Category: Publishing

A Gaggle of Announcements

Loud honking announcements that will chase you around the lake and beak you to death for a crust of bread!

Er… probably not.  These are actually very lovely announcements that don’t resemble geese in any way.  But gaggle is a cool word.  It’s right up there with gusset.

Anyway, onto the announcements!

  • In exactly 28 days I will turn 30!  (That’s March 2nd, for those of you who forgot it was leap year.)
  • I have TWO–count them, TWO–new books coming out in March!
  • One is GROWING UP DEAD, a humorous MG about a vampire trying to survive 8th grade.
  • The other is HARPER MADIGAN: JUNIOR HIGH PRIVATE EYE, a noir detective novel set in junior high.

I know, neither of these is the Renegade X sequel.  But it’s coming!  And in the meantime you can tide yourself over with some more great reading. ;)  Each of these will be available in both ebook and paperback.

Blurbs and covers will be up very soon!  If you want to be notified when these books are available for purchase, you can sign up for my newsletter in the top right corner of my site. And if you’re a book blogger interested in reviewing either–or both–of these books, please email me at CampChelsea@gmail.com or through the contact sheet on my site.

Want to get exclusive news about my books?

Good news! You can now subscribe to my brand new newsletter and get exclusive information on the Renegade X sequel! You’ll be one of the first people to find out the title, see the cover, and read an excerpt before any of it goes live on my website. There will also be subscriber-only contests you won’t want to miss, including a chance to get a character in the sequel named after you! You’ll also stay informed on when my next book is available, so you won’t miss out.

To sign up, go to my website (if you’re not already there) and enter your email in the top right corner, then click “Subscribe now!”

Boy Books

Hi, my name is Chelsea, and I write boy books. Even though I’m a girl and even though boy books aren’t necessarily flying off the shelves. But you knew that already.

There was a big kerfluffle lately, as a lot of you probably heard about, started when the NYT posted this article, about the lack of YA boy books out there and, consequently, the lack of boy readers. There have been a lot of good posts made by other authors about this, so I don’t want to get into the article so much as I want to talk about boy books in general. Especially since I’m a girl and I write them and that’s not exactly the norm.

I don’t really think of my books as boy books or girl books. They’re just, you know, MY BOOKS, and the ones I actually enjoy writing tend to have 1st person guy narrators. I don’t sit down and think, “Ah, I’m going to write a boy book! For boys! Now, what do they need to read about? What would I want to read if I was a boy?” Psh. Seriously, I write what *I* like reading. I’ve actually been surprised at how many girls have thought they wouldn’t like Renegade X–but totally loved it once they started reading–because it’s got a male protagonist. O__o I mean, I’m a girl, so I tend to write about guys that girls will love, while still being real boys. I write stories that I hope resonate with both genders, that are full of adventure and romance and snappy dialogue.

I can’t say how many boys are reading YA or not, but I can say most of my fan mail and reader comments are from boys, usually teenagers, while most of the public reviews are written by girls. I don’t know if this means girls are just more public about their opinions, or if it means boys don’t have enough books to bother making a review site. That’s not to say that girls don’t write to me, or that guys never write reviews, because they do. But girls have told me that they relate to Damien and his dilemmas in the book, and guys have told me they saw my book at the store and grabbed it off the shelf. So, yes, girls can relate to male protagonists (while also finding them swoon worthy), and guys are going to the book store, even to the YA section. They’re also going to the library.

It would be cool if there were more boy books out there, because I’d like to read them. (And I wouldn’t mind if I never got another rejection letter stating that a male protagonist makes a book unsaleable.) I’d also like if there were more dystopians (yes, really, especially actiony ones like The Maze Runner), and more horror. Definitely more horror. Double points for a dystopian horror with a male MC, plenty of action, and a romantic subplot.

