Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Natasha Preston who has had a really interesting and amazing career. We're gonna be talking about The Island, which is her newest release coming on February 28th. But first, I wanna talk to you specifically about the beginning of your career because you have a very interesting career path in that you got started on Wattpad. And Wattpad was really something that launched you in a pretty big way. I think your name is probably the one that comes up the most whenever people talk about Wattpad and success in that arena. So, if you could talk a little bit about that and how that was so integral to your beginnings.
Natasha: Completely. I didn't even start writing before I found Wattpad. So I wouldn't be here at all today if it wasn't for that. It was about 2010, and I was just scrolling through the app store and I came across Wattpad. So I downloaded it and started just as a reader for quite some time before I decided that actually I have some ideas inside of me as well, and then I started to upload chapters.
Mindy: And Wattpad is one of those things where it really is driven by word of mouth. It's driven by readers really liking and engaging with that content and then telling other readers about it. For me, I really think it is just one of the best examples of true word-of mouth grassroots fan-based readership.
Natasha: Yeah, definitely, and I met a lot of people through Wattpad. Some of them I'm still in contact with now. So you build a lot of friendships as well, and these people recommend you and you recommend them.
Mindy: I know that you had such great success there on that platform. Did you then decide to move out of that realm and look more into the realm of traditional publishing? Or were you doing so well, the agents and editors approached you?
Natasha: My friend, who was also on Wattpad, Kirsty Moseley, she self-published her first book, and she encouraged me to do the same. So I actually self-published first, and then my publisher, Sourcebooks, in the US, they picked up The Cellar. So then they traditionally published that one.
Mindy: Yes, and The Cellar was your first book that came out in the US. Ridiculously popular. So, I was a YA librarian. I worked in a public high school for 14 years. So, The Cellar came out in 2014, and I just remember all of my students were so in love with it. I couldn't keep it on the shelves. Colleen Hoover before TikTok. That's kind of what The Cellar was like, and then your subsequent titles as well. Something else that I wanted to talk to you about was your cover art. In the US, they're very stark, and they're very striking. Very much look like thriller covers almost even for adults. Your covers are amazing, and I think that that has been part of the appeal. Of course, just getting the eye drawn to get people to pick it up. Are your covers the same in the UK?
Natasha: Yeah, they are the same. I love them.
Mindy: Yeah. They are really beautiful. Did that come about through your publishers? Or you had something in mind already? Did they just happen to strike gold the first time?
Natasha: Pretty much gold, yeah. So when it was on Wattpad, I had a flower image on the cover of that one. The characters are renamed after flowers, so it was kind of pretty organic to have a flower theme.
Mindy: It really is. It's perfect. And then your subsequent titles, they match. Your publishers do a great job of branding you. It's kind of like Stephen King or Jodi Picoult's... When you see the cover, I don't even have to see your name to know that it's your book because the covers are so distinctive.
Natasha: Yeah, yeah. They’ve done a phenomenal job of carrying that through.
Mindy: So your next release, your newest release, is The Island. It revolves around 6 teen influencers who have accepted invitations to an all expenses paid trip to a luxury resort and amusement park. And then of course, when they get there things suddenly go quite wrong. I would love to hear more about where you got the idea for this book. I love that you're operating with kind of that closed room mystery in the sense that the room is an entire island and there are rollercoasters on it.
Natasha: Yes, it's pretty much... I think I was flicking through Instagram, and I was seeing like all these influencers. And they are rich! The idea came from that. Putting them all together and seeing what would happen if they are in a place where they can't escape. And I feel like quite a lot of influencers would go to an island if they were invited.
Mindy: Yeah, definitely. It's kind of like the Fyre Festival. Do you remember that?
Natasha: I don't.
Mindy: Fyre Festival... It was a US thing, so it is possible it didn't hit the news so much there in the UK. But Fyre Festival was this really hyped, big party. They had these promo videos made and it was like, "you were going to be hanging out with very rich, very beautiful people. Buy your tickets now. It's gonna be amazing." And then people got there and it was like hot dogs on sticks. Drift wood for your pillow. There was nowhere to pee. It was really bad.
