Interview: Lisa Renee Jones, author of 'If I Were You'

Author/entrepreneur Lisa Renee Jones is no stranger to success. Before taking up the pen, she headed a staffing agency that was recognized as the No. 7 top-growing woman-owned business by Entrepreneur magazine. But Jones realized that she didn't want to remain in the corporate world. In 2003, she sold her business and took her skill as a businesswoman into the world of romantic fiction. Since then, she's written more than 30 novels and novellas, many of them published independently. One of her independent works, If I Were You (book one of the Inside Out trilogy), was snapped up by a New York publisher shortly after it was released and has created a huge international buzz, garnering comparisons to E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey. We sat down with Jones to chat about her amazing rise to success, the Inside Out trilogy and how saying "no" to a publisher can sometimes be the best decision an author can make.

Pamela: Last year was a phenomenal year for you with the breakout of your Inside Out trilogy. You published the first book in the trilogy, If I Were You, independently, and in less than a month signed a contract for the trilogy with Simon and Schuster. Since then — that's six months ago — the trilogy has been optioned by Starz for a television series and has sold to numerous foreign-language markets. Tell us about this wild ride. Did you have any sense when you wrote If I Were You that the book would be so amazingly successful?

Lisa: It has been a fun six months. I had been plotting this series for years. My fiancé had found a journal in a real storage unit and really wanted me to write a suspense wrapped around it. I was optioned for books at the time, and I just never could get time to fully write it.

Finally, the time came to write it and when I was done I just felt in my gut it was the best I've ever been. I had one of my editors offer on the series, but the changes asked for and the money felt off. I took a deep breath and dared to believe in me and it and said, "No." I then went in search of an agent to handle the foreign rights, because the agent I had didn't handle foreign rights for indie.

I sent Louise Fury If I Were You, and she immediately got excited about the project with me, and so did her boss Lori Perkins. They wanted to show it to New York houses. Louise and I chatted it out because I had a lot invested in promoting the release day. We agreed I'd release on schedule, and she'd work her magic fast. And it was magic. We had interest before I ever released, but while negotiating I was able to release the book.

Needless to say, it was an exciting few weeks, and I didn't sleep much while we figured out where the series would land.

Pamela: When you inked the deal with Simon and Schuster, did you pull the book off the market then?

Lisa: Yes. As soon as we signed the dotted line I pulled my version of the book.

Pamela: What does it mean that Starz has "optioned" the trilogy?

Lisa: I can't share much at this point but hopefully much more very soon. I can say that I've talked with the production team, and their vision is really exciting. It will be fun to see that vision take form. I love that this is cable, which leaves room to push limits, and Starz makes amazing shows with such great visual effects. I also love that cable networks give shows a chance to get legs beneath them rather than cutting them after one or two episodes.

Pamela: Let's talk about indie publishing for a moment. Clearly, it's been great for many authors, and it's been lucrative for you. Your indie-pubbed Tall, Dark and Deadly box set recently made the Paste BN and New York Times best-seller lists. How many books had you published independently before If I Were You? Do you intend to continue publishing independently in the future?

Lisa: I tested the waters with a collection of six novellas and did a lot of learning about how to market indie and make things work well. Once I got my legs under me, I released the Tall, Dark, and Deadly singles, and they did very well. That was when indie really started to excite me.

I absolutely plan to continue with indie. I have a spinoff to Inside Out I plan to write, and timing on that will determine what and when I can do for indie. But I have another pet project for indie that I started some time back and have let simmer. I hope I can finish it in April. I haven't announced it or even teased it because I need to get by my set deadlines first and be sure I can release when I promise I will. Even with indie, readers really count on scheduled dates, and I don't want to let them down.

Pamela: You've published 30 novels and novellas since 2007. It's an understatement to say that you're very prolific. Are you a very disciplined writer who maintains a schedule? What kind of rules do you make for yourself to ensure you get words on the page?

