‘It’s Really Weird’ Ashley Poston Talks BookTok Fame, Writing Chaos and Her New Romance (EXCLUSIVE)
The author also shares her ‘chaotic’ writing process and her road to becoming a writer
Ashley Poston’s best-selling romance novels are the perfect blend of magic, mystery and memorable main characters, and her newest release, Sounds Like Love, which releases today, follows suit. Poston describes the novel to Woman’s World as a story of “one burnt-out songwriter and one has-been musician who find themselves inexplicably telepathically linked through a song they can’t get out of their heads.” In our exclusive conversation, she also discusses the inspiration behind the novel and how she really feels about her book, The Seven Year Slip, going viral on BookTok (book TikTok). To read what she had to say, keep scrolling!
Ashley Poston’s inspiration behind new novel ‘Sounds Like Love’
Surprisingly, the author tells us the book’s plot actually came from something Poston was experiencing in her own life.
“I wanted to write a book about nostalgia and about burnout and going back to your roots, because it was something I was having to deal with,” she reveals. “So I kind of inspected my own burnout through Joni’s [the songwriter] burnout and everything that she went through in Sounds Like Love. And obviously it’s sweet and cute.”
The novel also explores the tension between Joni and her love interest, Sasha, and the process of making this work on the page. “The more tension you have, the more impactful the scene is going to be once you get there. However, you can’t eliminate the tension too quickly, because then the reader gets whiplash. It has to build slowly, and that’s so hard.”
Ashley Poston on how she became an author
Sounds Like Love is Poston’s 10th book, and while she may seem like someone who always knew she wanted to be a writer, according to her, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“The first thing I ever wanted to be was a marine biologist, but I’m not very good at science,” she shares with Woman’s World. “I had a really bad stutter when I was younger, so I had to go to speech therapy, and I found that writing was the only way for me to communicate my thoughts and feelings and make words work for me. I could write things on a page, and I could actually command these words, and it was the most empowering and magical thing.”
And once she discovered that, there was no holding Poston back, especially after she learned about fanfiction, or fanfic, which is a form of writing where authors take well-known characters and put them in a variety of scenarios that they wish had happened.
“I started writing short stories, and then I found fanfic message boards on the internet in like 1998. I found a community through writing fanfic—and I found myself through that fanfic community,” she said. “I’ve been writing my entire life and that’s how I see the world. It’s how I process everything from my happiness to my grief to my homesickness. I love being able to do this for a living now, but I would do it even if it wasn’t something that I did for a living.”
Since then, Poston has traded fanfiction for traditionally published novels, which have stolen the hearts of readers everywhere. In fact, her 2023 novel The Seven Year Slip was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Public Library Best Book of 2023. Videos about the book on TikTok have garnered over 500,000 views and it has more than 400,000 reviews on GoodReads (more on that novel below!)
The chaotic writing process that works for her
There is no one way to write a book, and every author has his or her own strategies. But when Poston is faced with a challenge, she has some go-to tricks up her sleeve. “One of the writing exercises I do if I don’t understand a scene I’m writing is I will always put the main characters into a coffee shop and have them talk it out, and then I understand them better,” she shares.
Poston also reveals that when it comes to drafting, she is a little “chaotic.”
“I am a writer who writes from like 8 to midnight or whenever I finish my word count, which is usually between 2,000 to 5,000 words a day, depending on when my deadline is,” she says.
Ashley Poston the viral success of ‘The Seven Year Slip’
Out of her 10 novels, Poston’s most well-known is The Seven Year Slip, a story that follows a woman who falls in love with someone from the future.
“It’s really weird, because I can’t say the success comes from me at all. It’s definitely all thanks to the readers who read The Seven Year Slip and said, ‘I love this. I’m going to shout about it online.’ And then someone else hears their shout and then also reads it, and then they also shout. It’s one of the coolest games of telephone,” Poston says of the book’s success. “Honestly, I’ve been a reader my entire life, and I’ve written for half of that life, and I’ve always really loved the book community, and to be successful because of their passion and their love is just wildly cool.”
Ashley Poston’s recent campaign with Sonic
In addition to releasing her newest novel, Sounds Like Love, Poston also recently teamed up with Sonic to help them launch their Sweet Topped Lemonades—a line of lemonades topped with sweet cold foam in three flavors: Classic Lemonade, Strawberry Lemonade and Blueberry Lavender Lemonade. She also served as a spokesperson alongside fellow bestselling authors Abby Jimenez and Christina Lauren for the Sonic Foundation’s Limeades for Learning initiative, a nonprofit that is working to donate 100,000 books to students nationwide.
“It’s one of the coolest experiences of my career so far,” she says. “So I’m just really happy and excited to be partnering with Sonic and their Limeades for Learning initiative to help public education and especially help teachers buy supplies for their classrooms.”
Pick up your copy of Sounds Like Love—out today—wherever books are sold!
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