Final, Official Cover!

After a few minor revisions, I'm delighted to reveal the new, final cover for THE STAR THIEF!!

This is the front :D 

And this is the full cover, with all text & bells & whistles!
From how it's been described, the final, printed version is going to be amazing! 

Everyone's questions involve if/how much input I had in the cover design.
Answer is, not much :D
My editor did suggest this for the cover image while we were working on the manuscript, which I thought was a fantastic idea - when I was a kid, I would have gone for the book with the pegasus on the cover first thing - and when I saw the first draft and there were Honorine and Francis soaring across the night sky on Pegasus, well, I never thought this little story would ever get this far. It's amazing and humbling.

When you're not at ALA MidWinter but your book is!

So, tragically, I am not at the amazing ALA MidWinter conference that is happening Right Now in Atlana. Boo.
But I will be at the ABA Winter Institute next week! Yay!
While I couldn't make it to ATL, however, THE STAR THIEF did, and looks like it got a prime spot up on the Little Brown banner!

Many thanks to @r-busse for the pic! 

That's the brand new cover, which I have a copy of, and tried to load into this post, but I am having a spot of technical difficulty with that at the moment. But it will be up soon! It's a slight revision of the first version, same image, but a little bit more dynamic. I love it. 

In the meantime, I think I'm officially allowed to say that THE STAR THIEF is a Junior Library Guild selection! And there is more to come, but it is top secret at the moment :D
We're getting close though. Just over 11 weeks until Pub Day!!
 

How Long Does It Take To Write A Book?

By far the #1 question I've been asked by non-writer friends and family since they heard I was publishing my first novel, even more than "What is it about?" is  - how long did it take to write?

Well.

One year.

And then four years to find an agent.

And then one and a half years to sell the manuscript.

And then the standard two years from accepted offer to final, published book.

During this time I was constantly revising and rewriting, from the work I chose to do on my own to improve the manuscript to the requested revisions that came in from the first round of queries to the editor that eventually bought the book.

And this was for my third solid attempt at a novel length work of fiction.

So, all in all, it took a year to write a book, but when I count up all the years between when I first decided to write seriously for publication, and when my first novel will be out on shelves, the grand total is

14.

One year to write a book, but 14 to make it from aspiring writer to published author.
Some writers, many writers in fact, take far less time to get there. But I don't begrudge the time it took. I loved those years. Many wonderful, amazing things happened to me in those years. All of that time, and all of that writing, and all of those rejections resulted in a book I really, truly love, and the opportunity to work with some wonderful people. I hope I can continue. I have many more books in me. (I didn't spend that entire time writing just the one book, after all.) I would love to get the chance to bring at least a few of them into the world to stand alongside THE STAR THIEF.
So if you aren't quite there yet, if you're still just working on that first draft of your first book, or in the querying process or wondering if you've been at this too long and you're never going to get there, here's a little reminder that there is no time limit. As long as you are willing to keep working, every wonderful outcome is still a possibility.

And now I have to get back to revising chapters on a new project. Hopefully I will one day get to share more about this one with the world, too!

Welcome to 2017!

Hello! We made it! We're here! And I get to say the words I've been waiting for my whole life - 

my book debuts this year! 

In a little over 3 months, on April 11, THE STAR THIEF will officially be a real book out in the wild. 

Just before Christmas I found out that THE STAR THIEF is a Junior Library Guild selection, so it will be in thousands of libraries in the US and around the world, too!

The cover is also getting a few tweaks - I've seen the updated version, and it's beautiful. Hopefully I have something to share soon, so the rest of the world can see it! 

For now, there are already brand new 2017 books hitting the shelves today. This week other writers out there will get offers for their own debut novels. There will be new book deals signed for titles to debut in the coming years. Something wonderful about publishing is that there will always be  new, amazing, exciting books appearing on shelves. And now it's becoming real - I'll be part of it all. 

I look forward to writing more, reading more, and sharing some other fantastic debuts this year. 

 

In the meantime, I raise my coffee mug (the one my dear old scoundrel Ben got me for Christmas) in cheers to a wonderfully bookish new year.