2005-Amanda (Schubbe) Ruzsa
- Jason Lee Willis
- Oct 30
- 7 min read
Something Wicked This Way Comes:
Maple River graduate launches career as a horror author.
Since the days of telling ghost stories around the camp fire, storytellers have reveled in producing goosebumps, and 2005 Maple River graduate Amanda (Schubbe) Ruzsa has turned that love of being frightened into a diverse career in the horror genre. After being a life-long fan of horror stories, Ruzsa had jumped feet-first into being a horror author with 19 titles that range from poetry and anthologies to short stories and novels. Why horror? Ruzsa explains her love of the genre. “Horror gives you a chance to experience something extreme in a safe environment. It opens the door to horrors unknown, and I deeply feel that it is a beneficial way of processing through horrific experiences in one's own life. Because horror can hit you out of nowhere, you’ll find every emotion under the sun in a horror book. Love. Joy. Pain. Loss. Fear. Dread. All of it. To me, horror is more than just a scary story. Horror makes you think. It makes you question your abilities, your mental capacity, your physical strength. Your likelihood of survival in a horrific situation. It opens the door to so many outlets and I just love that.”
Ruzsa’s love of writing didn’t suddenly develop. Writing poetry has been a mainstay for
her over the past 20 years, and with a busy life raising children, her poems and stories began to pile up. While she attended writing conferences through the years, her professional literary journey didn’t begin until recently. “In 2023, I realized that not every author is going to make it big. They're not all going to be published by a top publisher and become as famous as Stephen King or Colleen Hoover or Freida McFadden. I realized there was a whole community of authors who simply enjoyed the craft and self published their work. They put their work out there themselves, and I realized that I could do that too. I had my first story accepted and published in 2023, and that’s what set me on this path of relentless storytelling. I self-published my first story on September 29, 2024, and I haven’t stopped since. It's truly a dream come true. And all it took is that one day, I realized I could do it, even if no one else (except my family, they always believed in my writing) thought I could.”
Even though Ruzsa just started publishing, she was a “superfan” of the genre for quite a while. Having read all of the “standard” horror authors like Stephen King, RL Stine, and Christopher Pike, she found herself reading more and more independent authors once her free time returned as her children grew older. “I discovered a group on Facebook called BOOKS OF HORROR, and that is where I found my community. Reviewers, authors, book designers, editors, and it opened my eyes to a world I didn’t know was out there.” After discovering independently published authors, Ruzsa became active in the horror community as a fan and reviewer. “I average anywhere between 75 and 150 books per year. And a lot of them are by different authors. There are too many books to limit yourself to just one author until you’ve finished all of their work. I discovered a horror book a few years back that was unlike anything I’d ever read.” Now that the superfan has published her own works, the relationship has changed. “I'm continuously invited to submit work to anthologies and collections.”
While large traditional publishers focus on the best-selling genres of romance, fantasy, and romantasy (see Rebecca Yarros), the horror genre has largely gone underground–and the fans are rabid. “Fear is a full-body feeling,” Ruzsa speculated on the popularity of horror. “It floods us full of adrenaline and dopamine and things that help us to move quicker, think faster, it elevates us. It's a boost. It's a rush. Your blood is pumping, your heart is racing, you may as well have just run a marathon. Your mind and body are awake and you feel the most alive you may have felt in a good while, at times.” With the popular theme of ‘facing your fears” found in horror, Ruzsa finds inspiration for her stories all around. “A lot of my inspiration comes from real life things. Now, that's not to say that all of my work is based on things I have gone through. But in each of my works are elements of truth. From paranormal experiences, to traumatizing experiences, to my reactions to horrific events affecting people around me. Sometimes I pull bits of information from history, sometimes from dreams that stuck with me long after I’d woken up afraid.” And what scares a horror writer? “My biggest fear is watching a loved one not survive something horrific. I’ve witnessed this already, but it's a deep seeded fear nonetheless. I can't imagine watching my family fall victim to a mass murder, a home invasion, a zombie apocalypse. This brings me back to horror being the doorway to living vicariously through a story.”
