Publication Date: May 6, 2025
Publisher: Harlequin Trade Publishing / MIRA
Sofie Wilde’s bestselling fantasy romance series has been breaking bestseller records and readers’ hearts for years. She’s primed to become a worldwide phenomenon as the tenth and final book is set to debut after the annual romance readers convention takes place in Chicago next week. As buzz continues to build toward the book’s release, Sofie is asked to headline the event for the first time, a career milestone. One she won’t let anyone take from her, especially “the next Sofie Wilde.”
That’s what they’re calling her—Hartley West, the self-published debut author who writes in the style of Sofie Wilde. Except she doesn’t actually “write” anything. After Hartley admits to using AI to create her novel, Sofie’s ready to watch Hartley be skewered on social media. Except in this unpredictable world, Hartley is instead lauded for being innovative, for being such a skilled editor to take what the AI churned out and massage it into a story that’s just as compelling as Sofie’s—maybe even more so.
After her unhinged rant unintentionally goes viral, Sofie loses her keynote, and she’s starting to lose all her support. That loss is Hartley’s gain—as her book sales start soaring, she’s given the headliner spot. Sofie is livid. And she’s not the only one. As the convention begins, Sofie is surrounded by fellow authors who also fear for their futures, their livelihoods, their art being stripped away, one AI prompt at a time. Something must be done. This has to be stopped. Now. With the clock ticking down to the keynote, Sofie enlists her fellow authors in a plan to stop Hartley, vowing, “‘The next Sofie Wilde’—over my dead body. Or hers.”
Lori Gold has crafted a raucous romp through the world of publishing, asking what it really means to be a writer in the time of AI, perfect for fans of Finlay Donovan is Killing It and Emily Henry.
Excerpt
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
It’s a commonly held belief that in order to be a good author you have to be drunk or tortured. To be a great author? Both. I am a great author. I am occasionally drunk (though not at present). But I am not prone to sprawled-on-the-bathroom-floor bawling. I have not, nor will I ever, utter the phrase: “Please don’t make me adult today.” And I am not the least bit disturbed by crawling into a king-size bed alone.
All that’s to say, I am not, nor have I ever been, tortured.
But there truly is a first time for everything.
The bookstore buzzes like an active hive. Beyond these rolling partitions masquerading as shelves, cushioned folding chairs cradle bums of all shapes and sizes and stages of cellulite. They are here for me. As I am here for them. This is my hometown. And this is the bookstore in my hometown that Jocelyn and Torrence and Callum and little Vance built, word by word, page by page, chapter by chapter, book by book. That I share with no one.
I am not a charity.
My coattails are not for riding.
Tell that to Lacey, my publicist for the last ten years. I already did. Multiple times and with only one expletive. (Which honestly is the definition of restraint.) And yet, I am here. Because Blaire, my agent with a heart mushier than a ripe peach, intervened on Lacey’s behalf and asked me to be.
Listen, that this industry is harder to navigate than Gen Z slang is not lost on me. I’m not completely averse to the idea of paying it forward, even though when I was starting out no one gave me so much as a linty nickel. But you can be damn sure that if a bestselling author who helped to define my genre had invited me (via said publicist) to a bookstore’s celebration of their blockbuster series, I’d have been on time.
Not late. By twenty minutes—and counting.
I reach for the partition cordoning off this back room, my rose gold bangles clattering as I wiggle free a chapter book—a tale about monsters hiding in school cubbies that must be the bane of every kindergarten teacher’s existence. A ghost of a smile plays on my lips, affection for my kindred spirit of an author who came up with this. I set the book aside and peek through the slim gap.
Heart-shaped helium balloons kiss the ceiling, “library” candles that smell of old books and lavender flicker on the windowsills, and my favorite cushioned armchair beckons from behind my usual signing table, an old desk with legs fashioned out of stacked books. Hanging above the register is a poster of the first nine titles in this series I nearly gave a kidney to make happen (don’t ask).
The dozens who have traveled from as close as Boston and as far as Iowa wait with more patience than me alongside half the residents of this small seaside town.
With so many bodies, the room temperature rises. The air turns electric. And I come alive. I wriggle my head out of my introverted shell and gorge myself on the energy of the crowd. I’m no longer a little girl with debilitating stage fright, convincing my teachers I’d been bitten by a squirrel or had a seven-foot-long tapeworm in my belly to get out of an oral report. Turns out I’ve always been good at lying.
