'Fierce female friendships and lashings of magic': Steffanie Holmes

Photo Credit: Charles Brooks

Steffanie Holmes is a USA Today bestselling author of paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and supernatural mysteries. Her books feature clever, witty heroines, dark and gothic settings, cunning witches, and a dash of sadistic humour. Before becoming a writer, Steffanie worked as an archaeologist and museum curator. From Dark Age Europe to crumbling gothic estates, Steffanie is fascinated with how love can blossom between the most unlikely characters. Steffanie lives in New Zealand with her husband, a horde of cantankerous cats, and their medieval sword collection.

Kete spoke to Steffanie about her latest novel, A Grave Mistake, and what inspired her to write about a book club with vampires.

Kia ora Steffanie, great to chat to you. A Grave Mistake came out in January and is the sequel to Fangs for Nothing. Vampires, tea, cake and a book club! What inspired you to set this series in a book club/coven? 

Thank you so much! The Nevermore Murder Club and Smutty Book Coven series is a spinoff of my popular Nevermore Bookshop Mysteries series, which is set in this magical bookshop where the love interests are villains from classic literature. I wanted to write another series set in the bookshop but needed a theme to tie it together, and I thought it would be fun to do a book club filled with fierce female friendships and lashings of magic.

Is your ideal reader for it a book club member? Who do you hope will pick it up?
My audience are romance readers – many of them typically read darker fantasy romance, and my books are the perfect palette cleansers between their huge fairy smut tomes. I think my readers love that I celebrate reading and being in a community of readers, and poke fun of romance and other genres in a loving way. 

It’s been so neat to get fan mail from book clubs who are reading the book together and creating Nevermore Coven-themed evenings with hot chocolate and tarot cards and vampire-themed snacks.

You’ve self-published over thirty novels and have tens of thousands of followers, but this one is published by Simon & Schuster. Have you found the process markedly different, and how do you feel about it?

It’s been a real adventure learning about all the differences, and all the things I didn’t know I didn’t know about the world of traditional publishing. 

I’m used to focusing on digital sales, but because trad is focused on physical books, I’ve had to learn how to tease and launch a book where I’m asking readers to go into a bookstore and order a copy, versus click on a button. We’ve done some fun launch events in Auckland, Wellington, and Hastings (including pole dancers and burlesque performers to go with the theme of A Grave Mistake) and I commission a lot of artwork that we give to bookshops as incentives for them to promote the books.

I love the editing process, and I think these books are the best I’ve written because of the editorial input from Anthea and her team at Atria Australia. I love having a few of the marketing tasks taken off my plate, although I still do the bulk of this myself. No one knows how to promote your book like you do! And I LOVE seeing my book in bookstores all over the world. I don’t think that will ever get old.

I’m definitely not giving up on indie (I have one indie release coming out this year), but at the moment, I’m loving having a publisher on my team and seeing how they can help my books soar.

What’s been the best part of writing A Grave Mistake?

My research trip to Paris was pretty magnificent, but I think the best part for me was getting to write a heroine like Arabella, who is very different to me. We all have those people in our lives who are so confident that they border on arrogant and always have the perfect comeback, and whether we love or hate them we sometimes wish we could be them, and so it was fun to inhabit her mind for a whole book.  

And moving away from writing, what’s been your best read in the last year? 

The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow is probably going to be my favourite of this year even though I only read it in January, but I also read recently and adored Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schaub, and We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer.

What Aotearoa New Zealand book do you wish you’d written?

Cassie Hart’s Butcherbird, so creepy, so funny, so haunting and beautiful.

And last, but definitely not least, what are you writing next? 

I’ve just handed in book 3, which is called You’re So Vein, so I’m tinkering with a couple of secret projects at the moment while I wait to see if the publisher wants a fourth book in the series – a cosy horror about a haunted house I visited as a teenager, and something I’m calling the ‘haunted museum book.’

A Grave Mistake by Steffanie Holmes is in all good bookstores now.