Hoping to provide the book some publicity, Marguerite asked her father whether she could record a TikTok video of him. Lloyd, 74, hadn’t heard of the social media platform.
“Well, what’s that going to do?” Lloyd recalled asking.
“Believe me, Dad,” responded Marguerite, 40, “just trust me.”
Marguerite recorded Lloyd working in his attic office — a 16-second video she posted that night with a message: “I’d love for him to get some sales.” The video went viral, and a few days later, “Stone Maidens” ascended to the top of Amazon’s bestsellers chart. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post).
“I don’t understand how that could translate into what’s happened with the book,” Lloyd said. “I’m grateful. I’m very happy. I just can’t believe it.”
In the mid-1970s, Lloyd was attending Indiana University’s law school when he said he remembers several women went missing in forests around the Midwest. Those crimes would later inspire the premise of the book he dedicated years to writing.
After he moved to Montpelier, Vt., in June 1984, Lloyd began working as a lawyer for a life insurance company. For two years, after finishing his workdays, he studied dialogue, structure and pacing with a local college professor. He read legal files about murders and studied books by his favorite authors, including Stephen King and Michael Connelly.
Around 1998, Lloyd began writing “Stone Maidens,” a 300-plus-page book that follows an FBI forensic anthropologist investigating a serial killer strangling women and leaving their bodies in southern Indiana forests.
Lloyd’s home office in his attic isn’t insulated, so he wore a hat and mittens in the winter and blew fans on himself and his computer in the summer as he worked on the novel. While practicing law and raising three children, he said he found a few hours to write at night and in the morning. He said he slept about four hours per night for over a decade.
After he finished a draft in the fall of 2009, Lloyd said, he was turned down by about 80 literary agents. Lloyd said his mail carrier despised him because his rejection letters weighed down his delivery bag. In May of 2010, Lloyd thought he was being hoaxed when an agent finally agreed to work with him.
But more disappointing news followed. By the fall of 2010, Lloyd said, not one editor had agreed to publish his book.
“It’s very dismaying,” Lloyd said. “I had to have thick skin. I had to just say, ‘You know? I’m going to figure this out.’”
The next year, Lloyd enrolled in an online writing class. Then, in the fall of 2011, Thomas & Mercer, an Amazon subsidiary, agreed to be his publisher.
Lloyd said he was relieved when the book published in 2012, but Amazon sales didn’t meet Thomas & Mercer’s expectations. While a few dozen people bought the book in the following two years, Lloyd said, sales soon fell off. He said he donated his books to his small town’s bookstore. He sold three copies online between this past December and January, Lloyd said.
Marguerite had been plotting since the fall to promote her dad’s book on TikTok. Growing up, she witnessed her father’s long hours in his office, and she wanted to make a video that would honor his hard work. She figured a few people might learn about his novel.
“It was such a great book, and I knew how important it was to him,” Marguerite said. “He never was like, ‘Ah, nobody cares.’ He just always stayed positive. I thought maybe it’s just because nobody knows about the book.”
After Marguerite filmed Lloyd for a few minutes last week, she posted the video, accompanied by a rendition of John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy).”
“My dad spent 14 years writing a book,” she wrote on top of the video. “He worked full time and his kids came first. But made time for his book.”
The next morning, Marguerite said the video had received about a million views, which she thought was a glitch. Then she looked at Amazon’s book charts and saw “Stone Maidens” was one of the top-selling mystery, thriller and suspense novels.
The following day, Marguerite invited her dad to her condo. When she handed him her phone to show him the video, Lloyd responded: “Do I touch it?” As he read the video’s comments and Marguerite told him about the sales, Lloyd cried. He celebrated with a chocolate milkshake.
“Stone Maidens” is now the top-selling novel on Amazon, surpassing Colleen Hoover’s “It Ends with Us” and “It Starts with Us” and Prince Harry’s “Spare.” Lloyd said Amazon hasn’t sent him sales figures, but he expects them by March.
The first video of Lloyd has received roughly 43 million views. Marguerite turned her TikTok account into one for Lloyd, who now has more than 305,000 followers.
“I owe all of what’s happening now to my daughter,” Lloyd said. “If I had said, ‘I’m tired, I want to go to bed, maybe some other time,’ we wouldn’t be talking. I’m very grateful, but that’s the only thing that’s changed in the last 11 years is this couple of videos she put on TikTok.”
While he tries to grasp the publicity, Lloyd is working on a sequel. He hopes after four and a half years of writing, he’ll land a publisher.
That may come easier as his fame grows on TikTok. In one of his latest videos, he offered the world a writing tip for the first time.
“Write, you rewrite and write it again,” he said. “And never give up.”