Novelist Officially

I have always felt like a novelist, and perhaps, in some senses, always been one. The stories I wrote in elementary school I divided into chapters and stapled together into makeshift books. As I got older, I even began to design the prose to look more “book-like”, adding in drop caps at the chapter opening paragraphs, putting the title and chapter numbers in a fancier display font than the Garamond I preferred for the interior body text. (Foreshadowing another future career of mine in book design, but I digress.)

I dabbled in early self-publishing in high school and college (this was before you could so readily self-publish online, and I suppose the publishers would be called vanity presses now, though at the time I didn’t know of such a thing nor did I understand anything about the publishing process, traditional or otherwise).

But now, with the announcement of my first book sale to Disney Hyperion, the “novelist” title feels official. This is my first time publishing in the traditional sense, and for a person who has dreamed of seeing a book she wrote in a bookstore since she was small, for me, this is what makes the “novelist” title finally feel real. I have an agent (she’s fab) and editor (she’s wonderful) and an interior book designer as well as a cover designer and a whole team of people who believe in my story at Hyperion.

AFTER YOU VANISHED is a novel born of a setting that inspired me, the lake where I worked nine summers running as a lifeguard. I’ve always loved books where the setting is practically a character in its own right, and I hope I’ve done that, or something close to it, with Bottomrock. The novel’s characters came to life organically, first Teddy, then Izzy, then Toby, with the rest falling like dominoes as I built the story around them. I can’t wait for you to meet them all.

—E.A.