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Kate Eberle

Kate Eberle

Debut novelist whose genre-bending rom-com-thriller *If Books Could Kill* sparked a 10-way auction, sold film/TV rights, and is publishing in over 14 countries

Jul 22, 2026

7:30
So would you say, like, if you were rating the book, do you think it's mostly rom-com? Is it mostly mystery? Is it a combination of, like, is it 50-50? Is it 80-20? Like, have you thought about putting a number on it that way? Or is it just organically what it is?
7:47
You know, I definitely haven't thought about it ratio-wise, but I do think it's both, you know, pretty firmly both.
7:56
But I will say that the romance side of it is always, like, kind of what came to me first.
8:02
And the mystery sort of happened by accident.
8:05
I love it.
8:07
And yeah, I mean, it was something where I was particularly touched by, you know, feedback after the fact where people were like, oh, it's a great mystery.
8:15
Like, I didn't guess what was going to happen because I was like, I don't know how I did that.

5 MINS LATER

13:30
But how does being a grown-up theater kid manifest in your life? How do you see that?
18:17
Were pictures of the characters there as well, or did they take some
18:21
time? Some took a while.
18:25
Some were very quick to show up.
18:27
The character of Grant Hoffman, who is the protagonist, Roxy's companion, who she meets early on, he was one of the first characters to really show up and just kind of inform me who he was.
18:41
Fantastic.
18:43
He's a very knowledgeable guy, and if he's not careful, he leans a little bit into the side of know-it-all.
18:50
And my first flash of him, he was in a very tense situation but still correcting somebody about a little factual inaccuracy.

7 MINS LATER

25:42
I mean, apart from this huge auction, what's been the most memorable moment for you so far?
31:57
And for Sparked though, how is Sparked contributing to the International Patient Summary?
32:02
Yeah, absolutely.
32:03
Great question.
32:04
So international patient summary, something that's globally agreed, is that core set of clinical information.
32:10
Importantly, we're not only thinking about it for that cross-border flow around as we travel between countries, but importantly, we are a federation here in Australia.
32:19
We do, and I think cross-border flow for us equals cross-border across state and territory, across primary care and acute care.
32:26
And so we're actually saying, well, how do we take that international patient summary and then how do we localise that and align it to something called AU core, which is that core foundational fire implementation guide? How do we align that and make sure we are creating something called the Australian patient summary? And that literally means that we're saying and taking that international concept and we're saying how do we actually use that same spec make sure it's got all the Australian healthcare identifiers, all the right Australian terminology, and then use that for our cross-border flow within Australia as well so that I could have a patient summary that's available through My Health Record, available through Health Connect Australia in the future to use between exchanging that information in-country.
35:06
How do you kind of see the importance of that element compared to just the pure technical side?

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