Everyone knows that Virginia is for lovers. Alexandria? Even more so.
For several years, the city has hit the top spot as the most romantic city in the country, according to Amazon. The company bases its rankings on sales data, including purchases per capita of romance novels.
Romance author Cristin Harber, an Alexandria resident, must be in the right place.
The former political consultant started self-publishing romance novels five years ago after getting written off by traditional publishers and agents, and she hasn’t looked back. Harber has published about 25 novels and enjoyed success right out of the gate, selling 30,000 copies of her first book the first month she self-published on Amazon. You can also find her books on Apple and at Barnes & Noble.
The Alexandria native began writing at an early age. “I grew up right off of Janney’s Lane, went to St. Mary’s and Bishop Ireton High School, Class of ‘99,” she said one morning over coffee. “I’ve always written stories, from the time I was a tater tot.” Her mother, Patricia, perhaps sensing her daughter’s future, saved a certificate Cristin won in 6th grade from her teacher — “most likely to become an author one day.”
While attending Bishop Ireton, Harber received a call from the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, asking her to come check out the campus for a weekend. “I went out there and it’s like everything clicked,” she said. “It felt right.” She returned and told her parents she was seriously considering attending the school. She did, and studied business.
After graduation, she volunteered for a political campaign in Kentucky and ended up working in state government. While she enjoyed the work, which involved traveling the state, she eventually ended up returning to Virginia. She worked in politics in DC. Throughout those first jobs, “the entire time, I had been writing stories,” she said.
While waiting for a prescription at the CVS on Duke Street, Harber picked up a copy of “Renegade” by Laura Leigh and started reading it. “It was the most magical thing I’d ever read,” she said. She bought the book and went to the library, holding “Renegade” and asked: “Do you have more of this?”
Romance writing, Harber said, revolves around a “central plot that is a love story, but it’s not just gratuitous.” She joined Romance Writers of America (RWA) and went to workshops and writers clinics. “I wrote some ‘romance thrillers’ that have never seen the light of day,” she said with a laugh. She typed left-handed while holding onto her infant daughter who didn’t want to be put down.
Eventually she was ready to publish but soon got caught in a Catch-22 of trying to get an agent in order to get published. Easier said than done. “I pitched and I pitched and I pitched,” she said. She went to a pitch event in New York where a “big-name publisher” told her “I love that. Who’s your agent?”
But after several stops and starts of trying to secure an agent, almost a year went by.
After attending a romance writing conference in the summer of 2013 in Atlanta, Harber was motivated to try self-publishing with KDP — Kindle Direct Publishing — where she’d have more control over her work and could get her books out to readers faster. She noticed several workshops on self-publishing at the conference were packed; six months pregnant, she elbowed her way in and scribbled down 50 pages of notes. She wanted to get her business up and running before a scheduled C-section in late October.
After asking the agents to pull her books from consideration, she quickly got to work and created Mill Creek Press using LegalZoom; her cousin created a logo. “All you need to do is have a great book and a plan,” she said. “I devised this plan that I would take everything that I’d been writing and publish it myself.”
She decided to publish five books, dubbed the Titan Series, that were part of a series featuring love stories based on a black-ops type organization. She found an artist online, The Killion Group, to create her book covers. For cover story ideas, she headed to Barnes & Noble in Clarendon to check out the cover art of their romance novels. She asked customers which covers they liked best, made notes and passed them along to the artist.
It was a welcome change from the slow-moving process and constant delays she had experienced with traditional publishing. She launched in September 2013, selling about 200 books; in October, she was tracking sales every day and sold 30,000 books. Her success was “even greater than my ‘pie-in-the-sky’ projections,” she said.
Harber loves the business of self-publishing almost as much as writing. She caught the entrepreneurial spirit watching her parents run their own business, CMS Services, a property management company, which they sold before retiring.
“Gosh, I learned so much from them. They started their business when I was 4 or 5,” she said. After a stint at horse camp one year as a kid, she came home and wrote up a business plan for how to run her own horse camp. That interest in business at an early age has ended up paying off. Harber is now a New York Times bestselling author who has self-published nearly 25 books and taught herself book-formatting and marketing as well.
She is currently working on her next series, “The Savior.”
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2019 print edition of Alexandria Living Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
