I’m so excited to say that “LINGUS” is now going to be available on paperback. (Imagine me squeeing.)
It only took me five years from initially writing it and three years (okay, almost four years) to publish it, and I am so, so excited. Out of all of my books, LINGUS is the only one that I can reread and at the end of it, there isn’t a single thing I would change about it. As my baby, I feel such a love for it that I wonder if my mom secretly loves my older sister the most because she’s her first born… and if she does, then I sort of understand why.
It was the first thing I started working on after I quit my job and decided to just go for it. I didn’t have any money saved up to get it edited or anything like that, and if you know me, then you know how stubborn I am. I just wanted to write. I wasn’t going to borrow money from anyone even though my parents and Chris had both offered. There were a few people from my stint doing fanfiction that had offered to help me with it, but everyone ended up not writing me back at one point or another. The original cover was a Christmas present from Chris, who had his tattoo artist friend draw it up for me.
I remember being terrified to release it, and after it was finally out, I think it peaked at like #12,000 on Amazon. People liked it but kept saying, “it needs an editor.” Oh man, it killed me. I wasn’t making enough money off royalties to be able to afford to pay someone even after it was out for a while but I thought “one day.”
So now, it’s a bittersweet thing for me to finally release it after editing (by the wonderful people at Hot Tree Editing) with a new cover that I absolutely love. It makes me feel like I kept my promise to myself, and that kind of stuff is really important to me.
On a different note, I have a surprise next week, RHYTHM, CHORD & MALYKHIN is now out as an audiobook, and LINGUS is getting made into an audiobook as we speak.
Yeah, I can’t believe any of this stuff either. I have multiple audiobooks. (more squealing)
The moral of this post: Dreams come true sometimes, bitches. Don’t ever give up.
xox
Mariana