1–What is the title of your latest release?
2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Good Girl Winnie Baker is ready to reinvent herself on the set of a spicy Santa Claus movie, but it turns out filming fake sex scenes is really hard when you’ve never had good sex in real life. Enter Winnie’s co-star, Kallum Lieberman, former boy band member, current Midwest pizza mogul with a dad bod, who is more than willing to give Winnie off-camera lessons in spice. For art, course! They say practice makes perfect, but what happens when the practice feels too good to stop?
3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
We created the small town of Christmas Notch, Vermont to escape the year that was 2020. Our first book in this series, A Merry Little Meet Cute, showcases this twee, forever-Christmas town with its quirky cast of characters, and we were excited to return in A Holly Jolly Ever After to some of our favorite haunts (including our Christmas-themed strip club, The North Pole).
4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
Kallum is the pizza-slinging, former Funny One ™ of the now-defunct boy band INK, and Winnie is the sweetest, purest girl you’ve ever met—we’d love to spend a week in Christmas Notch rating pizza and ski lifts with them!
5–What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Kallum is a silly, loyal, himbo, and Winnie is the girl next door.
6–What’s something you learned while writing this book?
Our experiences with purity culture cut a little deeper than we thought they did, and writing through Winnie’s breakthrough was incredibly healing for us. (Also we learned that there are no fully nude strip clubs in Vermont.)
7–Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Sierra edits as she drafts—Julie waits until she’s done. Or until Sierra makes her do it.
8–What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
We’ve made pie a tentpole of our friendship, and whenever we get together in the winter for a writing retreat, we make sure to bring plenty of pie for watching cheesy Christmas movies with (and for eating off the edge of a rental house hot tub.)
9–Describe your writing space/office!
We each have our own offices in our homes, but when we’re together, we love writing side by side on a couch so we can fuss and squeak at each other. (We have such similar taste in couches that we now officially own the same model of couch.)
10–Who is an author you admire?
We both have a huge author crush on Holly Black, and we love that she creates creepy, sexy worlds full of complicated and unforgettable characters. (Jude is our knife wife and you can’t tell us any differently.)
11–Is there a book that changed your life?
Julie: God-Shaped Hole by Tiffanie DeBartolo. I fell in love with this book, and it completely broke my heart—and I knew then that I wanted to try to make stories that made readers feel the way this book made me feel. I reread it every year.
Sierra: It’s such a “girl with glasses” answer, but Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë was my formative read, and basically the story my entire id crystalized around.
12–Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
When we got the email that our first ever co-written book, A Merry Little Meet Cute, had an offer, it was a race to see who could FaceTime each other the fastest. We basically spent an hour being genuinely shocked that anyone was willing to take a chance on our unhinged and unabashedly saucy Christmas caper.
13–What’s your favorite genre to read?
Julie: I’m a huge romance junkie, but I devour anything with family politics in it!
Sierra: For eyeball-reading, I’m a fangirl of basically every subgenre of romance, but for my earhole-listening, I love non-fiction, especially history.
14–What’s your favorite movie?
The Barbie movie is our favorite movie ever, of all time. Can you feel the Kenergy?
15–What is your favorite season?
We both love Halloween—currently petitioning to make autumn the only season ever.
16–How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
We both embrace the ceaseless approach of death with serenity and cake. Sierra prefers ice cream cake.
17–What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
Did we mention Barbie?
We also absolutely gobbled up Tastes Like Shakkar by Nisha Sharma, which is a Much Ado About Nothing retelling with a wedding planner and a sexy chef who likes tying knots, if you know what we mean…
18–What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Pie, preferably eaten in a rental house hot tub at two in the morning.
19–What do you do when you have free time?
We’ve forced our families to conjoin, and so we love taking multi-family trips and taking naps while our husbands binge-watch Alone.
20–What can readers expect from you next?
Julie: I have a picture book coming later this fall called Chubby Bunny, about a young girl learning to embrace herself. (And she has the cutest pet bunny!)
Sierra: I’ve just started a new series that’s a contemporary queer retelling of the legend of Mark, Tristan, and Isolde—it’s very morally gray with lots of spice. The first book is Salt Kiss and it’s everywhere now!
A HOLLY JOLLY EVER AFTER by Sierra Simone, Julie Murphy
An actress and a perpetually single former boy-band member are reunited as costars on a steamy holiday film in this all new spicy rom-com by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone, bestselling coauthors of A Merry Little Meet Cute.
Kallum Liebermanis the funny one™. As the arguably lesser of the three former members of the boy band INK, he enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame and then moved home where he opened a regional pizza chain called Slice, Slice, Baby! He’s living his best dad bod life, hooking up with bridesmaids at all his friends’ weddings. But after an old one-off sex tape is leaked and quickly goes viral, Kallum decides he’s ready to step into the spotlight again, starring in a sexy Santa biopic for the Hope Channel.
Winnie Baker did everything right. She married her childhood sweetheart, avoided the downfalls of adolescent stardom, and transitioned into a stable adult acting career. Hell, she even waited until marriage to have sex. But after her perfect life falls apart, Winnie is ready to redefine herself—and what better way than a steamier-than-a-steaming-hot-mug-of-cider Christmas movie?
With decade old Hollywood history between them, Winnie and Kallum are both feeling hesitant about their new situation as costars…especially Winnie who can’t seem to fake on screen pleasure she’s never experienced in real life. She’s willing to do the pleasure research—for science and artistic authenticity, of course. And there’s no better research partner than her bridesmaid sex tape hall of fame costar, Kallum. But suddenly, Kallum’s teenage crush on Winnie is bubbling to the surface and Winnie might be catching feelings herself.
They say opposites attract, but is this holly jolly ever after really ready for its close-up?
Romance Holiday | Contemporary Women’s Fiction | Romance Comedy [Avon, On Sale: October 10, 2023, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063222649 / ]
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About Sierra Simone
Sierra Simone is a USA Today Bestselling former librarian (who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk.) She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.
About Julie Murphy
Julie Murphy lives in North Texas with her husband, who loves her; her dog, who adores her; and her cats, who tolerate her. After several wonderful years in the library world, Julie now writes full-time.
When she’s not writing or reliving her reference desk glory days, she can be found watching made-for-TV movies, hunting for the perfect slice of cheese pizza, or planning her next great travel adventure.
She is also the author of the young adult novels, Puddin’, Ramona Blue, Side Effects May Vary, and Dumplin’ (now a Netflix original film).
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