Natasha: Oh no.
Mindy: It was really, really bad. Tell us a little bit more about The Island. What are your characters like? Because influencers in particular... I go back and forth. I'm a difficult person. I'll just say that. I'm a difficult person. Traditional marketing just doesn't work on me. I'm always a little bit cynical, and I'm always suspicious. So whenever someone is trying to sell something to me, I immediately shut down, and I'm just like, "No. I don't like you, and I don't want what you're selling."
Natasha: I don't believe you.
Mindy: Exactly. It also makes it difficult for me whenever I'm trying to think about marketing my stuff, because the traditional stuff that does work, I never wanna do that because it doesn't feel genuine to me. So talk to me a little bit about your characters and where you got the ideas for each of them as individuals because you are writing 6 different characters.
Natasha: Yeah, so the gamer, two beauty bloggers, Paisley, who is like a main character, she reports crime - love her - and then we have Harper who is book reviewer. So they all have very different personalities. Some of them are pretty cocky entitled. And then some of them are a little bit more reserved, and they grow throughout the book. Obviously, when somebody is out there trying to kill you, you have to try and mesh all these personalities together so they can defeat the bad guy together and get through it. And also one of them could be the killer.
Mindy: I think that would be very challenging. I tend to keep my casts pretty small - two or three like maybe four, and then some peripherals. But I think writing six and trying to build them and, of course, give all of them their own layers as well, and still creating a little bit of suspicion so you're keeping that mystery going for each one of them... I'm sure that was challenging.
Natasha: I did kill one of them pretty early so... It took it down a little bit.
Mindy: Did you do much research into influencer culture and what it's like to be an influencer?
Natasha: I did a little bit. It is pretty hard because I think all of them have quite different experiences and how they're perceived and how people react to them. So I didn't want to do too much research. I wanted to be sort of quite organically just writing and then building how I see them. Do you do that? I should really research it, then I get stuck in this "I've researched too much" and it stops being my character. I try to make them something that they never were, if that makes any sense at all.
Mindy: Yes, it does. It makes perfect sense. Absolutely possible to over-research. You could almost get stuck in it, I think, cause you worry so much about getting it right. I write YA as well. But I have an adult book that I would love to get out one day, we'll see. I still have to work on it. But it is set in 1916 during the Spanish influenza. And I was writing a scene... It's set in the US, like in a rural area in a one-room school house. And I was writing a scene where the teacher... 'cause the Spanish flu could drop you very quickly. Your symptoms could just come on and you could become very violently sick and die within hours. The teacher very suddenly - she feels herself getting sick. She knows something's wrong, and so she doesn't want her students to get sick. She runs out of the building as fast as she can, and she's disoriented. She's ill. She also trips and falls, and she rolls down the steps and the kids come out and they're like, "Oh my gosh. What do we do? Should we even touch her?" And in my mind, her shoe had come off, and her shoe was sitting on one of the steps. But would her shoe have come off? What would her shoe have been in 1916.
So I go and I start researching women's footwear in 1916, but it couldn't be like high fashion. It had to be what a middle class rural woman would have been wearing in 1916. So I'm trying to figure all of that out. Eventually I decide no, her shoe probably would not have come off because it would have been a boot, And it would have been the kind that you literally use a crochet hook to finish tying, and it's like "no her boot is not coming off." I mean, I probably did two to three hours of research to figure out if her boot came off. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if her boot came off or not, number one. And number two, a reader probably isn't gonna notice or care, and I literally dropped everything and did not write for three hours 'cause I needed to know if her boot came off. And that is an example of caring a little too much.
Natasha: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And it's so easy to get pulled into that.
Mindy: It really is. Have you ever had that one thing that you just felt like you had to chase down and then you were like, "Okay. That was not worth it."
Natasha: Oh yeah. So, it was when I was writing The Cellar, and he weights bodies, chucks them in the river, and disposes of them. And I'm googling this for a very long time - getting a little worried that someone was gonna see what I'm doing, and I spent hours, "what weight do you need to make sure that they don't come back up?" And I think, "You know what. I could just write, 'He's weighted the body.' They don't need to know exactly."
