Social media took Lloyd Devereux Richards’ serial-killer novel, “Stone Maidens,” from bottom of the barrel to top of the charts.
The Vermont author’s book — a flop when it was first published in 2012 — is now No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list thanks to a video his daughter posted on TikTok that’s garnered more than 40.3 million views, 9.4 million likes and a lot of book buyers.
“It’s surreal,” the 74-year-old author told The Post of his sudden success, beating out the likes of Colleen Hoover and Prince Harry. “I am not a social media person. I post pictures to Facebook and that’s it.”
Lloyd’s daughter Marguerite Richards, 40, however, is a social media person. On February 8, the teacher posted the video tribute to her dad’s overlooked hard work after finding out that the “Stone Maidens” sequel, finished late last year, had limited prospects of finding a publisher.
“I am so impressed with my dad and I hoped a few people would buy the book if they saw the person behind it,” Marguerite, who has a modest 4,000 person following on TikTok, told The Post. “I shot video of my father and he didn’t even know I was doing anything.”
Posted under Stonemaidens, the video captures Lloyd in his cluttered Montpelier, Vermont, attic office, pecking at his vintage computer and oblivious of his daughter’s presence. An on-screen caption reads: “My dad spent 14 years on a book … He worked full time and his kids came first … He’s so happy even though sales aren’t great. I’d love for him to get some sales. He doesn’t even know what TikTok is.”
The 17-second video, tracked to “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” written by John Lennon, also showed the book’s cover.
“I posted it and it had 200 views before I went to bed,” Marguerite remembered. “The first comment was that the book sounds great.”
Next morning, she recalled, “He had 700,000 views. I thought something was wrong. And the book was selling on Amazon.”
Marguerite can only guess at what happened. “Maybe because I presented the human behind the book,” she said. “It’s a love letter to my dad. I wasn’t like, ‘Here’s my dad’s book; buy it.’”
And that was not Lloyd’s attitude when he struck out on the 14-year journey to get his novel written and published. Back in the late 1990s, he was a lawyer for National Life Group, an insurance company headquartered near his home in Vermont, and read crime books avidly. He committed himself to spending nights and weekends crafting his own entry in the genre.
“It was difficult but I was determined,” Lloyd said, explaining that “Stone Maidens” was rejected by 85 agents before one took to it and managed to get him a modest $15,000 advance from publisher Thomas & Mercer, an imprint of Amazon. “Before now, my income from the book, when I factored in the costs of learning to write — including the hiring of editors to help me — was a negative. This is a passion.”
When Marguerite, who lives in the same town as her dad and mom, realized that the video had gone viral, she hoped that Lloyd would see the results organically, maybe by checking Amazon. But he didn’t. By the next day, the TikTok numbers had topped 1 million, book sales surged and people were requesting a reaction video.
“I showed him the video, I showed him the comments and he lost his breath,” she said of the follow-up TikTok. “I don’t think he was able to process what I was saying. We both cried.”
Asked about the status of his sequel, Richards said he could not comment. But, regarding the spike in sales, he did say, “My agent is impressed.
“Of course I had hopes that this might have happened at the start,” said Lloyd. “But, right now, I feel a lot of gratitude.”
Marguerite sees it more from the view of a seasoned TikTok poster. Speaking to the millions of viewers, she said, “I did not have the expectation of 40 million people falling in love with my dad and calling him their TikTok Dad. I just figured I’d get him a few thousand shares. But then the book becomes No. 1 on Amazon? That’s magic.”