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Leeanna Morgan is a USA Today best-selling author of Montana sweet romance, with over a million downloads of her books and a following on BookBub of more than 53,000. This former librarian runs her highly successful – and lucrative – book business from her peaceful home in Wellington, New Zealand.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on The Joys of Binge Reading Leeanna talks about what’s possible in this new world of indie publishing, global reach and the struggle with an international pandemic.
Leeanna’s got lots of First in Series free books on her website. You will find the links for that in the show notes for this episode, so if you are interested in her sweet romance, take a look. You’ll find some places to start that won’t cost you a cent.
Before we get to Leeanna, just a reminder. You can support the show on Patreon for as little as a cup of coffee a month, and get exclusive bonus content, including five quickfire getting-to-know-you questions with your favorite authors. Check it out at www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading/ and join us today.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- What jump-started librarian Leeanna into writing romance
- Thanking her Dad for Montana
- The business brain behind the creator
- Why she loves shining a light in darkness
- The remarkable discipline in her planning process
- The treasured book she reads every year
Where to find Leeanna Morgan:
Website: https://www.leeannamorgan.com/free-ebooks.html
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Leeanna-Morgan-220562971470830/
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/leeanna-morgan
Leeanna’s free books: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/leeanna-morgan
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Introducing Leeanna Morgan author
But now, here’s Leeanna.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Leeanna, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Leeanna Morgan: Thanks, Jenny. It’s awesome to be here and thank you for the invitation.
Jenny Wheeler: We’ve known each other for years through the New Zealand Romance Writers, and I’ve always been a great admirer of the way you work. You, like me, are a Kiwi, you live in Wellington, New Zealand, but you’ve developed a huge following in the U S. Tell us how you got embarked on this amazing adventure. What was it that kick-started you?
Leeanna Morgan: Of all things, Jenny, it was turning 40. I decided that the last 10 years between 30 and 40 had gone so fast that it felt as if I blinked and missed the whole ten years. I decided I wasn’t going to let that happen in the next 10 years, before I turned 50. So I thought of one thing I wanted to do, to feel as though I’d achieved something in that ten years. I decided to write a book and that’s how it all started.
I wrote one book and I really quite enjoyed it, so then I wrote a second one and I just kept going from there. By the time I turned 50, I had about 20-ish books I’d published. That’s how it started.
Jenny Wheeler: My gosh, you make it sound so easy. You have been remarkably productive. As you mentioned, all those books have got different settings and different series, but your genre and tone is very consistent.
It’s sweet, small town romance with real life emotion and pain that usually – almost always anyway – finds a happy resolution. That would be fair to say, I think. When you started out, was indie publishing a thing, because you are now indie published aren’t you?
Getting started on a new career
Leeanna Morgan: That’s right and have been from the beginning, apart from a little foray into the world of literary agents. I enjoy indie publishing and it’s been amazing for me.
Jenny Wheeler: You certainly have got it tagged in terms of how to proceed. We will get into that a bit later, but we’re delighted that we’ve got your Christmas series, the number one book in your Santa’s Secret Helpers series in our giveaway this month, The Twelve Days of Christmas giveaway.
That one is called Christmas on Main Street but you’re about to publish number five in that series, Endless Love. That’s an idea of the way you work – you have quite a few books in the series and you publish them pretty close together. What kind of planning goes into making that all happen?
Leeanna Morgan: It’s quite interesting because usually I plan a series two series before it’s actually published. I start introducing characters who are going to be in a series, probably a year to a year and a half before the reader has their individual story.
Planning a series is all about creating vivid characters that readers can connect with and giving readers a little snippet of those people until it’s their time.
For Santa’s Secret Helpers, all of the characters in those books have appeared in the previous series, which is the Sapphire Bay series.
Both those series are set in Sapphire Bay which is a fictional small town on the shore of Flathead Lake in Montana. The next series I’m about to write, readers are very familiar with one of the main characters in that series already. Mabel has been in the last twelve books I wrote, so she’s a familiar character and that will inspire readers to pick up that series and keep going.
A message for the times
Jenny Wheeler: It seems remarkably prescient to me because you started this, you say a year ago, but the world has changed so much over 2020. This book has a church at the center of it, a pastor who’s offering support and comfort to people who are going through hard times, helping with housing, with childcare, with all sorts of needs in the community, and it’s got a real resonance for people with the things they’ve had to endure this year.
I imagine you’ve picked up a lot of interest for those books, because of that.
