Although Wisconsin-based author Beth Amos always dreamed of having her work published, her journey to becoming a published author wasn’t always an easy one.
“I sent my first short story out when I was 17 years old to a magazine and it was rejected,” she said. “I spent most of my early adult years trying to write short fiction and trying to get it published in women’s magazines… I never had any success with that and I was also a single parent for a lot of that time and also working full-time as a nurse. It didn’t leave me with a whole lot of time for writing, but I had to go back to school to get my bachelor’s degree in health management and had a lot of elective courses to take, so I used all of those electives to take writing courses — journalism, technical writing, memoir writing, newspaper article writing, every kind of writing class they had. And of course I took some creative fiction writing classes as well.”
It was there that Amos transitioned from short stories to full-length works and began refining her writing process.
“In one of those classes, I decided to try to write novel-length stuff instead of short fiction,” Amos said. “I ended up hiring one of the instructors after the class was over — he was a grad student — to edit my work, go through it and show me the things I was doing right or doing wrong and show me how I could strengthen my writing. I was pretty frustrated after literally decades of trying to get something published. So I had a novel I had written and I met with him every week at a coffee shop on campus and he would edit the chapter that I’d given him that week before he’d hand it back to me and we’d go over it. Then I’d hand off a new chapter and we just kept doing that until we got to the end of that novel, which was a really bad novel and I ended up just kind of throwing it in the closet and starting over.”
Under her own name, Beth Amos was finally able to have her work published.
“I started over with a different type of novella — a standalone novel about a paranormal thriller kind of thing,” she said. “It was more in the line of Dean Koontz, which was the stuff I was reading back then. I ended up finding an agent with that book. It took me like 29 query letters to actually find an agent, and then she was able to sell it to Harper Collins as part of a two-book contract.”
Those two initial books did well enough to earn Amos a contract for a third book, but rapid change to the publishing industry brought on by the rising popularity of ebooks meant that Amos was dropped by Harper Collins just before the book launched and sales were much poorer than her first two books due to a lack of promotion.
But that didn’t deter Amos from continuing to pursue her passion.
Moving on from her stand-alone novels, Amos turned to a different style and subject.
“I had started trying to write another book — something fictional that would help me portray some of the humor that I’d encountered in my life in the medical field,” she said. “Medical people are some of the funniest people on the planet and there were just so many funny things and funny situations that I wanted to be able to share and write about. So I started trying to write a different type of a mystery where a nurse is the main character and I decided to have her go work in a medical examiner’s office.”
But something just wasn’t quite right about the new novel — a problem which was quickly solved by a change of scenery.
“I originally tried to set it in Virginia, which is where I lived at the time, and it just wasn’t working…” Amos said. “Then I moved to Wisconsin and decided to change the setting of the book to Wisconsin and suddenly it all just worked. Wisconsin is just strange enough and unique enough in so many ways that everything about it just worked. So I rewrote the book with the Wisconsin setting and eventually found an agent for that as well, and that agent was able to sell the book as part of a multi-book contract to Kensington.”
The Mattie Winston mystery series continued with Kensington for 12 books, but not under the name Beth Amos.
“When Kensington wanted to do the Mattie Winston mysteries, they looked back and said that since my last book with Harper Collins hadn’t sold very well, they were afraid book sellers would look at Beth Amos and see that the name didn’t sell very well and if they put it on a new series, it might taint it. So they wanted me to come up with a pseudonym.
Amos settled on Annelise Ryan for the series and two spin-off books — Annelise for her middle name, Ann, and Ryan for her son.
Annelis Ryan wasn’t the only pseudonym Amos adopted while working with Kensington, though.
“One of the editors that I worked with [at Kensington] said, ‘I’ve always wanted to see a mystery set in a Cheers kind of environment with a bar,’’ Amos said. “I said, ‘You know, I live in Wisconsin, so a bar kind of goes hand-in-hand.’
I created a bar owner in Milwaukee who has a neurological disorder called synesthesia that helps her to solve these mysteries… But when this editor approached me about the Cheers setting for mysteries, they told me they wanted me to come up with a different pseudonym. The Mattie Winston mysteries, at this point, were around book four and they weren’t sure how the sales were going to do. They didn’t want the new series to tank the Annelise Ryan series if the new series didn’t take off and then vice versa — if for some reason the Annelise Ryan series started to tank, they didn’t want that to taint the new series.”
And thus, Allyson K. Abbott was born — Abbott because Amos wanted a last name that would put her at top shelves in bookstores and Allyson K. for the initials, A.K.A.
As Allyson K. Abbott, Amos put out a six-book series featuring crime-solving, drink-mixing bar owner Mack Dalton.
But as uncertainty again hit the publishing market, Amos found herself being dropped once more and again turning to Wisconsin for inspiration.
“Being in Wisconsin has actually been a big bonus for me because Wisconsin really is just such a unique and kind of quirky place,” Amos said. “It’s got its own personality and that personality has really helped me in writing my books. It’s a character all of its own and that’s really given me a lot of ideas and helped move things along.”
“My agents and I put our heads together and came up with an idea for a cryptozoologist to be the main character and I was able to convince Berkeley that I could set several books in Wisconsin, because Wisconsin has a bunch of cryptids,” Amos said. “It’s got Bigfoot lore and a Loch Ness-type lore and the Hodag, Beast of Bray Road and the Thunderbird — I could go on and on. We pitched that to Berkely and they were all excited about it, so we ended up getting a two-book contract for that.”
The new Monster Hunter Mysteries series would be published under the Annelise Ryan pseudonym.
The first book, A Death in Door County, was released in September of 2022, following book store owner and cryptozoologist Morgan Carter as she investigates a potential homicidal monster in Lake Michigan.
The second book in the series, Death in the Dark Woods, hit the shelves in December 2023, this time centered around a potential Bigfoot sighting and its link to a vicious murder.
Book three in the series, Beast of the North Woods, is slated for release at the end of January 2025 and takes place in Rhinelander, Wisc., where Morgan Carter finds herself investigating the death of a fisherman who locals claim was attacked by a hodag.
A book launch for Beast of the North Woods will be held at Lion’s Mouth Bookstore in Green Bay on Jan. 28.
Learn more about Beth Amos and her writing at bethamos.com.
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