Interview With Author Julie Ann Sipos
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
As a longtime producer and entertainment executive bringing a generation of iconic screen stories to life, I’ve marked my Spring 2025 debut into literary fiction with the creation of an immersive story world. “Horrible Women, Wonderful Girls: A Jaycee Grayson Novel” is the centerpiece of an “all girl adventure series for somewhat grown women,” set in the fictional Village of Littleburgh, WI. Featuring a character-voiced cookbook, tear-and-share postcards book, and online interactive catalogue, the Jaycee Grayson Series launched a #1 Amazon Bestseller in both Humor/Satire and Amish Cooking, of all things!
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Horrible Women, Wonderful Girls: A Jaycee Grayson Novel tracks a newly unemployed kids’ entertainment executive from #MeToo Hollywood into the supposedly warm arms of Wonderful Girls, a famous Midwest doll company. Confronted instead by an angry army of Prairie Karens, Jaycee collects a colorful following of fellow misfits to stage a rebellion that could become her greatest production yet. Either that or the ultimate career killer that sullies her spirit, breaks her sobriety and stops her meaningful search for belonging dead in its tracks. Imbued with the adventure, romance and resilience of countless empowering girlhood tales, its shines a light on the failings of adult women in a post-contemporary sisterhood, where we are often our own worst enemies when we think men aren’t really looking. Thankfully, they usually aren’t.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Aren’t they all?
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Dickens and Twain are pretty obvious choices. They not only subverted social norms of their respective eras (slavery in the American south, child abuse in post-industrial England) into popular contemporary fiction, but also left us laugh-out-loud family classics that stand the test of time. Jaycee Grayson has her flaws, but her razor-sharp wit mostly results from an insufficient internal editor, creating highly teachable moments on her perilous journey toward reinvention. If readers ready to laugh at our own foibles find her a fraction as compelling a character as Huck Finn or Ebeneezer Scrooge, my work here is done, folks.
What are you working on now?
I’m about to make a turkey sandwich. Lettuce, tomatoes, the works.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
This could change once I figure out what I’m doing on Amazon and Facebook, but Bookbub (both ads and promos) yield insane numbers for me.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Never wait for a call. Not from any one, not about any thing.
Should you ever wish to do this, pause first and read Dorothy Parker’s famous essay, “A Telephone Call.”
“Please, God, let him telephone me now,” it begins. “Dear God, let him call me now. I won’t ask anything else of You, truly I won’t. It isn’t very much to ask. It would be so little to You, God, such a little, little thing. Only let him telephone now. Please, God. Please, please, please.”
It ends pretty much the same way. Today we have KDP and Tinder. Pull yourself together, girl.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Never give up. Never, never, never, never, never. I think that’s a Winston Churchill misquote, but don’t do it anyway.
What are you reading now?
I’m scrambling to finish a mordantly funny novel, “Deadpan,” by Richard Walter, for a Livestream he and I are giving this afternoon on humor and satire in chaotic times. I really don’t want him to sound smarter than me, although he is, by a lot.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Again, there’s that sandwich. Oh, I’m also working on the second Jaycee Grayson novel in the series, a prequel set in Y2K Hollywood.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
I would take 3 or 4 of my own books in various stages of completion, abandoned somewhere along the way for reasons unknown, probably because they were deemed unworkable or I just lost interest. A Sisyphean venture, to be sure, but I’m not nuts about islands and don’t really get why people save all year to vacation on them, unless they are Manhattan or Île Saint-Louis.
Author Websites and Profiles
Julie Ann Sipos Amazon Profile
Julie Ann Sipos’s Social Media Links
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