Leeanna Morgan: I think they have, because they talk about people being kind to each other and helping each other and that’s resonated with people. But that theme carries through in my other series as well.
In The Bridesmaids Club, I’ve got four friends who start up a business called The Bridesmaids Club and they receive donated wedding dresses and bridesmaids’ dresses from people all around America and they give them to people who can’t afford their own wedding dresses or bridesmaid dresses.
That whole theme of unconditional love and helping people – I like that, it really makes my heart beat fast. And I think it does for a lot of people. We’ve all been in situations where something has been a little bit unachievable and all it takes is a smile from someone or a helping hand and it can make the world of difference. That’s what my characters do.
Leeanna Morgan
In the Sapphire Bay series the big thing is a tiny home village and the pastor of the Connect Church, John, is building 25 tiny homes with the help of the community that can house people who possibly wouldn’t have the ability to rent a property.
They might have some issues they’re dealing with in their life, and so the community is making houses for these people.
Santa’s Secret Helpers is all about Christmas wishes and the church is organizing fundraisers to raise money for people who have had other anonymous people say they need something special. They are raising money to do that. It’s all about giving back.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s idealistic, it’s optimistic, it’s positive, and some people might say it’s a little bit naïve and it’s definitely different from literary fiction where they tend to take rather dark, self-involved, pretty depressing themes often. Do you feel that you get a bit of kickback from people who say, life isn’t like that?
Always heading for the light
Leeanna Morgan: No. Because some of my books deal with quite interesting themes. I have had main characters who have had dementia, but of course a cure is found. The thing with life is that nothing is ever impossible.
If someone had said a hundred years ago that you could operate on someone and have no problems with bugs, or if someone had said in the 1970s or 80s that there was going to be some medication for AIDS or HIV, they would have been seen as dreaming.
But unless you start somewhere and try and make a difference, everything will stay the same. With my books, I try and take an issue someone has, or different issues, and find a solution for it. (Safe Haven, Book #1 in The Protectors series.)
If that means inventing a therapeutic herbal remedy that will help someone, then that’s what I do. And who knows? In another 50 years’ time, it might have been something sitting under our noses that could cure Alzheimer’s. There is a lot of research that goes into making these assumptions, like for the Alzheimer’s thing, I looked up turmeric and all the different herbs that can help with inflammation and memory and other symptoms of dementia.
Plausibility mixed with promise
I try and base what I’m suggesting on some kind of plausible reality and I think that’s what people enjoy, because they’ll go on the internet and look it up and think, ah, that’s where she saw that.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Obviously, your readers love that optimism and positivity. It’s something they come back for over and over again.
Leeanna Morgan: I do. I think it makes them feel good because they feel as though they are part of this caring community. In fact, I had an email from someone yesterday in New Zealand and she said that she laughed when she saw a reference to New Zealand in a book.
She thought maybe it was just a one-off and then she read another two or three of my books and realized that I put little snippets of New Zealand inside my books.
She said, I hope all the small towns in New Zealand, I wish they were like that because that’s so positive and so caring. I told her, they are, they’re out there, you’ve just got to look for them.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. You have cleverly adjusted your books to the feedback you’ve got. You mentioned your first series was Montana Brides, and it was set in Bozeman, Montana. I’m curious. We’ve learned that you were a Wellington librarian who decided you wanted to write a book. It’s then a very big jump to deciding, oh, I’ll set it in Montana. How did that happen?
Getting started in Montana
Leeanna Morgan: It was really interesting. In a lot of ways my dad subconsciously played a part in this because dad loved listening to country music. When all the kids in school were listening to ABBA and Meatloaf, I was listening to Dolly Parton and John Denver. He loved Westerns, anything to do with the Wild West and cowboys.
When I started writing my first book, Gracie in Forever Dreams is a New Zealander, because people said write about what you know. I knew about New Zealand, so that was good. And she needed to go somewhere to find her birth father, because we’d already had a conversation about what she needed to do in the story.
I had a Google map of the States because I knew she wanted to go to the United States, and that’s probably my cowboy dad coming out in me, and so I looked and Montana just flashed in front of my eyes. I did a close-up of Montana and Bozeman winked at me as if to say, this is where you need to come.
I thought, okay, we’ll have a look at Bozeman, so I went online, and Bozeman is a fantastic place for a writer to set books. It’s got a huge IT industry, a physics and science industry, Montana State University is in Bozeman. It’s got a huge arts and culture scene.
