Amanda Sellet: Stay Weird
In this interview, author Amanda Sellet discusses mixing cozy mystery and romance in her new YA novel, Flirting with Murder.
Amanda Sellet is a former journalist and the author of romcoms for teens and adults, including By the Book, which Booklist described in a starred review as, “impossible to read without laughing out loud.” She loves old movies, baked goods, and embarrassing her teen daughter. Follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, Amanda discusses mixing cozy mystery and romance in her new YA novel, Flirting with Murder, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Amanda Sellet
Literary agent: Alyssa Maltese, Root Literary
Book title: Flirting with Murder
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Release date: April 21, 2026
Genre/category: Mystery/YA
Previous titles: By the Book; Belittled Women; Hate to Fake it To You; The Odds of Getting Even
Elevator pitch: High school junior Virginia Tillis spends her vacations acting out mysteries at her eccentric grandmother’s hot-pink condo in Florida—until the day they discover an actual dead body mid-game, forcing Virginia to team up with the handsome grandson of another resident to solve her first real murder.
What prompted you to write this book?
The first spark of this story was the characters. I wanted to write about an extremely plainspoken grandmother who tells it like it is and lives with maximum pizzazz, and the admiring granddaughter who is still figuring out how she wants to move through the world.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
This was a fun side project I’d been toying with off-and-on for several years before it reached the stage of going on submission. (Way back in 2021, I was talking about the idea as “Thursday Murder Club meets ‘Golden Girls’ with a side of Auntie Mame.”) Even after Flirting with Murder was acquired by my publisher in the summer of 2023, we staggered the schedule to fit around my pending adult rom-com releases, which meant pushing the publication date to 2026.
The voice and the characters stayed fairly consistent across all those years, but the plot gradually shifted from a traditional YA contemporary (with a focus on home life and school and friends) to more of a cozy mystery. Part of that process included changing the working title (True Grits) to something that more clearly signaled the genre.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Between the time I started writing and the eventual publication date, there was a sense that YA contemporary had entered one of those cyclical downturns in popularity (cf. also the fluctuating fortunes of vampires and dystopias), at least compared to fantasy. That probably played a role in the decision to lean into the mystery as much as the rom-com.
A bigger surprise was the scarcity of lighter “cozy” mysteries in the YA space. Given how popular comedic mysteries are in both the middle-grade and adult markets, it felt like the publishing industry had arbitrarily decided that teens lose their sense of humor from ages 15-19 and will only tolerate grimdark thrillers. As the parent of a recent grad, I can attest that many high school kids are, in fact, hilarious, and I suspected readers of that age might enjoy the occasional funny mystery with a romantic subplot, if they could find them on the shelf.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I think I would have been too scared to say “I am writing a proper mystery novel” from the outset, even though I read a ton of them in my youth. Telling myself that I was working on a YA rom-com with a light mystery gloss gave me the courage to ease into the genre sideways—and once I was in the thick of it, I realized that plotting a mystery is not an entirely different beast from writing any other kind of book. Structurally you’re still sketching characters and establishing motivations and dropping in clues in what you hope is an organic yet intriguing fashion, while sneaking in telling details that aren’t too heavy-handed. The fundamental question remains: what does the reader know and when do they know it?
As someone who has always preferred the intricate puzzle work of revision to drafting, I enjoyed the engineering challenge of setting up the whodunit while keeping the romance plot bubbling. It also helped that I had an editor who works on a lot of mystery novels to provide helpful guidance about genre expectations, like adding one more twist at the end.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
A pure vacation on the page. Come hang out with these freewheeling ex-actors at their gaudy condo and imagine all you have to do for the next few hours is sit by the pool, solve a few mysteries, and watch two goofy teens banter like their lives depend on it.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Stay weird. Nothing is more delightful in a piece of writing than the free expression of human idiosyncrasies.
