Carissa Broadbent Exclusively Reveals the Next Book in Her Crowns of Nyaxia Series
In July 2023, Bramble seized upon the seemingly permanent appeal of sexy vampires. A new romance-leaning imprint within science fiction and fantasy-focused Tor Publishing Group, Bramble itself was an endeavor of appeal: an acknowledgement from publishers that the “romantasy” fervor, epitomized by Sarah J. Maas’ smash-hit A Court of Thorns and Roses series, was no accident. Romantasy author Carissa Broadbent had spent much of her career writing about “magic and kissing,” and celebrated when her self-publishing income transitioned from covering utility bills to reliable four-figure paychecks. She’d nurtured a devoted audience in the indie space; she was satisfied. But when Bramble put a deal on the table last summer, she realized the traditional publishers that had once “intimidated” her, she says, were itching to sell her books, too. Later this year, Bramble will be the first to introduce her newest—and ELLE.com has the exclusive early look.
Before Bramble swept in, videos dissecting Broadbent’s The Serpent & the Wings of Night had already generated millions of views on the literary corner of TikTok known as BookTok. But when the imprint dropped its edition of Serpent in December 2023, she became an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Bramble will re-release Serpent’s sequel, The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King, this summer, and a novella, Six Scorched Roses, will follow this autumn. Today, more than a million copies of Broadbent’s books—including Serpent and Ashes, which are both part of the Crowns of Nyaxia series—have been sold across both her original editions and Bramble’s re-releases.
Now, the author has the kind of set-up her peers salivate over: A traditional publisher can package her stories in shiny hardbacks and shuttle them into bookstores, while she retains her e-book rights as an indie creator. It’s an agreement Broadbent is particularly delighted to explore as her third Crowns of Nyaxia novel, The Songbird and the Heart of Stone, arrives this fall. “We’re going to have lots of angst,” Broadbent assures. “You’re hopefully going to cry.”
On November 19, 2024, Broadbent will release Songbird, the first of her Bramble books not to have first published independently. A brand-new chapter in the fictional world of Obitraes, Songbird is “A Court of Thrones and Roses meets Dante’s Inferno,” or so goes Bramble’s pitch. (The book is available for pre-order now.) Broadbent, for her part, keeps her synopsis simple:
“We’re going to hell.”
For her first major media interview, Broadbent sat down with ELLE.com to discuss what readers can expect from The Songbird and the Heart of Stone; her complicated thoughts on the convergence of traditional publishing and indie publishing; and the literary community’s shifting approach to romantasy.
Walk us through the next installment in this beloved series, the beginning of a new duology set in Obitraes. What can readers expect? What can they get excited about? What might be familiar from the books that preceded it?
As some folks might know, the spotlight is shifting to a new P.O.V. character for these next two books as we head into the House of Shadow, which is another one of the three main vampire houses in this series. Our new protagonist for this duology is Mische, a very loved supporting character from the first two books. She’s been dealing with some pretty heavy stuff that we don’t necessarily know about from those first two books, and she’ll be taking the reins for these next two novels.
The [other] big thing is that we’re headed to the underworld. There’s a huge setting change. We spent the entirety of the last books in the House of Night, but one thing that I love about this world is that it is huge. I mean, not only is Obitraes, the land of vampires, huge, the House of Night is only a third of that entire world. But there is also an entire world of human nations that are totally separate from all of this stuff. We are slowly building up to something that’s going to encapsulate all of those areas. Our scope is slowly getting bigger.
In this particular book, Mische will be headed down to the underworld, and we’re also getting a lot more up close and personal with the gods and all of their drama.
Tell me about your transition from self-publishing to traditional publishing, and why that appealed to you in the first place.
I’ve been very outspoken that I’m very passionate and have very positive feelings about independent publishing. It has treated me very, very well. Never say never, but I believe that probably, for my entire career, there will always be some aspect of it that is indie.
There are a few reasons for that. First of all, I have always been entrepreneurial. I worked in marketing before I was an author, and that aspect of it was always very fun to me. Some authors, they just want to focus on their book, and they do not want to have to worry about all the other stuff, which is completely valid. For me, seeing how that entire ecosystem fit together was always interesting.
I don’t want to make any absolute statements around this, because I did not try to query my books. I did not try to traditionally publish before [I self-published]. My relationship [with traditional publishing] started more recently, after The Serpent and the Wings of Night took off. But the kind of books that I was writing, I would say four or five years ago—like romantasy, adult romantasy, it was definitely a thing. There are authors who have been writing this genre for many, many years, decades, but it was a lot harder to find a literary home for it. At least that was the impression that I got as someone from the outside looking in. Also, I will be honest, I found traditional publishing very intimidating at the time.
So what ultimately brought you over to traditional publishing? What made you say yes, especially given how deeply you have enjoyed and experienced success in the indie space?
Ultimately, there are access issues that indie authors really struggle with. That is very much not a problem with e-books, which is why I have retained my e-book rights. My e-books are still technically independently published as of today. But print books, there’s a whole infrastructure there that indie authors literally cannot access. In order for me to get books into bookstores, to get the margins to a place where booksellers are actually able to make a profit off of them—just that aspect of it, there are doors that are simply closed to us. That was a major part of it. It’s also a huge honor to be able to work with so many fabulously talented people over at Bramble, and that was also a major consideration when I was thinking about making that move.
What do you make of the larger trend of self-published authors getting picked up by traditional publishing once their books take off? What are its benefits? Do you have some reservations?
