By Zenia deHaven
Zenia: What sparked your interest in cozy fantasy? Are there other genres you want to explore in the future?
Rebecca: Cozy fantasy, at the time that I got into the market, was untapped potential. I found Legends and Lattes in a bookstore in March of 2022 and I knew based on my time at TikTok that it had just sold to Tor. I bought it because of TikTok and I knew that it was a self-published book and finding it in a Barnes and Noble was very weird to me. I didn’t realize that self-published books could be in Barnes and Noble like that. I read the book and thought wow this is the cutest, coziest, quaintest story, I love this. Then I thought, “Wait a minute, why was this book self-published, and in a Barnes and Noble?” Then I found out Tor had purchased it.
It made me realize that cozy fantasy had become mainstream before most of the general public realized it was about to be mainstream. The only way that I knew that was because I spent a lot of time in the traditional publishing space before that point, figuring out what became trends. I watched for eight years as genres came and went. It was very obvious to me to tell that cozy fantasy was about to become one of those genres and I just happened to find it six months before anyone else had.
That’s why I started writing it.
I mostly wanted to test out the experience of self-publishing. I wouldn’t have complained if Tor or another publisher had been interested in the book and that’s exactly what happened which worked out really well for me. But, it was mostly to explore the option of self-publishing because I wanted to use my Emerson degree to teach publishing in a classroom someday. I felt like I couldn’t really be a teacher in that regard if I hadn’t done the things. I wanted to know what the process of self-publishing was and prove that I had done it successfully before I got into a classroom to teach about that process.
The classroom stuff was on pause at that point because the book stuff did well enough that I had other things to focus on. But, it was a really cool experience in regards to cozy fantasy. It wasn’t any one thing about the genre. I think it was just a lot of little things, like I think I’ve always been a cozy fantasy writer in my brain because I was waiting for lower stakes.
I wanted lower stakes.
Whenever I was writing with my agent, she kept saying, “Amp up the stakes, more, more, more. Add an assassination, add a war, add a plague.” And I was like, “Oh my God, can’t they just have a cup of coffee?” You know? Like can’t I just have them have a cup of coffee without a war threatening their entire existence? Like, that’s what we’re dealing with all the time! So, I think cozy fantasy was a good fit for me. It was also a lot about the timing, and that’s why I went into the genre, but it was also a good genre for me to go into. I was already doing a lot of that.
I write pretty much in any genre that I want to. I don’t really have any limitations on what I can and can’t write. Right now, I’ve got a fantasy thriller, I’ve got a cozy fantasy, I’m working on a cozy sci-fi right now, and I’m exploring a gothic thriller. Like a fantasy/gothic thriller story. We’ll see if that takes place in 2026. I move genres a lot. The one thing I keep consistent is that there will be queer characters, probably a happy ending, cinematic action, witty dialogue, fast-paced banter, and dragons, if I can get away with it. So all of those things are hallmarks of my writing.
Zenia: Out of curiosity, there’s not one genre that you wouldn’t want to approach?
Rebecca: Contemporary. I started in contemporary. I think most people do because it’s what we know and it’s easier to write a story based in the world that already exists around us. There’s not a lot of worldbuilding that has to be done, you don’t really have to know too much about politics if you’re writing about high school politics. It was a good way to learn how to write, and now I’m just kind of bored with our world. I want an escape.
Zenia: That’s very understandable. Especially nowadays.
How do you get into the writing mindset? Are you someone who can sit down and just start writing, or do you have any rituals when you’re not particularly in the zone?
Rebecca: Adderall helps a lot. I wish I could say it didn’t, but it does. I did have a lot of systems in place before I got on Adderall, that’s a pretty recent development for me. I always have had a room in my house, or some kind of dedicated space, even if it’s not a whole room, like a desk. I don’t sit at this desk unless I plan on writing. I accept that the second I leave the desk is the moment I stop writing. That desk becomes the physical hallmark of where I need to physically be if I want to get stuff done. It doesn’t always work but it normally does.
Another tip that I always recommend is that I like candles. I pair the scent of the candle to certain scents in the book. Over time, as you write more and more, when you start to smell that candle, it becomes a habit of, “Okay, I’m going to go write this book,” because that scent hits your brain and you’re like, “I want to write this book.”
I think it depends on when people can find time to write and how desperately they want to carve out that time, and whether or not they have a good support system around them to guard that time. If my wife wasn’t so dedicated to making sure that I’m sitting at my desk writing, I think it would be a lot harder to get stuff done. If I had a kid who was constantly pressing me, or if I didn’t have a spouse to take care of that kid, I would imagine that would be a very difficult writing situation. Identifying your home environment and then working around I think is a pretty big essential for writing.
