Monica Murphy is well positioned to speak to the revival of new adult romance. “I was part of the first wave,” she says, but while traditionally published titles like her One Week Girlfriend college romance series (2013–2014) “did great digitally,” she says, they didn’t do well in print. Enter TikTok and its sales-boosting fan videos, and now Murphy is ready to start her second act with Lonely for You Only (Blackstone, Feb. 2024), in which heiress Scarlett Lancaster meets washed-up boy band member Tate Ramsey at a party to celebrate Scarlett’s 18th birthday. The author spoke with PW about comebacks in fiction and in real life.

What’s the premise of this book?

Tate Ramsey is down on his luck; he makes money doing Cameos. On Scarlett’s birthday, her dad says, “I got someone to perform for your party.” And she’s like, “Taylor Swift? Harry Styles?” No, it’s Tate Ramsey. And then they kiss and it goes viral, and Tate gets a second chance at fame. I explore how you can get all this attention without meaning to—I put a lot of my own emotion into that because I feel like I’ve been given a resurgence in my career. Word-of-mouth TikToks made my books explode. You can’t plan for anything like it. It’s wild.

Why do you write new adult?

There’s something about first love. It’s fun and relatable, because we’ve all gone through it, whether a one-sided crush or the ultimate high school love. Our feelings are heightened during this time of our lives. Everything feels almost life-and-death.

What tropes do you play with in the book?

I love a good fake relationship. You have to pretend that you’re into each other—and then, whoops, now we’re into each other. It’s fun to explore the in-between: of finding yourself falling in love, and also of being worried and unsure if something is real or not. Scarlett comes from a very rich family. Tate has had fame, lost it, and now is finding it again. I whisk them to New York and Los Angeles and the glamorous celebrity life. It’s pure fantasy. Also, everybody loves a former boy band guy.

How would you describe today’s romance readers?

They’re hungry; they have disposable incomes and they love paperbacks. They want pretty books to put in their pretty room and take pretty photos of. My daughter is 20; she’s all about aesthetics. They also push the norms of the genre. Traditionally in romance novels, you had three acts, and in the final act there’s what used to be called the “big black moment,” when all seems to be lost. Readers don’t want that third-act breakup; in fact, they hate it. They’re changing the way that we think and write about our characters. Traditional publishers used to say, “You can’t do that.”

Consumers are pushing those boundaries.

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