Welcome to the Meet Cute BookPod, the Trailer! Meet Cute Romance Bookshop is a queer-owned, feminist bookshop in San Diego focusing on genre romance, and *this* is its podcast. Catch up on virtual and live events you missed and join us for some exclusive conversations with folks working all over Romancelandia.

"It's never too late to be yourself." Ashley Herring Blake, author of Delilah Green Doesn't Care and Astrid Parker Doesn't Fail, chats with Taleen Voskuni about writing with a sense of place, interior design inspo, figuring out your sexuality later in life, what a day in her life as a writer and teacher is like, which of her characters she's most like and most likely to befriend, and advice for other writers. Ashley also previews the last book in her Bright Falls series, Iris Kelly Doesn't Date, and teases a holiday romance she hasn't even written yet!

"I am not writing to make other people comfortable." A conversation about “Diversity in the Age of Viral Books” with authors Adriana Herrera, Kennedy Ryan, Nana Malone, and Nisha Sharma, moderated by Nichole Perkins. They cover that and so much more. It’s an insightful, incisive, and wide-ranging conversation that covers what inspired each of the authors to start writing romance and what they find to be the hardest thing about it; the pressure they’ve felt to tone down the authenticity of their books to appeal to audiences who don’t share their or their characters’ identities and some of the choices they’ve had to make in terms of content and marketing; their experiences having books traditionally published and publishing them independently; and how TikTok, in particular, has changed publishing, and what that means when the app itself isn’t an even playing field for authors of color.