Lies, fibs, fabrications, tall tales. That’s all writing is, really, being good at making things up, convincing others that a little boy with freckled cheeks and a mop of carrot-colored hair can bend universes in one breath and giggle at fart jokes in the next. Ah, little Vance—everyone’s favorite character. Which is why he had to die. My socials will be flooded with heartbreak emoji and death threats when fans get their hands on this last book.
My god, do I love my job.
“Sofie, our little Sofie.”
I would take these words as a slight, given my five-footstature, if they weren’t coming from a woman slipping behind the partition with arms outstretched, a half dozen tiny pencils poking out of her salt-and-pepper bun, and a “Roxanne (as in Bel Canto!)” name tag on her ample left breast (the right is ample too, but there’s just the one name tag).
“Sofie Wilde, the hero of the harbor.” Roxanne repeats the same refrain each time I enter this store, be it through the back for an event like today or the spontaneous (read: alwaysstaged) drop-ins through the front to “casually” browse and be photographed with some new release Roxanne’s exuberance and penchant for underdogs caused her to overbuy. She posts them on the store’s Instagram. Knowing this, some of the younger authors, freed from the decorum handcuffs of my generation, have been bold enough to send extra copies of their books to the store. The feed for Harbor Books is the only place you’ll see me posing with a novel that isn’t mine. It’s my rule. Roxanne, somehow, over all these years, remains the exception.
“Tell me,” Roxanne says, wiggling her phone and pressing the side button to shut it down. “And not even Instagram will hear. Will Vance be able to restore the cosmic balance in time for Jocelyn to choose Torrence? Because she will, naturally. It must be Torrence.”
My face remains hard as steel.
“Sofie,” Roxanne coaxes. “It’s me. We did this together. We built this store as a team. This is ours.”
Roxanne also has a penchant for hyperbole. Still, these days, my fantasy romance series—what this Gen Z, grammar-phobic world now calls “romantasy”—is a New York Times bestseller, and I have more than half a million followers on social media. But fifteen years ago, I was a thirty-five-year-old woman with mousy brown hair, clear plastic-framed eyeglasses, and self-made bookmarks rolled off my laser printer in need of a yellow cartridge. A self-published author without the financial means to promote myself. That’s when I met Roxanne.
When I walked through the door of Harbor Books with my sack of sad-looking bookmarks and shoddily glued-together manuscripts, Roxanne didn’t even wait for me to finish my plea to support a local author. She was already slapping price stickers on the back and arranging them in a three-foot-tall window display. Hers was the first store to stock my books. She was the first bookstore owner to host an event with me. In return, I’ve held every launch party here, and Harbor Books is the only store where readers can preorder signed copies with one-of-akind swag. Whenever I have my last launch (a very, very, very long time from now), it’ll be here.
Roxanne bats her eyelashes. “I can better serve you and the book if I know how to respond to customer inquiries.” She gives me that syrupy smile we both know is exaggerated. “Truly, there were no advance reader copies printed? Not even for Jenna? Reese?”
“Not a one,” I say, firmly, though of course there were. Stripped of the cover with confidential and sharing prohibited upon penalty of death written across the front (though, as I think about it, no one ever confirmed the use of that perfectly reasonable suggestion).
A small number of advance reader copies are always necessary in this industry that relies on prepublication buzz to anoint its bestsellers, and my publisher plays the game well, distributing copies to high-profile outlets for review. I could have secured one for Roxanne, but Vance’s death is the surprise of the series and she’s terrible at keeping secrets. A photo of her still hangs on the wall of shame at the single-screen movie theater across the street for telling everyone that Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense is actually dead. (Ooh, did I just pull a Roxanne? Whoops.)
A ding announces the opening of the front door. Roxanne peers around the partition to confirm it’s her.
“Break a spine!” Roxanne says, whooshing out.
Instead of following, I pause to peer through that tiny gap on the bookshelf.
My “invited” guest, the author who will ask me a few questions and then moderate ones from the crowd, hovers at the front of the store, seemingly unsure, eyes scanning the room. Silver hair past her shoulders, flowy cotton skirt, well-worn canvas tote bulging with what can only be useless buttons and cheap pens and glitter tattoos she paid for herself. She has no marketing budget for swag or anything else. She’s only here because of me.
No one had heard of Hartley West until a month ago. As happens (usually thanks to a hefty Venmo transfer), an influencer “discovered” Hartley’s self-published debut, Love and Lawlessness. That influencer gushed about it and set off a trend among her fellow movers and shakers—leaders of the “next wave” of how books are found, the whole cadre featured in an article in The New York Times. Like a snowball, more and more readers “found” and recommended Hartley’s book. Said it reminded them of me.