The community is so environmentally aware and really push sustainability. They’ve been doing that for decades, which flies in the face of some other areas that just don’t seem to care. They also have an amazing ability to have that urban and rural intersection in life. I thought, this is a pretty amazing place, I’m going to write my books and set them in Bozeman. That’s where we ended up.
Jenny Wheeler: You did visit Bozeman yourself, but it was some time after your first Bozeman books had been published. Tell us about what that visit meant to you.
Montana Brides comes to life
Leeanna Morgan: I loved it. I went with mum, and it was about four years after I’d written the first book in the Montana Brides series. It was like stepping into your imagination. Everything I had seen on YouTube or rancher’s wives’ blogs or any information or pictures I’d been able to find on the internet – it was almost like it came to life..
I remember walking into a building with mum and saying, I’ve been here before, and she said, no, you haven’t. I said, I have. It felt like one of those déja vu moments, and I realized that I’d set one of my books in this bookstore, but I turned the building into a fashion boutique.
It had a beautiful mezzanine floor and a pressed tin ceiling. There were floor to ceiling books in the shop and it was absolutely amazing, but in my store there were beautiful gowns and dresses and the upstairs was where the fashion designer would create these gorgeous designs.
I walked around the store with my mouth open. It was just amazing. It was really, really good.
Jenny Wheeler: All your books are linked in some way and some characters may appear in more than one book. The Christmas books for example, are set in Sapphire Bay, which you’ve already mentioned, and you’ve got two other series which tap into popular romance tropes.
You’ve got the Emerald Lake Billionaires and The Protectors, which is more of a security strong man series. They are very different worlds from the ranch and cowboy locations of Montana Brides, but you manage to bring them all together. That takes some very clever planning, I would think.
Emerald Lake Billionaires
Leeanna Morgan: In the Emerald Lake Billionaires series, my billionaires are really nice guys. They are the type of men you would love to meet. They’ve got lots of money and are not shy of spending it, especially on the woman they love.
They live in Emerald Lake, this beautiful lake probably half an hour out of Bozeman. It’s not real, it’s all in my fictional area, and there are four properties around the Lake which belong to each of the four heroes in my four book series. I tied that series with the others by looking at what jobs they do.
The hero in the first book of that series, John Fletcher, owns and started a big high-end security company called Fletcher Security. The people he’s employed as bodyguards – they transport high value items around the States – form the heroes or heroines in other books in The Protector series.
So even The Protector series has more of a caring side to it, rather than a straight alpha male type. The title of the series, The Protectors, isn’t so much about protecting things and properties as far as the security company goes. The heroes and heroines of those stories become their own protectors.
The hero in the first book is called Tank, and he is the protector of a woman he is sent to find. One of the books is about a woman called Sam and she works for Fletcher Security. She’s a real IT wiz. She’s sent to protect a computer programmer some people are looking for. So it’s each of the characters becoming a protector, rather than the alpha male interpretation it could be.
And then we go to Sapphire Bay
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. There are six books in the Sapphire Bay series and now you’re doing Return to Sapphire Bay. It did spark in my mind the thought that it might have been something readers had asked for – a return by popular demand. Was it anything like that?
Leeanna Morgan: No. The whole premise of Return to Sapphire Bay is more about four daughters of a woman my readers have met, she has been in the last twelve books. Her four daughters return to Sapphire Bay after the death of their grandmother. It’s their return, rather than coming back to a town we haven’t been in for a while, because that is also set in Sapphire Bay.
I’m looking forward to writing that series. I’ve got some wonderful characters and some really good storylines. I’m really excited about that.
Jenny Wheeler: How far are you with that at the moment? Have you got any covers created?
Leeanna Morgan: Yes. I always have my cover designer, Steven Novak from Novak Illustration design my covers with me, probably about a year before the first one comes out, so those covers are all done for those four books in that series. The blurbs are all done, and the pre-orders are all out.
‘Military-style’ planning the secret
I know what’s going to happen in each book and so do my readers. They pre-order the books and I publish a book every three months. It means that my readers, from when they read the first one, from when that’s available, will only have another 9-12 months to get the whole series.
Jenny Wheeler: That is an amazing production line you’ve got going there and takes a remarkable amount of foresight. I think you must have a very good sense of intuition because a lot of this must be driven on a sense of intuition. Do you ask every character in your books what they want to do or what they want to achieve? Do you take that sort of approach?
Leeanna Morgan: I do, but that all happens way before. Because I’m planning in advance and because I’m wiggling characters into my books as little cameo roles who are going to appear later, I know, and my readers already know, what those people want.
