Just a quick reminder that BEGGARS WOULD RIDE is now available for your perusal and pleasure! All the purchase links are below! Look at them! Click at them!
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BEGGARS WOULD RIDE has been in and out of Amazon’s Top 100 YA Monster Fiction eBooks since its release. If you can do anything to help get it a little higher – buy a copy, leave a review, tweet about it, etc. – I’d appreciate it. I’m pretty sure I’m tapped out on what I can do on my own. But if BWR climbs a little bit higher, there’s a very good chance that casual Amazon users will start to see it, and then Amazon will start to boost it a little more, and then more people will see it, and on and on and on until the eventual heat death of the internet.
The book is a bit of a departure for me. It started as kind of an exercise to see if I could write something PG-13, and took a while to refine it into something I genuinely liked. I got there eventually, though, and now BEGGARS WOULD RIDE is something I’m really proud of. The story – basically Romeo & Juliet from two competing warehouse stores at the end of the world, meets 1954’s Them! meets post-alien invasion survival – is something I’d been brainstorming for forever in various iterations. I even released a drastically different (and abbreviated) version a couple years ago.
I keep wanting to get into the whole pity party about how I tried and failed to land a literary agent with this book, but I’m not sure what good that’s really going to do. Agents are quick to remind you that a rejection isn’t necessarily a commentary on the book’s quality, but it’s hard to remember that in the moment. Hearing “no” over and over again wears you down. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m starting to finally internalize that maxim. Nevermind that the industry is such a shitshow right now that it’s becoming easier not to take things personally.
The funny thing is that as much as traditional publishing is showing its limits and biases, it’s still kind of the end-all be-all for getting your book out there. You really need a big, horrible corporation bankrolling you, so you can get in with all the other big, horrible corporations.
If I’d written this book ten years ago, when the Hunger Games and Maze Runner books were hitting it big, maybe I’d have had a better chance. Those books are still selling and consistently in the top ten of various categories – and the Hunger Games especially hasn’t really faded much from pop culture memory – but, as far as publishing’s concerned, they’re old news. Maybe if I wait another five years, sprawling sci-fi epics will be back in vogue.
Anyway, I really appreciate everyone who’s helped so far. As much as I’m lamenting what could have been, BEGGARS WOULD RIDE is actually doing pretty well, at least by my standards. Thank you for that.