book news
Surprise: I wrote another one. My first romance novel (well, actually novella) will be out September 10th. It is called BIG FAN, and I will tell you more about it shortly.
But first I will tell you that about a month ago, I got some potentially good BIG FAN news. Then, a few days later, I got an email saying that my third book, LOOK, is going out of print.
This happens more often than people know, I think. In part because the internet makes it less obvious. For instance, my first book, A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART has been out of print for years. But you can still buy a Kindle copy on Amazon and get used hardcovers there, too. (I mean, please don’t actually buy books from Amazon, but just as a for instance.)
But also because authors don’t announce it the way we announce sales. You get the email; if you are me you cry a little. Sometimes a lot. You think about all of the love and labor you poured into your book. Your sweet, delusional hopes for its success. The publisher sends you ten copies and destroys the rest.
If you are lucky, your friends take you out for a drink and commiserate.
Three years ago (!) I asked: “How can I tell myself, let alone anyone else, a story that doesn't end the way we think it should, with a big ol' happily ever after, with a success to redeem each of the failures and frustrations that preceded it?”
Today I ask: how do you claim success at all if this is what “success” eventually comes to? That book barely made it four years. In the immediate aftermath I said to various people: if I’ve published three books, but two of them are out of print, what exactly is my career? Am I novelist anymore, even?
LOOK is an odd case in many ways. It came out in late March of 2020, into the earliest days of the pandemic. In some ways it feels like it never really happened. So I was not ready to reckon with: I guess it never will.
In a better mood I would tell you: everything dies baby / that’s a fact. We cannot keep producing books at this rate and keep them all in circulation. All kinds of things end, and mattered before they did.
It’s still fucking hard though.
Anyway. I have this new book coming out. I am excited about it. It’s about fandom and politics and, of course, romance and sex. I’m publishing it as Alexandra Romanoff— my legal name, did you know?— because it’s IP, aka intellectual property, aka it was originally someone else’s idea. More on that later too, probably. But unlike the stuff I ghosted for a while there, this is pretty much my book. It isn’t up for pre-order on Bookshop yet, but you can find it via many independent bookstores, including, locally, my beloved Skylight. I hope very much that you will read it, and enjoy it.