Happy Thursday! I’m so excited to have paranormal romance author Kat Kinney on the blog today. I had the pleasure of interviewing Kat about her life, books, and upcoming release Sold the the Dark Vampire Prince. It’s such a swoon-worthy start to the Immortal Royals series, and it releases on September 18th.
Getting to Know You:
Author Kat Kinney lives with her family and three extremely pampered guinea pigs who do not like werewolves, vampires, or dragons and wonder why their human insists on writing about things that like to eat them. When she isn’t writing about things that bite and howl, Kat can be found knitting crazy socks and plotting out future books!
Question: In your bio, it says that you enjoy knitting, gardening, and baking. Do any of your passions or hobbies ever inspire your writing?
KAT KINNEY: Oh absolutely. I had so much fun drawing on my love of gardening when I wrote Sage in The Siren’s Cursed Kiss, and Lacey and all her cupcakes were similarly fun when I wrote Crave (please don’t ask me to tell you how many cupcakes I baked during the course of drafting that book!)
Q: Your stories always have a strong sense of found family. Why is that theme so important to you?
KK: I think there’s something really universal about finding yourself in an uncertain place or experience and finding a way to slowly make friends, find community, bloom where you’re planted, and that’s why found family resonates with us all. We’ve all been there at one time or another, whether it’s been after we’ve needed to make a cross country move and leave our support system behind, or during a really difficult time in our lives. It’s one of the reasons I really love reading those stories and writing them as well.
Q: What’s the strangest or most memorable thing you learned when researching for your books?
KK: I always love this question when it comes up on social media because there have been some wild things I’ve looked up! Whether marmots can climb trees was an interesting one (they can.)
Q: If you woke up tomorrow and discovered that one supernatural creature was real, which one would you secretly hope it was?
KK: Ooo… hard to pick. This is like choosing a favorite ice cream. Maybe the fae.
About the Book/Series:
To save her sister, she’ll make a dangerous bargain with the heir to the vampire throne.
Daniela Girard understands all too well that ever since the fall of the human race, survival has meant making yourself indispensable to one of its new masters. The fae and the wolves can mostly be avoided, but the vampires thirst for human blood, and at a terrible price.
Dani despises none of them more than cold Crown Prince Alexander Visconti, who insists on making announcements about his impending royal engagement ball while she and her two sisters slowly starve.
In the dark of winter, her ten-year-old sister Ava’s chronic illness reaches a breaking point. With her father gone and her stepmother lost to the ravages of blood addiction, Dani has to find a way to obtain the medicine she needs. And she has nothing left to sell but herself.
But when she’s saved from the blood auctions and her rescuer turns out to be none other than Alexander, Dani doesn’t know what to do. Each time he feeds from her throat, she cannot deny the dark yearning she feels, the unexplained connection to a prince she knows she should get as far away from as possible, and a man who she is discovering is anything but what she initially believed him to be.
Neither of them anticipates the connection that forms.
Every taste of her blood, every stolen kiss she knows she shouldn’t allow, buys her sister a few more days. Every time Alex feeds from her, the bond between them grows harder to sever.
A bond that could prove very dangerous for her if discovered.
LINKS: Goodreads | BookBub | Amazon
Q: Sold to the Dark Vampire Prince marks the beginning of a new swoon-worthy romantasy series for you. Congratulations! What can you tell us about the series and what compelled you to write it?
KK: Thank you, I had sooo much fun writing this one! I have always wanted to write a vampire centric series because I love reading vampire novels. I wanted a world that had all the swoony romantasy feels, with castles and royalty and the fae, but also a dystopian feel to it as well, with an alternative Earth, if you will, where humanity was once prosperous and the dominant species, much as it is now, and… then things changed very quickly and they were fighting to survive with all these supernatural species that had emerged.
Q: I love Dani and Alexander! They come from very different worlds and circumstances, yet they have a lot in common. Dani spends much of her life caring for others, while Alexander is constantly torn between duty/expectations and his own interests, desires, and morals. Both struggle with power and autonomy (or the lack of), just in different ways. How did these dynamics shape their relationship?
KK: That’s one of the things that I love the most about them as a couple, that one of them grew up as a privileged vampire royal and the other, a human fighting every day to survive, and yet some things are universal. They both are fiercely loyal to their siblings. They both want their sector and world to be better, and to enact change in whatever ways they can. They both have a deep capacity to love and to do good, and I think for Alex, he’s surrounded by so many people in the aristocracy who aren’t as grounded, have lost sight of the suffering of those around them, and Dani’s selflessness and sacrifice is something that really resonates with him. And of course, she has a very different opinion of him at the beginning based on how he’s presented in the press, before she realizes he might not be as bad as she originally believed.
Q: Your story explores what happens when the world people once knew disappears, and they’re forced to adapt to a completely different reality. What drew you to exploring that kind of setting?
KK: I think at the heart of every good story is a compelling “what if” question. What if there were secretly werewolves and vampires living among us and then humanity found out? What would be their reaction (probably lots of different reactions?) What if you had a magical curse you couldn’t cure? How would you deal with it and find a way to bloom where you were planted? And part of what drew me to this setting were the impacts of the pandemic and how everyone was forced to adapt to changes, and how fast that happened. And the “what if” part of my brain was like, okay, but make it werewolves and vampires… and so what happens next if they can’t ever go back?
Q: If you could spend one day inside your book’s world, where would you go, and what would you do?
KK: My head is currently in the fae realm because that book is cooking in my brain right now, so I would probably hang out in Thornwood for a day :). And play with Finneas’ dog.
Lightning Round (Quick answers with no explanations):
- Cute baby dragon or fierce warrior dragon? Baby dragon!
- Fated mates or enemies-to-lovers? Both!
- Slow burn or instant attraction? Slow burn!
- Cozy cottage or gothic manor? Cozy cottage!
- Villain redemption or morally gray hero? Morally gray hero!
- Book you wish you could read again for the first time? Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center, The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
Wrapping Up:
Q: Your next book is Sera and Finneas’s story. What can you tell us about them that will make readers even more impatient to meet them?
KK: I’m so impatient to write their book! Their parents tried to arrange their marriage and that first meeting famously didn’t quite work out. And now Sera swears she doesn’t like him, but she’s protesting a little too much. 🙂 Like Dani and Alex, they come from different backgrounds, but there are some interesting parallels there, too, and when we start their book, Sera is at a crossroads and finds herself needing Finneas and having nowhere else to turn. I have 30,000 words already written because their swoony story has been shoving itself into my head at every chance and if Alex and Dani set the pages on fire in their book, I’m going to need a whole line of fire extinguishers for Sera and Finn! It’s slow burn, but these two are intense.
Q: Finally, where can readers connect with you online and keep up with your latest releases?
KK: I make sure to post to Instagram and Bluesky every day, and I also have a newsletter. Those are great places to keep track of me!
