Consistency, Authenticity & Going Viral

On happy accidents & big impacts

The following is a highly edited text version of my live podcast episode.

Hello friends,

So much has happened since the last time I podcasted that I want to share with y’all.

I was asked to be the writer in residence for Howard County, Maryland’s public schools by the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society, which is incredible. So it means I’m going to be going to the 13 high schools over the course of this upcoming school year and doing presentations and readings with students there.

I’ve done quite a few school visits before via the PEN/Faulkner Foundation in DC, usually talking about the real history of The Monsters We Defy. And now getting the chance to talk and work with other students is very exciting. It’s also a little bit scary. Kids are a little scary. I am happily childfree so I only have limited experience, but I’ve also served as a teen writing mentor for the past five years for The Muse Writers Center and let me tell you, I have encountered the Gen Z stare. I don’t know if high schoolers are still Gen Z or Gen Alpha, but that blank look they give you when you’re talking to them and you’re not sure if they’re doing other things in their head or if they’re listening to you is kind of wild.

(Shout out to my current mentee though, who is an amazing writer, the most engaged and professional young person I’ve ever worked with. I have a feeling she will take the world by storm. )

Anyway, regardless of the blank expressions, it’s still very rewarding to talk to young readers and young writers and introduce them to a professional author. It is really a privilege.

I also recently started dance classes again. I started ballet when I was 5 years old, and I did ballet until I was about 13, and then I also did jazz, tap, hip-hop, and then African dance in college. I danced a lot for a long time, but that was like 30 years ago. So I had been thinking about taking dance classes as an adult for several years, and I finally found classes that are close enough that I’m going to actually go regularly.

I’m doing ballet, tap, and jazz, and let me tell you, I’m sore in muscles I’ve never felt before. It’s a different kind of soreness than lifting weights and yoga, and all of that. But it’s incredibly fun, and I’m really enjoying it.

Going Viral

So the main topic for today is this viral post that I had a few weeks ago on Instagram that went super viral. It’s at around 180,000 views, with hundreds and hundreds of comments, shares, and all of that stuff. And it was a complete accident.

I’ve felt for a long time that the pitch for my upcoming novel, The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass (out August 11) is really strong. I’ve talked before about how when I give the pitch in real life, jaws drop consistently.

So I recorded a couple of different videos one day for Instagram. One of them included the book pitch, but I accidentally framed it in a different way than I usually do. I started with: “In April 1995, Zahara Douglass sees her sister get into a car with a stranger and drive away. Moments later, no one remembers her sister exists, not even their mother.”

And then I hold up the book and tell them that’s the plot of my newest book that comes out August 11th. And I ask them to do three things: download the first three chapters on my website, enter the pre-order contest, and share it with a friend.

I filmed it, did the captions, had it ready to go, and then my energy crashed. I spent the rest of that afternoon resting and reading because I was running on fumes. It was a Friday, and around 6pm I dragged myself up and thought, “Let me just write the post caption and hit publish.”

I honestly figured no one would see it. Friday evening is not exactly prime posting time. I walked away and didn’t look again until Saturday morning, when it had 7,000 views. For most of my posts, I’m thrilled to hit 300. As I write this, that post is past 183,000+ views on Instagram, with tens of thousands of likes, hundreds of comments still trickling in, and it took my following from around 6,500 to over 11,000 and climbing.

Patricia Arquette left a heart. India Arie shared it. Queen Latifah liked it. I did a whole reaction video just to process the fact that this was real.

So this is viral for me. I know other authors have millions and millions of views, but I’ve never had a post about my books go viral. The only other post I had that went viral was about my cats. That’s at over 15 million views. People love cat vidoes and it got me some followers for sure, but not a lot, because I don’t have much other cat content.

The Impact

And the post about Zahara had real results. The pre-orders are where the magic really happened. Because I’m traditionally published, I don’t get a dashboard or live numbers from my publisher, so I have to ask my editor. On June 1st, Zahara had 151 pre-orders. Over two months from publication and I knew I had work to do. My goal was 600 because that’s what The Monsters We Defy did, and that book is my most popular one. (Again, these are my numbers, which are definitely smaller than some and larger than others.) But by July 9, two weeks after the post, we were at 520. That’s close to 400 additional pre-orders in just a couple of weeks, and I know the number is higher now because I keep seeing new comments from people saying they ordered it or requested it from their library. If you’re one of them, thank you. Truly.

Pre-orders are important to authors in ways readers don’t see. In publishing, you’re only as good as your last book’s sales. So I have my current work-in-progress, Blitches, that I will one day finish writing and then sell, and it really matters what the previous book sales are. Not just for the amount of money I get for the new contract, but the novel’s placement, the support it gets from the publisher, how many bookstores it gets into. All of that stuff kind of ripples, and every sale feeds into another.

