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Susan May Warren is a RITA and Christy award winning inspirational suspense author with over 100 contemporary and historical romances published in more than 20 languages.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today Susan May talks about the adventure suspense she writes that takes her characters all over the world. She tells how she got started with her writing isolated in a Russian winter, and about her passion for mentoring beginner writers.
Don’t forget you can get exclusive bonus content, like hearing Susan’s answers to the five quickfire questions, by becoming a Binge Reading on Patreon supporter for the cost of less than a cup of coffee a month.
These are the links for this episode:
The True Lies of Rembrandt Stone (With James L Rubart and David James Warren – a new time travel series.
https://www.amazon.com/The-True-Lies-of-Rembrandt-Stone-6-book-series/
Sky King Ranch Series https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58301634-sunrise
Deep Haven Collection : https://www.susanmaywarren.com/series/deep-haven-collection/
Tricia Goyer, with her Big Sky Montana series.
Lynette Eason Elite Guardians Series hal edrod
Rachel Hauck Heart’s Bend Series
Hal Elrod Miracle Morning: https://halelrod.com/
Tari Faris – Christian romance
Ronie Kendig: https://www.christianbook.com/page/fiction/fiction-authors/ronie-kendig
Melissa Tagg: https://www.melissatagg.com/books
Lisa Jordan: Love Inspired series https://lisajordanbooks.com/
Lori Benton: Historicals: https://loribenton.com/
James Hannibal: https://jamesrhannibal.com/
Natalie Walters: https://www.nataliewalterswriter.com/
Where to find Susan May Warren:
Website: https://www.susanmaywarren.com/
Email: susan@susanmaywarren.com
Instagram: @susanmaywarren
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SusanMayWarrenFiction
Twitter: http://twitter.com/susanmaywarren
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/NorthShoreSuz
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 Susan.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there, Susan and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Susan May Warren: I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Introducing inspirational romance author Susan May Warren
Jenny Wheeler: You have got a remarkable backlist, over 100 published books reaching across 20 different series, and that doesn’t include the standalones and the non-fiction, and a range of different publishers as well. That is a tremendous span of a career. Tell us how all of this got started.
Susan May Warren: That’s a good question. Standing here today, I would have never, ever dreamed that I would be here from where I started. As a writer, everybody has this bug to write. I was always a writer. I wrote my first novel when I was 14 years old, but I never thought I would be a novelist.
I was actually called into missions. I was a missionary for about 10 years with my husband and our four kids. We lived in far east Russia, which is otherwise known as Siberia. It was a very challenging time, but a good time.
During that time, I felt like I was supposed to be writing. I started by writing newsletters and communicating with our supporters back home but eventually stories started to enter into my mind and my heart, and I started to look into writing novels.
I was a graduate of English at the University of Minnesota, so it wasn’t like that was a far leap for me, but I did need to learn how to write a novel.
Susan May Warren got started on her writing in a Russian winter
I started writing novels and I started with a historical tome of Russia. It started in 1938 and went to 1985 or something like that. It was this huge book but it was fun and I finished it. When I finished it, it was like the world opened up to me and I said, wow, I can do this. Then I thought, let’s try it again.
I wrote four novels completely before I was ever published, and I wrote them all while I lived in Russia. I wrote different kinds. One was historical, one was a historical suspense, one was a contemporary romance, and one was a contemporary suspense – trying to get a feel for what I liked. That kind of backfired on me.
I suppose it didn’t necessarily backfire, but what happened was when I finally sold my first novel to Tyndale, they came to me and said, what else do you have? I gave them a contemporary romance series and then I went home. I went to a writing conference, and I had some publishers come up to me and say, what else do you have? I sold the contemporary romantic suspense and then I sold the historical suspense.
Suddenly I had all these different kinds of books out there, these different genres that I was writing in. I even wrote what was called chick lit at the time, now it would be called romcom, a series about a girl in Russia. So suddenly, four or five different genres out there. It was like casting many hooks into the water to see which one hit, I suppose, and we had some success with all of them. Some were more successful than others, and I ended up following that route.
Experimenting at the beginning a good way to explore voice
It was a good way to see what voice was the best. I have to say that I probably enjoy writing historicals the most because I love research, but I find that my epic, romantic adventures are the books my readers most love, so those are the ones I’m invested in writing right now. But that’s how it got started.