Zenia: I’m with you on having a writing desk. My family has made fun of me but I like to have armless chairs so I can move around and cross my legs and hunch over like a gremlin.
What do you find beneficial or exciting in both self-publishing and traditional publishing and do you find that the two can work together?
Rebecca: I think that self-publishing and traditional publishing naturally lend to each other. I feel like there’s a lot of authors who start in one and end in the other. There’s a lot of trad authors who make a name for themselves, and then they get tired of the publisher taking 93% of their income, and then they’re taking 70% of the royalties instead. They can charge less for their books, their readers are happy, and they’re getting enough money even if it’s a smaller distribution line. There are other authors who are self-published and get fame, but they want more staying power that’s off Amazon. That’s why I signed with Tor. As much as I loved the income I was making on Amazon, Tor offered me enough where I recognized it was two-years’ worth of what I would’ve made with this series on Amazon. That buys me two years to go write something else. And in the meantime, I know that this book is going to hit every single bookstore in the world and whatever bookstores buy my book. It’s pretty heavily dependent on what countries will publish LGBT literature at this point.
It’s a bleak forecast for LGBT literature right now abroad, even in the US. There are plenty of people who buy it, and my book has done very well, but my agent has clients who are not selling as well in the US, but they’ve been able to do more foreign deals just because they’re not lesbian. That’s a crappy place to be, but it is what it is.
Overall, I think that there’s a lot of reasons why authors go one way or the other. I always advocate to be happy with the path you’re choosing. Don’t yearn for the other path. This is especially true for self-publishing to traditional. Authors email me asking, “How can I be hybrid? How can I be both?” The answer is, you can’t. You can choose to do one, or you can choose to do the other, and they both have a lot of luck and risk. You just get luckier down the path. If you have a self-published book that goes viral, you’re going to have a lot of publishers knocking on your door because that’s a piece of the pie that they’re not getting. Whether or not you accept heavily depends on what your career goals are moving forward.
I’m in a position where I was self-published and now I’m moving a lot of these books to traditional roots. It is kind of sad for me because I can see for the next three years I will not be able to self-publish hardly anything because of the timeline. They say, “You can’t put out a book in the same genre as this book within six months,” or “You can’t self-publish a book in fiction within six months of this other book.” And then my books are being released every five months. So there’s no way for me to possibly drop a book at any point. That’s a little disappointing and a little depressing to me, but I view it as building my career as an author that people know, and then later on, I’ll have some freedom to do what I want with those books. Tor is pretty much giving me the freedom to do whatever I want these days which is wonderful and I’m not complaining. It’s hard in this transition where I’m leaving one space for a good reason, but I’m sad that I’m not going to be as prevalent in this other space.
Zenia: Do you think that you have more control over your book as someone who started in self-publishing and moved into traditional versus someone who started off in traditional? It seems like you have more input in the process than you might’ve had if you started in trad publishing.
Rebecca: I think that’s pretty unique. I was lucky with the team at Tor. Tor is a really well-known publisher and they have a good reputation. The people who work there are genuine, passionate, and wonderful people who want the best product and they want to make sure their authors are happy in the meantime. That’s not the case with a lot of publishers. Tor seems like they’re pretty flexible in that regard.
I do think that I’m in a very unique position because I proved that I know how to market my book and I proved that I know how to package it on my own. When it comes to cover design or artists that are hired to do inserts of the artwork, they come to me and ask me, “Do you know anybody? Who do you want to use? What vibes are you going for?” They’ll always offer me an option and that’s very unique.
I also started a series. I wrote a series of four and I had two of them out. They had to keep the same vibe going across all four books or it would’ve looked weird. Once they decided they were going to keep the covers and redo the typography, it was pretty much a no-brainer that they were going to go back to that same cover artist, which I’m very grateful for. If I’m able to do another quartet in that world, I would love for that cover artist to come back.
I picked her up because she’s all about the vibes. I love that and I felt that it was perfect for cozy fantasy, especially because my book already mimicked Travis Baldree so much, I didn’t want my cover design to mimic it as well. I used a lot of his stuff for inspiration, and he knew from the time I was writing the first book. He was very flattered and excited and sent me a signed copy saying that he couldn’t wait to read my book. He was well-aware what was happening, but I didn’t want people to put the books side by side and think, “Oh, it’s another Legends and Lattes” knockoff. It needed to stand on its own and be its own series and that was something I was very careful about when I was designing. When Tor got involved they were a lot more willing to work with me because I had already proven with my social media following that I know what readers want.
I need them for distribution. I can package my own books, and I think they know that. I think frankly it saves them some time because they don’t have to go hunting for the right cover artist. I will be curious to see because we’re doing one new series that has never been seen before and they’re in discussions with me for Gilded Abyss. I’ll be curious if they end up repackaging any of that later and how the process will be for the book that has never been published before and if they continue to ask for my input.
