Samantha Young
Samantha Young is a Scottish writer of adult and young adult contemporary fiction, as well as adult and young adult paranormal romance. Samantha is a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author.
Tell us about your background/education and what you did before becoming a full time writer.
I was born and raised in Falkirk, which is a smallish town in Central Scotland. After graduating high school I matriculated at the University of Stirling on a film course. That particular degree didn't fit me so I took a year out, working as an administrative assistant for a finance company in Edinburgh. It was there I fell in love with the city and when I was nineteen I moved there to begin a degree in ancient and medieval history at the University of Edinburgh. I graduated with a bachelors degree, but struggled to get into field related employment.
How did you get into the world of writing professionally? When did you release your first book?
I self-published my first book, Moon Spell, in February 2011. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, I struggled to find employment. While I worked administrative temp jobs, I finished the third book in a YA urban fantasy series I'd started to write at university. The first book was rejected by a number of agents and publishers, and after reading about Amanda Hocking's success in self-publishing, I began researching the process and continued to write. Six months after I first started self-publishing, I began earning enough to become a full time writer.
In 2012 I self-published my first adult contemporary romance On Dublin Street and after seven days, word of mouth from bloggers pushed it into the top 100chart on Amazon US and eventually straight into the number one spot. It sat at no.1 for a non-consecutive two weeks and sold almost 200,000 copies in a month. This led to me finding my extraordinary agent and publishing the series with Berkley (Penguin Random House).
Tell us about your writing process. What does your day look like when you're in the thick of working on a book?
I'm always in the thick of working on a book so I have a daily routine and I have to stick to it to make sure the work gets done. I'm an early riser and a morning writer so I'm up at the crack of dawn. My first priority are my dogs, so they get fed, taken care of, given cuddles and then I grab a much needed coffee to sit down and write. I'll write anything between 2-6K words until around 10:00 am. Then I get ready for the day, take the dogs out, run errands such as dropping off signed books to the post office etc.
When I return, I have lunch, then I sit down to either write more words if I feel I didn't get enough done in the morning, or write chapter summaries that I'll use the next morning as a guide. From there I get stuck straight into administrative stuff (answering emails etc) and marketing and publicity items.
Because a lot of my readers are in the US, I try to make my social media presence known in the evening so I'm usually checking in, promoting work, on and off all night before bed. Moreover, I tend to get emails from my agent and publisher, writing partner and author friends later in the evening because of the time difference, so my attention is often diverted to work. Being self-employed, no matter the career, involves long hours. Luckily I love my job.
How do you come up with the characters for your stories? Do you visualize a certain person and base it off them, are they inspired by people you know, etc?
I find inspiration for my characters in different places - from song lyrics, or moments with people I know and love, or from stories I hear from friends and family about people who are strangers to me, about people from their past. I'm often inspired by untold stories; minor characters in books and movies whose stories are never told. They usually fire up my imagination.
I noticed you've found a really charming way to work the Scottish accent into your characters' voices--but it's subtle. How did you decide which words to make sound that way?
Where I grew up the Scottish accent is so strong non-Scots would find it hard to understand us. However, in high school my best friend had a more anglicized accent which rubbed off on me. Furthermore, when I moved to Edinburgh, most of my roommates were American and I had to anglicize my accent even further to be understood. Yet there are still certain words I slip into every day and so for me those are obviously an ingrained part of my dialect.
That's why I chose those words to give my characters' accents the cadence they needed without straining my non-Scottish readers reading experience. It's about balance and that's what I try to achieve.
What's a common misconception about your work that drives you nuts?
That I write 'sex books'. I write love stories. Paranormal or contemporary, I write love stories. There is definitely gender inequality when it comes to the world of romance. When a man writes a romance, he writes love stories. But when women write romance, apparently to those outside of the genre, we write 'sex books'. This misconception about romance books bothered me more when I first started publishing in the genre, but now I focus on my readers and their expectations above those who refuse to acknowledge the genre with respect.
What one piece of advice would you give to a writer who wants to follow a similar path to yours?
To understand that while writing is a passion, publishing is a business. To expect long hours, hard work, and to leave ego at the door before you venture into this industry. My entire career has been built upon learning. Learning from experience, learning from other writers, from my agent, from my editors and from my readers.
It's a fine balance between being willing to soak in the wisdom of others and retain your sense of self as a writer and business person.
