Vermont man Lloyd Devereux Richards has become a bestselling author 25 years after he started working on Stone Maidens, a thriller about an FBI forensic anthropologist trying to track down a mysterious killer. The book hit No. 1 on Amazon's Serial Killer Thrillers list and cracked the overall top 10 after his daughter posted a TikTok video that went viral with more than 40 million views, the BBC reports. In the video, Richards' daughter says he spent 14 years working on the book because family and work came first and he was happy just to have finished it 11 years ago, but she'd "love for him to get some sales."
"He doesn't even know what TikTok is," Richards' daughter said. That has now changed: In a follow-up video, Richards wipes away tears of joy after his daughter shows him the video and many positive comments about the book. According to his Amazon biography, Richards, a father of three, worked as an attorney in Vermont. Earlier in his career, he worked as a senior law clerk for an Indiana Court of Appeals judge, "researching and writing drafts for dozens of published opinions, including the appeal of a serial killer sentenced to death." The biography says he's now working on a sequel to Stone Maidens. The BBC notes that the Tiktok hashtag #BookTok has helped authors sell tens of millions of books in recent years. (More author stories.)
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