Look! I published my novel!
I don't know how to explain what a long road this has been and how many heartbreaks and regroupings and tryings again have led to this moment. I started writing this novel (known to its friends as 7T) in 2010, rewrote it from the ground up at least 8 times, and went through two very impressive and talented agents who did their best to sell it to traditional publishers. But traditional publishing is playing a very safe game these days, and getting them to take on 7T was like trying to fit a peacock into a pigeonhole. Nice bird, wrong dimensions. Too sexy to be literary and too real to be romance or fantasy. As the daughter of an independent bookstore owner, I shied away from self-publishing for a long time, because I wanted to see my book in bookstores, damnit, and that used to be nearly impossible for a self-published author. Times have changed, though. Now the wholesale distributor Ingram offers print-on-demand publishing as well as Amazon, so any bookstore that wants to carry my book can easily do so. In the end, I even designed my own cover, with a little help from my friends and an AI image generator and a cheap Photoshop knockoff program. And here we are!
Order a copy through your favorite bookstore! May I suggest:
City Lights Bookstore (Sylva, NC)
Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill, NC)
The Regulator Bookshop (Durham, NC)
Quail Ridge Books (Raleigh, NC)
Malaprops Bookstore/Cafe (Asheville, NC)
About the book:
To be a selkie…
For orphaned Silas, it’s welcome oblivion to loneliness and grief, but instinct keeps forcing him back to human form, first to conceive a daughter, and later to guard and deliver her sealskin.
For Silas’s daughter Alise, it’s a cage she can’t escape, stalked by obsessive Elliot who hopes to possess her by stealing her pelt, and madly in love with Douglas who has no idea his young wife is a selkie.
For Alise’s daughter Ellie, it’s a death sentence, unless she can find her missing sealskin before a weakening illness destroys her.
The fate of three generations of selkies depends on the success of Ellie’s quest, the power of love and desire, and a spell for calling a selkie back to land: Seven tears in the sea.
I love this book! I’m so proud of your work.