Aleatha Romig hits it big with "Fidelity"

Aleatha Romig recently reached a milestone achievement—becoming a bestselling novelist—but how the Greenwood writer got to that point might be the more impressive feat: she’s self-published. Last weekend friends and family gathered at Romig’s home on Indy’s south side to celebrate news that her latest book Fidelity had hit the New York Times bestseller list, where it cracked the rankings among ebooks and print books combined for the week of January 24 and joined works by celebrated authors like James Grisham and Jody Picoult.
“The nice thing about independent authors is that they are not relegated to a box,” said Romig, who wrote Fidelity as the fifth entry in a series called Infidelity. “Because of that, books are allowed to encompass multiple genres. For example, the Infidelity series is a dark romance saga. It’s a twisted story of much more than boy meets girl. It intertwines generations of betrayal, cunning, deception, entrapment, and fidelity.”
And supporters love it, passion that translates into a legion of admirers on social media platforms with 33,500 fans on Facebook, 14,100 followers on Twitter, and nearly 11,000 on Instagram. Some junkies have even gone so far as to create video trailers for her books and assembled fantasy casts of actors based on Romig characters.

A married mother of three adult children, and a grandmother, Romig graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington. A couple of years ago, she transitioned from a 30-year career as a dental hygienist to tapping on a keyboard full time. Without a huge publisher, Romig has become her own, investing thousands of dollars. She contracts editors and goes through multiple edits, professional book formatters, cover designers, and more. Book promotion is an obsession, and at the party last weekend—as guests feted Romig with wine and flowers—she passed around her mobile phone to let guests peek at cover options for her next novel, Respect.
By then, Fidelity had already hit bestseller lists of both The Wall Street Journal (No. 6) and USAToday (No. 19). Cosmopolitan and Redbook editors are fans, too, having put forth the Infidelity series as recommended reading for devotees of the Fifty Shades collection.
As guests passed around her phone, Romig smiled and took a sip of wine. “My ideas come from everywhere: my life, my friends, TV, movies, books, and songs,” she said. “A simple sentence can spawn an entire series.”