convincing you to grab DO YOUR WORST for $4.99 w/ bts content

or at least, a brief attempt

hi there -

this isn’t your normal bi-monthly(ish) edition of this newsletter. but my phone informed me (seriously, I got a notification from Apple Books) that my third book—Do Your Worst: an enemies-to-lovers adventure romcom that takes place in a cursed Scottish castle—is on sale for an indeterminate amount of time and I thought you might like to know.

in case this is the first you’re hearing of DYW, here’s one of those trope summaries that people either love (me, I do) or hate (if that’s you, sorry, I guess)

as far as I can tell, the ebook is on sale across retailers in the U.S.

here are a few places you can grab it from:

• Bookshop (support indie bookstores!)

• Apple Books

• B&N

• Amazon

to celebrate the sale, I thought you all might a little peek into some of its origin story.

first up, the title.

I will be honest, up until this book, I didn’t love any of my titles. they were more late-in-the-process sales strategies informed by my publisher, modeled after other well-performing romcoms at the time, than anything else. and hey, I consider myself very pragmatic but The Roommate was originally called *Never Have I Ever when we sold it and I was super attached to that name (as I imagine many debuts are with their first title) and had a hard time seeing the book as anything else.

*This was before the Mindy Kaling Netflix show came out, but in hindsight I’m glad we didn’t end up having to compete with that for SEO.

With the book that would become DYW, I was determined to think of a title earlier in the process and this time, I wanted a list of options I liked in case one got axed for whatever reason. as you can see below, as a title placeholder, I called the book “curse breaker” from its inception. the ones with the * were my preferences and after much informal polling, we settled on “Do Your Worst” (I’m glad no one voted for ‘Do Your Cursed’ smh).

do you have a fave among the alts? lmk in the comments!

I thought you might also like to see an alt cover sketch.

We worked with a new artist, Roxie Vizcarra for DYW (and also later for Fan Service) and I was blown away by how talented she is. She was able to combine elements of both of these sketches for us and to add in hand-lettering for the title, which is one of my favorite parts.

we ended up going with an amalgamation Clark for the final, and to me he is perfect :)

Okay that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this little BTS look! not to be alarmist, but if you wanna grab the book on sale, i’d act now because I have no idea how long this sale will last.

I’ll be back with a normal volume of tender, thirsty, ambitious later this month. Until then—stay soft of heart, lusty of mind, and when it comes to making art, always swing for the fences!