Mindy: No, you don't. You're right. But that's exactly the kind of thing that will happen to you. That you just end up going down that rabbit hole of wanting to make sure that you're right, and essentially it doesn't actually matter. You're talking about the things that you Google, and then you have to worry a little bit. As a writer, we do end up looking at some things or wandering into parts of the internet or information that we might not necessarily want to be associated with. I can tell you that my ads that I get or on Amazon, when it's like "based on your recent search history you might be interested in... " and it's like, "No. I don't need that bondage material thing." Have you ever researched something like the weighting of the bodies and just been like, "Oh man. I am a little concerned now about my search history." Or also just... "Gosh, I wouldn't want anyone to stumble across this in my browser."
Natasha: Definitely. So when I was writing You Will Be Mine, the killer cuts out hearts. So, I'm googling "how you get to the heart." You ought to get through the rib cage and how you would cut it out. That was interesting.
Mindy: I have definitely searched some things that have skewed my ads. I actually have a friend who writes tech thrillers, and she needed to know how to get a bomb onto a plane. So she just Googled it and tried to figure out how to get a bomb onto a plane. She lived in California, and her husband was a TV producer. He also lived in California, but because of their work, they were at different parts of the state. One of them would fly to the other one every other week. She went to go see her husband, and she had been put on the no-fly list.
Natasha: No. Oh my gosh.
Mindy: Yeah, she couldn't get on the plane. She had a friend in Homeland Security, and she talked to them eventually. And they were like, "Yeah, dude. I can tell you exactly why you are not allowed to fly on planes anymore."
Natasha: Oh no! Did she get off the list though? Is she okay now?
Mindy: She did. She did, but without her friend inside the system to vouch for her who knows how that would have gone? But you gotta be a little bit careful.
Natasha: You do. Yeah, you have to be careful.
Mindy: So, tell me about what you are doing for The Island and press. Obviously, you're doing interviews and you're doing podcasts like this. Post covid... Are you doing much traveling?
Natasha: I haven't very much at all. I would like next year to come back to America. I've been a couple of times. Barnes & Noble events have been so much fun. So this time around, I'm doing an online with Barnes & Noble. Which will be really fun, but it's nice to go to in person, I think.
Mindy: Definitely. I miss being in-person a lot. I have a release in March, and this will be the first time since 2020 that I have done much in terms of actually doing a string of events or tour. I had a book come out in March of 2020, and we shut down over here... Third week of March in 2020 was when the lockdown started. I was touring with two other writers, and we had, I think, five cities right in the middle of March and at our first event, we had people. It was cool. At our second event, we had about half the crowd. At our third event, I think we had four people, and everyone was wearing masks. And at our last event that we showed up to... The book sellers, they were very kind, but they got a hold of us and they were like, "We're closing. There's not gonna be anybody here. Please come, and sign stock. Wear a mask, and go back home." We were like, "Okay." And then as soon as I got home from that tour was when we went on lock down.
Natasha: A similar thing over here. Everything just stopped didn't it? And it's still not picked back up, I don't think. There's still a lot more happening virtually.
Mindy: Yeah, there has been a lot more virtual events and trying to make things work online and doing zooms and Instagram Live. So, is that something that you have found success with? Do you enjoy doing the online stuff?
Natasha: Yeah, I do. It's still nice to connect with people and booksellers and readers. It's just not quite the same as being able to physically see them and you get to take pictures with people and sign a book for them in front of them.
Mindy: Yeah. I agree. I get energy from other people. That's where my energy comes from... Is from drawing off of others. And when I can get them excited, then they're feeding me back, and we just get a nice little feedback loop. And there is so much about that that is organic, but there's also... There's a real presence that is necessary in order to make that happen. I don't know. I feel like it's hard to get that same feeling and to build that same energy when you're doing it virtually.
Natasha: Yeah, when you're just on your own, it's not the same.
