Anybody who is interested, I think they would be great too, but I’m not in that world. I just have to sit back and hope someday somebody reads one and says, yeah, this is great.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely. I read somewhere that a meeting with romance novelist Jane Porter was what encouraged you to get started with the fiction side of things. Tell us about how that happened.
Writing romance proved to Kaira ‘I can’t write sex scenes’
Kaira Rouda: I had written Here, Home, Hope and In The Mirror, and I had just moved out to California. I met Jane Porter at a mutual friend’s. She had a bunch of authors over to her house, and Jane said, have you ever tried writing romance? I said, no, never, not once. She said, do you want to? She had just started a new imprint called Tule Publishing, and she wanted to know if I wanted to write for her. I’m like, sure, I’ll give that a try. I wrote I guess one or two series of romance and what I found through that was really shocking to me, because I had never thought of it this way.
Romance is so empowering for women and all those women who write romance are fabulous. It led to me speaking at the Romance Writers Association in New York. I did a twist on my non-fiction book for women, but for writers, and I did a presentation about that for them, which was great.
I loved that, but I also found during my two years of romance that I can’t write sex scenes. I just can’t do it. I’m not good at it. I don’t want to write them. Even the leading up to it part, I am not good at. I decided, perhaps I should segue back into women’s fiction, which is what I was working on when suddenly the idea for Best Day Ever popped into my head. That, as we know, is not women’s fiction. It is my first dark scary book.
The Indigo Island series – getaway romance
Jenny Wheeler: The romance you were doing. Was that contemporary romance?
Kaira Rouda: Yes, it was. I had a series with Jane and it was called Indigo Island series. It was based on the Putnam family on this sea island off the coast of South Carolina that we used to go to when the kids were little. It’s beautiful, it doesn’t have a bridge to it and it has all this Scala history. I love that island. I had a whole series of romance books there.
Jenny Wheeler: I’m interested that you’d already written your first two books when that happened. Was your first book, Here, Home, Hope, indie published? I notice that you won an indie award and I thought, perhaps you did indie publish that one.
Moving from indie to trad publishing
Kaira Rouda: I’ve done every kind of publishing. Here, Home, Hope was, I think it’s called hybrid. I worked with the people at Greenleaf Book Group. I had an agent, and we kept getting close on the submissions and I got impatient because I came from the business world with a marketing background and I’m like, I need to get going on this career I’ve decided on.
They were great. I worked with Greenleaf Book Group for Here, Home, Hope and then with Kindle–the ability to self-publish had just started bubbling up–I decided that would be a good skill to learn. I fully self-published In The Mirror and All the Difference. That was fun too because I learned algorithms and how you set all that stuff up, the nuts and bolts behind the publishing business. It was all very helpful.
Then Jane’s small press published my romance, and so by the time Best Day Ever came along and we sold it to Harper Collins and Harlequin, I think I had had every single experience, and they all were additive.
Jenny Wheeler: It was a good apprenticeship to getting into one of the big publishers.
Distribution is the name of the game…
Kaira Rouda: Absolutely.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you like being trad published now? Do you prefer that to indie?
Kaira Rouda: It’s still a distribution game. I think in that realm, yes, because there is no competing with that kind of reach as an independent person. I love the control of being an indie published person and picking the cover and all that stuff, but yes, it’s nice to have a professional team with all these years of publishing experience on your side.
Jenny Wheeler: You have mentioned having a go at romance, so we’ll look at the genre question again before we pass on to a slightly wider look at things. Why do you think you’re drawn to suspense as a genre?
Kaira Rouda: I think I always have been. My very first manuscript I ever wrote that no one will ever see was in suspense. It was a domestic suspense set in the suburbs, bad things happening within a family setting, and when I look back on that, I’m like, oh my goodness, this was where I was meant to be. I got led into softer women’s fiction because I had done that non-fiction book to begin with.
Those you love can hurt you the worst
Even In The Mirror, which is about a woman, a young mom who has this cancer diagnosis–it’s heart-wrenching, but it’s a suspense story too. I think I’ve always been leaning in that direction. It speaks to me that those who you love can hurt you the worst.
Jenny Wheeler: Were you doing any fiction writing before you turned around and decided I’m going to give this a go, after your nonfiction book? Were you the sort of person who throughout your life did a weeny bit of fiction writing on the side?
Kaira Rouda: I’d say yes. When I graduated I was an English Lit major, and my first jobs were all either in magazines or newspapers. I had a society column for a long time on the side, back in Ohio, so I was always writing something, even if I was doing marketing.
Kaira Rouda’s early career in copywriting and TV
My career there was copywriting and public relations and TV writing, all that kind of different writing, so I have always been writing something. I dabble in poetry, but I’d say, yes, if I’m not writing, I wouldn’t be happy.
Fictionally though, I think it was getting the courage. I remember my first byline for the newspaper was scary for me, putting yourself out there and having people read your works. I wrote nothing for publication throughout college and high school, just a couple of poems, so it was a big step. Doing the book thing, I think it took me going around the country and helping other people live their dreams to make myself have the confidence to go on and do it. You’ve told all these people to do it. Now you go do it.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning away from talking about the specific books, I know you started a real estate agency. One of your claims to fame was that you started a real estate agency that became represented in 22 states, and probably the crown on it all was that it was bought by Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle. Tell us how that part happened. That was a lot more than just doing marketing, wasn’t it? It was a major thing.
