Introducing the Class of 2017!

Here's the Deal - A.V. Geiger

Here's the whirlwind story of how I ended up with a book deal for not one, not two, but THREE books!

Part 1

Unlike a lot of successful authors, I haven't been writing my whole life. I've always had a habit of making up stories in my head, but I never took the time to write them down. I spent my teen years as a hardcore science nerd, laser focused on getting accepted to an Ivy League college, with no spare time for boy bands or romance novels... or even for dating.

Then, three years ago, something inexplicable happened. Out of nowhere, I developed an intense celebrity crush on Adam Levine. You'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you how completely out of character this was. I found myself fangirling with all the teens on Twitter, and I dreamed up a whole convoluted plot about the "true" inspiration behind Adam's song lyrics. The romance novel in my head was too delicious to keep to myself. I knew I would regret it if I didn't write it down. With a first draft burning a hole in my hard drive, I googled "Adam Levine fanfic" to find a place to post it. Up popped this website I'd never heard of in my life....

Wattpad? What the heck was Wattpad?

I began posting my fanfic, Obsessed, in July 2013, and it turned into a three-book series over the course of the next year. By then, my celebrity crush had mostly fizzled, but I'd caught the writing bug. FOLLOW ME BACK was my second original novel, and my way of processing the whole bizarre experience with fandom and celebrity obsession after the fact.

Still, I saw my writing as a hobby, not a career, until things took a turn for the serious in early 2015. FOLLOW ME BACK was about 90% complete and the #1 ranked story in Mystery/Thriller, when I woke up one morning to this message in my Wattpad inbox:

Hi there,

I'm really enjoying FOLLOW ME BACK! I'm a literary agent, and while I haven't quite finished the story yet I think it has a lot of potential, so I wanted to say hi and ask if working with an agent is something you would be interested in....

At first, I was skeptical. I knew that authors usually queried agents, and not the other way around. I figured the message was most likely some kind of scam, but I did my research, and it turned out to be legit. I accepted this agent's offer of representation in March 2015. Then the real work began.

I soon found out that there's a world of difference between the first drafts I'd been posting on Wattpad and the fully polished manuscripts that sold to publishers. My agent led me through several intense months of developmental editing before she finally declared FMB ready to make the rounds. My manuscript didn't go out to publishers until fall 2015. At that point, there was nothing else I could do but sit on my hands and obsessively refresh my inbox, waiting for news.

The only way to make the time pass quickly was to write. The whole time the book was out on submission, I distracted myself by posting FMB's sequel here on Wattpad. By the time the sequel was complete, I still didn't have a book deal, and I had all but convinced myself that neither Book 1 nor Book 2 would ever see the inside of a bookstore.

Then, a couple weeks before Christmas, came the most exciting email of my life.

It was glorious, my friends. Trust me when I tell you, it was worth all the waiting and biting of nails. The email from my agent finally came through on a Monday morning, and I saw those three beautiful words in the subject line:

OFFER FROM SOURCEBOOKS

I'm not sure exactly what happened after that. I probably screamed. Jumped up and down. Did a moonwalk across my office. Cried in the shower. Re-read the wondrous email twenty thousand times. I did all the things that one does on such occasions. But I never imagined for a second, that email was only the beginning...

Part 2

As soon as the ink had dried on my book deal, a couple things happened that took me by surprise. First, within a few weeks of acquiring Follow Me Back, my original editor promptly left the company. (There's a term for this in the publishing biz. It's called being "orphaned," and it's generally a bad stroke of luck.) I couldn't help but worry about what it would mean for my book. I imagined FMB shunted off to the bottom of some other editor's list, with no real energy or enthusiasm for the project.

Luckily, I couldn't have been more wrong. It turned out that the acquisition editor was not, in fact, the person at Sourcebooks who originally championed my book. The manuscript had gone first to an Assistant Editor, and she was the person who fought behind the scenes to acquire it. Needless to say, this Assistant Editor is now and forever my hero. I couldn't have been more thrilled when I learned that she herself would be taking over the lead.

Then something else happened that came as quite a shock. My heroic new editor and I were just getting acquainted, when I suddenly had this email from her in my inbox:

FOLLOW ME BACK news!

Here's where the story gets a little complicated if you're not well-versed in the ins and outs of international publishing (and trust me, neither was I!). You see, when I sold FMB to Sourcebooks, they acquired something called "World Rights." That meant Sourcebooks had the right to re-sell translated versions of FMB to other publishers around the globe, and they would split the proceeds with me for a pre-determined percentage.

This arrangement was spelled out in my contract, but I figured it was all just standard boilerplate until that "news" email suddenly popped up. To my complete and utter astonishment, they had actually done it. They'd sold the rights to a publisher in Italy, and the Italian version would come out concurrently with the North American release.

I was thrilled with this unexpected windfall, but I didn't have too long to celebrate. The time had come to buckle down and get to work. My Sourcebooks editor had some changes in mind for FMB, and she wanted to talk with me about it over the phone. The call took place in March 2016, and it went something vaguely like this:

Editor: Congrats on Italy!

Me: Yay! Thank you! I'm so psyched!

Editor: So we have a couple other countries that might be interested...

Me: Really? That's ridiculous!

Editor: BUT it will help us close those deals if you agree to change X-Y-Z in the book.

Me: Um. OK. I guess that's what I'll do then. (Internally: what is happening??????)

Editor: Awesome. Bye!

Me: WAIT!

Editor: What?

Me: Um. I'm just thinking out loud here... You know, if we actually change X-Y-Z, then the story might benefit from a sequel.

Editor: Hmmmm.

Me: As it happens, I wrote one this past fall. (Internally: thank you, submission process, for taking so excruciatingly long...)

Editor: That's interesting. *Various non-committal noises.* So we're all good on changing X-Y-Z, yes?

The call ended, and I honestly thought my editor wasn't interested in the sequel – at least not yet. I dismissed the entire subject from my mind, until her next email popped up.

MORE FMB NEWS!

This time the book had sold to a publisher in France. The email told me all the ins and outs of the deal – and tacked on to the bottom, my editor added this:

Also got a chance to take a quick peek at the text for the FMB sequel that's on Wattpad, but it's a bit hard to get to those pages—do you have the sequel in word doc form? I'd love to take a look at it as I start thinking about the edit letter for book 1!

I will leave to your imagination the ensuing mad rush of copying & pasting from Wattpad into Word. Suffice it to say, I had a Word document in my editor's inbox within the hour. Three days later, my agent received an offer memo. Sourcebooks wanted to acquire two more books.

So now here I am, three years from the date I posted my first Adam Levine fanfic, with three books under contract, and translations underway in three major European countries. (Spain jumped on board as well, a few weeks later.)

They say good things come in threes, right? I guess I'm living proof.