The next Sofie Wilde. That’s what they’re calling her. Over my dead body.
“Ms. Wilde?”
I turn.
“Are we missing anything?”
The bookstore employee—Amy (just like in Little Women!) according to her name tag—lifts a large wooden tray as if making an offering to the gods. On it are three black Sharpies with an ultra-fine tip, a pad of sticky notes (blue), six peppermint-flavored lozenges, two glasses of water, no ice, and a bottle of hand sanitizer disguised as hand lotion.
I’m not a diva. (Despite how it sounds.) I’ve simply paid my dues. I’ve earned the right to be here, to be doing this, and I want to do it well.
“It’s perfect, Amy,” I say just as on the other side of this partition, chair legs scratch against the floor.
I return to my peekaboo window. Hartley West has circled the table. She drops her bag on the seat of the armchair. The single armchair. The chair that is mine. She puts her back to the room. Her eyes are closed. Her hand presses against her breastbone, and I wonder if this is her very first event. I’m positive it’s her very first event like this. I remember the feeling. And by feeling I mean fear. Maybe that’s why she was late. I feel a momentary surge of empathy toward her, understanding what it was like to be just starting out, to be hoping and praying to all the gods and no particular god (to cover all the bases) for the doors of publishing to open even the tiniest crack.
I watch Hartley’s chest inflate and deflate, and suddenly I feel like I’m intruding. I lower my gaze, but I can still hear her on the other side, the faint mumbling as she repeats her pitch one final time. Rehearsing the quippy soundbite that we authors spend more time writing than the actual book. We are actors without training. Performers without a safety net. We are thrust into the spotlight despite our desire to avoid it being what led most of our introverted selves to become writers in the first place. When we stand before a crowd, be it one or one thousand, we must be witty and wise.
I am.
Is “the next Sofie Wilde”?
Honestly, what is that? Is it supposed to be a compliment? Me being replaced? Isn’t that called a coup?
Flump.
Flump, flump, flump, flump.
I resume my spying. Hartley West is plopping stacks of bookmarks on the table beside a two-foot-tall tower of books that she must have pulled from her Mary Poppins tote.
She then reaches into that bag and draws out a single sheet of paper. I watch as she carefully folds it in two. Printed on the front, in big blocky aquamarine letters, is her name and underneath: CO-PANELIST.
I text Lacey: Hartley West, what did you say to her?
Lacey: She’s late, I know. Roxanne’s been hounding me.
Me: She’s here. With a “co-panelist” name card.
Lacey: WTF?
Me: My thoughts exactly.
Lacey: Looping in Blaire.
But Blaire wouldn’t overstep. She may have a heart that bleeds so much she needs daily transfusions, but she defers to Lacey on all things publicity related. Lacey started as my in-house publicist, working for a publisher where she had more authors to handle than romance authors have euphemisms for penis. Lacey hung out her own shingle after helping me hit the New York Times bestseller list with book four, and I became her first client.
Blaire: It must be a misunderstanding.
Lacey: Damn straight, because if you look up the definition of limelight, you will see Sofie right here and now. Not Sofie and Hartley West. She came out of nowhere at the pinnacle of Sofie’s career. Sofie cannot validate this flash in the pan at her own event.
Sofie: Isn’t that what I said to you? Right before you hit “click” on the posts promoting this entirely predictable debacle?
Lacey: I’ll fix it.
Lacey could talk a lobster into a pot of water—then get it to use its own claw to turn up the heat.
And yet . . . in exchange for a blurb, I once offered to donate a kidney to a bestselling author on dialysis (I said not to ask). I had to fight for every reader at the start.
Just like “the next Sofie Wilde.”
And if karma exists, I need it on my side. Today marks the beginning of the end for Jocelyn and Torrence and Callum and little Vance. I mourn them. A part of me always will. They’ve rented space in my head for more than ten years. I know what they eat for breakfast and what they’d wear to a funeral and the fears that paralyze them. Things I barely know about myself. But it’s time to let them go, and along with them, shifting universes and alternate dimensions and three-headed beasts. At least for a little while. I’m not leaving romance behind—I may have my flaws, but self-sabotage is not one of them. But the idea of penning a meet-cute that doesn’t involve fantastical elements like a talking dolphin or a sidekick with yellow feathers makes me all warm and fuzzy (though honestly, that could also be the hot flashes).
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