In which shelving a manuscript is like driving to that corner in Grande Prairie where you can turn left and get on the Alaska Highway and then going straight through
In the town of Grande Prairie, there is an intersection where you can turn left and get on the Alaska Highway. I haven’t spent a significant amount of time at this intersection, but the time I have spent there was significant. It is a corner of possibilities. For a shining moment (metaphorically: I was usually there at 6am), you can forget about gas station coffee and muskeg and whatever smell in the backseat of the truck is the most fragrant that morning, and dream. And then the light changes, and you drive straight through.
One of the weirdest things about publishing—recently seen on dismaying display in the PRH trial—is the combination of art and business. On one hand, you have the writers (and usually the editors, lbr), who produce the art. We tend to be focused on things like sentence structure and theme and which room of the house we can clean as a procrastination method. The business side is focused on money; numbers that have never had to argue about the Oxford comma or think about how you definitely can hiss words that don’t have an s. It’s not a particularly congruous match.
When I was working as an archaeological consultant in Alberta, we spent a lot of time in the middle of nowhere. I lived in St. Albert, but I spent ten days out of fourteen in some northern town, and every morning we’d get up at 5 or 6 AM, get breakfast and lunch from a gas station, and drive so far into the forest that we didn’t get CBC Radio anymore. It was weird, but it was my job. And when we were in Grande Prairie, I’d pull up to that intersection in my Ford 450 and wonder: What if I just went.
There was a time a few years ago when trilogies were all the rage, but there’s a dark side there. I have friends whose trilogies were cancelled. Friends whose publisher support dwindled to nothing, and by the time the third book came out, they had almost none. It is the publisher’s job to sell the books, but sometimes they choose not to, and then they blame the author. Not marketable. Not a good investment. I saw this happen over and over, and decided that I would avoid that problem by simply never writing a trilogy. Famous last words.
The morning I remember the most clearly at the intersection, I was actually in the passenger seat. My field partner was driving, and we sat there, trying to find a Sirius station we didn’t both hate and wishing for daylight before we hit the logging roads. I remember her eyes sweeping up, looking at the sign we’d seen dozens of times. And I knew exactly what she was going to say: Do you ever wish?
Sci-Fi doesn’t do well in YA. When it comes right down to it I don’t do well in YA. I’m what’s called a midlister, even though Star Wars makes it seem like I am a bestseller. The truth is that I am simply not (though I do have great name recognition, but that doesn’t pay my rent). So deciding to do a YA sci-fi trilogy was risky, and I knew it, but I still wanted to, because it’s hard to make stories go away. I hoped more Star Wars readers would follow me over. I hoped Taylor Swift would read it and say nice things about it on Tik Tok. I hoped for a miracle.
My field partner didn’t even have to finish the question. I said “Yes” almost as soon as she opened her mouth. And for a moment, I thought we might really take the truck and go. Then the light turned green, and we went to work, but I think about that moment, that feeling, all the time. It’s choosing practicality over a dream, and it’s never very much fun, but sometimes you do it anyway.
As of April 30th , 2022, approximately 8,500 copies of Aetherbound have been purchased. That’s almost its whole first year of publication, and soon we’ll be switching to paperback royalties, which are…not in the author’s favour (bless everyone who has bought the audiobook! Ashley Eckstein is the best!). The chances of this book earning out are slim. You don’t have to earn out to be successful as an author, but it sure helps (see previous re: paying the rent). In any case, Penguin has no reason to put money behind a second book. That’s the math.
A few years ago, I returned to Grande Prairie for a convention. It was a little one and all of my school visits got cancelled at the last minute, so I didn’t actually get to talk to that many kids about how I had sort of burned their town down in Prairie Fire. My clearest memory, other than the stark mid-conversation realization that a “fan” I was talking to was in fact a white supremacist, was the drive from the airport, when we stopped at a very familiar intersection. I laughed, tried to explain to the nice librarian why I was laughing, and, in spite of everything, still thought: someday.
The Aetherbound sequel is written. I kind of like it a lot. It has an ace protagonist and a spooky space station and Ned gets to [redacted for spoilers]. I don’t know if you’re ever going to see it. We will get The Good Girls in 2024. Andrew and I are both very excited about it, but after that, it’s kind of a question mark. Do we keep going straight, or do we get to make that left turn?
There is a pretty good chance I’ll go to Alaska someday. I’m friends with Blair Braverman, for starters, and I feel like that increases my odds a lot. I don’t know if I’ll drive there from Grande Prairie, but at this point it doesn’t really matter. The journey has been a lot of not going, and now the important part actually is the destination. I don’t know when or how or why, but I’m used to waiting, and there’s other stuff to do.
On my end, the plan is to put my heart and soul into The Good Girls, and hope it finds audiences the way EXIT did. It’s part of the EK Johnston Multiverse, so I’m verrrrry cautiously optimistic. And after that, we’ll see. (And probably something about Reels??? No: I stopped Tik Tok for this reason. I write the books. That’s my job.)
On your end, there are several things you can do if you would like to, even if you have already purchased the book in some form or another (thank you, genuinely, for that!).
Post about it on social media, in particular Instagram and TikTok. You can tag PenguinTeen, and if you live in Canada, you can tag PenguinTeenCA as well. This will show the publisher that there is interest, and will also keep the book “current”. Both of the Teen accounts repost (Sunday Shoutouts and the Wednesday Feature), so if you tag them, they can spread the photo/video even further.
Request a copy for your local library/school library. I know that both are under fire in the US right now, but it’s still a good plan. You can request all three formats: hard copy, ebook, and audiobook.
Request copies from your local Independent bookstore, if you are planning to purchase the book. The paperback is currently available, and there are still hardcovers around.
I won’t lie to you: it was pretty devastating to shelve a story that I really love. I know that’s just Hashtag Publishing, but also it sucks. If we are able to make a difference, it will be a small one, but frankly seeing your support makes me feel a lot better. I’m glad I get to keep telling stories, and I am SUPER excited that The Good Girls will come out sooner than I thought. I’ll keep writing and chasing the ever-moving goalposts of publishing, and I deeply appreciate all of you cheering me on.
(If one of you DOES know Taylor Swift, tho…)