Yesterday I thought I thought I would be all fired up because of seeing EBONY GATE in print, and I was, but turns out what really fired me up yesterday was meeting so many booksellers, meeting other authors, and just being surrounded by people who love books.
The California Independent Bookseller Alliance (NorCal) Spring forum was held at the Oakland Asian Cultural center. I used to work in downtown Oakland and it was a real treat to return to my old stomping grounds for a book-related event.
Something like 75 independent booksellers from all over Northern California showed up yesterday. They gathered to talk about issues their stores faced, hear from the publisher’s sales reps, and to commune in person after a long hiatus due to COVID.
The keynote speaker was Gene Luen Yang. We’ve been big fans of his and love his Avatar the Last Airbender stories. I’m so thrilled that American Born Chinese is being made into a tv series with a phenomenal cast (all the beloved actors from Everything Everywhere All At Once) on Disney+. I really can not get over Ke Huy Quan’s comeback story. It is so beautiful.
So I put on makeup, took my tween to school and drove through YET ANOTHER ATMOSPHERIC RIVER up 880 to get to Oakland. By the time I arrived, I was frazzled and undercaffeinated.
Then the lovely team of CALIBA folks ushered me in, welcomed me warmly and sat me down at the back table and began to unpack a box of Ebony Gate ARCS!!!
I was overwhelmed. I used a red Sharpie and wrote in the First Law – PROTECT THE HOARD. That was the first time I’d seen and held Ebony Gate. A friendly bookseller in Chicago had received the ARC and described it to Ken as “a bit of a chonk” which was pretty amazing and very accurate. I cannot wait to behold it in hardcover!
After signing, I went down to my car to practice my little “author speed dating” talk and instead I just got so choked up and cried in the car instead.
Signing Ebony Gate ARCs!
When Ken and I were writing Ebony Gate, we really didn’t know where the road would take us. We wanted to write something fun, we wanted to write a book that we wished we could have had when we were younger. We wanted to feel seen. So we wrote a story that had all the fantasy and adventure elements we loved, but with martial arts and monsters ripped out of Asian myth. And that was Ebony Gate. In the end though, it became a bigger book. It’s about learning how to walk in two worlds, how to go from feeling like an outsider to an insider. I’m so grateful to Claire Eddy for championing this book, and happy that TOR will be launching Ebony Gate into the world.
Writing can be a really solitary experience and I am lucky because I have a writing partner, which means Ken and I talk about story together all the time. Yesterday though I was with all these booksellers and listening them talk about how to train up associate store managers, how to navigate Edelweiss, where they keep their ARCs, what type of store events work best and all these really nitty gritty things that they do to get more books into the hands of readers of everywhere. To some, it might have seemed mundane but to me, it was magical.
Author speeddating was really intense, and I loved getting a chance to talk to Katherine Lin who has an amazing book launching in June, “You Can’t Stay Here Forever”. Since we both practiced law, and the book features the widow of a lawyer, I couldn’t resist picking her book up. Set in SF and France, it promises to the be the beachy book read of the summer for me!
Also very cool, I had an opportunity to meet the Macmillan field sales representative, Brittany Greenway. She covers all of California! That is a huge territory. She had read Ebony Gate and she told me she loved it. She didn’t have to do that and it totally made my day.
Another big treat, Emma Mieko Candon came to town from Hawaii. Their ARCs of The Archive Undying were out from Tor.com. I can’t wait to read it. Anything that talks about gods and machines has that vibe I totally love and this book will be catnip for me.
It was wonderful to sit with Emma and Nick Candon in a boba shop in Oakland Chinatown and talk about the vagaries of publishing, our next projects, and mostly we were just all bracing ourselves for so much extroverting. I mean, I had already extroverted, I was just mainlining caffeine at that point.
So, in summary, yesterday was a wonderful day.
Emma Candon and Julia Vee at CALIBA 2023
