Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive

look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't

have to.

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Zibby Owens. Lori Gold is the author of Romantic Friction. She is also the author of an adult

historical and four novels for young adults. She currently lives outside Boston, where she

fosters a writing community through her creative writing classes, book coaching, and writing

retreats. Romantic Friction is her book club fiction debut. She has a second book club fiction

coming, spin on the game of Mary Kiss or Kill, which will come out in April of 2026.

Welcome, Lori. Thanks for coming on to talk about romantic friction, a novel. Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Oh, my gosh. I really enjoyed this book. It is the best behind

the scenes in publishing. The voice is so funny. Literally, you pack in,

like, every paragraph has, like, another 12 things about the publishing world and the author

life that you just somehow, I'm like, I can't even, like, miss a sentence because everything

is so on target and so funny. So, I don't know, congratulations. Thank you, I'm glad you found it funny because I love writing with humor and I love making myself laugh, but you never know if other people are going to find it funny, too. I found it really funny. Okay, tell listeners what romantic friction is about. Okay. So it is about a best-selling romanticist author named Sophie Wilde, and she is at the height

of her career when she discovers that another author has used AI to write in her style.

And instead of that author in the book being canceled, as we might expect, in this unexpected

world, fans embrace it. And she's called

Innovative in the Press, and social media is trending all about this author. And probably the

worst insult to Sophie, who has worked so hard to get where she is in her career, is that the other

author is invited to the largest romance readers convention in the country, something that Sophie

...