I’d be surprised if they didn’t ask me for my overall opinion on things. They usually present me with two or three options and they always go with the option I choose. I have some ideas and mockups in mind for the cozy sci-fi but we’ll have to see if that ends up panning out.
Zenia: I don’t think I’ve read cozy sci-fi.
Do you know when your novel might be coming out?
Rebecca: It’s probably going to be in 2026. Cozy sci-fi isn’t really a thing.
There are some other books that have been bullied into it. Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is very cozy sci-fi. It’s focused on the relationships rather than the journey. They’re just vibing in space. The Murderbot series is another one that a lot of people are calling cozy sci-fi even though it’s not really cozy. There is some violence, but it’s hilarious and the found family is prime, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that it’s being shoved in that corner. There are indie books out there that are doing this, I just don’t know if there are going to be traditionally published books in cozy sci-fi. There are cozy sci-fi books coming out from the indie sphere but they’re not going to be mainstream right now.
The book that I’m writing is basically going to be Legends and Lattes meets The Spellshop in space and that’s what I’m aiming for. It’s about a girl who buys an alien ship and there’s a sentient moss computer that handles life support because moss emits so much oxygen. She ends up using that sassy computer moss on her ship to renovate an alien space station. It’s going to be very sustainable, very solar-punk.
It’s been fun because it’s been challenging for me to imagine how sentient moss curses, like “Oh death and desiccation.” I get to research a bunch of stuff about moss like how it doesn’t have roots. Like the main character will say, “I’m getting back to my roots.” And the moss will say, “Ugh, I don’t have roots.” It’s been fun to play around with that new vibe.
I feel like I need to start my own moss colony now. I have so many ideas.
Zenia: I love when writing leads to weird research topics.
What is one thing you wish you knew before getting into self-publishing?
Rebecca: I’ve had a wonderful experience with self-publishing. The one thing I wish I knew was that I could have done it earlier. I spent so much time with my last agent, who I had for four years, and she was a great agent and a great person. I just reached a point with her where I felt like we were banging our heads against a wall. I wanted to do one thing and she’s telling me that it’s a bad idea and that the market won’t support it and I’m telling her that I can write it in a way that the market will respond and she didn’t understand that. We had creative differences and I had to go my own way. I had been doing this for seven years, almost eight, and I felt like she didn’t think that I was a New York Times bestseller. I wasn’t, and I’m still not, but I know that I have it in me. I have outsold many New York Times bestsellers at this point.
Zenia: Didn’t you mention that you were almost a New York Times bestseller?
Rebecca: It was so close. It was 3,000 books away for Treason and 1,500 books away for Pirates. It’s because it’s a paperback and competing with Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros and all of these big books that have been bestsellers for years that are now in paperback. The hardcovers are a lot easier to get on for the New York Times and you can sell way fewer books to do it. The hardcover returns are almost double what paperback returns are so your royalty rates are almost double. They’ll give you an escalation clause where you start with 7.5% for mass market paperback, but for hardcover you start at 10%, then you climb to 12% after the first 10,000 books, then 15% for 20,000 sales. Then you’re at 15% and you’re literally double the paperback sales for a book that costs more money. If a paperback is $20 and you’re making 7.5%, but if your hardcover is $30 and you’re making 15%, you’re bringing in more money. It’s easier to get on the New York Times and you make more on the back end because those advances are easier to earn out because you’re making more money on the hardcover books.
When I renegotiated for this new cozy sci-fi, I begged them for a hardcover. They’re still deciding, they won’t be able to let me know until nine months before production. I think there’s a pretty good chance. I’ve been selling pretty well in paperback, but I’m just annoyed because if I calculate the difference in royalty rate between the paperback and the hardcover, if I’d sold even 70% of the books I sold paperback as hardcover, I would’ve made almost double and that would’ve been very helpful.
Rebecca: I think that they recognize that I’m selling well in paperback and that’s why they don’t want to give me a hardcover, but they’re kind of cutting me out of a larger profit by not giving me a hardcover. I do think that the team at Tor is rooting for me, they have made some major investments in my career, and I think they’ll continue to do so. I think for me, my near future will be churning out as many good books as I can so they know I’m not a one hit wonder. I’m not just a quartet of cozy fantasy books, I have all of these other things in me that can sell really well.
Zenia: That’s another frustrating thing. Not only do you have to establish yourself as a writer, you have to keep doing it. That sounds exhausting.
