Lynn Painter is a New York Times bestselling author renowned for her engaging romantic comedies tailored for both young adult and adult audiences. Her notable works include Better Than the Movies, Mr. Wrong Number, and The Do-Over. In addition to her novels, Lynn contributes biweekly to the Omaha World-Herald’s parenting section. She resides in Omaha, Nebraska, with her husband and their lively family. 

Accidentally Amy was never meant to become a book. It was a spontaneous project meant to make marketing less…well, annoying, yet somehow became a project that grew legs and walked herself right into 2025.

It all started in 2020 (didn’t everything, right?). I signed my first traditional publishing contract and was trying to get a grip on how to put myself out there. As a debut author, the big question is always how do you get people interested in your upcoming book when nobody knows who you are? You know you need to market yourself, but how exactly do you do that when there’s no one to market yourself to?

One answer I was given: newsletters. Everyone and their mother (that’s a lie, actually – no one’s mother told me anything) will tell you that as an author, you must have a newsletter. So I ran to ye ol’ computer and churned out a newsletter, but it was basically just me shouting a version of “I wrote a book and you should care,” then sending it to a meager grouping of family members and acquaintances who’d been kind enough to hit the subscribe link; it was a wee-tiny distribution list.

I tried a few things to grow more subscribers (like giving away a pizza every month lol), but the bottom line was that everything felt yuck because I hate getting newsletters. Why would I want to inflict email-spamming or newsletter-receiving on others? Personally, when I check my inbox, I hit that trash-can icon faster than you can say “oops I accidentally deleted something important,” so I haaated myself for dropping into other folks’ junk folders like a book-pushing fiend.

But when I started brainstorming ways to make people not hate me and my newsletter, I remembered reading that Bridget Jones’s Diary had started as a serial in a newspaper. And that made me think: what if I gave subscribers free content? Not only would they get something for letting me drop into their inboxes, but I could write something similar in style to the books I had coming down the pike so they might be interested in considering more of my work if they liked what I sent them.

It was worth a shot.

So I ran with it, using a meet-cute idea that my husband actually came up with (he’s a keeper, my Kevin;). I wrote a chapter and sent it out to my subscribers, but a funny thing happened after I did. Yes, I started gaining a few more subscribers, but I became hooked on the serial! Writing this way, a chapter at a time with no outline and no idea where it was going, was like the world’s greatest creative writing exercise. I followed Blake and Izzy, having more fun writing their shenanigans than I was having writing my actual contracted books.

Would they or wouldn’t they? I had no idea. How would this situation resolve itself? Tune in next week to find out. It was such a blast, this fast-paced form of spontaneous writing, and I was in love with every bit of it.

When their story eventually concluded, a few of my subscribers inquired whether or not there was a way for them to get the content in book form. I honestly wasn’t sure – like, was there? After checking with my agent and bothering the indie authors I knew, I decided to self-publish it. I didn’t know what that even meant, but surely it couldn’t be hard, right?

Reader, it was. Figuring out new software, shouting at Amazon through my computer screen to please just let it work, editing and re-editing and then asking my husband to edit and re-edit so it was ready on the one solitary day when I was contractually-allowed to release it; I do not have the skillset to manage this complicated process. Indie authors are obviously like ten very-organized people rolled into one and sprinkled with magical fairy dust; I don’t know how they do it.

I think I might’ve almost died but I’m not sure. The whole thing has become like a fever dream.

But somehow–somehow–it happened, and Accidentally Amy was a book.

Only I kind of hated it. Not the story itself or the characters –Blake and Izzy are my little low-angst babies and I love them with my whole heart– but the finished product. The third-person POV that felt right for a serial newsletter didn’t feel so right to me in book form. And the nefarious typos that made it into the book were killing my soul every time I picked it up (insert Michael Scott no-God-please-no meme).

So a few years later, when the idea was floated for my publisher to release a new version of the book, I was ecstatic. Not only would those soul-crushing typos be removed, but I would have the opportunity to make it into the book it always should’ve been? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

Accidentally Amy released on January 14th. It’s been entirely re-written in first-person (dual POV), and now weighs about 10,000 words more than it used to. I loved adding scenes and characters to the existing story, and I finally feel like this is the book AA was always meant to be.

Accidentally Amy by Lynn Painter

Isabella Shay makes one impulsive decision—claiming a stranger’s coffee order—to save her first day at her dream job. But when she spills that stolen PSL on a ridiculously handsome man, she finds herself in the middle of a hilarious, chemistry-filled meet-cute gone wrong. Things only get messier when she learns he’s her new boss, and the grumpy Blake Phillips has zero tolerance for her “Amy” antics—despite the undeniable sparks between them.

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