In the few short years that former television producer Amy Hutton has been publishing books, she has carved a successful niche in the world of rom-coms – often involving four-legged friends.
She scored a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster for her debut novel Sit, Stay, Love released in 2023 and the follow up Love From Scratch that was released in 2024. But now, she has teamed up with the publisher once more for a very different 2025 release, Ghosted – trading poochy for spooky as she delivers readers a tightly-woven paranormal romance!
It's just the latest milestone after deciding to switch careers and going ‘all in' in pursuit of being a published author.
“To be honest, I still can’t believe it happened and keeps happening!”
A new beginning
When she quit her television career, Amy’s original plan had been to write freelance articles to support herself while she wrote fiction.
“I decided if I was going to follow my heart and give professional writing a shot, I should just go for it. Admittedly the next step seems a bit extreme. I sold my unit, quit my job and moved back into the family home. I knew if I was going to do it — try to write full-time — I had to commit, or it would fall away when I got too busy as it had in the past,” Amy told us.
After making such a decisive move, Amy knew she had to learn the craft of writing if she were to succeed. She enrolled in the Australian Writers' Centre's Content Writing course, which was the first time she had studied for years.
She next dove into the AWC’s fiction courses, learning the essentials of Fiction and Grammar, Plotting and Planning and how to Pitch Your Novel.
“The more I learned, the more I realised I needed to learn, so taking courses just naturally became part of my development,” Amy says.
“The courses I chose to do were accessible and varied. There were some that were run online in a group situation over Zoom, and I loved those. I loved having the opportunity to discuss what we were learning, listen to others’ ideas and be inspired by them. Then there were the ‘at your own pace’ courses, which were fantastic because I could just jump into the study whenever I had the time. The courses on offer are varied, with fantastic materials and coaches,” Amy says.
Having previously worked in a creative environment, Amy knew she had to put herself out there and not be deterred by rejection. She had a few stories published in the Romance Writers of Australia anthologies, which kept her buoyed. And then came the call from Simon & Schuster.
“I had pitched Sit, Stay, Love to Cassandra Di Bello of Simon & Schuster at the 2022 Romance Writers of Australia conference. About a week or so after the conference I received an email from Cass requesting a full manuscript.”
During the call, Cassandra offered Amy a contract. She immediately put her indie publishing plans on hold and threw herself into the process of editing and working with the publisher to make her manuscript the best it could be. And a few months later, she secured another contract for her second book, Love From Scratch.
More than puppy love
Amy’s first novel, Sit, Stay Love, is a friends-to-lovers rom-com that revolves around Sera, who owns a pet shelter, her bestie and local vet Toby, and Ethan James, a famous actor with a terrible fear of dogs.
“I think the story came from my love and experience with my own rescue dogs, Harry and Buffy, who both star in Sit, Stay, Love. I’m passionate about animal rescue and it was important to me that it wasn’t just the human characters in my story who found their happy-ever-after, but that the shelter animals did as well. I also wanted to write something local to the area I grew up in as well as an Australian story. I think it’s important to have stories in Australian voices, especially in the romance genre which is heavily populated with American voices,” Amy says.
Her follow-up novel, Love From Scratch, also features rescue animals.
“The cat may be based on my cat. Okay, he totally is,” Amy says. “He wasn’t the nicest of cats, but he was still pretty great, and he really made for a great three-dimensional animal character. Love from Scratch is an opposites-attract rom-com about a heart-throb actor, the grumpy woman who minds his beloved dog, and the cat that steals his heart.”
Steamy and a little spooky
In Amy's latest title, Ghosted, she has returned to her paranormal roots, teaming up a supernaturally spectacular duo.
“Holly can see ghosts. Callum runs a ghost hunting podcast,” Amy reveals. “They have a complicated past. So complicated they haven’t spoken for two years. But now Holly finds herself working with Callum again, investigating an infamous haunted house, and digging into a chilling mystery bound up with the town’s very own seventeenth-century witch trials.”
Compared to her previous books, Ghosted may not be so pet-heavy (although perhaps, heavy-petting?), but Amy couldn't be happier. “This book is so close to my heart,” she says. “It’s based in a world I adore with characters I relate to deeply and are the nearest to me of anyone I’ve ever written. It’s romantic and fun, a little steamy and a little spooky.”
Amy also let us into a little secret.
“I actually wrote Ghosted first,” she admits. “I have always said the two things I love the most in movies and books is romance and horror. I think paranormal romance does a really great job of merging those two vibes that you wouldn't think would go together. But when I first wrote it, paranormal romance as a book trend had been and gone. Then suddenly, it's now having a moment again and I had a manuscript ready to go!”
That writing life
Amy now treats her writing as a full-time job, and has a slew of publications and awards to her name.
“I go into my office in the morning and ideally will try to get about six-hours of work in – though that is sometimes peppered with social media commitments and other various aspects of the modern author life. I call myself a ‘plantser’ a hybrid pantser/plotter author. I start my story by the seat of my pants – a pantser – until at some stage, usually around 30k words, I step away and break the story and give myself at least a little bit of a plan to follow. I have a whole lot of story ideas floating around, some with titles and first pages written, some broken via a synopsis, some purely a two-line elevator pitch. I have no clue where any of the ideas come from. I think that’s why I pants the start of them, because they just download into me as I type.”
And her advice for other writers is simple:
“Do a vast array of courses. Learn everything. Don’t think being an author is just about writing a book, because it is so much more, and there is so much more to the craft of writing than you probably think there is. The more you learn, the better your writing will become, and the more you learn about all aspects of writing and the business of writing, the better you’ll be prepared for when you finally get that publishing deal call.”
Courses completed at AWC:
