The Big News

7

shahov_1It is my great pleasure to announce that my debut novel, Among the Red Stars, will be released by HarperTeen in fall 2017.

Among the Red Stars tells the story of the Night Witches, the all-female Russian bomber regiment that fought in World War II. It’s my privilege to bring this little-known but fascinating piece of history into the YA canon and I hope you’ll love these courageous women as much as I do.

So many people have helped bring this project to life. When I entered Pitch Wars in 2014, my mentor Fiona McLaren saw potential somewhere in my unpolished manuscript and patiently helped me craft it into presentable shape. My agent, Thao Le of Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, has been working tirelessly on this project and helping me through the labyrinth of the publishing industry. And my new editor at HarperTeen, Emilia Rhodes, is the perfect person to bring Among the Red Stars to the public. And countless wonderful friends, beta readers, and family members have provided the support to get me through.

I can’t wait to share Among the Red Stars with you.

You can see the deal announcement here.

Image is fighter pilot Olga Shakhova, found here.

7 Comments


  1. Yay! Congratulations, this is such awesome news! I remember when you were first going into Pitch Wars, and it sounds like it was a really great experience for you! WOOOOOO! 😀

    I hope I too manage to get traditionally published one day, but honestly I’m so swamped with my self-pub and brain work right now, I don’t have much room left over to learn the ropes for a traditional pub at the moment. Hopefully one day!


  2. Thanks, you’re the best! It would be great if you went the trad pub route some day, but I think you’re also doing an amazing job going the indie route with material that might be hard to sell to a mainstream publisher.


  3. Yeah, I hope too one day, but it seems to involve a skillset I haven’t developed yet. Is Pitch Wars prose only? Lately I’ve been on a comics bender, and while I think my current big memoir (which I plan to Kickstart) would be publishable by a prose publisher, I have NO IDEA on how to even start going about that. Any thoughts?


  4. How to write a memoir or how to publish one? Because I know nothing about the former but could help with the latter.

    If you wrote a YA nonfiction about your life with DID, I think there would be a lot of interest.


  5. Oops, I was misleading. Back up a sec.

    A lot of the best selling comics these days are not actually published by comics publishers. They’re published by regular publishers– Tor, Harper, Gotham. (This leads to other weird shit, like comics fanbrats claiming they aren’t REAL comics, because these comics tend to be marketed to “niche” demographics like. You know. Girls. ‘Sisters’ and ‘Nimona’ are good examples of this.)

    For the past year and a half, I’ve been working on a long comic about our multiplicity and trauma work. I was selling it in installments as floppies called “All In the Family,” but I’m working to compile it, edit it, and finish it into a big 300 page bookslab. Memoir comics in particular are pretty popular right now, especially if you’re suffering from some esoteric illness.

    I was planning on self-publishing and Kickstarting the big book (which I’m titling ‘Out of Mind’), but that involves a fair amount of hairpulling because as a disabled person, the amount of money required to buy a decent print run is more than I am legally allowed to own. I’ve found some ways to help with that, but not gonna lie, my audience would probably be broader if I could find a traditional publisher to carry it, and it’d also be less of a pain.

    The problem is, I have absolutely NO IDEA how to sell it. Plus frankly, the level of editing I’d likely have to do would be crushing. I dunno, maybe it’s not really worth trying right now. I’ve heard the money is so bad, it’s not worth it.


  6. Oh, OK. I get it now.

    Unfortunately I don’t know anything about comics publishing. It’s kind of a separate world with a different set of rules. Sorry!

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