Female-Driven Stories That Win Awards with Kay Oliver

Welcome to Milestone Moments, the show where we explore the journeys that lead to success. I'm Sheila Slick, your host and founder of Five Milestones. In every episode, we will bring you insights from the minds of entrepreneurs, leaders and experts who will share not just their expertise, but the milestone moments that have reshaped their journeys and led to significant achievements. So if you're looking for motivation, you're in the right place.

Subscribe now and discover the milestones that mark the path to success. Welcome to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. I'm your host, Sheila Slick, and today my special guest is Kay Oliver. Kay is a dynamic storyteller with degrees in both radio, TV, film, and an MBA, with over three decades in entertainment, spanning studios, TV stations, and film production.

She's defying Hollywood's gender biases and the notion that female -centric stories lack marketability. Kay became an author championing women's resilience through compelling characters like archaeologists and anthropologists who navigate life challenges with humor and imperfection. Her literary journey began with the success of Disturbed Tombs, evolving into the Dr. Kylie Worthy series, and it includes works like Road to Elysium, and her latest, Ice Cream Moments, where she explores family dynamics with empathy.

Welcome to the show, Kay. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. This is a very interesting background you have.

I don't know where to start digging in. Yes, I understand. How did you transition from working in Hollywood to becoming... an award -winning author.

The transition was a leap of faith. However, there was a predecessor to that in the sense that I worked in Hollywood and did advocate for women in the industry because it is a male -dominated industry and pretty much still is. It's starting to change a bit. The industry itself.

Technology wise is making it change as well, because before you had to have all that equipment in the studios and all that. Now you can do it on a phone. So that helps broaden who can create content and places to display it. However, during my journey in Hollywood, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and I was let go of my job the next week.

which meant my income and my insurance was gone. And I had to survive the help of friends and family. And I did that for like a year and a half having to, you know, survive on that. So when I went back after, you know, being cleared of cancer, I had different priorities, right?

Life was different. I put up with a little, a lot less, a lot less and decided. I know female stories can sell. I know that we can have strong women with intelligent minds if they happen to have a counterpart, you know, that that person is also strong and intelligent.

Nobody has to be put down in the stories. Not one character has to be weak and goofy or unintelligent. And I wrote, I decided that if I did it, when I... didn't plan on doing it and survived it.

I can do it when I'm planning on it. And so I took the leap, wrote Disturbed Tombs and won four literary awards on that book alone. That was my first debut book. And now my 15th book is coming out.

So I have truly enjoyed. I am still advocating for women through my characters and my books. They are action -packed. They have humor.

They have flaws. Everybody, all my characters in my books have flaws because, you know, we have flaws, self -included. So I like to make sure that I write very, very compelling stories that I want to read. I'm a Clive Koosler fan.

He writes, you know, I believe he writes the Jack Ryan series. Anyway, action -packed, but they're male, right? Male action -packed type of, you know, who've done its mysteries. And I thought, let's just switch it up and have some highly intelligent archaeologists in that first book who make some major discovery.

And then... I've got three book series going now. I have another one where she is a scientist as well and retires to a ranch, and there's a whole story around what she finds on her ranch. There's one where a woman becomes a private investigator, all because she inherits a house and finds a letter from a confessed killer that nobody knew about.

So all my women are strong, action -packed. able to handle a gun or able to take on whatever's coming their way, go to a foreign country and do what they need to do and get out safely. And I make sure that I'm writing those kind of characters because all the women in my life are strong, highly intelligent, take on the world type of women that I know and that I gravitate towards. And I'm writing about those people because we exist.

We are here, aren't we? So yes, I write about that. So is all your work fiction or is it based on a true story? How does that work?

Most of my books are fiction. I have Road to Elysium is based on a true story and that does have a male lead character, but there is a strong female character in there as well who helps him through some of his issues. That was based on a news blurb that I heard on TV. And then I tried to find out more about it and nobody had written anything about this amazing life that happened.

and circumstances that happened. And then the latest book that's coming out is also about a particular serial killer, but it's more about the aspect of what the police go through to try to get the information from him that they want to recover the bodies and how they are left with not being able to get all the victims back and how they have to live with that. I don't think we think about that very often that, you know, their goal is to try to recover everybody and make families whole again.

And, you know, serial killers like to keep it to themselves. You know, that's their little trophies. And how do you live with that? So I explored that in my book that's coming out.

So a lot of it, a lot of my stories are what ifs. Disturbed Tools was based on a question I had for years. Why do we exhume? Every mummy we find, we find 28, we exude 28.

But our graveyards, you're not allowed to touch them. They're in peace, right? Why are we disturbing the peace of every mummy? For the sake of science and history, do we need to exude every mummy?

Do we need to go scavenging through and finding kings and people buried? Do we have to find them? I mean, can we just find them and say there they are and leave them where they're at and leave the treasure and everything where it's at? And so that was what Disturbed Tubes was based on, and I answer that in my own way.

I like your process, and I've been writing nonfiction books, so understanding a bit about how you're beginning your process, which sounds like a simple question. Spark of curiosity is what just gets that idea in, and then you sit down, you create the character, and you write away. Right away. I'm not a plotter.

I think that's part of my background from the motion picture industry, having written scripts, directed. I see it all in my head. It's a place you don't want to go. And I can literally, I know where I'm going.

I know where I want to start. I know how I kind of want to end. And then I kind of fill in the gaps. I have some idea of things that will happen along the way.

But I just start writing. I take my question and go, how am I going to answer this? As a fiction writer, it's you, you know, it's you, it's your thoughts, it's your twists, it's your turns. I like to throw history into my stories as well.

