Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Victoria Woods. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Victoria, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

“I really enjoy reading Mafia romance books, but it would be awesome if there were one with South Asian Mafia brothers. Has that ever been done before?”

Ten seconds pass.

“No, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that before.”

Ten more seconds pass.

“I should write one!”

Two important things came from that mental conversation in early spring, 2020. The first was a quick realization, and it was that I was a rather slow thinker. Ten-second blips between strings of thought would never fly for a main character in a novel, so what made me think I was qualified to map out the inner thoughts and feelings of fictional characters for a book?

The other product of that slow series of thoughts came several months later, that November, in the form of my first independently published book, Power.

Jumping from idea to publishing felt much like diving headfirst into a murky lake—the kind where you can’t see the bottom. I was not a risk-taker. I thrived on routine. My days involved sending my kids off to school in the morning, kissing my husband goodbye, and heading off to my job as a pharmacist, and I was too scared to venture into anything different.

Then, the pandemic happened. COVID-19 turned life upside down for everyone worldwide, and especially for me as a healthcare provider. Although pharmacies remained open as essential businesses, the rules had changed. Patients were limited to small numbers at any given time and employees were required to maintain distance from each other in a tiny fishbowl environment. (Things would swing to the opposite end of the spectrum later on with the rollout of the COVID vaccine and I would find myself working more hours than I could mentally handle.) My once hectic pharmacy could no longer accommodate its full staff, and my hours were cut. For the first time, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands, which funnily enough was conducive to outlandish schemes like becoming a published author.

I had always been an avid reader and enjoyed writing, but never had I thought to turn it into a business. Not until the pandemic forced me to. Another thing to note about me is that I struggle with “downtime,” so having extra free time always turns into some sort of huge project creation. And this era of life was a classic example of me revolting against relaxation.

I still have no idea what pushed me to actually start my manuscript—perhaps it was the anxiety I felt as a healthcare provider, over a contagious virus that medication couldn’t cure—but one day, I just pulled out my laptop and started typing out a story. I built a world of two Mafia brothers, Shyam and Jai Sethi, who were born in India and moved to New York. I created plot lines involving their technology company, which they used as a front for their illegal business. I mapped out character arcs, including that of Shyam’s love interest, tech-genius employee Amelia. I painted a story where the villains were actually more good than even realized, and women knew no limits to their power. I included everything that I wished the romance books I loved would, like representation of POC characters. Shyam and Jai simply existed without explanation of their heritage and reasons for living in America, like many other non-POC romance characters are able to.

I was on a high, and my project completely fed my ego.

After five months, my first manuscript was complete—and my ego promptly deflated because I had no idea what to do next. Even now, after having published seven books, drafting a manuscript is still the easiest part of the process. Writing is the perfect complement to my introverted-loner personality, where I don’t need to interact with anyone to create art.

The next step, I learned, was to have my manuscript edited. I was nervous sharing it with another person so soon after creation, but I knew I needed help to clean up my grammar and fix my faulty writing conventions. I found an editor on a freelance-service site, which I went on to use for multiple other book services. The person I chose seemed competent, so I decided to take a chance and forked over the sizeable editing fee and submitted my manuscript. I was a ball of nerves when she returned the manuscript, and I opened it to see her corrections holding my breath. I was expecting terrible feedback, but to my surprise, it wasn’t bad. My manuscript had minimal markings, and I immediately pocketed my worries and began to correct my work with her recommendations.

However, while combing through, I noticed that she had missed some of my errors. My guard immediately went up, and I panicked. I no longer had faith that my manuscript had been edited thoroughly. I had already paid her a large amount of money, and to dip into my budget to have editing done again scared me. But I didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t going to put out a project that was subpar. So, I found another editor from the same service site. This second editor offered to revise a sample of my manuscript as a test run to help me decide if her service was the right one for me. I didn’t know this at the time, but this was a huge green flag for an editor, and an author should really look for an editor offering this service. When she returned my sample, it was covered in red! Every line had multiple mistakes that she had caught. My heart fell to my stomach. I felt like a failure. I knew my manuscript needed help, but I hadn’t realized just how much, and it was shocking. After taking a few breaths and giving myself a peptalk, I replied to her and said that I would like to proceed with her services. It was difficult to face this kind of criticism over my “book baby,” but it was necessary if I wanted to be a legitimate author.

Just as expected, when she returned my manuscript, it was covered in red. It was hard to take hit after hit as I resolved each error, but each fix thickened my skin. And this editor was completely thorough in her work. To this day, I still use that same editor and only trust her with my words. She has made me a better writer with each project we work on together.