There’s very much an attitude in indie publishing that you have to write many, many books. There is no expectation that you are going to be successful with your first book, or even your first three books, or five books, or 10 books. You’ll find people who say, “You should not invest in marketing at all until you have five books out, six books out,” because they subscribe to the mid-list business model, where they say, “The road to making a sustainable living as an author is having many books out there and feeding that pipeline with lots of books. If you do have a smash hit, awesome.” Some of those mindsets lean very much into the extreme, where you have people saying, “Well, you have to have 30, 40, 50 books out there to make a living.” That’s the extreme end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the traditional authors and the rhetoric around traditional publishing, where there is very much this sense of your debut, your very first book that is ever published, needs to be a big hit, because otherwise, publishers are not going to invest in you.
I actually can’t speak as to whether that’s true, because that’s not how I came up in this industry. What I find interesting about how so many indie authors are now getting scooped up by traditional publishing is that it feels like a little bit of an acknowledgement that sometimes authors need more than one book to build a sustainable career.
I would say that both extremes are probably not accurate and probably not a sustainable way to approach a career. It’s probably not true that if your debut in traditional publishing is not a huge smash hit, that you’re a failure forever, just as it’s also probably not true that you need to publish 35 books [independently] before you can start making any money off of your books. But to me, what this signals on both sides of the house, both for indie authors and traditional authors, is that we’re moving towards a middle ground in both of those mindsets.
The discourse lately has gotten heated over the specifics of romantasy versus romantic fantasy versus fantasy romance. In your opinion, what’s the difference between those terms?
Well, first of all, it’s a little funny to me that this is a controversial question because I… I will say something that I hope is not going to be controversial. I recognize that it may be. I think that, on the whole, readers care so much less about this than authors do. I think that authors can get a little hung up on the minutia of terms. I mean, I would say if I were to pull out just five random readers that I find in the general romantasy section or fantasy section of a bookstore and ask them that question, I think most of them probably do not really have strong feelings about it.
But authors were very particular about the difference between romantic fantasy and fantasy romance. Fantasy romance was defined as a romance novel that took place in a fantasy setting. Romantic fantasy [is] more like most of Sarah J. Maas’s books, for example, where there is this fantasy saga usually over multiple books, and then there’s a very large romantic component in that. I personally find that I don’t think readers care as much about those distinctions, because generally, the same reader likes both of those things. My interpretation of the term “romantasy,” when it first started being coined, was that it was an umbrella term that encapsulates both of those things.
I don’t mean to sound holier than thou about it or anything, because I completely understand why industry people like us, like authors and publishers and agents, need to be specific about those tags. Because when they’re buying or selling or trying to market a book, they need to be aware of those distinctions. I get it. I think readers are going more on vibes than anything else, to be honest.
Do you feel as though the larger literary community is taking romantasy “seriously” in a new way?
I probably have a strange perspective on this question, because…My mindset is still that of an indie author. I have my indie chip on my shoulder probably forever. It’s just in my blood at this point, so the idea of being “taken seriously” is something that I just never even attained to, because indie publishing has never been taken seriously by many of those powers that be. Critics would not review indie books.
As early as less than a year ago, I’ve had experiences where I went into a bookstore… This is always the most awkward thing in the world, when you go up to them and you say, “Hey, I’m a local author. If you stock my book, I would sign them,” or something like that. At this point, I was a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. And you just get this look that’s like, “Sure you are, honey.”
As soon as you tell certain circles of people that you are independently published, there is definitely a moment where they switch the way that they think about you. All of this to say, it has never been a concern to me whether romantasy is “taken seriously” critically or artistically, because I invest artistically into my books—heavily—but I’ve recognized that not everybody is going to look at them that way. That’s okay with me. I’m completely fine with that.
What has been your strategy in terms of marketing, building a social audience, making this world feel like you’re in every little piece of it?
I worked in marketing. That was my career before I came into the book world. My biggest takeaway from marketing is—not to sound cynical—lots of things don’t matter. So many things do not matter. I realized that it’s sink or swim, in the sense that you absolutely must invest your time into the things that matter and not invest your time into other things that matter less, because you’re one person with 24 hours in the day and presumably other things that you have to do, including writing books or taking care of your family, and you can’t invest equally in all things. I’ve always been very ruthless about that, partly out of necessity, because I am a naturally disorganized person who’s supposed to focus on lots of different things at once.
A lot of the most important aspects of marketing, actually, are about the book itself. How you package it, what the cover design looks like, the actual premise of the book, and whether you can elevate or pitch it in a successful way. A lot of that investment for me went into the book itself, because it also makes a stronger book. If you create a book that has lots of moments that readers can grab onto and go, “Oh my God, this moment is something that I can sum up in a 15-second Reel or something,” that also means that it’s something that, as a story, the scene really resonated with them. I’m always very careful when I say this. I am not saying that I put soulless marketing stuff into my books. I’m saying that I try to look at it through that lens as I’m writing, not just for the purposes of marketing, but also for the purposes of making it the best book it possibly can be.
People are not going to remember a year from now all the plot intricacies of a book. But they will remember how that book made them feel. That’s, ultimately, where I invest a lot of my energy. I grab those moments, those high-impact moments, and I try to get them out into the world. Once you have a readership, I found that readers, if they feel passionately about that book, will do so much of the work of actually promoting that book with those moments that you handed them—because they feel passionate about it, which is what we want.
Tell me what excites you most about sharing this new book with your audience.
I am really excited to share Mische’s journey as a character, because she’s someone that, as I was writing the first two books in this series, I knew had a lot of other things going on under the surface. She’s grappling with some really emotional issues that I connected with a lot as I was writing her, so that’s a big aspect.
I love her love interest. I love a good grumpy wizard, honestly. I’m very excited to return to the grumpy wizards. Finally, I also am super excited to take readers on this descent to the underworld, because I really love some weird, gross, dark magic, and there is that in spades. I’m glad that my readers are on board for both the hot vampires, the kissing, and the weird, gross, dark necromancy magic, because we have all of those things.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.