While surviving the plot of a horror story is often challenging, surviving as an author in a market flooded with other authors requires a great deal of ingenuity, which Ruzsa has shown as she gets her fledgling career off the ground. First, she’s created a diversity of formats. Along with publishing traditional paper copies, Ruzsa publishes her stories with Amazon’s KDP and Kindle Unlimited, which allows readers unlimited reads with a monthly subscription. Submitting a story in an anthology of established authors brings name recognition. Her 20 years of poetry allowed her to package and create a series of “short” reads in her portfolio of stories. Yet she’s still a fan of the classic format. “Novels are my favorite literary form. I like to spend my time in the world I’ve chosen to glimpse. While short stories and poetry both can have that same effect, a novel immerses you for much longer and often much deeper.”
Another way Ruzsa has diversified her career is by providing services to other writers who need editorial and cover design help. “I spend about 30-40 hours per week editing for others, but it's not that way every month. Some months are busier than hours, and in those months I am able to be more focused on my own work. I really enjoy editing, and often when I’m reading a book I have to remind myself to switch out the editor hat with the reader and just enjoy the book. Being an editor is so different from being an author in that we have to help shape an already formed story into the best version of itself there can be. What is difficult is switching from the editor hat to the writer hat. When I write, I write. I don’t stop to fix typos or errors, I get it all down on the page. And then I switch to the editor hat. Because as a writer, we wrote the words and we read the words over and over, making it make sense, and eventually the words begin to blur together. You start missing the little things because you’re so focused on the bigger picture. You have to really find that line between creating a story and polishing a story.”
This self-described “artsy woman” might’ve only recently begun selling pre-designed covers for other authors, but the skill took root years ago. “As kids we read books and would later draw pictures about them. Those could be considered for covers for those books, they’ve captured a scene or the whole vibe of the book. And I have to again mention the BOOKS OF HORROR group on Facebook because that is also where I found that there are even independent book cover designers. You can literally do anything independently. You just have to want it and do it. And so I started designing my own book covers. Much of my earlier works bear my face, and you can tell those were my earliest design attempts. As I’ve grown in the job, I’ve found so many tools out there. And who shared them with me? OTHER cover designers. Again, there is so much support in the community that you feel like you can do anything, and any one of them will help you in any way they can.” If a picture tells a thousand words, a good cover is equally important in selling a story. “When walking the produce section at the grocery store, you're always going to look for the brightest, most beautifully presented fruits and vegetables available to you. Your eyes will be the first thing that draws you forward. It's the same with bookshelf browsing. When you're looking at hundreds of books and trying to choose just one or two, the cover is what brings the title to life in that briefest of moments you have to shop. The cover is the face of the story, the mapping out of what world you might dive into when cracking open the book. And like all art, it's got to elicit a big feeling. Whether its adoration, curiosity, intrigue or disgust… it has to have an impact big enough to reel you in.”
Getting through dire moments in a story often relies on the wit of the protagonist, but also, the fellowship of others, and Ruzsa’s foray into writing came with help. “In a word, support. My husband works many, many hours so I am able to work from home as an editor, while also working on my own writing and keeping the household running smoothly. Expanding on that, my children are now at ages where they require less of my time, and as a bonus, they also enjoy spooky stories so I’m often getting ideas from them. Further, my mother is my biggest cheerleader, going so far as to read even the most depraved work I’ve written, just to help me edit and proofread and brainstorm. And finally, the indie author community itself has fueled this explosion of horror I’ve greatly enjoyed. I have never seen so many people actually supporting and helping those who are technically their competitors. It really is all about support. You can do anything you put your mind to, but a little support from others really helps you to go even further than you ever dreamed.”
So in the midst of the darkness found in horror, there must be a little light in order to see the shadows. “That brings me back to that first question of what horror does for me: it's a community that knows that even with all of the good and beautiful and wonderful things, there is darkness but it doesn't have to define us. It’s not the whole story. And we can write our own.”
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