Jenny Wheeler: The contemporary romance, the romantic suspense and the adventure are all quite similar, aren’t they, in the sense that you choose similar settings. They are raw, wild settings, small town or rural communities, and the family and community relationships are extremely important as well. Have you done anything at all in a big urban metropolitan center?
Susan May Warren: Yes, I have. In Russia I wrote a number of books set in a city in far east Russia. I had a couple of thrillers set there. Most recently I wrote a book with my son and James Rubart. That was set in Minnesota, in the Minneapolis area.
People will move in and out of big city areas, but I do like the rural settings. I like the small towns. You get to know people, you invest in the people. I think our nation is made up of small towns. We do have big cities of course, but a lot of people long for the nostalgia of small towns, and so that becomes a great place to set a book or a series because you get to know all the people in that town. I love to build those little towns that people can escape to.
Susan May Warren’s new series – Sky King Ranch
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. We like to focus on some of the most recent books and you’ve got a new series just started. The book is Sunrise, book one in the Sky King Ranch series. It is very much romantic adventure/suspense set in Alaska.
Your characters often have military backgrounds and that’s the case with the three brothers who are launching this series. Tell us a bit about that. Do you have a military tradition in your own family that you’re drawing on? Where does that come from?
Susan May Warren: Yes. I’m a patriot and I love my country and I am grateful for the sacrifice of our military to grant us the freedoms that we have. But yes, in my past we have. My husband was in the army and my son is in the navy, so we have that military connection. My husband and I never served. He never served active duty when we were married. He had finished and was on Reserves by that time.
But I was still aware of that, and then of course my son is on active duty right now. I feel like there’s a patriotism, a heart of a hero for men and women both, that serve in the military. I have a great respect for them, so I do enjoy writing military heroes or former military heroes.
Jenny Wheeler: Also, they often are in helping professions. They’re helicopter pilots, running rescue missions or medical teams. That is a very strong theme that comes back again and again – the serving of other people.
A taste for survival stories – with ‘man against the world’ plots
Susan May Warren: Yes, very much so. When I was thinking about writing suspense, there are a few different routes you can go. One is, of course, FBI or the CIA or police stories. But I tend to like the survival stories, the ones where it’s man against world. I am intrigued and impressed by people who put themselves out there for other people, and that servant heart.
I started years ago looking into what makes this kind of hero. Who is this person that would brave a mountain top to go and save a couple of people stuck up there, put their own lives on the line. So, trying to get inside that kind of person and that head, and then build a series about these kinds of people. They are, in my opinion, true heroes. I like the idea of pitting yourself against nature and the elements as opposed to running from bad guys, although I do have those kinds of stories as well.
Jenny Wheeler: Sunrise very much fits into that genre, because you’ve got three brothers, Ranger, Colt and Dodge. Initially their family life is ruptured by a rivalry over the attentions of a girl.
In Sunrise, the first book, that disaster is restored and forgiven. The Alaskan environment plays a huge role in it, but they are very much out there as helicopter pilots and medical teams supporting people. I wondered, have you spent time in Alaska because the Alaskan thing comes through a very strongly.
Alaska: A great location for adventure stories
Susan May Warren: Thank you. Yes, I have. We lived in Alaska for a short period of time when my son was born. We were in Russia, but we decided not to have a baby in Russia, so we flew to Alaska and lived there for a number of months while we waited for him to be born, and then afterwards.
I was there mostly during the Russian winter, September through November, and then later on we came during the springtime and we were there for the summer once. So we have spent considerable time in Alaska, more than just tourists, living the life there. We have a lot of friends who live in Alaska too, so I pulled on them for information.
I love Alaska. It’s so rugged and beautiful, and I think it fits the character of some of my stories, or rather the setting fits the character of my characters, if that makes sense. They’re rugged and wild and they do their own thing and yet they have a beauty to them. I’m very much in love with Alaska.
Jenny Wheeler: Sunburst, the second in that series, is due out next year. You move it to Nigeria and the brothers are battling against a terrorist organization. That’s a complete change of face and location, isn’t it?
Susan May Warren: It is, although I do have them come back to Alaska. I try to keep that central. One thing I love about this series is that it’s very much of a trilogy. You could stand alone with them, but it is better read as a trilogy.
Where Sky King Ranch series goes from here
The first one is about Dodge coming home, dealing with the past, moving forward. We set up the ranch, we set up the life, we set up what’s going on there. At the end of book one something happens, and in book two his second brother, Ranger, enlists him to help their third brother, Colt, who has been taken by terrorists.