Mindy: Yeah. It's really hard to generate excitement for yourself. Well, and speaking of that, generating excitement for yourself... How was it for you writing over covid? I know a lot of writers struggled with being on shutdown, first of all just emotionally and mentally, but also just being creative and finding ways to write or things to write about. Suddenly we had all the time in the world, but we needed to have the drive.
Natasha: Yeah, no, actually, I was great during lock down. I mean, I had my children at home which I had to home school. So that was a little bit of a battle, but... No, it was great. I would get up at six. I would probably write a couple thousand words, and then the children would get up. I was on it. That hasn't happened since... It ended.
Mindy: So, is that your typical approach? Do you have a word count for the day that you like to hit?
Natasha: Yeah. Typically, I try to... 1500-2000 words, and I'm generally happy with that.
Mindy: I always say minimum 1000. If I can get two, that's amazing. 15 is a nice, nice little bonus. Do you write every day then?
Natasha: Every weekday usually. On the weekends I keep my children at home, so... Yeah, every weekday... Go drop them off and come home and just sit in front of the computer until I'm happy with my word count.
Mindy: Yeah, and that's something that a lot of newer writers or writers that are trying to finish their first book talk to me about. Tips and tricks. They're like, "How do you write a book?" And I'm like, "Well, unfortunately, the only answer is you have to sit down and do it."
Natasha: Yeah. You have to be quite disciplined 'cause when you are just at home, there's so many things you could do. You need to make yourself have that time.
Mindy: Yes. And writing is hard. I will do anything other than write.
Natasha: That's exactly what I do. I'll check social media, and I'll do some other things. And I tell myself I'm being productive by doing different posts here and there and answering emails, but it's really just putting off starting writing.
Mindy: That is exactly accurate. Yes. I have been working really hard for three hours, and it's like, No, you haven't... Actually you haven't done anything. So speaking of social media then... What has your experience been like with social media kind of changing? 'Cause you came out right around the same time that I did. The Cellar was published in 2014. My first book came out in 2013, and when we were first out in the world and publishing, social media was very text-based. It was tweets. It was Facebook posts. And then Instagram came along, and it was pictures. But now suddenly, it's videos, and it's music. And it's whatever the trends are. It's just more time consuming than I'm willing to put into now. It's like, I can have a thought, and I can have a one-off. And I could tweet that 10 years ago, and that was good. And people were like, Yes. And they would interact with that. And it's like, now I have to make a video, and I have to be using the right filter, and I have to have whatever song is popular right now. And for me, I've just kind of stepped back from that a little bit because like we were just saying, I can get too sucked into that and put a lot of time into it when I should be writing.
Natasha: I completely agree. My heart is still in 2014 where you could just pop a post up every couple of days, and that was great.
Mindy: Yep.
Natasha: It's a lot of work now. It's more interactive, I think, and I do like that. But you can spend hours where you used to just spend a few minutes, and it does take away from your actual writing time.
Mindy: I agree. I feel too that things are more crowded. I was on TikTok for about five minutes. I have an account there, but I very rarely post because I would put together something, and it took me so long to put it together, and then I would put it out there. And it's like if the algorithm doesn't basically choose you, you're not going to get a lot of reach with that. And it's like, man... And granted... Learning curve. I didn't really know what I was doing, and so it took longer. But I would just be like, "Oh my gosh. I just spent an hour making this 15-second video, and 40 people saw it." I say that as someone that definitely has not figured out how to use TikTok. I will say this though. The nice thing about TikTok and booktok... The readers are the ones that are generating the content. There's not so much responsibility on us to generate it. If they can do it, that's great.
Natasha: I mean, if someone out there just wants to do all that for my books, that would be fantastic.
Mindy: No, I agree. Whenever anybody is like, "Oh my gosh. I read your book, and I loved it." I'm like, "Cool. Are you on TikTok?" Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find The Island when it comes out on February 28th, and where they can find you online.
Natasha: The Island is to be in stores in America. So, it will be in Barnes & Noble for sure. Everywhere else, it's going to be online. So yeah, it's where you can get The Island. And you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. All of them. Just Author Natasha Preston.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.