Ivy Smoak

Ivy Smoak built the whole career by publishing herself. She began writing in college, was turned down by agents, sold almost nothing with her first two books, and moved to romance at the suggestion of her husband Ryan Hauge; by 2019 the pair were running it as a full-time business from Delaware, and the catalogue has passed four million copies with placings on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today lists. Temptation, first published in 2015, opens The Hunted series, in which Penny Taylor works out that the man from the coffee shop teaches her communications class; Seduction is the fifth book of that run. Elite is the second Empire High novel, and The Society, holding Stalker Problems and This Is War, spins off from it. Scarlett and the Kiss Thief started a separate set in 2022. Bad Things Feel Best (2023), which came out through the Amazon imprint Montlake rather than her own shop, sends a young writer to a private island for a job with a famous novelist. Roughing the Princess, also 2023, is a football romance that drew press attention when readers matched it to a celebrity couple then in the news.