They don’t know specifically why, but they know what they want and what they’re doing in their lives. By having the blurbs done a year in advance, I’ve already thought about that in my headers. I’m writing the blurb – what do my hero and heroine do, when do they meet, what’s stopping them from getting together. It’s that type of thing I need to know.
If I’m going to have a character who is going to be cantankerous and a bit mean and nasty, they can’t be cantankerous and mean and nasty when they first appear and then suddenly turn out really nice by the time their book comes up.
There has to be something that’s irritating them beyond anything, and my readers have to know that.
They have to know that beneath that irritation or standoffishness or shyness or that overworking philosophy in life – there has got to be a reason for it. They want to know as much as the next person what that reason is, so they will buy the book to find out what makes that person tick.
Jenny Wheeler: You are creating a whole society, aren’t you? I’ve seen it suggested that your work is similar to Robyn Carr and the Virgin River series, which has become a very popular TV show. You’re creating a whole society, a fictional world. It’s quite encompassing, isn’t it?
Creating an entire world
Leeanna Morgan: It is. You need to have believable characters and small-town life is fun to write. I like imagining myself standing on the shore of Flathead Lake. For me, as a writer, it gives me as much enjoyment as my readers get. I think because New Zealand is so beautiful, you can appreciate that synergy between Montana and New Zealand. But it is important to keep everything flowing as far as the series go, and to keep those characters fresh and engaging.
Jenny Wheeler: How did you decide on Flathead Lake?
Leeanna Morgan: When I was still working at the library, we were negotiating a very large contract with a company in America for buying our books. We’d set up a nationwide consortium so that all the libraries pitched in and we got better discounts on our books.
The gentleman we were talking to was the Chief Executive of a big company in the States who provide books to libraries. He was telling me one day that he used to go to Flathead Lake to go fishing. There’s a place called Whitefish, and he used to go there all the time and it was absolutely beautiful. When he came to New Zealand to meet us, he loved New Zealand because he said it was very similar in parts to Montana.
I think that was in the back of my mind when I was looking at a new location for a series, because we’d stayed in Bozeman for about fifteen books and I wanted a fresh look. I probably will go back to Bozeman at some stage, but I’m enjoying Sapphire Bay at the moment. I thought of Flathead Lake and I went and had a look again on Google and looked at the map and then I looked at YouTube and at some videos and I thought, we could make something of this.
Mixing imagination and fact
But this time I created an imaginary small town, because a lot of the towns around Flathead Lake are incredibly small and I needed a town slightly bigger than that, that wasn’t a city, but was still a reasonable size. That’s why we came up with Sapphire Bay.
Jenny Wheeler: Moving away from talking about the books particularly and turning to your wider career, you’ve referred to the experience you had prior to writing as a librarian, and you rose to a very high level in the library system. It was a lot more than putting books on shelves. Tell us about your previous work before you decided you wanted to be a writer.
Leeanna Morgan: Putting the books on the shelves is really important actually. As a librarian, helping the customers and putting books on the shelves is why I started. I used to always think the fairies used to come in at night and put the books on the shelves but when I became a librarian, that’s what I did.
When I left the library where I was in Kapiti Coast, I was the Libraries and Arts Manager. I had about 46 staff and I managed four libraries. It was a big job and I really enjoyed it, but I must say the best part of it was helping the customers. And as you rise in an organization and hierarchy, sometimes you miss that connection with the community, and that’s what I really loved.
Loving being a librarian
So a lot of the time, the community would find me downstairs, putting books on shelves. I couldn’t do it all the time, but when I could I’d nip down and do that and then help with inquiries because that’s why I became a librarian in the first place. I think if you lose sight of your community and what’s important to your community, then you’re not doing your job.
That probably ties in with my books. I try and figure out what’s important to that community, and what’s important to that community is important to the people. My stories have to reflect that and what my characters do reflects that. My readers love it because they can see similarities with some amazing things that are happening in their communities and it makes them feel good. So it’s a win-win situation.
Jenny Wheeler: Looking over your career, is there one thing you’ve done more than any other that you would credit as being the secret of your success?
Leeanna Morgan: There are probably two things. The first thing would be to set a realistic goal of what you want to achieve when you first start writing. Some people might want to write a family history and the only people who are going to read it are their family. So they’re very happy, doing what they’re doing.
