I'm a paycheck player, as I like to say. I'm good at hitting deadlines. So everything like a New York publisher could ask for, but I wasn't really getting super anywhere. I would have one book that would do fine. It would do great. And then like it would just kind of taper off. Around 2015, I had been self-publishing like some stuff that was my manuscript bed, because I was still writing faster than what New York wanted.

And in 2015, Amazon came out with Kindle Unlimited.

And I was like, oh, I want to try that, but I do have a lot of New York books.

And I don't want people immediately coming in back and being like, I can't read this one.

I have to pay for this one. So I was like, I'm going to make another name.

That was the voice of Ruby Dixon. And you are listening to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah McLean. I read romance novels and I write them.

And I'm Jennifer Procop, a romance reader and editor. And Sarah had this great idea.

We have, as you all know, done many trailblazers, which when we first started doing them

many seasons ago was sort of the idea was, who is it that is like recording romance's

stories?

And we're like, I guess we are.

And, you know, many of those were kind of what we'd sort of conceived of is like you know authors who built the house right like

the people who were like early boots on the ground kind of early in the romance space the first people

to do something interesting right a lot of the people that were like doing it first. And, you know, we are in no way saying that we captured all those voices, right? Like, there are people we couldn't get to. There are people we haven't thought of, right? Like, that doesn't mean that idea will never come back. But then we started to really think, like, okay, but a lot of our listeners maybe didn't read those books,

like they're interesting, but, you know, who are the modern trailblazers? This was Sarah's

idea, right? Like, the people who we all know and love, but that are also leaving a really big

mark on the genre in some way, right? Either an innovation in the kinds of books we're reading,

an innovation in the way that we are publishing books, an innovation in the way that we are thinking

about tropes or characters or right, whatever. And so we really then sort of started to make a list

of like, well, who are the people we would love to have on and hear about like those same sets of questions, right? Your romance journey. What made you a reader?

What are your, you know, what were you trying to do? Did it work at first? And one of the first

people on our list was Ruby Dixon. Because for all the reasons, those of you who listened to our Ice Planet Barbarians deep dive,

...