Lisa: I worked 70- to 80-hour weeks in the corporate world for many years and I still managed to never miss one of my kids' sporting events, and I was always there to talk to them before bed and tuck them in. Now as a writer, I write seven days a week and don't take much time off. I'm not sure I know how to take time off. I enjoy what I do, though, so the hours don't feel long. It's a blessing to write for a living rather than work in the corporate world as I did for far too long.

Pamela: Your novels are very sensual. What's your focus as you write a sex scene? Do you start with the physical action, the characters' emotions, or something else altogether? Are they more challenging to you or easier for you to write than other aspects of your stories — suspense threads, for example, or dialogue.

Lisa: Every scene is about emotional growth to me. Sex is never just sex, even if it's a one-night stand. Sex scenes take me the most time to write. Many of the scenes in The Inside Out trilogy took me days to write. I had to feel just right about where they took the characters and where they would be after the scene occurred. In fact, book one has a much lighter BDSM element than books two and three, because I didn't go where the characters were not ready to go just to go there. They had to be ready.

Book two, Being Me, is very dark and the scenes are extremely intense. Those were not easy to write, but what the characters are going through isn't easy, either. I think if writing them was easy then that would have been a problem. If I don't feel the discomfort and the recovering from that discomfort, I'm not sure readers would either. I'm really proud of Being Me. I think it is my best work to date, even more so than If I Were You.

Pamela: The series has found a home with fans of the Fifty Shades trilogy and is, in fact, being described as "the next Fifty Shades." You've described it as "Fifty Shades meets Basic Instinct." What inspired this series?

Lisa: I started planning this series long before Fifty Shades. We (my fiancé and I) found the journal that inspired the series while living in Austin, and we left there four years ago. We also found a dresser with a "sex drawer" of interesting items. It's crazy the things we discovered in our years of buying and selling storage units.

Writing the story sexy and suspenseful was automatic. It was going to be sexy based on the journal and the other items we found in units and how they came together to spark the idea. And it was going to be mysterious because I always wondered about the people who left their things behind in these units. What makes someone leave their entire life behind?

When I finally got the finished book and got to market, the Fifty Shades craze had started and the dark hero and sexual content worked well as a comparison. Also, the storage shows had taken off at that point as well. Had I written this fully when the idea first formed, the timing might not have been as good.

Pamela: What can you tell us about If I Were You? How is your trilogy different from Fifty Shades? One thing that comes to my mind is the suspense element — the mystery surrounding Rebecca.

Lisa: The mystery is a huge part of my series, and each of the books leads readers toward solving that mystery. The books surround Sara's entry into the journal writer's life and her trust in people who might have done the journal writer harm. Is she trusting the wrong people when trust is so hard for her to give in the first place?

Both series share a dark, damaged male character. There are two damaged men in my story, not one like in Fifty Shades. In my stories Sara ends up with one of the two men, but they both have their own role in how her life changes from the time she finds the journals.

Sara is also equally as damaged as the man who becomes the key love interest, while in Fifty Shades Ana is innocent and untouched in ways the hero is not.

There is a shared BDSM element in the series. This element is very strong in books two and three of my series, but I think goes completely different places and in different ways than Fifty Shades. I think that will become extremely clear in book two, Being Me.

Pamela: When can we expect the rest of the series to hit bookstore shelves?

Lisa:Being Me is June 11. I know lots of fans were upset it was a long wait but that was to allow for the print release of If I Were You. But it's soon now, and Being Me is my favorite of all three books. It's a dark, gritty, emotional ride, and I hope fans will feel it was worth the wait. I'm excited for it to come out. Then Revealing Us, book three, is out Sept. 11, and it leads into a spinoff I have plotted.

Pamela: Thanks so much for spending time with us today!

Lisa: Thank you for having me!

Pamela: Our pleasure!

For more about Lisa Renee Jones, visit her website at www.lisareneejones.com.

Pamela Clare is an award-winning journalist and nationally best-selling author of both historical romance and contemporary romantic suspense. She loves coffee, the Colorado mountains, and her two grown sons. Her website is PamelaClare.com.