How Sarah M. Eden found her niche as a writer of clean romance

SALT LAKE CITY — Fifteen minutes until the book signing is to begin and already the line in the maze is getting crowded, stretching toward the back of the store. These are Sarah M. Eden fans, romantics at heart, awaiting the arrival of the woman who has filled their lives with clean romance novels.

Eden feels their need; she understands where they are coming from. She, too, wants to read love stories that leave much to the imagination — a lot more Jane Austen than Jackie Collins. It's why she became a writer in the first place.

Well, that and the dare from her mom.

Let's go back to 2004 and set that scene:

Eden, 25 years old at the time, and her mother, Ginny, are in the kitchen of Ginny's house in Glendale, Arizona. Eden is complaining, telling her mom how frustrated she is at finding a decent romance story at the library. Book after book, she'll get partway through and have to quit reading because the content becomes trashy. Plus, the plots are too often flimsy, and the writing is weak.

To which her mother replies: "Why don't you write your own book?"

It was a sympathetic reply, an innocuous throwaway line to end the rant, to which Eden — whose relationship to books to this point in her life has been to read them, not write them — says nothing in response.

But she went home and wrote her own book.

It took her 18 months to do it. Eden, who graduated from BYU with a degree in statistical data analysis, leaves nothing to chance; she's a planner. If she was going to write a book, she was going to learn how first.

Between and around taking care of her young family — her husband Paul Eden, who was in grad school getting his MBA, and their two children, 1-year-old Catherine and 4-year-old Jonathan — she got busy. She checked out every book at the library about writing she could get her hands on (Stephen King and Donald Maass were two favorites), she signed up for writers' workshops, she dove deep into the internet to learn about plotting and editing and organization.

"I could do it just about anywhere," Eden says, "as long as I had a computer or a piece of paper and pen — and the kids' naps were overlapping."

A year and a half later, on Mother's Day of 2006, Sarah Eden drove to her mother's house and gave her mom her present: an 80,000-word manuscript with the title "The Ramshackle Knight."

Ginny was dumbfounded. She had no warning what her daughter had been up to. And also, she'll admit 19 years later, she was anxious.

"I have to say I was a little nervous about reading it," she said. "What if it's not good? What am I going to say to her without crushing her?"

That night she curled up with her daughter's first manuscript. She couldn't put it down. She read it in one sitting.

The next day she called Eden and said this: "It's like a real book."

"Still my favorite review I've ever received," says Eden.

Now properly motivated, Eden used Amazon's print-on-demand service to self-publish "The Ramshackle Knight." Just five or six copies were printed, but she now had a bound book in her hands she could shop to real publishers.

It wasn't long before Covenant Communications, a Salt Lake publishing company that caters to a mostly Latter-day Saint audience, bought the rights to "The Ramshackle Knight," changed the title to "The Kiss of a Stranger" and effectively launched the career of Sarah M. Eden.

She was already at work on several more books, all of them historical fiction, the majority taking place in 18th and 19th century Europe. Through a variety of publishers, and some that have been self-published, she has been releasing her romance novels as if on a conveyor belt ever since. This May she'll publish her 80th book. That's an average of four a year since she first started plotting "Ramshackle Knight." (The notably prolific novelist John Grisham, for one frame of reference, has published 54 books in twice the amount of time).

In 2021 and 2022, Eden released eight books each year. In 2023, she passed the 1 million mark in books sold; today that number is approaching 1.5 million. That includes "Seeking Persephone," her all-time bestseller that was made into a movie this year in England and is scheduled to be streaming by the end of the year.

All the while, her fan base keeps growing, as was evident when she ended a three-city book tour at the downtown Salt Lake City Deseret Book store on conference weekend in early April.

Before wading through the crowd to the podium to start signing her latest book, "The Tides of Time," Eden reflected on the serendipitous way the writing whirlwind that has become her life began.

"I mean, if my mom hadn't issued that challenge, I don't think I'd have ever even discovered it," she said, "because it never occurred to me to even try. I had grown up believing that authors were these spectacular, like already incredible, amazing people, that you had to be something special to be an author. And I didn't feel like that was who I was, but her challenge was enough for me to give it a try, and I discovered that if you have stories in you, you're an author, that's all it really takes."

She smiled before adding, "I don't know of another writer who started on a dare."

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