And Now For A Word… (A Nightlights non-story post)
Hi there!
I’m still working on various ways to get the word about Nightlights, and you can help me! Until September 12 (when I expect Illumination 1 to conclude), if you post about Nightlights on your blog or social media of choice, you can get a free copy of either Illumination 0: Disintegration or Illumination 1: Guardians in ebook form– and if you opt for Illumination 1 (aka ‘volume 2′– I regret some decisions already) you can get a copy as soon as it goes up on Smashwords, which will probably be around September 5th. Just comment or drop me a line via the Contact form with a link to your post (or an anecdote, if your social media of choice is ‘real life’).
After Illumination 1 concludes, I’m going to be running a favorite character poll before starting Illumination 2. The results of this poll may influence the story! I suspect I’ll leave it open for a week or so because I believe not everybody reading reads every posting-day. 
But since I’ve never done this sort of thing before, I welcome advice on duration and methodology!
Thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story!
Spring On Fire
After a few months of querying agents for Matchbox Girls, I decided to switch my focus to publishers. I was still interested in agents, but despite having a query that seemed reasonably functional, I was getting very few requests. I’d already realized that MG wasn’t as commercial as many other urban fantasies (and by ‘commercial’, I mean, focused on using the factors known to sell a lot- I don’t know if that’s what publishing professionals mean when they use that term) so I couldn’t blame an agent for not being interested in something that they probably wouldn’t be able to sell for very much. After all, they only get a percentage of what I would!
Still, I was pretty sure that there were people out there who would enjoy Matchbox Girls. Not everybody enjoys what’s considered commercial, after all. So I started looking at small presses as well as doing my weekly agent submissions.
A few weeks ago, the editor of Candlemark and Gleam asked to see the full manuscript of Matchbox Girls. And a week after that, she sent me an extremely nice email telling me how much she’d enjoyed Matchbox Girls, and how she’d like to send me a contract.
This made me jump up from my seat, pick up a handy child, and twirl him around in a circle. Then I sat back down sedately, asked her for the contract and started doing research.
I did a lot of research, on Candlemark and Gleam, on small presses in general, and on contracts. I thought about what I wanted for Matchbox Girls. Then, I signed the contract!
Matchbox Girls is scheduled to come out in February 2012! It’s with an editor now and I’ve already contributed my cover suggestions. I’m pretty excited, but also pretty busy: I’m still planning on launching my serial novel Nightlights in August, and I’d like to get a draft of the sequel to Matchbox Girls done by February. I’ll also have to find time for the MG revisions and proofing.
I’ve been accelerating my schedule for Nightlights. It still won’t be complete when I launch it– which is by design and part of the experiment– but it will probably be more than half done. I’ve also been playing around with this website, since my current plan is to launch Nightlights in this blog. Some lucky invisible reader might even have seen the first scene of Nightlights when I started testing out some options!
So, yeah. I’ve suddenly got a lot going on, and I’ve been working harder than ever. But don’t worry, invisible audience! I’m still going to be posting here at least weekly. And I’m still hoping to have a contest later this summer.