Just over 10 years ago, Aussie Author T.L. (Tee) Swan lost everything.
“My husband and I made a bad business decision, and we lost everything. I went broke,” she tells nine.com.au.
She recalls trying anything and everything to claw her way out of “the depths of hell”, until she stumbled across an old diary.
The diary was filled with stories she’d written when she was 16 years old, and when she founded it, she was reminded of her childhood dreams of one day becoming an author.
“My whole adult life I’d been looking after everybody else and having kids and supporting my husband’s dreams, and I’d just completely forgotten about mine,” she says.
With no money in the bank, Swan couldn’t afford to download the Microsoft suite on her computer. She also didn’t have the time to go through the traditional publishing process.
So, she came up with a plan.
T.L. Swan is one of Australia’s most successful romance authors. (Supplied)
“I downloaded a free copy of Word for Windows because … I got a free trial for 30 days and I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got 30 days to write a book’,” she recalls.
“I never submitted to an agent, I never submitted to a traditional publishing house. I didn’t have those 12 months to wait. I needed to pay off my credit card this month.
“I literally packed supermarket shelves at night to pay for my edit, and I uploaded it to Amazon.”
At first, Swan kept her side hustle a secret. She was writing what some would describe as erotic fiction, but she simply refers to it as romance.
“I’ve always been a romance reader, and I hate closed doors,” she explains.
“When you’re in that zone, and you’re falling in love with the character … for them to say “and we kissed” and close the door and then you wake up in the morning, it’s like what? What about the good stuff? Don’t leave me out of that part, that’s the best part!”
She was inspired to start writing after finding a journal where she would write stories when she was a teenager. (Instagram/@tlswanauthor)
Her first book “did okay,” it was enough to help her pay off some of her debt. So, Swan kept writing. But it wasn’t until she released her fifth novel that her life began to change.
“I woke up one morning, and I was in the number 30 in the US store,” she recalls.
“The next thing that happened after that was Amazon emailed me and asked me to write for them as they would be my publisher, and they had never signed an Australian author before, so I thought it was my husband pranking me.
“So I wrote back, ‘Ha ha, I know it’s you’.”
Thankfully, Amazon took it well; they thought it was “hilarious” and still regularly bring it up with Swan.
It’s been 12 years since Swan published her first novel, and since then, she hasn’t read another romance novel in an attempt to keep her voice fresh and unique.
Since she began writing her own books, Swan has never picked up another romance novel. (Supplied)
“If I were writing books in the same genre that I was reading, how would I know what part of the brain that story’s coming from,” she says.
“I’m not trying to get a million new readers every book, I’m just trying to keep every reader that I ever get.
“So that’s my strategy, I just want to keep my readers that I do get, which means they buy my next book and the next book and that I become an auto-buy author for them … I have, honestly, the best readers in the world.”
Swan now has dozens of books published, and another on the way.
A collection of T L Swan’s many, many novels. (Instagram/@tlswanauthor)
She describes her upcoming novel, The Heart You Kept, as “funny, raunchy, luxurious, and complete fantasy”.
“It’s [about] a character from one of my old books, he’s a billionaire, and when I was in the South of France and in Monaco, the big yachts and the beautiful people and all the watching, I just thought, ‘Oh, this would be such a great setting for a new series’.
“So it’s a billionaire who owns the casino, he’s a badass, and he meets a normal girl. That’s all I can say.”
Since Swan writes romance novels – and spares no details – many make assumptions about her, her own romantic life, and even sometimes question her morals.
“I guess it makes me laugh because people are really okay with someone who writes about murder and crime. That’s something admirable, to write about killing people and torturing people and everything like that,” she says.
“But if you dare write about something that is literally procreating the whole earth … somehow it’s taboo. It’s just so old-fashioned, and I mean, honestly, are we really back there where this is judged?
”These other authors aren’t getting accused of being murderers because they’re writing a story about murder … Literally no one would say ‘Oh, so you are a serial killer on the side?’
“But every single person will think it’s okay to say to me, ‘Oh, so this is what happens in your life?’ How is that equality?”
her goal is to impress her readers with each new novel, rather than write for a new audience. (Supplied)
She explains that there’s no shame in what she writes, and while she kept it to herself at first, her family and friends now all know what she does, and all read her novels.
“The people who don’t read it, I feel like they’re really missing out because it’s escapism,” Swan explains.
“And the most beautiful thing in life is falling in love. So why wouldn’t you want to do that every weekend with someone new in a book?”
Produced in partnership with CareerOne.