Another area that I had no experience in was book formatting. In a truly rookie move, I used Microsoft Word to format. Now that I look back on it, I should have just hired someone to help me with formatting because it was a headache to size an 8.5” x 11” document down to a 5” x 8” book. Even though I now know how to format my own book, I still opt for hiring a formatter because it is just a part of the process that always stresses me out. I’d rather devote that energy to writing my manuscript rather than formatting, if I have the budget for it.

Finally, my manuscript was ready to be shared with the public, and my next step was creating a cover. This was perhaps the most fun part because it was all visual. I found a cover designer with good ratings from the same service site I had been using. After I submitted a quick summary of my book, a rough idea of the cover I wanted, and a blurb for the back cover, the designer went to work. Opening her email with the draft image was surreal. It really hit me in that moment that I had created a book, and this was something I was going to publish. Though I released Power with a new cover this past year, that first cover will always hold a special place in my heart.

I was ready to publish my book in November. I decided to take a leap and throw it up on Amazon. To my disappointment, but not to my surprise, no one ordered my book. I reloaded my KDP dashboard every few minutes, hoping for at least one sale. But I was no one in the publishing community. One fish in a sea of thousands, maybe millions.

All I had to work with was my book with zero sales and an author Instagram account that I had set up in the early stages of writing. I decided to offer my book for free for a few days, and that generated a lot of downloads, getting my eBook into the hands of readers. From then on, it all kind of just spiraled into action. I created a website as a landing page for my book. I interacted with the #bookstagram community that I had become a part of and even reached out to a few #bookstagrammers I was following, offering them a free copy of my book with no commitment to review. I just wanted to spread the word about my book. As more and more readers discovered my book, I found a PR company to help me with promotion. Flashforward to August of 2021, I had turned Power into a four-book series called the Power Series and had amassed a good starter-sized readership, which I continue to cultivate today.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am Victoria Woods, and I am a self-published author in the PNW of dark romance—and sometimes light romance, depending on my mood. My books tend to include diverse couples, reflecting my own mixed roots. I was born in America and belong to the South Asian diaspora, with my mother being Trinidadian and Guyanese and my father being Bangladeshi. Representation of my cultures and the experiences that I’ve had is important to me and I make it a point to incorporate these things into my stories. I’m most proud of including characters of color in romance, a genre in which the majority of authors and the characters they write are white.

I have published seven books and am currently working on two more for release next year. Two of my books have even been translated into Spanish, with one more coming in January 2025. My first book was Power, which featured two South Asian brothers involved in organized crime and using their tech business as a front for their illegal dealings. I had the amazing opportunity to expand their story and have since created an entire Amazon-bestselling series chronicling their misdealings, mishaps, and amorous journeys.

I tend to subgenre-jump, and my next two books after the Power Series were paranormal romances drawing on the Caribbean folklore and ghost stories that terrorized my childhood and robbed me of quality sleep. Numinous is a loose retelling of The Great Gatsby, but in a way that you’ve probably never read before. The prequel, Songbird, explores the human life of a spirit that we meet in Numinous.

I’ve even changed gears from dark subject matter to lighter topics, like in my contemporary romance novel, A Discovery: Love and Other Things. It’s about a bi-racial American woman who participates in an archaeological internship in Egypt, seeking to feel closer to her late Egyptian father. This book explores my personal experience with connecting with my heritage as an American while having lost an immigrant parent. My father suffered from brain cancer in my teen years, and when he passed it felt like my connection to Bangladesh died with him. The story follows Kitty’s realization that she is still very much Egyptian and that her connection could never be severed, despite living in America and not knowing much of the language.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

When a reader says they’ve never read a book like mine before or have never experienced a trope told the way that I have explored it, I find that to be the highest compliment. I pride myself on creating stories that are unique and don’t fit the mold of what is already available. In fact, I sometimes find it difficult to market my books because they’re so different. Like with Numinous, Caribbean lore in romance is not a common trope, and finding graphics with characters of color to market my book was difficult because I needed everything to be a true representation of the breath of the story.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

I’ve had better success with Bookstagram than with BookTok, and I think the reason for that is because it was the community that I originally started out in when I was writing my first book. I find that it is easy to foster relationships with readers because we all have a fundamental interest: books. And whether a reader is talking about my books or another author’s books, it feels effortless to connect with them on our shared interest. I don’t think of my connection with readers as something calculated or a venue to increase sales. I am genuinely interested in their book recommendations and getting to know them as community members, so the relationships are very authentic to me. If I never published another book, I would remain a part of the community because I really enjoy my place in it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.victoriawoodsauthor.com/#/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/victoriawoodsauthor/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/victoriawoodsbooks
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@victoriawoodsauthor

Image Credits
(These photos were all taken by myself or by my husband)