What’s New

So it’s been a little while since I posted. Real Life sort of kidnapped me and locked me up in a cage dangling above an oversized cauldron and I only just now escaped. *phew* It’s been a busy sprummer, and I think it’s only going to continue to get busier until fall. (In the NW, we have winter, sprinter, mud, a short spring, and a long sprummer, followed up by a few days of real summer, and then fall.)

But anyway, here’s what’s been going on with me. I started grad school, which at first was underwhelming and now is totally overwhelming and I have to go to Syracuse for a one week residency in only a little over TWO WEEKS and I have to get all the work done for two classes first and agghhh!!

Ahem. Grad school has made this a pretty crazy sprummer, especially since it took over a month for financial aid to go through, due to me taking different amounts of credits during different sessions. (I’ve never had financial aid in time to buy books and stuff before the beginning of school, but this takes the cake and eats it too.) And then I have the two classes I’ll be attending during my residency, but I have to get all the work and reading done for them ahead of time. Plus keep up with my regular class that spans the whole semester. Hopefully in the fall things will calm down a bit, especially since I’ll only be taking two (hopefully evenly spaced) classes.

Oh, and as soon as I get back from my residency, I have jury duty. -__-

In more exciting news–I know it’s going to be hard to top the excitement of jury duty, but I have to try–my film option with Disney was almost up, and they decided to renew!!! Huge W00T!! I know very little about this project, but I do know that the writers are making good progress and that Disney liked their revisions to the script.

The paperback version of The Rise of Renegade X is out on August 23rd, if my current info is correct. I don’t remember if I posted about it here or not, but it was supposed to be out in May, BUT the sales reps liked the blurb on the cover from the awesome Julie Kagawa and wanted more time to pitch it to bookstores and stuff. (Or whatever sales reps do.) It will be much cheaper than the hardback, but just as cool! And I’m planning to have a contest to go with it, where I’ll be giving away a behind-the-scenes annotated copy of the hardback.

I also have a new book going out on sub soon that I think you guys are going to love.

And that’s all for now because my five page paper isn’t going to write itself… by Friday.

Upcoming Stuff

So, I’m working on a big overhaul of the site that hopefully I’ll be able to share with everyone soon-ish. If everything goes according to plan, I’m going to be getting rid of WordPress and exclusively using the LJ (but you won’t have to go to a separate site to view it). I’m also developing a plan for blogging regularly, possibly with TOPICS.

My big news at the moment is that I got into grad school at Syracuse University, for their library and information science distance learning program! I’m still waiting to hear from the University of Washington and Rutgers, but, hey, I got in, and all three schools sound amazing. If I get into all of them, it will be hard to choose (unless one of them comes with major funding, and then it’ll be a lot easier). I wasn’t expecting to hear back yet, so it came as a big surprise. Each school starts in a different month, ranging from July to September, so I’m not even sure when I’ll be doing what, but at least now I have an idea of what I’ll be doing next year.

The Rise of Renegade X comes out in paperback in only a little over three months, which I’m getting pretty excited about. I mean, yeah, I know the book’s already out, but now it will be out again (and only $8.99) and sitting on shelves next to other paperbacks. I’ve got some ideas for some new RRX swag and maybe some contests in the near future, so stay tuned for that.

So yesterday (well, technically the day before yesterday, since it’s after midnight) I got my first ever royalty statement.

*le gasp!*

But before you break out the streamers and cake, I have to tell you that a royalty statement is not the same thing as a royalty check. Everyone gets royalty statements twice a year, whether they’ve earned out their advance or not. The only thing is that now when people ask me how the book is doing, I can tell them how it was doing through June, which was only six weeks out from release date. If you want to know how the book’s doing right now, I won’t know until April when the next statement comes.

My statement only represented a six week window (though usually it would show six months), but if we assumed that those numbers were representative of how sales will go forever, it would still take me two years to earn out my advance. (And they are probably not representative of forever.) So, I’ve still got a ways to go before breaking out that cake. (But I might as well bake it now and save it until then, because it will totally keep, RIGHT? Or will it be reminiscent of that time I found out I’d been eating rancid butter and that’s why everything tasted so weird?)