Again, the story is not necessarily about bad guys – running after them, shooting and this sort of thing. It is very much a survival story. Ranger gets separated from his team along with the heroine, and they have to survive and make their way back to their team. It’s about how they survive.
It’s set in Nigeria, and I worked very closely with my daughter-in-law who’s from Nigeria to create the setting, the food, the culture and other things in there. It was very fun to work with her on that. I’ve never been to Nigeria, but I’ve seen it through her eyes and she was very meticulous in helping me get it right, so I’m very grateful to her.
Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful. You are a real series expert at this stage. How do you go about setting up a series? How much plotting and outlining do you do ahead of time, and do you know at the beginning how many books you are planning to have?
Plotting series with a long story ar
Susan May Warren: I do. There’s a difference between a series and a collection. A collection can be any number of books. It’s set in the same town and it can be a story about these people and a story about those people or a story about a family or whatever, and they’re in this collection. You can add as many books as you wan
I have the Deep Haven collection. I also have the Christiansen family. That’s a series, but more of a collection. You can add books because we’re continuing on with their lives.
In a true series or a trilogy, you have a story arc. You have something that happens at the beginning that ignites a problem that you’re carrying through and morphing and building on throughout the whole series. I do plot what happens in those. I plot the big stuff for that. In book one, this is what’s going to happen. In book two they’re going to find this clue and deal with this issue. In book three, we’re going to have another problem that’s ignited, and go off course on book four.
I usually do either a five or six book series and I plot them all ahead of time in terms of the big story arc. Then you have to have the story plot, so you have to have the series arc and then the story arc. The story arc is also plottedandgenerally speaking I know what’s going to happen. But the story plot does morph as I write the stories, as I meet the characters, as more things happen, as I discover more issues, so the series arguably stays very much intact, but the story arcs might be a little bit different as we move forward.
Generally speaking, I know what’s going to happen in the whole series before I write it. I’m very much of a plotter. I like to see the future so I can see whether or not it’s going to work.
Co-authoring with Susan May Warren’s son
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned your husband and I was intrigued to see that you have a detective series he has co-written with you. How did that collaboration get underway? It is branded slightly differently from the books that are under your own name.
Susan May Warren: It’s not my husband. It’s my son. My husband is not a reader. He doesn’t even read my books. He has occasionally listened to them on tape, but he’s willing to listen to me plot, so he’s a hero. The real genius is my son. He and I and my good friend James L. Rubart conceived of a time travel series together. I had been wanting to write a time travel series for some time. Jim and I are good friends and we also love time travel together. We actually love the same time travel book.
From there we came up with a series idea, and David stepped in as what we call the Time Lord. He made sure every piece of timey wimey was right, and everything was intact. When we changed something in the past, the future got changed, and then that affected the past again. He kept it all straight for us. He was integral in corralling these two creative minds and keeping everything linear and straight. It was fun.
We had decided to do a pen name because it was all three of us, and we couldn’t figure out whose name to put on the cover first. We ended up doing it by name. Our names are on the covers, but we list them under David James Warren, which is fun.
Sunrise Publishing a new enterprise with other writers
I don’t have my name in there because we are pretending this is a man and it’s first-person and he’s got a masculine voice. I didn’t put myself as the lead author in that because I’m sure people would think, what is a woman doing writing a man’s POV? I know men write women’s POV all the time, but I think there’s a question as to whether or not women can write men’s POV. But I did write it. I was the drafter on it and then I sent it to Jim and he would fix all the girl stuff. Anything I said that was too girly, he’d be like, nope. We were a good team. It was really fun, he is fantastic. Then he voiced it, so that was fun too. We had a narration that went with it and he did all the audio books and they’re fantastic.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. That’s not the only collaboration you’ve done. I noticed that in some of the recent Deep Haven stories, you have a shared collaborator/author with you. I wondered if it was a bit like the James Patterson model of having almost a studio. Is that the way you’re going at the moment?
Susan May Warren: Absolutely. In fact, I started a company called Sunrise Publishing and what we do is take lead authors like me, someone who is established, and we partner them with what we call draft authors or aspiring authors who may or may not have been published but have great talent and skill and are looking for a home and maybe a little bit of guidance.
Mentoring others to help them get published
The lead author takes an established world they have written about, and the draft authors work with the lead author to create stories. For clarity, I actually didn’t write the books. I edited them, I had a strong hand in creating them, but the authors for my series are Rachel Russell, Andrea Christenson and Michelle Aleckson. They wrote the books and then I came on as an advisor. I did do quite a bit of editing and helping them. I am not writing in that series right now, so the goal is for readers to have more books in that series and also to help some new authors find their footing.
