The daughter who made her father a best-selling author overnight on TikTok

Meet Lloyd Devereux Richards, a former attorney in Vermont who wrote a book 14 years ago. It's called Stone Maidens and even though the book was released 11 years ago, he's taken #booktok by storm thanks to his 40 year old daughter making a 16 second video about her dad and his art.

The book itself has now sold over 100K copies and has taken TikTok and more specifically #booktok by storm. 

How It Started

Lloyd started writing the book while working in his home in Montpelier, Vermont. 

At the time, he was raising 3 children and holding a full-time job as an attorney. His side hobby however was reading thrillers and when the kids were teenagers, he decided to give it a go. 

What resulted was Stone Maidens, a thriller book that he actually had trouble publishing back in 2012. He went to multiple publishing houses for months and all but one rejected him. It only takes one. 

That one (ironically) was Amazon Publishing who launched the book in 2012, over a decade ago. The original didn't sell well. This was an era where TikTok was still Musical.ly, Instagram and Facebook were still separate companies and more people read print news. 

Making a book go viral and sell hundreds of thousands of copies was unheard of, not to mention impossible in 2012. 

A Stroke of Luck 

Fast forward to 2023 and Lloyd mentioned to his daughter (now a 40 year old adult) that he was working on a sequel to his book Stone Maidens. She started brainstorming ways for the book to sell. She turned to making a TikTok and didn't overthink or plan. She just wanted to make something that shared her dad's story. 

The main takeaway here is Keep It Stupid Simple (KISS). It's an approach that can be applied to content creation and especially when you're trying to decide what story to tell.

What she settled on was a 16 second video of her father telling his story with overlaid text of him writing at his home.

The text reads: 

What followed was something neither father nor daughter could have predicted.

Millions of likes rolled in, thousands of re-shares & comments. Comments like "just bought" or "this really moved and inspired me to keep writing" or "I'm currently reading Stone Maidens and it's AMAZING"

In just 2 days, the book on Amazon shot up to the top of the book charts on Amazon peaking at #1 for over a week. Sales skyrocketed and in the coming weeks would reach 90K+ in a month.

Contrast that to the less than 1K sales that had happened over the last 10 years.

The book now has a review rating of 4.6 stars and the duo quickly got invited to visit every major media outlet from NBC to NPR to the BBC talking about the book and their newfound success. 

Takeaways

1. Ideas are easy. I'm sure Marguerite had an idea of what TikTok to make. Execution is hard. She posted a simple overlaid text story and boom, viral.

2. Start a new account for something new.

3. Don't overcomplicate the art of creation and don't underestimate consistency

4. Be thankful

So What's Next?

What's next for Lloyd Devereux and his daughter? Well Stone Maidens fans will be glad to know that a sequel is in the works. Lloyd has already started writing and expecting to bring the characters of Prusik and McFaron to life in a thrilling sequel expected to be out in 2024.

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