Today’s featured author is Leigh Stein, who joins us to talk about her new gothic mystery, If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You. I obsessed over its modern take on the classic genre and sharp insights into parasocial relationships and social media stardom. Fans of missing persons mysteries, tarot readings, and crumbling Los Angeles mansions won’t want to miss this one.
In the interview to follow, Leigh talks about the gothic novel, TikTok, book marketing, and more.
Connect with Leigh on Instagram, TikTok, Substack, and her website. Grab a copy of the book from your retailer of choice here.
Welcome, Leigh! If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You is a contemporary gothic novel. The classic gothic setting—a storied, crumbling mansion—gets a 21st-century makeover as a social media hype house. What do you love about the gothic novel, both past and present? How did you approach traditional gothic themes in such a contemporary premise?
I’ve long been obsessed with stories of girls and women confined to houses. In children’s novels like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, or The Secret Garden, the girls discover that these houses hold wonderful secrets. In gothic novels written for adults, the houses are more malevolent. A literary ancestor of the gothic novel is the French fairy tale “Bluebeard,” about an aristocrat who forbids his new bride from entering one room in his castle—where he keeps the corpses of his previous brides—but her curiosity catalyzes her to disobey him.
I had a lot of fun transposing gothic tropes (the wealthy older man with a secret, the younger woman who arrives at the house seeking the truth, the crumbling mansion) to a contemporary key, by confining my characters to a TikTok hype house, a kind of factory for creating content, so they can raise enough money to restore the house to its former glory.
The inspiration for my gothic manor is the Ennis House in Los Angeles, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and used in 80 film and TV shows including House on Haunted Hill, Day of the Locust, Bladerunner, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Mulholland Drive. The house looks like a temple or a fortress that should protect its inhabitants from calamity. But the more research I did, the more it seemed cursed. By the time Wright arrived in Los Angeles in the 1920s, his critics thought his best years were behind him. His mistress and her children had been murdered at the estate he built as their hideaway in Wisconsin. He was constantly in debt. The exterior is wrapped in 27,000 concrete blocks but those blocks weren’t properly sealed, so a combination of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the record rainfall in 2005 caused the blocks to crack and deteriorate. It became a huge eyesore.
One feature of Wright’s architecture is “compression and release,” which confines inhabitants to narrow, confined spaces, before releasing them into airy, open spaces. I used this as an analogy for what “the platform” is demanding of the content creators in the novel. There’s this pressure to do something you wouldn’t normally do, and the release of attention—a form of currency—when you perform.
An underlying mystery pulls you through the story: the unsolved disappearance of a social media-famous tarot reader. Why did you choose a missing-person mystery as a focal point of the story?
I got the idea for my gothic hype house novel after reading Rebecca for the first time and I knew I needed a dead or missing woman haunting the characters left in the house, and giving the female main character a secret to expose (a forbidden chamber to enter). In earlier drafts, my gothic mansion was going to be the site of the Black Dahlia murder (one theory is that the murder happened in the basement of the John Sowden house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son Lloyd).
But I have such mixed feelings about making entertainment out of murdered white women, I couldn’t bring myself to murder my fictional character. I wrote about a disappearance instead.
Becca is a teenage girl who gains a lot of influence on TikTok for her eerily accurate tarot card readings; when she disappears, her fans can’t forget her. They become citizen detectives, searching for clues in what the other content creators in the house post (or don’t post). One of Becca’s fans fills out an application to become one of the members of the hype house, so she can get even closer to solving the mystery. I wanted to explore the power of parasocial fandom, and what happens when your audience feels entitled to more from you than you can give.
I’ve long followed your work, especially on Substack, and it’s been exciting to watch this project develop. What marketing advice do you have for writers at all stages of their careers? What have you found most successful (and perhaps most enjoyable) versus least?
Thank you! A lot of writers feel gross marketing their work and believe marketing to be someone else’s job (their publisher’s). But you’re the biggest advocate your book will ever have, so I think you should be able to describe it in a way that makes a potential reader go, Oooh! I want to read that! And I also think you should be able to define who your ideal reader is, so you know who you’re trying to reach with all your marketing efforts.
I hit the USA Today bestseller list for the first time with this novel, thanks to my Hype House marketing campaign, where I created a 30-day course for writers who wanted to learn content strategy from me. Instead of paying to take the course, they had to purchase 10 copies of my novel. I promoted this to my Substack audience and sold 1000 copies in thirteen days.
I was really excited to go on a book tour for the first time since 2016 (my last novel came out during the pandemic), but it has been extremely challenging to get people to show up to in-person events. I really think the pandemic changed how people commit to events. At several of my events, only 25 to 50 percent of people who RSVP’d that they were coming actually showed up. My digital marketing efforts have been quantitatively more successful, but connecting with old friends in person, or meeting my students for the first time in person, is very meaningful to me.
If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You is your third novel. Did you approach the writing of this novel differently than, say, Self Care? What about this project is especially new or significant for you?
With every book I write, I enjoy the challenge of learning a new form. Self Care was my first satire. This was my first mystery. It took me nine months to sell this book to a publisher and in hindsight, I can see that my third-act twist was pushing readers away, instead of pulling them closer.
When I finally found my editor Jesse Shuman at Ballantine, he gave me an edit letter that said the twist was not connected to the house. That was the key to the secret garden in my imagination. I spent five months rewriting the third act and the novel is so much better now. I’ve never done such a huge revision before.
Lastly, what’s next on your horizon? How are you celebrating this release, and/or is there anything else you’re working that you’d like to share?
I just moved back to Chicago, my hometown, so that’s the biggest thing happening in my life right now!
I’ve had the same writing group in Connecticut for ten years and we’re going to try to keep it going, even though I moved. I’ll be back to see them in November, so in the month of October I’m hoping to start drafting a new project . . .
Thanks so much to Leigh for the interview. Detectives, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.