Harlequin Teen #YeahYA! Tour, Houston stop

@Page Turners Blog is the official Houston blogger for the #YeahYA event, so definitely check out the official post there 🙂 But just cause I’m not the official blogger doesn’t mean I can’t write-up my own summary. 🙂 The tour was hosted at Katy Budget Books, which was so convenient I just couldn’t NOT go. I mean, it was like 10 minutes from my house. I literally went to the event on my way to the grocery store.

Julie Kagawa and Aimee Carter were the two authors at the Harlequin Teen #YeahYA! Houston stop.

Here’s a closer photo of Julie Kagawa, she’s the reason I went to the event. I enjoyed her Iron Fey series and have her latest Eternity Cure on my ARC to-review list. I haven’t read any of the Goddess Test series (Aimee Carter’s series). I’ve linked to the author’s Goodreads pages above so you should definitely check out their books.

I really enjoyed the event and both authors have really cool personalities and it was fun to listen to them speak. I didn’t get any books signed cause I need to behave myself when I go into bookstores. I have too many already purchased books I haven’t read yet, so I’m forcing a book buying ban on myself unless I absolutely need it like for book clubs. IT. IS. SO. HARD. NOT. TO. BUY. BOOKS.

The authors started out their event by telling us their road to publication. Julie Kagawa (I’m gonna write JK from now on for ease of typing) told us she is an overnight success… that took 10 years! For 10 years JK attended writing workshops and ended up being told she was too young (at 23) and needed to go out and live. But finally she met an agent who was living in the same building in an urban campus who liked her sample and wanted to see the whole book. JK had to finish writing the book that weekend. That particular book never sold but she ended up writing The Iron King via NaNoWriMo in about two months and Harlequin Teen bought it up a few weeks after she finished it.

Aimee Carter (AC from now on) started out writing fan fiction for Harry Potter. She said she wrote about 3 million words of fan fic in high school and wrote two full length novels before her Goddess Test book was picked up. AC got an agent her first week of college and the next day the agent took it back (oops, the agent’s manager didn’t like AC’s writing). At that point AC stopped trying to get published and focused on her degree in film and screen writing. When AC was 22, she was supposed to work on a film but she had her wisdom teeth removed and the dentist had to break her jaw in two places! So instead of working on the film she was home on pain meds and ended up writing Goddess Test. She told herself this was going to be the last book she sent out for publication. Two weeks after that she got signed, but the book took a year to sell. AC says the moral of the story is that editing never ends.

Both authors have new books coming out soonish but JK couldn’t tell us her books yet. It is still a secret. But AC told us her next series is the Black Coat Rebellion series, and it is a dystopian. She actually wrote this when she thought Goddess Test wasn’t going to sell. The series sounds really interesting – it is a world where at 17 you take an aptitude test to see where you rank in society, and that rank is tattooed on your neck. It controls what jobs you get, where you live, etc. I’ve already added it on Goodreads.

On favorite characters, JK said Grimalkin (he’s my favorite too!) and then Puck because he is snarky and Jackal (from her vampire series) because doesn’t care what you think of him. AC’s favorite is Knox (from the upcoming dystopia series – I’m guessing at the spelling) because he claims to be one thing but you’re not sure if you can trust him. She likes to approach her characters through their motivations.

Both authors have very little say in their covers, but they are sent cover concepts to discuss. They did mention that Harlequin Teen has teen reader panels and they are what motivated the cover changes for JK’s Immortal Rules series.

An audience member asked about paperback (PB) versus hardcover (HC) books and JK told us that if it releases in HC first, that means the publisher thinks it will do really well. JK’s first book series (Iron Fey) was in PB because she was an unknown and they were not sure about her yet. AC insisted her books come out in PB only because she doesn’t want her readers to pay almost $20 for a book (I love her now!).

When asked which book was their favorite to write, JK said Eternity Cure (because of the scene at the end – and now I really need to read this. It is one of the ARCs I’m sitting on) and Iron Queen because everything came together (and so epically, may I add). AC said that her favorite was the one she hated writing – Goddess Legacy (a prequel to the series). She said it was a nightmare to write because of her writing schedule for it (wrote it January – March and published in July!) but there was so much discovery and it ties everything together so well.

JK was asked how she switched from writing fae to writing vamps, and she said at the beginning she didn’t want to write vamps at all. She had a post-apocalyptic world in her mind that was dark and bleak and her publisher said to write vamps so she added vampires to that world. That’s how The Immortal Rules came out. The way she came up with the Iron Fey series is she tried to come up with something the fae are afraid of – human technology, and create a fae that isn’t afraid of that. She also said she was walking through a bookstore when she realized her main character needed to be half human and not know she was half fae. JK said she wrote Iron Knight because it was requested. The Iron Fey series was supposed to be a trilogy but her editor said you can’t leave it like that.

AC wrote about mythology because that is what she grew up reading. So she didn’t have to do any research for the Goddess Test series. JK had to research types of fae for the Iron Fae series and for the Immortal Rules she had to research for the world building of a decaying world. She said shows like “Life After People” really helped to see what would happen to buildings and roads after people were mostly gone. She also had to figure out how long it would take a group of people to travel without paved roads where vegetation runs wild.

AC estimates that 60% of her books are read by adults, and only 40% by teens. JK said that YA is so popular because everyone can relate to it.

And there you have it – my notes from the Harlequin Teen #YeahYA! Houston stop. What did you think? Did you attend any of the #YeahYA! tour stops?

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