Bailey Seaborn
Bailey Seaborn is the pen name of Meg Casebolt, a contemporary romance author who writes witty, feminist romantic comedies, including the All or Nothing series. Beyond writing fiction, she is an AI discoverability strategist, the founder of the marketing consultancy Love at First Search, the creator of the author education platform Happily Ever Indie, and the co-host of the First Dates & Soulmates podcast.
The books are for readers. The education is for authors. The podcast is for anyone who takes romance seriously as a craft and a cultural force. All of it lives here.
In 2021, Meg was reading so much romance to escape the fact that the world was on fire that she started dreaming novels.
Not in a vague, “I had an idea” way. In a full-scene, dual-timeline, I-woke-up-and-immediately-needed-to-write-this-down way. The first dream was a story about a man who looked like Chris Evans going back to his hometown and driving past the gallery of the girl he’d always had a crush on — his little sister’s best friend, the one who got away. She didn’t know his name yet. He didn’t know hers.
Five years, three full-length novels, and one holiday novella later, she finally published their story.
That’s how it works sometimes. You think you’re just reading romance to survive a pandemic, and then the stories start coming to you in dreams, and you realize you’re a writer now. The characters tell you their names in the epilogue. You cry over a pivotal scene at the YMCA while your kids are in the game center. You sign a different name at book events and it still feels a little strange.
Bailey Seaborn is named after the two copywriters in The West Wing — yes, she’s that much of a nerd.
The Books
The All or Nothing series follows the extended family and friend group of Grace Clarke — feminist contemporary romance featuring women who’ve been told to dim their shine one too many times, and the partners who help them reclaim their full, messy, powerful selves.
The series is built around a found family, not a trope. Each book follows a different character to their HEA, which means each one lands on different shelves, hits different emotional notes, and attracts readers looking for different things — enemies to lovers, second chance, fake dating, neighbors to lovers. What connects them is voice, values, and the Clarkes.
The books are available on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited. See the full series →
The Day Job
& Why It Matters Here
By day, Meg runs Love At First Search, an AI discoverability consultancy helping small businesses understand how to show up in search and AI-generated results. She has spent a decade reverse-engineering how recommendation algorithms work — Google, Amazon, AI search — and translating that into plain language that business owners can actually act on.
When she started publishing romance novels, she looked around and realized nobody was doing that translation for romance authors.
Most indie publishing education is built for authors generally. Romance doesn’t work like other genres. Romance readers are voracious in ways that readers of almost no other genre are — they finish books, binge series, leave reviews, maintain Kindle Unlimited subscriptions. That reader behavior is extraordinarily valuable to Amazon’s algorithm. But only if you’ve built the infrastructure to capture it.
Nobody was explaining the infrastructure. So she built Happily Ever Indie.
Happily Ever Indie
Happily Ever Indie is the romance marketing education nobody else is teaching — how readers actually find books on Amazon, what makes the platform decide to show yours, and why so much common advice doesn’t lead to sales.
It’s not a promise of six figures. It’s not a social media growth strategy. It’s an honest, data-informed, romance-specific examination of how the business actually works — the algorithm signals, the shelf strategy, the product page mechanics, the reader behavior patterns that determine whether your books get found by the readers who would love them.
Meg writes it from inside the genre, with real data from her own catalog, as someone who is two years in and still watching the flywheel build. That’s not a confession. It’s a credential. She knows exactly how this system works, she’s doing everything right, and it still takes time. That’s not failure. That’s physics.
The Romance Podcast
First Dates & Soulmates is the romance podcast Meg co-hosts with Nikki McKnight — rigorous and ridiculous in equal measure, applying an analytical lens to the genre they love. Tropes, craft, cultural significance, and the occasional deep dive into why romance readers are among the most algorithmically valuable audiences on the internet.
The show launched in 2024 and has published over 100 episodes on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Meg lives in Rochester, New York with her husband, two boys, and an 80-pound pit bull who is deeply unaware of her size. She does yoga, reads more romance than she probably admits to, and has strong opinions about s’mores and Broadway musicals.
She wrote her first book — a business book about getting off social media — before she wrote any of the romance novel.
For business inquiries, speaking requests, or to geek out about Amazon algorithms, reach her at [email protected].