For me, when I wrote Forever Dreams, it was to write a book that one person apart from my mum would read and enjoy. I thought that was an achievable goal. That goal has changed over the years, but I always try and keep things realistic because you don’t want to set yourself up to fail. Writing is not easy, and it takes a community to support you with family and friends. You can’t do it on your own. So that’s important.
The other thing I did really well is, before I even started writing Forever Dreams, I had a clear idea of the market, and I didn’t reinvent the wheel. I didn’t try to do things differently than what was working well.
Avoid re-inventing the wheel
I’ll give you an example. When I started writing Forever Dreams, I really enjoyed that, so I wrote another book. Then I thought, I’m writing a series. I looked at what some really good authors were doing who were selling a lot of books and had really good reputations.
I looked at what they did for their marketing – how they structured their series, the markets they were tapping into, the audience they were tapping into, the themes they were using and looking at what resonated with the readers.
That’s when I started putting my business hat on. My business hat didn’t kick in for probably 12 to 18 months after I wrote my first book. That’s when I started thinking about the long-term impact of the series. It’s important to think about that.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned to me, off-air, that you slightly changed the heat level of your romances from when you began. Tell us a little bit about that as well.
Leeanna Morgan: When I wrote Forever Dreams, when I first started writing, self-publishing was seen as something you did if you couldn’t get a traditional contract. So I wrote Forever Dreams for Harlequin because at that stage, they were the main publisher of romance novels.
There were set criteria in those books that you had to have. In the particular line I was looking at, they expected one or two love scenes, a set limit on words, and lots of other things. Those expectations I followed through into Forever Dreams, because that was the book I submitted to Harlequin to see if they wanted to accept – well, my agent did in the end.
And then adjusting to reader tastes
When I wrote those books, I always had in my head the expectation that I needed to have a love scene or two. Then as I was writing – I think I got to about book four in that series – I suddenly realized it was nonsense. I didn’t have to have love scenes in the books. I had to have love and emotion and respect and intimacy, but my characters didn’t need to make love. So I started changing the way I wrote.
Jenny Wheeler: You yourself are quite a romantic in your personal life. I seem to recall hearing about a trip you and your husband made to the States to renew your wedding vows. Tell us about that.
Leeanna Morgan: We had a wonderful time, Jenny. Tim and I were celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary and we decided to go to Las Vegas and, as part of another small trip we were doing, renew our wedding vows with Elvis. We were serenaded by this amazing man who impersonated Elvis, and we had a big limousine ride. It was fantastic. Our daughter was our flower girl, and our son was our best man and mum was there to walk me down the aisle. It was absolutely wonderful.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. I think there’s a link back to your first book, isn’t there? Didn’t one of your characters get married at Las Vegas?
Family fun at a Las Vegas wedding
Leeanna Morgan: She did. Gracie got married at Las Vegas. It was like a full circle of life, a coming around point, and it felt wonderful to do that. When I’d written that scene in Forever Dreams, it was just imagination and, again, doing a bit of research on the internet. But to do that ourselves, it was just magic, it was wonderful. Although her circumstances weren’t quite the same as ours, so it’s quite interesting.
Jenny Wheeler: Did you find your research was pretty accurate when you went through it yourself?
Leeanna Morgan: It was, but I liked our Elvis better. He was amazing. He had the wiggle on his hips. Really good.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Leeanna as reader, because this is The Joys of Binge Reading and we like to give people some recommendations for books they might not have discovered yet. I imagine you are a big reader, being a librarian at one stage of your life. Tell us about your favorite reads and if you’ve got something you’d like to recommend to readers and listeners.
Leeanna Morgan: I like reading lots of books and I read a lot more when I was a librarian, but my favorite books – anything by Nora Roberts or Janet Chapman I adore. Also, a gentleman called Matthew Reilly. He writes kind of James Bond on steroid books.
Favorite books – modern and classic
The book I really, really enjoy and I always go back to, is a book called Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts. It’s about a 17-year-old girl called Novalee Nation who hates the number seven, because it’s really bad luck for her.
She’s seven months pregnant and her boyfriend leaves her in the parking lot of a Walmart store in the States. It’s about her survival and the friends she makes in the small town and the characters. Billie wrote everything so vividly. You could imagine yourself being in Novalee’s shoes and going through everything she went through. That would be my absolute favorite pick for everyone to read.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s funny, I’ve got a book like that. I picked it up when I was coming home from university on the bus in one of those country cafes with one spinning book stand.
It was called By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It was by Elizabeth Smart, who I’d never heard of before but discovered later was a well-known poet and it was a so-called fictional story, although it was actually based on her own life I discovered years later.