I do a lot of research, realistic histories. And I've had readers come back and say, not only are your characters active and fun, and there's humor thrown in the middle of something that should be, you know, nerve wracking, because that's kind of a Spielberg thing. I do the same thing. Learn that from him.

I learned as I'm reading your books. I'm learning that there's a different kind of horse out there I never knew existed. I didn't know there was sunken ships in the Great Lakes outside of Michigan. I didn't know there was tunnels in Michigan.

I didn't know, you know, and they read it and they go, then I go and look and sure enough, you know, that exists and I never knew about it. So how do you do that? If it's a fiction book. How do you mix real history or real facts in the books?

It's up to the reader to have to decide to Google it or research it to see if it's true or not. Partly, yes. Partly, you throw history in and if you're a reader of mine, after you've read a couple of books, you start to know those are facts. And adding real facts to a fiction book makes a fiction book less fictional to the reader.

more real. So I didn't really realize that when I started that I didn't have my writing voice that when I started that I have today. That is something that I have found along the way that people go, oh, you know, this is so real to me. And these characters are so real.

I'll tell you a trick about my characters. They are real people. So when I started writing and I didn't really know how to develop characters, I asked my friends, hey, I'm going to make this character. I want to use your first name.

Give me a last name you want it to be. So in my first book, you'll come across a Doris. Yes, one of my best friends' name is Doris. I know everything about, well, I don't know everything about Doris, but I know a lot about Doris, right?

And I throw that into my character because I already know what she likes to eat, you know, her personality, highly intelligent, you know, and I... And I've done that to several friends who are in my books. I use their first name, they give me a fictional last name, and I use them as characters. So I enjoyed learning your thinking process.

And I'd love also to know, what were some of the challenges you had to overcome? How did you overcome all that? I was prepared. When I left, I had income that I was putting.

most of my salary away knowing that I was going to leave. Then some of the challenges of the change. Well, I found it an exciting set of challenges because in Hollywood, when you write a script, you have to please the producers, you have to please the powers that be. And when I'm writing my book, I'm pleasing me and my readers.

That is a flip, a big change. Scripts are extremely formatted and they are a visual medium versus a... mental medium reading so you have to put more information into the book and finding a really good editor is a challenge finding someone who gets you get your style read your books my first couple of editors weren't the best I even had one book go through a couple of editors and there's still a bunch of stuff in it that was had to be fixed that I found out after readers started reading and you go oh geez so you know, learning the system.

Now I started with novellas and novella is a smaller book, right? And my first book, I actually wrote five novellas just to get through the experience, the covers, the editing, the process. Then I put them together to make Disturbed Tubes. I found out later that a number of well -known writers write that way.

They will flush out, write a novella. They may not publish it. but they'll write a novella and then flesh it out later and I was like okay well I did it that way because that's the way I figured it would work for me but the the challenge was self -reliance not only did I have to believe in myself I had to trust myself that you know I'm going to get this done I'm going to do this and I had great friends who kept going write more write more so that takes a lot of planning and creativity.

And you're right, you don't get into writing and publishing to make millions. I like to assist new writers, help them understand what it takes to forget your voice, what it takes to write, what, you know, you need to sit down and do it. It's not going to just appear on the page. How not to have writer's blocks, how it's okay to take a few days off.

You don't know, something might happen in those couple of days and you go. That's perfect for my book. Right. So it's OK to take a day or two off.

But, you know, once you've got that pattern of writing and then to tell them, don't expect millions of dollars on your first book or millions buys. It is most people I self -publish, but most people who self -publish or publish, you'll sell about 200 books. I've sold over 2000. But it's not, you know, it's not the norm.

So I try to explain that you need to keep writing. You need to keep going. Nobody in Hollywood is an overnight success. I learned that.

So I already knew that. Right. It could take you 10 years to become an overnight success. So with that in mind, that tells me to keep going.

Keep going. Keep going. You're on the right path. I've won over 30.

three awards now, literary awards. I lost count, sorry. I've been, you know, inducted into Who's Who, and I became Fiction Author of the Year this year, 2025, through an organization. So, you know, I must be doing something right, and those female characters must be saying and doing the right things.

Well, congratulations on all of those achievements. Thank you. You directly challenged Hollywood's belief that female -centric stories perhaps lack marketability by building your literary career around these female characters. What advice would you give to women creators in any field, whether it's film, business, books, archaeology, who are being told that their vision isn't commercially viable?

Book the system. Normally the answer is because you don't market them like you market the mail, right? So we just recently had that experience with women's soccer and women's basketball where they started winning and then all of a sudden they started, TV started carrying their programs and then they started selling out stadiums. Because they started marketing them.

They started talking about them. And that's the reason that people, you know, don't know about something. They're not going to go see it or view it. So it's the marketing aspect that messes with the markability.

You're not marketing it, therefore it isn't selling. It's the same thing for anything else. Keep pushing. Keep...

Take yourself into the third person. Don't take it personally. We have to just keep at it. Just keep at it and believe in ourselves.

So where can we connect with you or find all of these books and these female characters? You can go to my website, which is my full name, K -A -Y -A -Oliver .com. I'm also on Amazon.

So you can look me up on Amazon and the Author Central or look up Disturbed Tombs and you'll find all the other books and my latest coming out. And I do send out a newsletter. So you can sign up on my website if you want that. It's about upcoming books and writer's tips that I send out.

So I am across all social media, which is listed on my website. Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today, Kay, and for joining me. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

And thank you all for tuning in to another episode of Milestone Moments in Business and Leadership. Until next time.