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What do you do when your best friend disappears? Paige is thrown into a frenzy looking for her best friend, Susannah. With the help of Susannah’s boyfriend, Owen, Paige uncovers dark secrets in her small Oregon Coast town. In this young adult mystery, Paige grows into herself as she says goodbye to her best friend one last time.
Previously Published as The Disappearance of Susannah Dane (Episodes 1-31) on Kindle Vella.
It’s a pleasure to introduce Eliza Stopps to the blog with a guest post. The Disappearance of Susannah Dane, is the first book in her Paige Parker mystery series published in 2022. Eliza is an author of a young adult mystery series and also a book blogger. The book is available in ebook (including Kindle Unlimited) and paperback and also you can download a free copy of The Disappearance of Susannah Dane on BookFunnel https://dl.bookfunnel.com/d2x9p4ecqu
Book 2 in the series is The Absence of Aurelia Perez (Paige Parker Mysteries Book 2) and is also available on Kindle Unlimited.
Over to you Eliza.
From a Failed Manuscript to a Writing Career
by Eliza Stopps
I’m a writer for a living. I’ve always dreamed of being a writer, ever since I was in the 3rd grade and I realized that writing books was an actual career you could have. I started writing my first book right away, with my best friend. Together, on wide-lined loose sheets of paper, we wrote a story that was over 75 pages long. The story was full of scandal (by 9-year-old standards) with details about the main character’s crushes, her parent’s divorce, and many sections about her fluffy white cat. I remember feeling so embarrassed (and excited) when I brought the book to class and it was furiously passed from student-to-student. That same feeling rumbles up in me anytime I meet someone that has read one of my books. It’s a weird brew of anxiety and elation because I want to share my books, but I’m also terrified to share them.
The first real novel that I wrote was in 2016 for NaNoWriMo. By this time, I was 22. I created a pen name (Eliza Stopps) and I decided to share the process of trying to finish NaNo, for the first time, on a free WordPress blog. I did finish NaNoWriMo that year, reaching just over 50k words in November. I went onto expand that novel and finished it at a little over 75k words. And I have never published that story. I’ve talked about this before and I’m often met with wide-open eyes and people asking me why I wouldn’t publish a book that I worked so hard on. And the truth is—that first book sucked.
Of course, when I first finished it, I had every intention of publishing it. I even paid an artist to design a book cover for it. I was thrilled with the story. I loved the characters. I was convinced that it was pretty much amazing. And I was really into the self-publishing world at the time, so I knew that I should send it out to beta readers. I’m so glad that I chose to do so. The reactions on that first book were shocking for me. One reader said they hated it so much that they wished they had read it in paperback format so they could throw it across the room. Another reader said the story seemed to go in an exhausting circle and they disliked the characters so much that they wanted them to fail. This book was supposed to be a Hero’s Journey Fantasy story. It was my Lord of the Rings and it didn’t feel good that people disliked it so much. But I’m so grateful that these readers were honest with me because I went back to the drawing board and I started over.
I decided to put that first book away and start something completely different. I did a ton of research on how to write well. My husband gave me some books on writing and I poured over them every night. I found a suggested outline on how to write a mystery novel that included all of the story beats and I decided that I would write one. My mystery novel was just going to be set on a distant planet, in a post-apocalyptic world with mythical creatures (because of course it was).
The next year, I wrote and published that science fiction novella and I called it Mythical Investigations. It was my first published book and I took all the lessons that I had learned from my first failed manuscript and turned it into something that I was truly confident in. Of course, when I sent this book out to beta readers I was anxious that I was going to get the same response. But people didn’t hate it – some people even loved it. It was a very niche story that required readers to suspend disbelief and buy into a very bizarre world and even though I was asking a lot of them, the beta readers loved it. My editor loved it. I had someone send me fan art and I’ve occasionally run into readers “in the wild” that loved it too. It felt really good to be accepted for such an “out-there” project and it gave me the confidence that I needed to keep going.
I kept blogging. I started writing for magazines and eventually, I started writing for clients who needed social media content or newsletters. And I kept writing for myself.
In 2021, I published my first young adult novel on Kindle Vella, The Disappearance of Susannah Dane. It was a new platform, similar to Wattpad – but run by Amazon, and I decided to dive right in. I wrote, self-edited, and published a new episode each week (sometimes more than one). The response that I got was overwhelming. The book ended up becoming a best seller on the platform and reached #1 in multiple categories. I remember crying when I saw that first royalty check on my dashboard. $778. In one month, I managed to find enough readers that I could buy groceries with the money from my books. It was the first time that I had seen a significant amount of sales in one month and I couldn’t believe it! While most of my income still comes from client work, I finally felt like an author. I used the money that I earned to reinvest it back into the series and pay for a professional editor and a formatter.
I can’t help but feel like my writing career would have taken a different turn if I had tried to force that first book out into the world. Moving on from that story allowed me to grow as a writer (and grow a thick skin). I think it’s all too common for writers to rush that first book. Just because the book is done, doesn’t mean that it’s ready. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Now, I’m publishing the third book in the series and I’m still writing for a variety of clients. I am able to write full-time and that gives me the freedom to stay at home with my three little boys. The Disappearance of Susannah Dane is being turned into an audiobook and you can read the third book, The Boy We All Forgot, on Kindle Vella (the first 10 episodes are free and you don’t have to read the first two books to enjoy it).
Right now, I’m hoping to get more reviews on the Amazon listing for the first book in the series. If you would like to help, you can download a free copy of The Disappearance of Susannah Dane on BookFunnel: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/d2x9p4ecqu
You can read more from Eliza on her blog: https://elizastopps.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/elizastopps
Book Links: Amazon UK | Amazon.com
Have you ever started eating a bag of chips and think that you’ll just have one? Before you know it, you find yourself with fingers covered in salt and an empty, crumpled bag on the floor. That experience is exactly what writing has been for Eliza. She started writing books in 2016 and just couldn’t stop (despite her name.) It turns out writing is something she can’t not do.
She writes across multiple genres and has tried a little bit of everything. You can read her science fiction mystery novellas, The Leslie Kim Serials, if you’re into alien species and distant planets. If you want to keep your feet on the ground, consider trying out her new young adult mystery series, The Disappearance of Susannah Dane, exclusively available on Kindle Vella.
Want more content? Check out her blog, www.elizastopps.com, where she shares her writing process, interviews with other authors, and reviews whatever she is reading lately.
Eliza lives in the middle of nowhere with her family (including 3 wild boys), her horse, and a whole buncha birds (chickens, mostly.) She doesn’t share a lot about her family because she is hoping her children will still like her when they grow up. I mean, someone must inherit all these books, right?
