We recently connected with Rachel Scott and have shared our conversation below.

Rachel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?

In terms of being an author, my goal always has been and always will be to ensure that no one feels alone. That people never look at mine or another person’s success and think that it’s only attainable for certain people. I want every aspect of my work to be transparent. For my journey as a writer, I want other writers to know that I’m just a girl who felt lost and afraid, which gave me the push of bravery that I needed to chase my dream. I want other writers to see that you don’t have to be perfectly prepared or perfectly knowledgeable. I want them to know that whatever fears or anxieties they have, they’re not alone in them. Even with readers, I want them to walk away from my books feeling seen and understood. Which is why I have a tendency to insert myself into my stories on a fairly vulnerable level. Because I think things like shame and loneliness and pain fester and grow in the silence. So if I’m honest about my feelings and my experiences, then maybe a reader will leave my book feeling like someone out there gets it. That’s the legacy I want to leave behind in life. That at the end of the day, I could help make someone feel understood.

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’m a former teacher turned self-published author. I substitute taught for a few years and taught full time for just one year before leaving it behind. The short of it is that the opportunity to continue teaching in my school suddenly closed, and I felt like God had released me from continuing on that path. It took me a few months to pursue my dream job, because at the time, I didn’t believe that I could ever make my dream job happen. But finally, I just decided to take the plunge. I knew nothing about self-publishing, but I knew how to write. I’d been drafting books since middle school, so I took my passion, my inexperience and my desperation to finally be happy in a career and dove in. I’ve been publishing for two years now. I write romantic fantasy of many varieties. From urban fantasy to classic fantasy. My books are always clean and wholesome, but also snarky and fun. It’s been a process in the last two years to figure out my writing style and what stories I want to tell. Turns out, writing for an audience versus just yourself is a very different process. But I’m finally at a place where I’m very proud of what I create, and I feel that my books are a good representation of me. A lot of writers choose characters and might add one or two anecdotes about themselves to add to the story, but I work quite the opposite. What readers might notice is different about my books is that every character has a layer of depth to them that came straight from me. Most notably is my debut book, in which the main character was based on me and shares just about all of my feelings and experiences. And since that book published, it’s been my goal to continue writing characters that feel vulnerable and authentic. With a dash of snark and sass, of course! Recently I’ve been rapid-releasing an urban fantasy trilogy that, although it’s not quite as close to my heart as my debut simply because of the sentimentality, it’s the best representation of what I want to do. It’s a fun, snappy, book that features a snarky heroine (that’s definitely something that came from me) and lots of clean romance. But it also has some mysteries and layers of plot to solve. It’s taken some time to find a balance between the lighter, faster paced style of many romance books, and the deeper, more lyrical style of many fantasy books. But this trilogy (called A Tale of Ribbons & Claws) is exactly the kind of story I plan to continue writing.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When I first started publishing, my books were very long and of a much slower pace. I’m immensely proud of them, they’re beautifully written and incredibly honest. But they didn’t sell well. I asked a fellow author why this was, and she said either the books weren’t getting enough eyes on them, or they just weren’t resonating with people. And at the time, that kind of response hurt a lot. These books were very personal for me, so to have people not love them felt like a big blow. But after some time to think, I started to wonder what it was about my books that wasn’t resonating. I’d already read in a few reviews that people found the story to be a little slow. Which is fair given that book two was 700 pages long. So I bought a book called Writing to Market by Chris Fox. In it, he talks about researching other self-published books in your genre that are selling well. And that’s what I did. I found that most people who wrote fantasy or urban fantasy and sold lots of books were writing 300-400 page books. Many of them had much more romance than mine (still clean, just more of it). And they were all snappy. Kind of that slightly Gilmore Girls style of fast, snarky writing. And as I did this research, I realized that writing snappier, more romantic books sounded right up my alley. The real challenge was shortening my writing style so that I was now writing shorter, slightly more chopped sentences. It took some time, but I did end up finding a style that combined my natural rhythm with the faster, cleverer style that I was wanting. And now my books sell better and I didn’t have to ‘sell out’ and completely change myself to do it. The trick with business isn’t molding yourself into what other people are doing. It’s about finding out what sells well, and what pieces of it fit with what you love.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

This one has been a new discovery for me. Selling books can be hard because the content you’re selling doesn’t change unless you write a new book. And as one can guess, writing a book isn’t easy nor is it a short process. So marketing generally looks like a lot of social media and a lot of repetitive posts about the same five books. The downside to this is that readers can only see content about the same books for so long before they get sick of it. And reaching a new audience with that kind of content is really challenging. I personally have always despised creating and posting marketing content. It feels dry and boring and I annoy even myself with it. So lately, I’ve been taking a different approach. I realized that my favorite authors to follow are the ones who show behind the scenes things. They talk about themselves and their process and their lives, not just their books. Which works perfectly for me, because my mission has always been authenticity–which is why I struggled so much with marketing. So I started posting non-book related things. Posts about my week, about how my writing is going, what I’m doing over the weekend, how I’m struggling. I started doing a few Instagram lives while I got ready in the morning, and talked about a little bit of everything. I also started a YouTube channel with a vlogging approach to my videos. I’m still a small-time author and I by no means have a large following, but it’s grown in the last month at a much faster rate than it has in the last year. For me, the key to building a community with my readers has been to be as ‘me’ as I can. Turns out, people like getting to see real people, not just ads.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://rachelescott.com/
• Instagram: instagram.com/res_writer_chick/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/241129281858337/permalink/244316454872953/?mibextid=W9rl1R
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RachelEScott-sg2py