Sandra Gerth (born March 19, 1978, in Mullheim im Markgraflerland, Germany) is a German novelist, senior editor at Ylva Publishing, and the author of a popular series of writing-craft books for fiction writers. She graduated from the University of Freiburg in 2004 with a degree in psychology and worked as a working psychologist for eight years before transitioning to a full-time writing and editing career in 2013. She earned a certificate in editing from the Academy of German Book Trade and is now senior editor at Ylva Publishing, one of the largest lesbian-fiction publishing houses in the world.
Her writing-craft books, published in English under her real name, include Show, Don't Tell: How to Write Vivid Descriptions, Handle Backstory, and Describe Your Characters' Emotions, which works through the single most common piece of fiction advice ever given to a writer with concrete sentence-level examples and a working definition of the principle most craft books leave undefined. Point of View: How to Use the Different Point-of-View Types, Avoid Head-Hopping, and Choose the Best Point of View for Your Book treats POV decisions at the structural and sentence level. Goal Setting for Writers, Time Management for Writers, and Write Great Beginnings round out the craft series with reference titles for the working business of writing.
Under her pen name Jae she is one of the most-read working novelists in lesbian fiction, with more than twenty-one novels and several dozen short stories. She started writing at age eleven, published her first novel Backwards to Oregon with L-Book ePublisher in 2007, and joined Ylva Publishing in 2012. Her novels have been Amazon number one bestsellers in their category, have won multiple Goldie Awards, Rainbow Awards, and Lambda Literary Award nominations, and have been translated for international publication including a Korean edition of her craft series.
She divides her time between writing her own novels under the Jae byline and editing other writers' work at Ylva, and her writing-craft books draw directly on the kinds of fixable problems she sees most often in working manuscripts. She lives in Germany and maintains her writing-craft site at sandragerth.com and her fiction site at jae-fiction.com.
