Q&A With Katie Holt 

I am so excited about doing this Q&A with Katie Holt whose debut romance novel Not In My Book will be available on December 10^th! Not In My Book sounds like something that would be in my book just by the title! 

Q: Katie, would you please give a brief description of Not In My Book? Where did the idea for the novel come from?

A: Not In My Book is about two MFA students who are in a novel writing workshop and cannot get along. Rosie and Aiden write romance and litfic respectively and are constantly critiquing each other’s work harshly. However, their professor has had enough and forces them to team up for the class and co-write their novel. As they write their book, though, they discover there’s more to each other than that meets the eye as they see it on the page instead. 

I’ve had this idea for years, way before I ever wrote it. I was in a novel writing workshop at Columbia University one summer and it was the first one I ever did. It was intensely vulnerable for me, and I found it hard at times to share my work, especially as a romance novelist. It made me think about how hard it would be to share this personal process with someone else, before you’ve had the chance to hit the backspace and tear your work up with red ink. And then the idea of being vulnerable in relationships popped up, too. Sometimes it’s easier to write something down than to say it. The book just kind of came together after that! 

Q: I love reading stories with romance and I know you obviously enjoy writing them! What made you want your debut novel romance?

A: I love romance! It’s always been my favorite genre. When I moved on from middle grade books to YA, I gravitated towards dystopian novels because I realized there was always a romance in those. I didn’t even know romance existed until I read Stephanie Perkins, Kasie West, and Rainbow Rowell. Then, my whole world was flipped upside down when I read The Kiss Quotient. I’ve always naturally gravitated toward romance. If I were to read 100 books, 99 of them would be romances. There’s really nothing else I would ever want to write. I love this genre and community so fiercely that it only felt natural for my debut to be a romance. 

Q: What lessons & emotions do you hope readers learn and feel after reading Not In My Book? 

A: I hope they learn to listen to others that disagree with them. Rosie and Aiden would have used that lesson at the beginning. It’s so easy to judge a book by its cover, and I hope people see that Rosie and Aiden realized they were wrong once they looked a little deeper. 

For emotions, I hope people get the gooey feeling that I always get when reading romance novels! Where you just can’t put down your book and are kicking your feet and giggling way into the night. 

Q: If & when Hollywood gets the rights to Not In My Book, who would be your dream cast to play your characters? 

A: Oh my God, what a dream that would be! I would love for David Corenswet to play Aiden and Isabela Merced to play Rosie. It’d be important to me to make sure that Rosie and Alexa are played by Peruvian actresses because I really want to there to be more Peruvian representation!

Q: Which scenes in Not In My Book were your favorite scenes to write about? If there were to be a sequel to Not In My Book, what would your characters be doing right now? 

A: I’m a simple girl. I love banter and smutty scenes. So obviously, those were my favorite things to write. The early scenes with Rosie and Aiden in their workshop were so fun, especially since I got to vent a little about romance novels and their perception through Rosie. There’s also a particular co-written Google Docs scene that I can’t wait to see the reader’s reactions to!

Rosie and Aiden would be living in New York still. They’d be working on their next novel, probably still arguing over a scene. 

Q: Can you reveal any details about the second book you are writing right now? 

A: Yes! It’s titled THE LAST PAGE and it’s another NYC rom com! It’s about a woman who’s been trained to take over a popular NYC bookstore, but the owner unexpectedly dies before he has the chance to change his will. Which leaves the store to his estranged grandson. The two disagree on the way the store should be run, but quickly discover they must work together to save the store before it closes for good.