Author Spotlight - Kia Leep

***Author Spotlight aka Ask them Anything***

Today I'm excited to give you a fairly new author Kia Leep

I was super excited with this author, because they have gotten to work with the amazing Daniel Henning as their narrator!

So without further messing around, here we go!

Tell us a little about yourself?

I’m Kia Leep, (they/them) new author of isekai LitRPG! 2025 is my first year publishing, though I’ve previously written dozens of books and been involved in the writing community and for quite some time now. I started writing stories when I was 7 years old, but I got an engineering degree because I figured building spaceships was as close as I could get to living in the works of fiction I love to read. I like to write books about inhuman characters exploring humanity.

As a queer person myself, I also enjoy including a lot of diverse, queer representation, because I so rarely see it in this genre, and it’s even more rare that I see it written by a queer author. Between writing in first person, having inhuman queer MCs, and playing with the concept of fate vs free will, I’ve effectively made it as hard as possible for myself to succeed in this genre, ha ha. But hey, where’s the fun in making things easy for myself?

What’s your newest release?

My next book, Friendly Fyre, will publish on July 14th! It’s a cozy queer kingdom builder that features a scientist reborn in a fantasy world who is inadvertently thrust into the role of The Dark Lord. Determined to use her engineering experience and newfound powers for good, Fyre befriends dragons, wields Dungeon Cores, and raises ancient and buried kingdoms.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, the title of the book is a pun. All of my book titles are puns. You can expect my books to contain humor of a similar caliber.

Where did your inspiration come from?

Fyre is the only main character I’ve written who shares my background of having an aerospace engineering degree. It was fun to write from a scientific perspective, as I usually try to write characters very different from myself. (I just get bored of writing similar main characters over and over! As a result, almost none of my MCs are designed to be self-inserts.) I am non-binary, and Fyre is trans, so it was also cathartic to write her examining her identity for the first time.

I wanted this book to subvert many of the tropes you typically see in isekai, and explore these concepts with more nuance. It’s a gender-bender, but Fyre’s new body is the catalyst for her reflecting on her gender identity in her previous life. She is assigned the role of The Dark Lord, but she wants nothing more than to help people and live in peace. She’s a logical scientist, but also compassionate and caring. And most importantly, as on outsider transplanted into a new culture, I didn’t want her to enlighten the citizens of this new world, but rather, have them be the source of enlightenment for her. Instead of solving their problems for them, she leans on their history and technology to solve problems she was responsible for creating.

Truth be told, I fully expected this book to be a commercial failure as a result, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it did better than any of my other stories on Royal Road. I think right now a lot of us could use a cozy and comforting escape from reality 

All Social Media Links

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/kialeep.bsky.social

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0DQ2Q8HNH/allbooks

Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/profile/343978/fictions

Website: https://www.kialeep.com