Meet Alexa Sierra And Maryssa Edwards of Nashville Smut

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alexa Sierra And Maryssa Edwards.

Alexa Sierra and Maryssa Edwards, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Nashville Smut was created in 2023. After a whole year of Alexa convincing Maryssa to give smut a try, she finally did after being influenced by the movie 365 Days. Shortly after watching, Maryssa read all three of the 365 Days books and was on the hunt for more. This lead Maryssa to ask Alexa about starting a book club, after a little hesitation, they said why not. What started on Facebook as a small book club with 100 followers, turned into Instagram, Facebook and TikTok and have now reached over 10,000 people across all platforms. While we’ve grown so much over the last almost two years, and have now turned into a business, we stay true to our core of being a book club and keeping our monthly meet ups. We’re not like a regular book club though, we don’t read the same book every month! Everyone reads at their own pace, has tropes they like or dislike and kinks/triggers that they may or may not want to read about. We strive to keep our community a safe place for women. It’s important to us that it remains a sex and book positive space, and a space where we can gather to talk about the books we liked and didn’t like in a respectful manner.
Since we’ve started, we’ve hosted a Halloween party our first year, A Halloween Masquerade our second, and now our inaugural event Tempted By Fiction in May, Tempted By Fiction again in October (this one will be at night and have a dark and halloween twist), and then our end of the year party, A Circus Of Temptation, which is a circus inspired holiday event that’s a combination of a show and a party.
Tempted By Fiction is our book festival that shines the light on spicy indie authors and romance/smut related small businesses.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
We feel very thankful that it’s been relatively smooth getting everything going. The only challenge has been making something that used to be so taboo to talk about, not taboo. Thankfully smut is getting more popular and its becoming normal!

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Nashville Smut?
Nashville Smut is known for hosting minimally one meet up a month where readers of smut can talk about the books they’re currently reading, get recommendations from others, and make new friends. What sets us apart from others is that we don’t just read the same book every month to discuss, and we don’t just have our one meet up for an hour or two a month. We’re truly a community. Members have come to meet ups without knowing anyone and left with all new friends. Even planning to meet up with each other in different cities when they travel for book conferences!

It’s so important to us to be inclusive to everyone, and to be a safe place, and I think we’ve done that. The community we’ve created blows us away, just a couple weeks ago Maryssa and I were at the airport and one of the TSA agents saw our Nashville Smut merch and mentioned how she was in the group too! Our smutties are everywhere and we love them. That’s what we’re proud of. Everyone knows they can come to a meet up and they will be welcomed with open arms.

We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Everything from the beginning has been a risk. Creating this group and not knowing if people would join, planning monthly meet ups and not knowing if people would show up. Planning an author and vendor event and hosting our first one having no idea what the turn out would be like (truly terrifying). Creating our brand, our logo and merch and selling it and having no idea how people would respond to it. The book community has been incredible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nashvillesmutlovers.com
• Instagram: nashvillesmut
• Facebook: Nashville Smut Lovers