(Parenthetical P.S. I *didn’t* just tell you about the time I was eating rancid butter over a period of SEVERAL DAYS without realizing it, even though it tasted really bad. Only, like, someone really dumb would do that.)

So, um, yeah, that’s about all I have to say about royalty statements, other than that my royalties on ebooks are way higher than on hardbacks, even though the list price is the same. That is, I get my royalty percentages from the $17.99 cover price, for both hardback and ebooks, regardless of what price the book is actually sold at. So, go ebooks!

Website stuff

So you might have noticed that I added a new Renegade X frequently asked questions page. Hopefully that clears up some confusions people have had and answers the age old question, “Will there be a sequel?” Which I know is the only reason anyone comes to this site, hence the reason I have kept the answer seeeekrit, my precioussss. Actually, the answer is not a secret and I haven’t been withholding it to lure people into checking out my site in the hopes of finding answers. (Sadly, there are no sequel plans at this time.)

If you have any other questions not answered on the FAQ, feel free to ask them! If enough people ask them, I will add them to the FAQ and then every time you look at that particular question, you can sit back and take pride in knowing you helped put it there. It’s kind of like naming a star, only not. At all. But you can still feel good about it.

SLJ mentions Renegade X

School Library Journal mentioned my book today in their Interesting Reader Society – Book Reviews by Young Adults. It was my first brush with a pro journal, and it went a little something like this (actually, it went word for word like this, because I’m copying it directly):

Campbell, Chelsea M. The Rise of Renegade X. Egmont. May 2010. ISBN 978-1-60684-060-3. Gr 7–12.

Damien Locke lives in a world where your DNA structure decides whether you become a hero or a villain. On each inhabitant’s 16th birthday, the hero/villain’s thumb fingerprints change to an H or a V. But when Damien’s thumbprint becomes an X, everything changes.

This story was fast, exciting, and fresh. I thought the cover was good, and it showed an important scene when Damien is being forced to jump off a building. The confusion of Damien throughout the book is so real.—Madison C., age 13

Not bad, eh?

Books!

I may have opened the door to find three boxes of books and shouted YES! for all the neighbors to hear. Except I don’t think they were listening. But here they are, my shiny new hardback copies of The Rise of Renegade X!

Here they are in their boxes. I was not impressed with FedEx’s handling of said boxes, since they were kind of falling apart, but oh well.

Here’s one on my favorite photo location, the cat tree:

And spread out so you can see the wrap around cover:

A couple of them in a stack, a book’s natural positon:

Ta da! And, as a bonus, here’s the summary listed on the copyright page. I think they did a good job:

Expecting to become a supervillain on his sixteenth birthday, Damien Locke, son of one of Golden City’s most notorious supervillains, is horrified to discover that he may instead be destined to become a superhero.

I am a pop culture collectible!

Or at least my book is. It must be a pop culture collectible, since you can buy it on this pop culture collectibles site. You do not know how happy it makes me that you can buy Batman and Harry Potter merchandise in the same place you can buy my book (excluding Amazon, of course, where you can by EVERYTHING, so it’s not the same). I mean, you can buy Indiana Jones collectibles and Hellboy collectibles and a Domo-kun fedora and a plush Murloc and all sorts of TV and movie and other pop culture collectibles, and boy do I love collectibles, especially of the pop culture variety. This place is practically the Chelsea store, it has so many things for me to drool over. So how super awesome is it that I opened up my google alerts today to find that amongst all that stuff, they’re selling my book?

In other news, I have my first Goodreads giveaway going on. You pretty much just press a button to enter and you can win an advanced copy of The Rise of Renegade X. The contest runs for a month and then Goodreads picks a winner and tells me where to send it. It’s easy sauce for everyone involved and makes the book visible to a lot of people.

My glasses also came today, so expect another post with pictures later.