It has been a really successful first year for us. We were blown away by the reception. Readers were so thrilled about it, and the writing is really good. Of course, we work them. We call it the Navy Seal Budcamp. It’s called the buds of writing because these authors get put through the wringer.
They come and meet with us for a week and we help them with their story concept. Then they have to send us in synopsis and then a first chapter and then the first three chapters and then the book. Then there’s a rewrite, and usually there’s another rewrite. There might even be a third rewrite and then there’s editing. It is a lot of work. Like I said, it’s boot camp because they progressed quickly and all of them have such amazing talent.
Working to the James Patterson model of publishing
We have now six lead authors and we’re about ready to announce our seventh. We have six seasons of authors coming out, so we’re very excited. Our next lead author is Lynette Eason, and her series is coming out this next year with three very talented writers. It is very much the James Patterson model of publishing.
Jenny Wheeler: Is there any other series particularly that’s working with, or was it mainly Deep Haven?
Susan May Warren: I was the lead author for Deep Haven, so we’re doing that series. Lynette Eason is doing her Elite Guardians series, and her authors have picked three more Elite Guardians that they’re doing. We have a series with Tricia Goyer, with her Big Sky Montana series. There are three authors writing in that series. Rachel Hauck has a series. She has got four authors writing in her Heart’s Bend collection. Each one of them has their own collection and setting and their own authors that they’re nurturing and they grow these books.
Jenny Wheeler: Wow. I see. The sky is the limit with that, isn’t it?
Susan May Warren: It is really fun. The key is finding the right lead author. We’ve been so blessed. We have amazing lead authors.
Jenny Wheeler: Did that partly come out of your work originally in helping to coach writers? Is it a natural development from that work?
Publishing house is the ‘next step’ along from coaching
Susan May Warren: For sure. I run a school for novelists called Novel.Academy. For years I had a coaching service and I have written a number of books on how to write a romance, how to write a novel, this sort of thing. I felt like I was training up all these authors and taking the next step with them would be to bring them to publication.
I couldn’t do that with everyone, and so I had to figure out how to do that correctly and making a separate company to do that. If you’re publishing with us, it’s not a prerequisite to belong to Novel.Academy, although it does train people. We have what we call blind auditions. We don’t know who is auditioning, but I have noticed that many of the people who have auditioned and gotten slots are Novel.Academy members because they’ve been trained how to write. That is a good marriage, but it’s not required and we do keep it separate.
For me, it is a way to finish the race. I’ve started with teaching people how to write and then to bring people into a place where they are getting published is very exciting for me. I love to see authors’ dreams come true.
Jenny Wheeler: You say that your coaching clinic is to “help story tellers who want to change the world create success for lucrative careers”. I wondered, is there one main plank that a beginner writer needs to be aware of or build on to have that outcome?
Susan May Warren: You have to know how to tell a story, so you need to know structure. You need to know how to create a character that is living and breathing, so the fundamentals of writing are very important. Then you need a strategy. I would say that writing a novel, or the key to success, is quality, quantity, quickness.
Crafting a good story one secret of success
You need to have good quality books. That’s the first thing. You need to know how to craft a great story. That’s where a lot of people struggle. They struggle with plotting or they struggle with characterization or emotional layering or pacing, any of those things. Getting them to learn those things is the first thing.
Quantity is teaching them how to create more than one. How do you take a novel and build on it to create a collection or a series or more standalones? The third one is quickness. We are all about time management. How do you create a lifestyle that leaves room for writing? How do you build a career or what kind of priorities and habits do you need to have in order to be a successful author?
We have coupled that with a planner. We have a special planner for people called My Brilliant Writing Planner. It helps people align their values and their joy and their strategies with productive habits and helps them get that story and build that career.
Jenny Wheeler: Bringing it back to you and your personal writing career, what would you say is an ideal working day for you? What plan do you work to?
Susan May Warren: I have what I call writing blocks. I have writing block times. My week is separated into five days of three to four blocks of my day. My early morning block, which is my prep time, I have Miracle Morning, if you know anything about Hal Elrod. Then I have my first block. It may be a writing block, or it could be a marketing block, and then I have two more blocks in my day and all afternoons are writing blocks.
