The Sophie Edition...

This one's for my Sophie OGs

From a business perspective my Sophie books feel like a bit of an anomaly. The first Sophie novel, published in 2005, sold better than any of the sequels. After publishing the 5th one with Mira they did not offer me a new contract. I self published two more books in that series and sold a Sophie short story to Amazon’s Storyfront. Those all did fine but not great. From a sales perspective they didn’t touch my romance Just One Night.

I haven’t gotten a reader email or social media comment about Just One Night in quite some time. But at least every month another reader will reach out asking for more Sophie. When I self-published Vanity, Vengeance & A Weekend in Vegas so many of you wrote in to Audible inquiring about when it would be available as an audiobook Audible sprung for the cost of production to make it happen.

That something that garners such enthusiasm should have middling sales while the books that sell like gangbusters don’t seem to have a lasting fan base…that’s a bit of a head scratcher for me. Yet, here we are.

And it’s not just the readers. Just before this last Christmas Cosmopolitan magazine listed Sex, Murder & A Double Latte as one of their 15 best mystery romance books. I’m assuming they meant best-of-all-time or at least of this century because we’re talking about a book that’s almost 20 years old. It’s also a book that, while available on Kindle and Audible, is otherwise out of print.

But Cosmo’s not alone. In the last few years Sophie’s gotten love from Popsugar, Book Riot, Shondaland and more.

I don’t want to sound like a gold digger, but where’s the bag that’s supposed to come with all that love?

Sophie’s my girl but writing is my career. I can’t write more of her unless I’m able to make some kind of living off of it. And yes, I know I wrote a post awhile back about different kinds of success and how sometimes success isn’t measured in dollars. But my Sophie books are not literary fiction. They are not inaccessible poetry collections nor were they written with major literary awards in mind. Sophie is not out here trying to change the world. She exists to entertain and to be friends with the reader. This series is fun, it is escapist…it is meant for a commercial market.

So here’s what I’m gonna do. I’ll try to get the books back in print. But I really can’t make any promises on that score. Unlike So Much For My Happy Ending, both the ebook and audio version of the Sophie series sell well enough to make it difficult to impossible for me to get them back from the publisher. That said they might not sell quite well enough to make it worthwhile for them to invest money into putting the books back into paperback form.

What I can do is write a new Sophie Katz novella. I’m thinking something with a holiday theme that I can release for Hanukkah/Christmas of 2024. I could even bring Alex Kinsky back from Vanity Vengeance & A Weekend In Vegas since he and Sophie definitely have some unfinished business. I could release it as an ebook or I could start doing a paid subscription tier here on Substack and make it available to those subscribers as a kind of holiday bonus…in which case I suppose I’d also release additional bonus content to those paid subscribers a few times a year. And maybe if the response to that is strong I could do another full book in the year or two that follows.

But I really need your input on this before I proceed. Is there actually a demand for this or is it just that the only 15 or so people who still really love the series are very loud?

Please, comment below or comment on the social media post you found this on. Tell me if you genuinely want more Sophie and in what form. And if you’re done with her you can tell me that too, no hard feelings. After all, I don’t just write Sophie for myself. I write her for you. If you want to move on to something new, trust me, that’s coming regardless.

But if enough of you want to join Sophie in a new, crazy adventure, I can make that happen. I’m going to give it to the end of this month (January) to see how many responses I get and read what it is you have to say on the matter. So be sure to share this post with other Sophie readers you may know because from the feedback I receive I’ll decide if Sophie has a future in the near term or if she needs to remain in hiatus for a much longer period of time.

Readers, the ball really is in your court on this one. Sophie Katz still lives inside me, but if she feels the love, she’ll come live with you again too.