Heating Up Amazon: Kristi Pelton
Photos by JOHN BURNS
Kristi Pelton loves that can’t-put-it-down feeling of a good book. When she started Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series one night, her husband found her in the same spot the next morning, still reading.
“I was totally absorbed in the characters,” she said. “I thought, ‘How fun to make someone feel that, to make somebody get lost.’”
Today, Pelton has given thousands of readers that same feeling with her romance novels in the young adult and new adult genres. An Amazon bestselling author, she’s sold over 100,000 books since 2013. Pelton wrote her first short story in a college writing class but didn’t write again until she needed something to keep her occupied while her kids played soccer for 2 to 3 hours at a time.
“I just started putting down words to see what happened,” she said. “Once I started, I never looked back.”
Pelton’s friends read her early work and liked it, but Pelton didn’t trust she had something until someone outside her close circle of friends told her she should do something with her draft. That unsolicited praise prompted Pelton to reach out to a friend at the University of Kansas who could edit her books
A SPARK IN SALES
When her editor reviewed Pelton’s draft, she told her she didn’t have one book, she had four. That draft became Pelton’s first series, Old Enough to Love. While the first series is still her favorite, it didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. Regardless, Pelton was thrilled when she sold 100 copies of her first book.
“It didn’t get me down,” she said. “I just kept writing because I love making that world for people to read.”
Pelton’s next book, Pure Will, had much different results. Pelton was traveling when a friend called her at 2 in the morning to tell her the book was 150 on Amazon’s best seller list for all genres. It went on to sell 16,000 copies in six days. After the success of Pure Will, Pelton said the words poured out.
“I just became prolific,” Pelton said. “Thank God my sons played soccer year round.”
Pelton’s sales kept getting better. Her next title, Sessions Interrupted, reached 130 on the Amazon bestseller list. After that, sLick hit number 33. Authors who reach the amount of success Pelton did get compensated from Amazon on top of their book sales. That milestone carried significance.
“It made me feel validated,” she said. “It was never about self worth, but it made me believe I could be an author.”
STEAMY SUBJECTS
Glancing at Pelton’s covers (many of which contain shirtless men and couples in intimate poses) readers wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Pelton’s books contain sexual content. Some have labeled her work as “erotica,” but Pelton disagrees with that label.
“I feel like I have a message in my books. The message is not sex. It’s not even intimacy,” Pelton said. “Every one of my stories is about love and the building blocks of a relationship.”
Pelton draws inspiration from different parts of her life. Her love of CrossFit often works its way into her plot. Her career as a part-time juvenile court services officer has shaped some of her characters. The central female character in Your Honor has a career fighting for children’s rights. In Convicted, the male character is working off a sentence. But perhaps her biggest influence is her two sons, who motivate Pelton to create healthy male characters.
“It’s easy to read about a male that’s abusive or a stalker or unhealthy in someway,” she said. “I try to show that someone who makes mistakes is redeemable.”
THE FLUSH OF SUCCESS
Now 10 titles into her career as an author, Pelton said it can be hard to not fixate on her books’ rankings.
“Your mindset changes a little bit because you’ve had that success,” she said. “Sometimes it’s really hard not to judge your success by how well you get the books into the hands of other people.”
Since her first book, Pelton has seen the industry evolve. Pelton purchased her own stock photo for her first-ever cover for $16.99.Now, she said, the process is more elaborate.
“The first covers were awful,” she said. “But in the beginning, it was just simpler.”
Now Pelton sees her books through multiple rounds of editing, formatting, pricing, blurb-writing and copyrighting.
“It’s not just a matter of kind of putting the book on the site and clicking ‘Publish,’” she said. “It is crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i.’”
While Pelton likes the flexibility of publishing on her own, she said it would be nice to have a publisher take some of the promotional tasks off her hands. Regardless of how her future books will be published, Pelton is certain that she will keep on writing them.
“I don’t think I could not,” she said. “Stories are firing up in my head.”