So I think part of the reason the post took off is that by starting with the words “In April 1995,” I framed it as a real story. Commenters were saying they were surprised they hadn’t heard of this; they were starting to Google the story. People who lived in Modesto, where the book takes place, were like I didn’t know about this. And then the reveal that it’s a novel came in and they felt, what I assume, is a sense of relief and pleasure, and interest in reading the book.

That framing was a complete accident. I didn’t set out to make anyone think it was real. But it turned out to be part of the secret sauce, and now I get to carry that lesson forward as I keep pitching this book.

I ended up having to cut off my pre-order giveaway at 200, which is over double what those giveaways usually look like. I had to order more character art cards and bookplates. And I totally forgot to buy stamps before they raised the price to its current astronomical level, sigh.

Takeaways

So what do I actually take from all of this? Not “go viral,” because I couldn’t reproduce that on purpose if I tried, and I don’t want to spend my life remaking the same video over and over the way the algorithm supposedly wants. My real goal for this launch was simply to be more consistent, to show up for this book with the energy, time, and money I had available.

I made myself a grand schedule for Instagram: three posts a week. Friends, I did not hit that schedule. Not even close some weeks. But I still showed up more than I ever had, once or twice a week, occasionally three, trying different things to see what stuck. And when I fell short of the goal I’d set, I didn’t let that be a reason to disappear. I just kept going. That’s the whole lesson, honestly: show up for yourself, and forgive yourself when the perfect plan doesn’t survive contact with real life.

The other thing guiding me is authenticity. My word of the year is audacity, but my word of a lifetime is authenticity, and social media so often feels like the opposite of that. When I sift through all those lists of post templates and trends authors are “supposed” to do, I keep asking myself the same question: does this feel like a Leslye thing to do, or does it feel like something someone told me to do? I try to live in the Venn diagram where what works online overlaps with what feels true to me. Maybe that post went viral because it was mine, my actual story, told in a way that felt good to tell. I don’t want to add more noise to the world. I want to add the real thing.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to the book I’m not finishing right now. I’ve been living inside Blitches, my magical HBCU story, for the better part of a year, a book I want to be a celebration of the joy and culture of HBCU life made into literal magic. I got unstuck, wrote a whole new synopsis, started writing chapters again, and then had a conversation with my brother, who’s my first reader, that sent me back to the deepest question: is it fun? Is this story the celebration I want it to be?

I’d whittled the possibilities for telling the story down and down, and I started to suspect I’d whittled my way to the wrong one. So I’m giving it space. I picked up an old, cozy romantasy draft as a brain break, and I’m sitting with the two real questions underneath everything: what story do I want to tell, and how do I want to tell it? There’s no deadline forcing my hand, which is both a luxury and, if I’m honest, terrible for my productivity. But a quote from Michaela Coel’s Emmy speech from a few years ago keeps circling back to me:

“Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn’t comfortable. I dare you.”

That’s been my compass for a long time. And that’s how I want to choose.

If you’re a fan of urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, supernatural thrillers, and mysteries with magic, please pre-order The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass, or request it from your library. It would help me so much.

Upcoming Events

On July 29, I’m teaching Writing From Your Why for Jane Friedman, which is about standing out and staying human in a marketplace flooded with AI.

If you’re near Baltimore, I’ll be speaking live at the Fiction Makers Conference on August 22.

And the Ink & Magic Mastermind I’m co-leading with two of my closest writing friends runs September 4–6, online, with a few spots still open.

Episode Show Notes

• Ink & Magic Mastermind (online, Sept 4–6, a few spots left) -

• Howard County Poetry & Literarture Society - https://hocopolitso.org/

• PEN/Faulkner Foundation - https://www.penfaulkner.org/

• Pre-order The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass (out Aug 11) + download the first three chapters free - https://lpen.co/zaharaexcerpt

• My Viral Instagram Post!

• Expand Summit (July 22–25, free) — My workshop Doubling Down on Being Human: Building a Distinctive and Authentic Writing Voice

• Writing From Your Why workshop with Jane Friedman (July 29) — https://janefriedman.com/writing-from-your-why-with-leslye-penelope/

• Fiction Makers Conference — live and in person in Baltimore, Aug 22, 2026 — https://lpen.co/fictionmakers

• Michaela Coel’s Emmy speech quote: “Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn’t comfortable, I dare you.”

📣 Your turn: When was the last time you showed up for your work even though the “perfect” plan had already fallen apart, and what happened when you did? Let me know in the comments.

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