Author Interview: Tiana Smith

Match Me If You Can releases tomorrow, and I’m celebrating with an interview from author Tiana Smith!

Q&A with Tiana Smith

Let’s start off with a quick teaser about your book—describe Match Me If You Can in five words:

Matchmaking gone wrong. Plus kissing!

What inspired Match Me If You Can? Do you have any real life experience with matchmaking?

Have you ever seen the movie She’s the Man? If so, we can be friends. If not, go watch it now. I’ll wait.

The beginning menu of the movie sums it up by saying something like “Duke wants Olivia, who likes Sebastian, who is really Viola, whose brother is dating Monique, so she hates Olivia, who’s with Duke to make Sebastian jealous, who is really Viola, who’s crushing on Duke…”

And it’s this convoluted mess of relationships that basically stems down to the fact that there’s a girl who likes a boy that she shouldn’t. I kept wondering, what if there’s a girl who likes a boy, and she has the ability to actually make that relationship happen? And what if fate has someone better in store for her, who wasn’t on her radar? Someone persistent, a little suave, and a whole lot swoonworthy? It’d probably get just as convoluted. I wanted to read that story, so I had to write it!

I’ve never actually tried my hand at matchmaking. I think my friends are all probably glad about that fact 😉

Let’s play a little matchmaking game right now! Mia’s best friend Robyn is the ultimate matchmaker, but which YA character would you match her to?

So ,in my book, I kind of tease some hints about Robyn crushing on a certain boy in her journalism class. If I were to ever write a companion novel to Match Me If You Can, it’d probably be Robyn’s story so she could get her own Happily Ever After.

But! If I were to match her with any YA character out there, outside of my own books, well, that’s a trickier question! I actually thought about this much longer than I should have, haha, and I don’t think I could match her up with some of my favorite rom-com characters because I couldn’t see those characters with anyone but who they end up with in their own books!

Mia and Logan visit The Pier on their first date, where they eat cotton candy and ride the Ferris wheel. What’s your favorite carnival food and ride?

Ice cream! You might notice that Mia eats a lot of ice cream in the book, and that’s probably because I consider it a major food group. Hey, it’s a dairy!

As for carnival rides, I actually really hate most amusement park rides of any kind. I know, I’m a party pooper. But in my defense, I get motion sick verrrrry easily, so me and rides don’t mix.

I adore the Swoon Reads imprint and how involved readers are in it! What led you to submitting your manuscript there?

I love everything about Swoon Reads! They do such a good job marketing their author’s books and I love how they get readers involved. I first heard of them when I did NaNoWrimo one year. I met an author in the forums who had a book coming out from Swoon Reads so I looked into it. I’d recently parted ways with my first agent and didn’t know that there was a Macmillan imprint that accepted un-agented submissions!  Of course, once I researched it some more, I knew that they had something special going on and I was lucky enough to be accepted.

Before we end, what can you tell us about your next novel, Not Up For Debate?

I’m so excited about my next book! It’s basically You’ve Got Mailmeets high school speech and debate, which are two of my favorite things. It will hopefully be coming out about a year after my debut, so you can look for it in January or February of 2020, but Not Up For Debate ison Goodreads now! I can already tell you, you are going to love Grayson, because he is just the cutest.


22718738Release Date: January 8, 2019
Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble

Mia’s best friend Robyn is known for her matchmaking skills, which is perfect, because homecoming is just around the corner. But Robyn refuses to set Mia up with the guy of her dreams, which forces Mia to take matters into her own hands. She uses Robyn’s matchmaking service to make sure popular Vince Demetrius falls for her.

Vince asks her out, but Mia doesn’t count on Logan, the persistent school newspaper photographer who seems to like her out of the blue. Now she has to choose between Vince – the guy she knows is right for her – and Logan, who insists that she give him a chance. And she needs to make sure Robyn doesn’t find out that Mia’s been matchmaking behind her back.

Mia has two weeks before homecoming. Can she fix the mess she made or will she have to kiss her perfect match goodbye forever?

 

About Tiana

Tiana Smith is a copywriter turned novelist who grew up in the Wild West of Montana. When she isn’t writing, she’s chasing after her ninja boy, reading, or binging the Disney Channel. She’d love to be fluent in sign language, but for now she gets by with awkward hand gestures and even more awkward French. She has double degrees in Honors and English from Westminster College but wants to go back to school to be a lion tamer.

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