Hey everyone! Some lovely news: I’ve recieved a grant from the Canada Council of the Arts for a project I’ll work on in 2026. I’ll tell you more about that as time goes on, but for now I’ll just say that I’ll have a small chunk of money to pay myself to work on a book part-time for a couple of months next year. It’s not easy to get a Canada Council grant these days (I struck out with Mercutio, with a note that the project met the threshold on its merits but that most projects are not accepted because of the increasingly constrained budget for funding. I did receive a smaller grant from the City of Ottawa for Mercutio, which made a huge difference to me last year.)
Next month, there are two events here in Ottawa that I’m very excited about.
I’ll be one of the guests of honour at Can*Con. My schedule is below. If you’re coming and would like to attend the kaffeeklatsch, please don’t forget to sign up. I’ll have some chapbooks I’ve been printing up to give away at my kaffeeklatsch and signing.
Right after Can*Con finishes, on October 20, I’ll be in conversation with my friend Premee Mohamed, at the launch of her novella The First Thousand Trees. That’ll be at the fabulous bookstore Perfect Books in downtown Ottawa. I have read and loved this novella, and the two that came before it in the series. Please come by if you are in Ottawa.
The last couple of weeks have been milestone ones for Mercutio, which is coming out from HarperVoyager UK in May 2026. I went over the proofreader queries, and saw the draft cover, which always such a great moment.
Today I did one of the final things I do for any book in production, which was to write a paragraph thanking members of the team at my publisher who have worked on the book. This requires asking my editor to give me a list of names, because authors typically don’t know all the names of everyone who works on their book.
This is one of the many things that surprised me about publishing as a new author. When I worked at a newspaper (especially early in my career before a lot of things got outsourced), I knew exactly who was next in the copy chain and had probably had a beer with them at some point. But authors tend not to be physically there to get to know people; I’ve never met my current editor, Jane Johnson, or visited my publisher’s offices in England, because I live an ocean away. My family trip to Normandy this summer was the first time I’d been to Europe in 5 years. (The very Big Names do tend to get flown around and brought in for meetings and thus meet more people, or at least that’s my impression, but it’s not the norm for most of us.)
So the result of living in a very remote-work sort of industry is that I have to ask for the names. (This did not even occur to me as something I could do until I was a few books into my career. I wish credit pages were standard in book publishing, the way credits are standard with movies and videogames.) It’s always a moment for me to take stock of just how much work, from many talented and hard-working people, goes into every book.
There are acquisitions and development editors (often but not always the same person). There are desk editors and production editors and assistants shepherding books through the process and communicating with authors and agents. There are copy editors and proofreaders (these last two are often freelancers). There are production managers, art directors, cover artists and cover designers, publicists, marketing teams, sales teams, distribution teams and more. Some or all of those roles are replicated in other countries where the book will be published, too. I communicate quite a bit with the amazing publicity director at HarperCollins Canada, Lauren Morocco (we’re already talking about Mercutio).
I should mention that my agent, Jennie Goloboy, is involved in every step, checking in on my behalf, checking in with me, making sure I get paid on schedule (advances typically come in chunks associated with milestones in the publication process) and working on things like translation and film rights with her colleagues.
In micro-to-small presses, it’s typical for all or most of the publishing work to be done by one or two people, which is amazing. And self-publishers do it all themselves (and/or they contract or outsource parts of it).
Publishing with the Big Five (any imprint of one of the big global publishing conglomerates) tends to take a while. (I have friends who self-publish who are regularly horrified by my timelines.)
We signed the contract for Mercutio in April 2024, so almost exactly two years before it’ll be published. I handed in the first draft in December 2024, got very useful comments back from Jane within a month, handed in the revision in March so she could go over it again, and we were going to copy edits by April. In July and August we did the review of the copy edits, the brief for the cover, the jacket copy (this is what goes on the back and the retail websites, describing the book) and the pronunciation guide for the audiobook. Now we’re in September and the proofs are done and the cover is being finalized. I’ve already been gathering endorsements from a few writer friends.
This leaves us about eight months for everything that still remains to be done to get the book into bookstores and let people know it exists.
There’s production and printing, which takes longer than it used to, thanks to paper shortages, bottlenecks in the printing industry, and supply chain issues. There’s the recording of the audiobook. There’s distribution, marketing and sales (sales, in publishing, usually refers to the all-important relationship with bookstores). It takes time to get the book to reviewers and bloggers. For books that have special editions and/or are in subscriber boxes (as was the case for The Embroidered Book), that all has to be arranged in the months leading up to publication too. That can involve sending the author tip-in sheets to sign, by courier.
So that’s why it takes so long. At least, it felt long the first couple of times I did it. Now, I’m used to the rhythm, and I’m happily working away on the first draft of a book that will come out in a couple of years, while I deal with whatever emails come in about Mercutio. As we get closer to the publication date, I’ll do my best to support the book in the few areas I can control — whether it’s small tasks like checking to see the cover’s up on Goodreads once it’s public, or using my social media platform to let people know about events I’m doing. And, well, doing those events.
I’d also love to get this newsletter up to 400 subscribers (we’re nearly there), which is an arbitrary number, but it would be nice to grow this little community, which I so appreciate. No book finds its readers without the work of everyone at its publisher, but it also relies on the efforts of readers who support it. So, thanks to you as well, and consider yourself acknowledged with all my heart.