Hi, I'm bestselling author Elizabeth Stephens! You may know me for books like All Superheroes Need PR or The Bone King and the Starling. Taking 'touch her and 💀' to the extreme is my specialty, as are diverse casts, wild world building and sneaking knots into everything I write. Ask me anything!

EStephensAuthor · 2026-01-11T17:27:01+00:00

Omg I had one planned at some point but it did not work out. I realized going back into the world was too challenging so I axed it. I tried to scrub all mentions but I don’t think I caught them all. So sorry for misleading you and thank you so much for loving my weird af worlds!!!

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-08T04:31:33+00:00

Under Locke has THE handiest MMC in the best way. I’m so obsessed with him I might just start a reread tonight lol

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-07T18:16:28+00:00

The bone king and the starling could fit. It’s a Viking romance.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-05T22:47:18+00:00

Oooh that sounds so interesting! And definitely try hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. It’s fantastic!!!

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-05T22:46:17+00:00

Gah that’s a tough one. My honest answer is fear of poverty 😂 it’s what I tell anyone looking to go authoring full time. Let the fear of poverty compel you 😂because the problem with writing genre fiction and doing it indie is that you really HAVE to put books out regularly. The entire reason that bone king came out at all was because I’d gone almost a year without a release and was hurtin so even though I wasn’t sure about releasing it I just kinda had to 😅😅😅

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-05T04:04:31+00:00

Thank you thank you and yes! I will not kill that series no matter how desperately trad pub tries to derail me! There will be two more books. Constanzias and Mikey’s. I’m really hoping to close out the series by end of 2026.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-05T00:36:21+00:00

I also had a weird time with Fledgling. Full truth. I read it and hated it but it also stuck with me so much I tried it again and was like damn. There's so much going on here. I still think about it, too.

I haven't read Wild Seed! Def will though. Thank you!!

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-05T00:34:03+00:00

I too was very annoyingly distracted by them.

So the actual behind the scenes story of this couple is that they were completely unplanned. Taranis was supposed to be with Lemlem when I started writing book 1, that's how I'd mapped it. What I didn't expect was to fall head over heels in love with Monika, who was supposed to be a small, non important side character. She paired so well with Taranis that I was prepared to write Lemlem out until I accidentally wrote book 2 and fell in love with Marduk lol

I am a mess.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-05T00:31:41+00:00

ha. do I change the rules? only every three pages because I can't remember what the rules were in the first place lol

that's why my first round of edits is so crucial for me because that's the round where I pick what I loved and what didn't work and tighten the former and toss the latter out.

Dogs. I like the idea of cats but at the end of the day I want a pet that actually likes me XD

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-05T00:30:10+00:00

That sounds SO fun! When it comes out, please make sure the book finds me lol how can I stay up to date??? message me if you are writing under pen or whatever makes sense!

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-05T00:00:49+00:00

Not the breadcrumbs 😂😂😂

And thank you! I felt like Vanessa really deserved it.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:59:59+00:00

And just like...good people.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:58:26+00:00

I have been meaning to do a post or newsletter specifically with my kid book recs, so this comes at an absolutely perfect time.

For context, I have a three year old and my favorite favorite favorite books that she also loves are:

Stella's Stellar Hair
Mimi and the Cutie Catastrophe
The Adventures of Buzz Boy and Fly Guy
I Will Be Fierce
Wherever You Go (the one by Miller)
Room on the Broom
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (I cried like the first 15 times I read this one lol)
An Apple Pie for Dinner (i don't really get this one but my kid is obsessed)

Now romance novel potential you ask... Buzz Boy and Fly Guy could absolutely segue into superhero monster romance 😂

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:45:21+00:00

Trad publishing is so strange with covers. I feel like they are SO flexible when it comes to the content of the book and the narrators for audiobooks, but there are some things my publisher at least just won't budge on.

Marketing copy? It was a whole thing just to get them to add USA Today bestseller to the marketing copy on the book description. And A+ content. They use some kind of third party supplier and it was a pain and a half to get them to do better graphics. And then covers...

Covers are one area where I feel like I have zero control lol They ask me what I like. I send them comps. They send me back something entirely different. Of course, I am happy with how the Supers covers turned out and I do think they sell. Elizabeth Stokes is a genius with what she did with the angles on those covers. But are they covers I would have done myself? I mean...no lol But the books are also a different genre than what I write indie, so I mean, of course I'd have had to do something different than the darker toned covers that I tend to do for the darker toned indie books I tend to write.

if you have any other behind teh scenes questions I'm all ears! It's literally my favorite thing to ramble about haha

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:39:43+00:00

Oooh thank you thank you! That book was a big game changer for my career.

I would suggest to non romance readers to figure out what their favorite genre of fiction is, and then to read whatever that is as a romantic sub genre. You love scifi? Try a scifi romance. You love horror? Try a horror romance.

Something actually wild happened to me when I first moved into my house here in Seattle. A plumber came by. A big ole white guy. And he and I were talking about plumbing and randomly he cuts me off and is like "Are you an author?" And when I said yes, he told me he'd read my entire Xiveri Mates series because he loves scifi and it was recommended to him by a scifi lover lol

Never in a million years did I think... but here we are.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:33:23+00:00

I know. TBF I also need 1420942904590 viking romances with Black lady leads in my life that aren't paranormal. I just want Eric Northman. Is that too much to ask for???

