Blurbs + pub news
On Phoenix Pencil Company blurbs, and some pre-pub news
Only a few more days until The Phoenix Pencil Company hits shelves! Meanwhile, I thought I’d go into blurbs… Stick around ‘til the end for other news (book launch event, pre-order campaign, UK cover) as well as some art of the real stars of this show, Peach and Woody 😺 🐶
Blurbs
When you publish a book, you likely have to go through this horrible process of asking authors who you love and admire very much to read your lil book and ask them for the free labor of saying nice things about your book. There’s a lot of opinions on this process—it takes a lot of time, many authors get too many requests and don’t have time to focus on their own writing, it favors those who have connections, and it’s unclear if it actually helps a book. Nevertheless, we keep doing it, and I did it, had a lot of anxiety about it, and wanted to hide in a corner every time I sent a request out. Thankfully it’s over for now, and I’ve collected five incredible blurbs I am so grateful for, which I wanted to take the time to highlight here, and the authors who were so kind as to provide them! In the order that I got the blurbs in…
Liz Moore
You’ve almost definitely seen Liz Moore’s books out and about recently. The God of the Woods is everywhere, and for good reason! It’s the definition of a page-turner. I gifted it to my mom and we both loved it. I also read Long Bright River recently, and as someone who grew up and went to college just outside of Philadelphia, I found it especially poignant. Here’s her blurb for The Phoenix Pencil Company:
I loved this wildly inventive novel and its exploration of how technology and humanity can intersect in deeply meaningful ways. Allison King is a talent to watch.
A talent to watch? Me?? I’ll go back to hiding in a corner now.
Gish Jen
I met Gish Jen at an event titled “Cambridge as Inspiration: Women Authors: Past and Present” that took place at the Cambridge Public Library back in 2023. After the talk, I asked her to sign my books (I had Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land with me). Her books were some of the first that I had read featuring Asian American characters. I got to tell her how much I enjoyed her books, and it came up that I was working on my own, and she very generously told me to send it to her. I’m still in awe of her generosity towards a totally random person!
China, America, generations and stories connect with literal magic in this suspenseful debut. Marvelous!
It means a lot, coming from pretty much the first person I knew of who was writing about China and America!
Ray Nayler
The Mountain in the Sea is an extraordinary book. It is so unbelievably clever that sometimes I had to pause just to sit with an idea for a bit. Set in the near future, it features hackers, androids, and most importantly, a species of super smart octopus. I loved the tech and the ruminations of consciousness, in both machines and animals. I hope my writing can evoke even a bit of the thoughtfulness on tech that Ray’s does. Here’s his blurb:
A beautiful ode to the warmth of family connection, the power of memory and the magic of the written word.
Thanks so much, Ray!!
Fonda Lee
I’ve been a Fonda Lee fan for a while now, and even have Green Bone Saga fan art hanging up in my living room. It’s a pretty much perfect series, rife with the kind of character dynamics you can’t look away from. And of course, an extremely cool jade-based magic system. Here’s what she had to say about my lil story:
The Phoenix Pencil Company is a masterful blending of history, fantasy, and romance that sank into my heart the way the magic of its pencils sinks into veins. King has written a stunning debut that pulses with love and loss, regret and forgiveness, and above all, the undeniable, painful, joyful pull of human connection. This book had me smiling through my tears.
Tears from Fonda Lee?! My revenge for how I felt reading Jade Legacy!
Sequoia Nagamatsu
I read How High We Go in the Dark a few years ago and found it so clever yet moving. I have an email to my friends listing it as one of my favorite books I read that year. It spans hundreds of years and follows the aftermath of a plague. It sounds dark and it is, but it does what all my favorite SFF books do—reveals the tender human moments even in worlds distorted from our own. It also features some very impressive pigs! Here are his thoughts on PPC:
Like the emotion infused graphite hearts of the pencils in this tender novel, King has delivered an impressive juggling act of voices that made me feel like I was in on a secret—not merely hearing about familial connection, regret, betrayal, and finding the truth of one’s own story, but feeling these lives traveling within my veins. The Phoenix Pencil Company is a rare novel that unpacks the integrity and modes of how we form connections, both through graphite and magic and through digital highways, ultimately asking the question of what really matters when it comes to the people we love.
🥺🥺🥺
I’m so grateful to these authors for taking the time to read my book, and I hope you will check out their books as well, as I’m such a fan of all of them!
Other news
Lots going on with the book coming out in less than a week! Here are a few highlights:
The Phoenix Pencil Company releases on Tuesday, June 3rd! If you haven’t already, you can preorder the book at your favorite independent bookstore ❤️
I’ll be doing my launch event with Brookline Booksmith on June 11th, and I’ll be in conversation with Ken Liu, one of my favorite authors ever! Hope to see you there!
I just found out if you preorder through Brookline Booksmith you’ll also get a pencil and a temporary phoenix tattoo! How cool is that?!
The cover of the UK edition of The Phoenix Pencil Company is out! Check out this cool video they put together, featuring many of the blurbs above.
Peach and Woody
Here’s that piece of Green Bone Saga fanart I was talking about. I commissioned this to show our lil family following the structure of the clans in Jade City. Peach is the Pillar of course, the leader in all house affairs, and Woody is a lowly lantern man… but one who is very good at making connections for us!
That’s all for now, see you on the other side!
Allison