Susan May Warren’s disciplined time management
Generally speaking, Mondays are my business days and I’m working on doing stuff for my companies. Tuesday and Wednesday are completely writing days and I shut off my email and my phone and after my miracle morning, it’s all writing. I usually write about 5,000-6,000 words on those days. Thursday morning, I usually write and then Thursday afternoon, I prep for a class that evening that I always teach on Thursday nights. Friday I call my free day and my free day can be anything. It could be marketing, it could be writing, it could be taking a walk with a friend. It’s just my free day.
My goal is about 15,000 words a week. Sometimes I get to 20,000. Sometimes I don’t have a lot going on with my businesses, so I can write on a Monday afternoon, and I get to 25,000. It depends, but my standard production is 15,000 a week.
Jenny Wheeler: How many books a year do you aim to get through?
Susan May Warren: I usually write one big one at least, so 100,000 words, and then I might write four or five smaller ones around 50,000-70,000 words. I balance that between trad and indie. I’m a hybrid. I leave my nice big books that I consider you sink into and you devour for my trad publishers. Those are the trad books, and then the smaller books which are fun and quick, that you can read on a Saturday afternoon, I leave those for the indie ones.
Creating a wider ‘Susie-verse’ where characters interact
It works out because I will write a big, thick book about a family and their adventures and then the smaller books would be about the people they’ve met in the area, or maybe another little family, or some events that happened, something like that. But all of them mesh together for one solid package.
I call it the Susie-verse. All of my characters now throughout all my series are connected in some way. If you’re reading a book, a character might walk on from another series, and Susan May Warren fans will go, oh, I recognize them. I know who they are. It’s fun to catch up a little bit and see what’s happening with those other characters. That’s a treat I like to give my readers – to see and connect with old characters and catch up with them a little bit.
Jenny Wheeler: And give them a little surprise.
Susan May Warren: Exactly.
Jenny Wheeler: How did your life experience before you started on this amazing career help you get it started? What were the things you’d learned that fed into this success?
Susan May Warren: Like I said, I was a missionary in Russia, so I had a lot of things that happened. My early books were taken from actual events. We had a murder in our city of a couple of missionaries, and so I wrote a thriller about two missionaries who were murdered.
I lived in the north woods in Minnesota for a long time, and we had a lot of hotshots and firefighters and search and rescue up there, because we lived near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and we had catastrophes that happened. I was a skier. I used to love to ski and we’d have all sorts of things that happened there.
How life helps feed into research for Susan May Warren’s books
I’m an adventurous person. I’m a scuba diver. I do a lot of adventuresome things, and you naturally run into rescue divers and people who are in the area of rescue. Then I started making friends as I went along with people who were in the rescue fields. I started to be able to ask questions and attend events and learn a lot more about them. I have been in a couple situations where I’ve had to rescue people, but not on a team or anything like that. But I have done a lot of the things I’ve written about, even jumping out of a plane.
Jenny Wheeler: What was your key goal when you started out? Did you have any idea that you’d reach this level?
Susan May Warren: No, not even a hope. I was a missionary and I felt called to write some books. I wrote, like I said, the history of Russia, this tome that we ended up using as a highchair for the kids. Then I wrote a thriller and then I wrote a historical and then I wrote a contemporary. I was all over the place.
When Tyndale launched me – my first contract was with them – it was contemporary romance. And I was like, okay, but I was still planning to go back to Russia as a missionary. Then those doors closed and my career took off. People have said, did you plan any of this? I said, no, I just walked through open doors.
Author Susan May Warren – ‘I’ve always been a risk taker’
I plan a little bit more now because I know what my readers want and I’m looking forward to giving them this particular series or having them meet these particular characters. But I still am, let’s walk through the open doors. I’m still a person that can take risk. It’s not a problem for me to be like, let’s just try this. I don’t know why. I have always been a risk taker, so I kept pursuing those opportunities and ended up here. That’s how it works.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. This is The Joys of Binge Reading and we like to tap into what you like to read or have read in the past, particularly in this area of popular fiction and binge reading. A lot of your books would lend themselves to being that kind of series binge read. Somebody reads book one and wants to go on with the rest of the trilogy or the collection. What do you like to read and what would you recommend to our listeners?
Susan May Warren: We’ll start with some of my favorite authors. I’m a Melissa Tagg fan. Melissa Tagg is great, she was one of my students and she’s taken off. She’s got some wonderful series set in Iowa, and she’s just got a new book out, Autumn by the Sea. She is a fantastic author. If you just want to read her Christmas stuff, she’s got this collection called One Enchanted Christmas that is delightful. I love her books.