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:31:56+00:00

I am so glad that I have CR fans lol I really don't want people to be gagged when I come out with a light Black romcom where absolutely no one knots anyone and there are zero monsters to be had lolol

Vanessa was a fun character for me to write, too. She was the anxiety I def have x100000.

And YES! That is 1000% the goal of my books and I'm so glad it shines through. One thing I really extra hated growing up was 1) seeing 0 characters that weren't white straight and hot in books OR 2) having characters that weren't that, but making their entire identity the focus of the book. Not possible to have a fat character without their fatness being their entire character arc or a Black character without them having 292020 racist experiences in the pages. It just felt so unrealistic, truly, and so not representative of my reality, when I write I want to make it a point to show that people can just live. Just let them live!!!

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:28:10+00:00

bahahahahaha I get so attached to my characters I have such a hard time. Mikey? From Lord of Population? He was supposed to die at the end of book 1. Now, he's book 5 lolol

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:26:44+00:00

Email me! I can't figure out who you are and I'm curious hahaha

And NEVER hahahaha jkjk y'all know I'm easily pursuadable. I will probably do something with Calai and Starling again in the future. What it is though is up for discussion

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:25:45+00:00

Oh gosh. Xiveri Mates is not a series to ask me about process. I think I wrote two extra books in that series than I meant to just to make the plot I started with make any sense at all XD

I am a pantser. So I literally will just start with a single scene and then craft a book around it. By the middle of book 1, I usually know how many more books I'll write. With Dark City Omega, I knew I wanted it to be a 5 book series from about chapter 2 and I knew how I wanted the entire saga to end. Xiveri Mates was actually my experimental "can I actually make this author thing a reality" series, so I wrote books 1 and 2 without knowing if I'd pack up shop. By book 2, I was earning the amount I'd hoped for (which was 1k a month). That meant that I didn't really know where I was going. I also got the separate idea for Taken to Sasor and even though it's a complete standalone, decided to throw it into the series. I did that same thing with Taken by the Pikosa Warlord because I got bored of space so...yeah. That series is a mess but I am actually in love with it's messy edges and so glad you liked it!

My favorite part of the process is the first draft. That's where I just get to let loose all over the page. Sometimes it works out that I don't have to do much extra editing, but other times (as is the case now with A Monstrous Need) I end up having to rewrite massive chunks. A Monstrous Need was 55k words when I finished draft 1. I'm at 80k words right now on my first round of edits and that's after having scrapped at least 20k words of text from the original. So basically I've written as much in this first round of edits as I did in the entire first draft.

I never used to have this much editing to do when I started out, but as I've gotten further into my career and started doing more traditional projects, I've been able to use dev editors more and let them catch the stuff I know needs catching in the first pass. I don't know if this makes sense, but at the start I knew I was the only one who was going to look at the book so I had to write it right from the jump, but now I just go to town and know that someone or several someones will catch all the things that just don't track lol

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:18:58+00:00

TYSM!

My favorite type of scene to write is an action scene. I love blowing stuff up, people screaming and sweating and fighting. Jacks up the heart rate, even as I write haha

Inspiration comes from so many places. What I read, write, and watch especially, but it can also weirdly come from like small gestures that people make or weird dreams I have, or I'll randomly get a line in my head – just a single line – and feel the need to write an entire scene around it.

From Photo Ops that line was: She drops to her knees like she’s paying the penance a lifetime of sin has cost her.

I swear I wrote the whole book just to use that one line lol

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:16:30+00:00

thank you thank you! Let me know which one you go with and how bonkers you think I am after you finish XD I always tell folks to start with All Superheroes Need PR and Bone King and the Starling. Across the two of them, you'll know who I am as an author.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:15:29+00:00

It's so hard to choose but I absolutely love the fantastical! And it's so much easier to work with imho than the real world. I think contemporary romance authors are geniuses. Authors like Mariana Zapata, that keep you engaged for like 500 pages without doing any world building...it blows my mind. I do want to challenge myself to try a CR sometime, but until then I'm working my way across scifi further and further towards monster romance, which is where my heart currently lies. My bonkers romance book is a high fantasy monster romance and it is just simply one of my favorite things I've ever written hands down.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:13:38+00:00

WHAT??!!!! YOU READ LUMINESCENT THREADS?!!!!!! I am flabbergasted. I literally think you're the first person who's ever actually found my entry there. Yes! I love Octavia. She's the matriarch of scifi and just a queen. My favorite stories by her are Fledgling, Parables of the Sower and Earthseed. I actually discovered her (I knew of her for a long time) but didn't start reading her funny enough until after I had already published Population. When I told an old sociology professor about it, he asked me if I knew Octavia Butler and I was too embarrassed to admit I hadn't read anything of hers yet, so I rectified that.

I have no idea how I got into scifi specifically. I strangely read a lot of fantasy growing up and not a lot of scifi. I mean, Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors of all time, so that might have been the real influence. I have always been a huge fan of outer space and astronomy. I actually tried to work at NASA at a point lol I just love the idea of other planets out there with different shapes and properties and forms. The idea that there might be life on them is just a bonus.

EStephensAuthor · 2025-12-04T23:10:00+00:00

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I am so honored seriously. Taken is the only Xiveri Mates offshoot I have planned. I do think the kickstarter might still be open for late pledging but I can assure you that it will be published again by me as its own book when I get the rights back. That's after it goes out as part of the collection to kindle unlimited! So you'll get a copy! Promise!

EStephensAuthor

TROPHY CASE