Tomorrow is the official release day for THE MIRROR EMPIRE, my fourth published novel and the first in a new epic fantasy series.
Folks always want to know how you feel on book launch day, and the thing is, you know, I can tell you that on the *eve* of book launch day, I feel resigned. Not in a bad way, mind. But I’m content knowing that we all did the best we could to put out a great book.
Thanks go to my agent, Hannah Bowman, for helping me yank this thing into shape with a full burn down and rewrite. Thanks also for talking me down from cliffs and providing a measure of sanity in the chaos that is the writing life, where one can often get so stuck in a feedback loop that seeing outside of it is difficult.
Angry Robot Books has been a fabulous partner throughout this whole process. It was wonderful to work with a great team of book folks who, to be frank, knew what the fuck they were doing. Thanks to Lee Harris, Marc Gascoigne, my editor Amanda Rutter, and fabulous PR and marketing work from Michael Underwood and Caroline Lambe. Some miracles were achieved, let me tell you.
Thanks to cover artist Richard Anderson (and Marc Gascoigne again, for managing this process so smoothly all I had to do the whole time was be like “YES!!”) for an amazing cover that was just right for the tone of this work, and made it super easy for all of us to sell this book. Thank you to Steff J. Worthington for stepping in to swiftly create a beautiful map for the book. Thanks to my copyeditor, Richard Shealy, for bearing with me through all the made-up plants and people. And many, many thanks to my assistant, Danielle Horn Beale, for managing the massive wiki and inputting round after round of extensive copy changes.
And, of course, thanks to my spouse for tireless support and plot checkups during this strange rollercoaster of a ride. It was not easy to pick up after my last series and move on, with all the entanglements and sorrow, but we’ve done it, and I’m super happy to be moving on to more pleasant entanglements.
Thanks forever and ever to all the fans of my work: the book bloggers, the passionate convention goers, the booksellers, the forum posters, the book club members, the readers, readers, readers for spreading the word about my prior work and this work. Without folks clambering for more, and sharing it with their friends, it’s just me yelling alone on the internet.
As you can see above, there’s a lot of work from a lot of people that goes into making a traditionally published book. I didn’t just bang a typewriter with my forehead and slap the resulting words onto the internet. Whatever happens with THE MIRROR EMPIRE – whether it sells 3 copies or 3,000 or 30,000 or 300,000 – I know that we put together the best book we could put together at this point in our careers.
What happens after you position a book the best you can, and promote it as best you can, is that you have to let it go. It either connects with readers or it doesn’t. It either swims or it sinks (or just circles around awkwardly treading water, which is what happens to most books). This is where hard work ends and luck kicks in.
So good luck, little book. We’re all rooting for you.