A young woman in exactly that situation as well, left by her boyfriend pregnant. And it resonates, I think, even being in a slightly older age group, speaking for myself, because when I was younger it was still a very difficult thing, if you became pregnant without having a husband at your side. Those books do seem to resonate, don’t they?
Leeanna Morgan: They do. There is something that pulls at the heartstrings. This book has actually been made into a movie, years and years ago. It was a good movie, but the book was so much better. It was so vivid and the characters – I suppose, because you’re using your own imagination instead of watching someone else’s imagination unfold. It’s a beautiful book.
Jenny Wheeler: We are coming to the end of our time together so circling around and looking back over this amazing career you’ve had – it’s only part of your life, but it’s been a remarkable part of your life – at this stage, if you were doing it all over again, is there anything you would change about it and if so, what would that be?
Looking back over time
Leeanna Morgan: I don’t think there’s anything I would change too drastically. I think I made some good decisions before I started writing. There are two things I would do. One is I would have joined the self-publishing world a lot earlier.
I left it until 2014. In the early days of self-publishing, around 2011, there were far less authors, so you had a much easier way of bringing your books to the reader’s attention and building a lovely readership. Now it’s a lot more difficult, it’s still not impossible by any means.
The second thing I would do, if anyone is listening, that you can put into action now, would be to start your newsletter as soon as you think you will be writing a book.
Make a website. There are some wonderful free website templates like Wix or Weebly. They don’t cost anything and you can start encouraging people and building interest in what you’re writing by having a newsletter on there that people can join. You can start sending people little snippets of what you’re doing.
That’s really important as you grow your career, to be able to have that contact with readers without having to go through retail groups or other promotion companies to let them know what’s happening.
Jenny Wheeler: Do you mind me asking, how many people do you have on your newsletter list now?
Leeanna Morgan: I’ve got about 10,500. I don’t actively grow that now, I just let it grow spontaneously. That’s a good number. A lot of authors have much more than that, but that works for me at this stage.
Where to find Leeanna online
Jenny Wheeler: For out and out fans, which is what you’re supposedly looking for, that’s a very nice number to base a career on. I see you’ve also got 53,000 or more BookBub followers, which is a huge fan base you’re providing entertainment for.
Leeanna Morgan: I really don’t know how it happened, but the numbers keep ticking over. I think that’s the power of BookBub – they can reach so many readers and people enjoy what I’m writing. It’s wonderful to have a company like BookBub who keep in contact with those followers and let them know when new books are out or when there’s a sale on one of your books.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s certainly validation for what you’re doing. What is next for Leeanna the writer? What projects have you got under development for the next 12 or 18 months?
Leeanna Morgan: My next series is called Return to Sapphire Bay, which we touched on. That’s probably the next 10 months of my life, back in Sapphire Bay. The following series is also going to be set in Sapphire Bay and they are about some little cottages that a group of people are going to renovate.
I’m really looking forward to writing those. That will be most of 2021 and 2022 sorted out. I don’t want to look too far afield because I might have a brainwave in between those two and do something completely different in 2023.
Jenny Wheeler: I guess from what you’ve said that the 2021 one would already have the covers and blurbs done.
Leeanna Morgan: Yes, they’re all done and all available for pre-orders. I’m looking forward to writing them. There are some wonderful storylines and some heartwarming, emotional scenes that I can see in my head already for each of the books.
What’s coming next for Leeanna
They are about four sisters who return to Sapphire Bay and the sisters are as different as chalk and cheese. It’s going to be an interesting journey, the next 12 months.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. You sound as if you’ve got a great relationship with your readers. How do they find you online and where are you most active?
Leeanna Morgan: The easiest place to find me is via my website. Readers can go to Leeanna Morgan.com and I’ve got all my contact details there as well as some of the free books that are available. Or you can go to my Facebook page and the link is there as well, on my website. I’m happy to receive emails. I love hearing from everyone, so feel free to contact me.
Jenny Wheeler: I’m sure people have heard what a friendly, approachable person you are, and you will have lots of them getting in touch.
Leeanna Morgan: That would be wonderful.
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks so much for your time today, Leeanna. It’s been great talking to you.
Leeanna Morgan: You’re very welcome, Jenny.
If you like Leeanna’s sweet small town romance you might also enjoy Australian author Alissa Callen’s uplifting country town romance – some set in Australia and some – like Leeanna’s books – in Montana.
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 light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at abe@pointandshoot.co.nz