Author Ali Hazelwood.Justin A Murphy/Supplied
If you pick up any of Ali Hazelwood’s best-selling novels, you’ll almost certainly see some variation of a blurb – perhaps from The New York Times, or one of her fellow romance authors – touting the book as a “steminist” masterpiece.
It’s a complicated label for Hazelwood, a neuroscientist who began writing as escapist stress-relief during her PhD.: “At the beginning, it was just a word for me, like any other,” she says of the term, which refers to feminists who believe women should have equal opportunities in the male-dominated STEM fields.
When she began to see online chatter in reaction to her early books – stating that there wasn’t enough exploration of feminist themes or they were excluding women who were in academia but not in STEM – the phrase came to feel like less of a compliment and more of an impossible standard.
“I don’t want people to feel hurt,” she says. “I really took it to heart.”
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It’s a word that she herself has stopped using when referring to her own work, although she adds it’s not something she can stop her publisher from using as a marketing hook. Along with a cohort of other science-minded writers, such as fellow bestsellers Helen Hoang and Susannah, Hazelwood’s “steminist” stories have become a genre as recognizable as that of Regency romance.
Hazelwood got her start writing Star Wars fan fiction, in particular a “Reylo” (that’s an imagined relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren for the uninitiated), which eventually became her debut smash hit The Love Hypothesis in 2021. “I was a grad student when I started writing, and academia was my world,” says Hazelwood, who is Italian but moved to the U.S. for her PhD, and was a neuroscience professor until she left to write full time last year.
Here, The Globe chats with her about the double-edged sword of being a bestseller, why she thinks her next book is her best yet and her neuroscientist’s theory on why we can’t seem to get enough of romance novels.
What does it mean to be a best-selling author?
It’s not that I’m not happy about it – it’s amazing, it opens a lot of doors, it’s a very good marketing tool – but the truth is that I personally think bestseller lists are very gate-keep-y, and some of them are kind of made up. There’s a lot of editorializing. There are a lot of obstacles, especially for certain types of authors, that make it harder for them to get on the list. I know it’s something that my team really prizes and it’s helpful for them when they’re negotiating things, like with my publisher. For me, it’s kind of a meaningless thing. Is that a horrible thing to say?
Was it something you ever aspired to?
Selling a lot of books and being on the bestseller lists are two different things. A lot of indie writers who have outsold me by billions of copies are never going to make a bestseller list. So yeah, being a bestseller wasn’t necessarily aspirational, but being able to make enough money that I could write full time was.
It sounds like you don’t value bestseller lists because they’re not a pure metric.
It’s true, it bothers me. Part of it is that I’m very close to authors who were also pandemic debuts, and I have seen the way that there are a million different factors that authors cannot control, and which are controlled by luck, by timing, by publishers. I have seen how much they impact whether you’re a bestseller or not. I’ve also seen a lot of my friends be like, ‘Oh crap, I didn’t hit the list, my team is disappointed,” and because of that, I’ve been looking at it more critically.
There are very few other careers where there is literally a list of “who’s the best” that gets published weekly.
I hate that! My publishers would send the lists to me via e-mail, and I had to ask them, ‘Please, I don’t want to know anything about this. I don’t want to know if I’m nominated for some Good Reads award or whatever.’ I hate the whole comparison game. I hate that it gets in my head, I hate that it gets in other authors’ heads.
The bookish community, and particularly the romance community, is very much a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ environment, where if someone reads a romance, they seek more. It’s such an inclusive environment, that to me, the lists almost ruin it. At the same time, I know that being on those lists can be a little bit of a break out, so I’m not saying they’re terrible, but I personally cannot deal with it.
You had that dream arc of, ‘She was discovered writing fan fiction and then her debut was a #1 New York Times bestseller.’ On the other side of that, is there actually anxiety and pressure to perform the next time?
For me, no book has done as well as my first one. I’ve now stopped reading reviews, but I’ve read so many that said, like, ‘One hit wonder.’ At some point, I internalized it a little bit. It’s been so hard, because on the one hand I’ve been so lucky. I met my agent through fan fiction, but I also feel like I’ve been called out for it a lot. At the beginning, when I was giving interviews, I downplayed how much work I was doing, and how hard publishing was for me. People took it as, ‘Oh look at this person, it was so easy for her.’
But the truth is, there’s so much behind-the-scenes – so much hard work, so much heartache and so many amazing things as well. It’s hard to communicate everything that comes with having exposure and having a writing career. I’m still coming to terms with it. I am so, so lucky, and I am a very privileged person. When I’ve given credit to my agent and my editor, I’ve gotten in trouble a little bit, but my publishing team has been amazing. They’ve been so helpful, and so great with me. I cannot not give them credit.
As a journalist, I know the difference a great editor can make to a piece, and they so often don’t get the credit for that.
I know, I hate it! There are so many people who work on a book. I just got my first copies of Not In Love [Hazelwood’s latest out this June] and on the back, it says who designed and illustrated the cover. I’m so happy to see Lilith the artist and Vicky the cover designer get credit, but I’m like, ‘Why don’t the editor, the production editor, the copy editor get the same type of [recognition]?’ It’s only fair. Editors are amazing, even when I get mad at mine when she asks me to change things.
Let’s take this opportunity to pull the curtain back. What does your process with your editor, Sarah Blumenstock, actually look like?
At this point, I tell her a sentence about what the book is going to be about. For Not In Love, I told her, ‘This is going to be set in STEM, but industry. There’s going to be a hostile takeover, they’re going to be on opposite sides, but they’re going to want to have sex with each other.’ And she was like, ‘Okay!’
Then, I deliver her the manuscript. With Not In Love, she told me exactly what I thought she’d tell me, which was basically, ‘Your main character is unlikeable. She’s a very cold character, and she’s giving us nothing.’ Which made sense, because my beta readers said the same thing.
It’s very hard, because you have a character in your head and you know their motivations, but sometimes it doesn’t come across on the page. I don’t think I changed the character, per se, but I explained what was happening behind her actions a bit more. And then there were some plot elements that didn’t work. With Not In Love, it was one round of edits, but with other books we’ve done, like, 10.
One round of edits?!
We maybe did a second round of very light edits. Editors are great for the creative part, but what really matters is something that [combined pen name co-author duo] Christina Lauren Christina Lauren told me: What your editor does is not just fix your books, but they are your advocate in house. They help you position the book, they know how to sell it to sales so you have the best resources for promoting the book. That’s something I think my editor is amazing at. I don’t even know everything that she does! There are probably millions of conversations that I’m not privy to, and I don’t even know how much she fights for me, but I know she does.
This interview has been condensed and edited.