First woman VP – and then a class action suit and a career wall
Kaira Rouda: Life is funny how it twists and turns. I was in my marketing career, working at ad agencies and then ended up going in-house for a company called Stanley Steemer which is a carpet cleaning firm and franchisor. I was the first woman to work there as Vice-President, and I had an office on the wall where you have your own door and window and all that good stuff.
While I was there, and it was a great learning experience, but I had to leave because I had to file a class action lawsuit for gender discrimination and sexual harassment. Suddenly I was free. At the same time, my husband had rolled up three real estate companies, and it included 20 different brands within Ohio. He needed someone to help bring a brand to life that would be the umbrella brand for all of those. I said, suddenly I’m free. I would like to do that.
It was great working with him. We created Real Living, and what I learned through my marketing days was that women make or control 91% of all home buying decisions. They have the power of the purse. Back in the 2000’s when we launched this, people would still refer to the consumer as a man in almost every category of consumer goods, so we launched the first women-basing consumer real estate brand, acknowledging women have the power of the transaction.
Creating a real estate firm that worked for women
Not only that, back then 69% of all real estate agents were women too. It was one of the first careers where a woman could make as much as a man could. There was no ceiling there. Anyway, there were all kinds of reasons it made sense to target women as the primary consumer in the real estate transaction. That is what caught on. We could franchise it in 22 states and everything was going great until the recession hit, and then we needed some help from some big guys.
We first sold to Brookfield Hathaway, which is a Canadian company, and they had bought another franchise system that they couldn’t keep the name from. I tweeted the head of that, literally through a tweet, and said, Real Living is looking to grow and you need a name. How about we work together? So, we first sold to Brookfield and then Warren Buffet later on.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Looking back over this wonderful career in both marketing and writing, if there was one thing that you saw as the secret of your success, what would it be?
What has been the secret of Kaira Rouda’s success?
Kaira Rouda: I’d say resilience. Everybody, no matter how perfect it looks, will have their trials and their rejections. Publishing is filled with it and so is any other business. If you can have faith in yourself and the resilience to keep going, things will work out.
I tell this to my kids too. All four of them are creative, but two are pursuing careers in the creative field – singer/songwriter and a screenwriter. The only way you won’t be successful in that career you’ve chosen, which is really hard, is if you give up. I guarantee you won’t make it if you give up. So, I think resilience.
Jenny Wheeler: When you started out with your fiction career, what was your main goal and have you by now far exceeded it?
Kaira Rouda: I guess the first goal is getting a finished novel, or a manuscript finished. That would have been my first goal. Then I always wanted to go to one of those big expos in the book publishing world. I would see other people I knew, like Jane Porter would be at these big book expos.
The book that was Kaira Rouda’s breakthrough
Best Day Ever was my first breakthrough with the big guys. They acquired it and then they called a little later and said, we’re going to make this hard cover. I’m like, get out. Then they called a little later and said, we’re going to start a new imprint and your title’s going to lead the imprint. I’m like, get out. And then they said, we’re going to fly you to BEA – BookExpo America – and you can have a signing and meet all the people in the publishing world. I’m like, oh my gosh, this is so exciting.
They flew me there. I get to New York and I walk in the Javits Center and literally just coming in the door and I look up and my book is on a banner that, to me, was 12 stories high. I don’t know how big it was, but seeing that I stopped in my tracks. This guy was signing people up for American Express cards next to me, and he was like, are you okay? He thought I was having a stroke or something. I’m like, that’s my book up there, and he’s like, oh my gosh, you need a picture, and he’s taking pictures for me. I would have said, that would be my goal. Each happy thing that happens, you try to hold onto those.
I don’t really have another goal. I would just love to keep writing and keep having people enjoy my books. That would probably be the same as when I sat down to write Here, Home, Hope. It’s just, I want to do this, and hopefully people will like what I write and then I can keep doing it.
The favorite books Kaira Rouda loves to read
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. And that is the case still today.
Kaira Rouda: So far, so good.
Jenny Wheeler: Because this is The Joys of Binge Reading, we like to talk about books that people enjoy reading. We do focus on the popular fiction. I imagine you have been a reader your whole life when you’ve had the time with all the other things you’ve done as well. What do you like to read and what would you like to recommend to our listeners?
Kaira Rouda: I have always been a big reader in the suspense world. I remember my Nancy Drew’s growing up, and then all the Sue Grafton’s and Susan Isaacs – any of those were my inspiration.
I love to read in the area I write in, but I also like to read more widely. During the pandemic, my attention span has been terrible, so it has been very hard to concentrate on books. I don’t know if you’ve found that, but I’ve talked to other people and they have the same thing. I can sit down and write and concentrate. But if I get a book, I will suddenly veer off.
Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery was life-changing
That said, I’m trying to make myself read before bed. Like, you are going to sit down and read. I’ve been fortunate to have been sent some advanced reader copies by some amazing authors that are stacked next to my bed, so I’m going to get to this. I always say, and I’ll say again, that Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery got me involved in this realm because it was so shocking and surprising. I was recently revisiting her work, and she was such an amazing writer.
Jenny Wheeler: I don’t know her, to be honest.
Kaira Rouda: Okay. Read The Lottery and then you’ll see what I’m talking about. She was a mom of four and raised her kids in the suburbs. Her husband was a famous critic, so he got most of the attention while they were a married couple. I read her autobiography/memoir. In the States we have to read, at least we did in advanced English classes, this short story called The Lottery, and it changed my life.
Jenny Wheeler: Tell us a little more about that. How did it affect you that way?
Looking down the tunnel of time, anything to change?
Kaira Rouda: I can’t say too much about it because I don’t want to give it away. You seem like you are in this rural town where a lovely tradition is starting. Once a year they do this lovely tradition. The writing and the tone is a seemingly perfect town, and then from there all chaos breaks loose. I guess it’s the way that all is not what it seems is where that came from.
Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time, if there was one thing about your creative career that you would change, what would it be?
Kaira Rouda: Oh, I know, because I’m just learning this now. To be more grateful for editorial letters and less taking it personally, like I’ve failed. My daughter is actually the one who is teaching me that lesson. Being a perfectionist, once I submit my story I’m like, it’s done, and I know you’re going to love it.
Then, no, because it has to go through all these different rounds of editorial letters and direction changes and character tweaks and all that. I took it personally. I’d get one of those letters and for days I’d mope around. Now I have been re-defining that in my brain, thanks to my daughter. She would say, mom, you should be grateful that all these people care enough about your work to give you their input and feedback. Take it like that. I’m like, right, that is a grownup thing to do, yes.
What is next for Kaira Rouda, the author?
Jenny Wheeler: Is she one of your creatives?
Kaira Rouda: She’s my screen writer. She and I wrote a pilot episode for a series for The Favorite Daughter together, which was fun because there’s a mom and a teenage daughter in it. Avery’s in her twenties now, but she can still channel the teenage daughter. She always helps me with dialogue when I have a teenager or early 20 something woman in my books.
Jenny Wheeler: It sounds like she’s got the right attitude because screenwriting is certainly a very collaborative process, isn’t it?
Kaira Rouda: Absolutely. It’s so different from novel writing. It’s such a gift. I watch what she does and I’m mesmerized because you have so few words to say so much in scenes. It’s amazing.
Jenny Wheeler: What is next for Kaira the writer looking down the next 12 months? What have you got on your desk?
Kaira Rouda: As you know, Somebody’s Home is out now and I’ve been doing the virtual book tour. This is my second pandemic book release. The Next Wife came out last May, and that was during the pandemic, so I was Zooming all over the place. Now I’m Zooming again for Somebody’s Home.
New book – The Widow – coming out in November
I have another book called The Widow coming out in November, so that’s exciting. It’s my first time having two books in the same year.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Are you able to say anything about what you’re working on? Have you got a new one at the moment?
Kaira Rouda: Yes. I just submitted my next one. Hopefully, if they like it, here comes a letter I’m going to be dreading, but anyway, we’ll see what they say. Hopefully, they will like it.
Jenny Wheeler: I know with the pandemic that we haven’t been able to interact with readers in person as much, but interacting with your readers online, where can they find you, and do you enjoy that process?
Kaira Rouda: Oh yes, absolutely. I really like social media for books. As long as we’re talking books, I love it. I am all over the place. I’m on Instagram under my name and Twitter. I have a Facebook page called Kaira Rouda Books, and I just started a club with my two of my friends, two authors. We started the Killer Author Club, so every two weeks we are hosting a different author, and we talk to her – usually her, sometimes him–about why they like to kill and how they kill–in their stories, of course.
Finding author Kaira Rouda on line
That has been fun too, because it gives us a social outing every two weeks to talk about books. So, yes, I pretty much love to engage with readers online and in all of those different places.
Jenny Wheeler: The Killer Club–that’s a podcast, is it?
Kaira Rouda: No, we haven’t done a podcast yet. We’ve been thinking about it, but we are only on episode three, so we have just started this. We’ve been streaming it to YouTube and Facebook live.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much, Kaira. It’s been great talking.
Kaira Rouda: Thank you. Great questions, Jenny. I really appreciate them.
If you enjoyed Kaira Rouda you might also enjoy J. T. Ellison’s Her Dark Lies…
Next week on The Joys of Binge Reading we have Reyna Marder Gentin, a former criminal appellate attorney who turned her hand to writing about crime, rather than sitting on the bench and judging it. Her latest novel, Both Are True, examines the temptations a woman judge faces when her personal and professional lives collide. That’s next week here on The Joys of Binge Reading.
That’s it for today. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you can be sure not to miss out next week, and if you’d like to go that extra mile and support us on Binge Reading on Patreon, we would be so grateful. Check it out on www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading.
Until next time – and Happy Reading!
Thanks To Our Technical Support:
The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at dcaudioservices@gmail.com or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.
Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both lighthearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at abe@pointandshoot.co.nz