Rebecca: I don’t really mind it. I think it’s the same for any job. If you show up for one day’s work, you’re going to be paid for one day’s work. If you want to keep making money, you have to keep showing up. That’s how writing is as well. It’s a creative art, but by the time you want to pursue publication, it’s a business. If you’re not producing a product, you’re not making money. You might be lucky and continue to make The Hunger Games level, but good luck, that’s not something that most people achieve.
It could happen. Keep your hope. I’m not going to tell anybody it will never happen for them. But if you want to hedge your bets and set yourself up for success in that field, you have to be prepared to have a backlist. Most readers are going to want to read more than one book by you.
I’ve seen a lot of authors get their massive bestseller and they stop because nothing else can compare. I’ve been facing that a bit with Gilded Abyss and the cozy sci-fi. When I was plotting cozy sci-fi, I went through probably five iterations of this plot before I decided that was what I was going to write because it needed to be good. It didn’t need to just be good, but just as good as Tomes and Tea but not the same thing. That’s a very hard balance to strike. I still think that people are going to like Kianthe and Reyna better than the characters in this cozy sci-fi but I do think that if they’re looking for similar vibes but in space they’re going to find it all here. But yeah, it’s hard to follow up on one of those massive bestsellers. It’s tricky.
Zenia: I find that some of those authors try to write in that same universe and even then it doesn’t really work.
Rebecca: I think that Tamora Pierce was one of those authors who did that really well. She had a really big universe but she always picked stories that were opposite of the stories she did before. Her main cast would come back, but they wouldn’t come back in any meaningful way; they would just operate on the outskirts of a new story that was good in and of itself. That will be interesting to see because I do feel that Kianthe and Reyna from the Tomes and Tea series are two of my biggest sellers. People love following them, people love watching what they’re doing. I think it’ll be interesting for me when I try to go to a different story because I have a whole different cast planned for the quartet if I get to write it. I think I’ll do point of view chapters from Kianthe and Reyna just because I feel like people want that. People want more Kianthe and Reyna.
Zenia: Do you have any advice or tips for Emerson students who are currently enrolled in the PopFic MFA?
Rebecca: Experiment with things outside of what your professors are teaching you. I feel like it’s easy to explore your curriculum and only your curriculum especially when you’re in a master’s program. I think that the best things I did at Emerson were not in a classroom. I enjoyed my classes and I learned a lot, but I think the things that set me up for my career—I think the reason they chose me as the commencement speaker—were all of the things that I was doing in my free time outside of class. It was great because I was able to go to my professors and ask for their opinions about what I was doing. You have access to professionals which means you have a safety net and free information. They won’t center a class around testing self publishing, you know, but most people don’t have a finished novel. If you’re able to try that, if you’re able to get a mentorship program with a literary agent, get started on TikTok or Instagram or whatever’s around by the time this airs, you can start testing out promotion and marketing opportunities. Even for a trad author, that’s still important. My publisher still asks me to make videos for them so they can show them abroad. I’ve shown them that I can do that stuff, and there’s more money on the backend because of that.
I think that it’s a lot of getting as creative as you can, and getting as ingrained in these communities as you can, not just at Emerson but outside of it. Are there any writing conferences in Boston or wherever you live? Get out and try new things. If you’re just doing the curriculum, you’ll always feel behind. Whereas if you get to start exploring, you’ll see cool ideas, and there’s a lot of ways to get published these days.
Zenia: I like what you said about a safety net. It’s a great time to try something and then ask professionals, “Does this make sense? Is this silly?”
Rebecca: Sometimes you can get college credit for that, too. If you’re doing some kind of independent study with a professor who is guiding you. I did that because I wanted to start teaching online curriculums and I had a professor help me create a syllabus that was genuinely very helpful. She had me create the coursework for it and helped me walk through what this six-week class would be if I were to teach it on my own. That helped lend some credibility to me because now I know curriculum development, which I didn’t before, and helped her understand that my goals were more in line with education and not publication at that time. That has shifted, but I tend to do things simultaneously, so I’ll probably be looking into the education sphere more in the next year or two, but I’ve got some deadlines first.
Zenia: You’ve got some things to write first.
See Rebecca Thorne on tour: https://rebeccathorne.net/events/
Instagram: @rebeccathornewrites
TikTok: @rebecca.thorne
Author Bio
Zenia deHaven is a writer and teacher. They primarily write fantasy but enjoy exploring horror, science fiction, romance, and nonfiction. Their short stories are featured or forthcoming in SIEVA Magazine, Stork Magazine, and Page Turner Magazine. Their critical essays, which cover issues spanning from LGBTQ+ rights to animal conservation efforts, are published in FruitSlice and Lit Shark Magazine. They are completing their MFA in Popular Fiction Writing and Publishing at Emerson College. When they’re not writing, they enjoy group exercise classes, video games, and petting their dogs. You can find more about them on Instagram @zeniadehaven_