Some of Susan May Warren’s favorite authors
I am a huge fan of another author I’ve taught, which is Tari Faris. She has a small-town series too called Heritage. She has written about five books, I think, but they’re all, again, in this collection. Rachel Hauck – I love her stories. She’s more of a standalone author, but she’s got this Princess Royal series that I love and I’m waiting for book three on it. It’s fantastic.
I’m also a huge fan of Ronie Kendig. I devour everything she puts out. I love the way she writes and can’t get enough of it. She writes military heroes, so for me that’s a real win. I love the military heroes. Melissa Tagg and Tari Faris write small town, and Lisa Jordan who writes Love Inspired also has small towns, so I really love those. Then I love the fantasy. Rachel Hauck has a spiritual depth to her that I love, so I enjoy reading hers. For historicals I love Lori Benton. She is an incredibly talented author and I love everything she writes.
What else have I been reading? I think that’s about it. Oh, I’m reading a James Hannibal series right now. The first one was called The Gryphon Heist and the second one is called The Paris Betrayal. That’s good too. I’ve just started a Natalie Walters book called Lights Out. She is an up-and-coming author.
These are some of the authors I’m reading right now that I’m enjoying. But there are so many. Give me a Jenny B Jones book and I’m so happy for the weekend. She’s great. That’s where I’m at.
What, if anything, would Susan May like to change?
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. That will keep people going for the next year. Looking back down the tunnel of time, is there anything that you would want to change?
Susan May Warren: I wrote all over the place. The wisdom is to find out one genre and own that genre and sit there and be really good at that. I think there is a lot of wisdom in that. For me, I think my writing stretched and grew because I wrote in different genres. I don’t think it gave me as much success as I could have had if I had been like, okay, I’m only writing contemporary romance. But I did like finding my voice and stretching myself.
It depends on your goals. I think I would worry less about marketing and some of those things, and I would spend more time on building that newsletter relationship with my readers and putting out the books they’ve loved. I’ve started to do that in the last seven years and enjoyed digging down into those books they love and giving my readers what they love.
I have stopped looking at bestseller charts. Yes, I still land on the bestseller list and that’s nice, but I have stopped looking at those as a measure of success and I’ve started looking my readers. Are they delighted? Do they feel like they’ve gotten something for their time and effort? Do they send me a note and say, I really love this.
Where to find Susan May Warren online
No one is ever going to read all my books. The whole world is not going to read all my books. I’m not the Bible. I’m one little, tiny author in a mass of thousands of authors, millions of authors. My job is to write the very best book I can for my readers and give it out there and let it be. That’s how I view success. Have I done my very best for today?
I don’t have a lot of regrets. I don’t look back and say I wish I’d done something else. I have written according to my values. I’ve lived according to my values and I feel like I’ve let success be defined more by, have I done my best, and do people enjoy the stories, and I leave it at that.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. You obviously enjoy interacting with your readers. Where can they find you on and offline?
Susan May Warren: I am pretty active on Instagram and Facebook, but my home is my website. If you sign up for the newsletter, you do get a free book, but also I try to send out a newsletter about every three weeks. That’s kind of chatty – here are pictures, here’s what’s happening, here are the books.
A lot of times I’ll get quite a bit of reader mail back and I try to answer as many as I can. It’s fun to build relationships with readers that way, I enjoy that. But otherwise, I’m on Instagram and Facebook too.
Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. I’m absolutely in awe of what you’ve achieved. It’s marvellous. Thanks so much for being with us today.
Susan May Warren: Thanks for having me.
Next week on Binge Reading – award-winning crime with Isabella Maldonado
Jenny Wheeler: That’s it for today. Next week we have as our guest award-winning author Isabella Maldonado who wore a gun and a badge for more than two decades in real life before turning to writing about crime. Her spine-chilling thriller The Cipher is being turned into a movie starring Jennifer Lopez. Tune in next week to hear all about her switch from front-line policing to writing.
You can find the show notes for this episode on the website www.thejoysofbingereading.com and extra bonus content at www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading. We love to hear from you, so give us your comments and suggestions. Keep in touch through our Facebook page. I’m looking forward to sharing Isabella’s story so join us again next week.
In the meantime, thanks for listening and happy reading.
If you enjoyed Susan you may also enjoy Christine Carbo’s Montana Suspense
If you enjoyed Susan May Warren you might also enjoy Christine Carbo’s Intense Montana Suspense stories.
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