Living off-grid and paying the bills with romance: 'There's never been a better time to be a writer'

Back in 2015, Steffanie Holmes decided to have a crack at becoming a full-time writer in the genre she loved to read - paranormal romance.

Nine years later, she's got over 55 books under her belt and an international fanbase.

Holmes tells Saturday Morning about her journey to finally paying the bills with her books, the adversity she's faced being legally blind, and the game-changer that is self-publishing.

Paranormal romance asks, "What if the horrors and I held hands and kissed a little?" Holmes wrote in a recent Spinoff article.

To establish herself as a professional writer in the genre, she "very deliberately" set her books in the US and UK, where romance readers are more plentiful. Kiwis are rapidly catching on, though, she says.

"I'm seeing so many romanticky books in the bookstores, and people are so excited about the authors in my genre coming over on book tours, and there are lots of pretty books everywhere."

In her own romance novels, Holmes was determined to leave behind the trend for setting up women as "competitors" and instead portray "really beautiful female friendships".

Growing up a "very weird kid" in a typical small-town New Zealand, Holmes says she didn't have many friends but did have a mum and dad who encouraged her to pursue her specific and intense interests.

"My parents were always very big on 'follow where your passion is and where your skills are and you'll figure it out'."

Due to the "really rare and kind of strange and interesting" eye condition achromatopsia, Holmes is legally blind.

Proving wrong the high school careers counsellor who laughed when she shared her dream of studying Ancient Egypt at university, she attained a double honours degree in archaeology and ancient history and worked on archaeological digs overseas.

Job-seeking back home in New Zealand, though, Holmes faced discrimination from people who feared her eye condition, which involves extreme light sensitivity, poor depth perception and the inability to see colour, made her too much of a liability.

"I was too young and too shy to push back on that in a way that I would now."

On the website Rage Against The Manuscript, Holmes now encourages other people to boldly chase their writing dreams via self-publishing.

There's no time like the present - when it costs next to nothing to self-publish on Amazon - to find out if you have a book in you, she says.

Just like tech startups that launch and sometimes "fail really quickly and really publicly", self-publishing enables writers to get their stories in front of readers and get feedback very quickly, Holmes says.

For writers, "indie" publishing is much quicker and cheaper than traditional publishing, offers a much more direct path to establishing yourself and pays better, Holmes says.

"We keep roughly 70 percent of the royalties, versus 10 percent in a trad pub contract, which means that we don't have to sell as many books in order to build an audience.

"I really feel as though there's never been a better time to be a writer."