DEAR HERO by Alyssa Roat and Hope Bolinger Spotlight Book Tour ( Part 2/2)

The Story Behind Dear Hero

 

How do two college friends end up writing a book together? The answer is sillier than you think!

Way back in ye olden days (the summer of 2018) Hope Bolinger and I were just two interns working for a literary agency, nerding out about the MCU, and spending too much time on what was then Twitter.

I thought it would be funny if I created a Twitter account for a supervillain and imagined what they might tweet about. Instead of #justgirlythings, what if a villain tweeted about their latest villainous activity with #justvillainthings?

I tweeted out my quips to a moderately entertained audience, until who should appear but…a superhero account, vowing to defeat my villain account!

It didn’t take me long to realize the superhero was, in fact, Hope. We had a fun time with our parody accounts, and it got us thinking—what if we wrote a book about Gen Z superheroes in the age of social media? And even better, what if they met on a nemesis pairing app, like Tinder for finding someone to fight?

So we wrote it—a chat fiction rom com about a teen superhero and teen supervillain who match in order to become nemeses, but in the end become so much more. It was zany and campy and we thought, hey, we think readers will actually really like this, we should publish this thing!

Our publishing journey had a few bumps in the road as COVID shut down our first publisher, and our second publisher needed to majorly downsize and gave us our rights back, but now that we’re with our THIRD publisher for this book (hey, that just means it was good enough to get published THREE times!) we’re hoping third time’s the charm for this comical YA love story that just won’t go out of print.

We’ve come a long way from the goofy interns we were six years ago, and Dear Hero has seen improvements since then too. So if you give this humorous and heartfelt rom com a try, our hope for readers is that you have even half as much fun reading this book as we had writing it!