UNTIL SUMMER ENDS #newrelease celebration!

Okay, so it's release day for UNTIL SUMMER ENDS! I am thrilled to have this book out in the world before summer ends! It was postponed for a while, until my publisher was able to partner with Simon & Schuster Digital to distribute their books. Yay for summer romance!

So UNTIL SUMMER ENDS is a clean, contemporary romance. It is not inspirational, like my Liz Isaacson books. But again, it is clean. There's no swearing, the innuendo is mild, and there is one closed-door fade-to-black love scene. That's it.

If you like food trucks, you'll like Until Summer Ends.

If you like a beach romance, you'll like Until Summer Ends.

If you like your heroes to be tall, blonde, and an aspiring actor, you'll like Until Summer Ends.

If you like clean, feel-good romances, you'll like Until Summer Ends.

There is a month-long blog tour going on to celebrate the release of my debut contemporary romance. You can enter through any of the blog tour stops, or go here to enter to win a Kindle Paperwhite. You will need to sign up for my romance-only newsletter, where you'll only get news and notifications about my contemporary romance titles under the name Elana Johnson. (If you want news and notifications, which include special sales, about my Liz Isaacson titles, GO HERE.)

Blog tour stops today:
Wishful Endings
One Day at a Time

 

Buy UNTIL SUMMER ENDS today! 

(Available in ebook only; paperback comes out January 17, 2017.)

Amazon | B&N | Kobo | iTunes

Until Summer Ends will be out in two weeks!

Okay, so my next release, UNTIL SUMMER ENDS, a contemporary romance novel, finally has a release date!

And it's in only TWO WEEKS.

Yes, my jaw hit the floor too. But I am super-excited about this book. I loved writing it, and I hope others will love reading it.

It's my full-length contemporary romance debut, and I hope you'll order it and tell me how I did in a new genre!

A few fun facts about UNTIL SUMMER ENDS:

• It's the first in a new series, the Redwood Bay Romance series, which will have at least 3 books.
• It takes place in a small fictional beachside town called Redwood Bay in northern California.
• It features a taco stand owner as the heroine. Food trucks, FTW!
• The hero is a down-on-his-luck actor.
• This is a clean romance -- there is no swearing and mild sexual content.
• This is a contemporary romance -- no paranormal, no historical, nada. Just a girl, the beach, and her taco stand. Oh yeah, and that actor...
• Until Summer Ends is the perfect beach read! I hope you'll take it on your vacation with you.

You can order UNTIL SUMMER ENDS from these retailers:

• Amazon
• B&N
• Kobo
• iTunes
• Book Depository

If you're interested in joining my romance newsletter, I've recently split it from my speculative fiction list. You can join the romance newsletter here, and get my beach-themed novella, OPEN FOR LOVE, for free. Then you'll get news and deals about my romances in your inbox.

UNTIL SUMMER ENDS will be released on August 9! I'm pretty stoked this book is coming out -- it's been a long three months of waiting past the original release date!    

Another Story Behind Another Sale

So you may have seen my new YA sci-fi announcement. I sort of wrote up a little story behind the sale for that book, because it's had a Journey.

This story is different. I thought it would be fun to showcase both stories, simply because they are different, and every journey toward publication is unique, even for a single person.

So here's the deal:

Yes, it's a romance deal. Yes, it's adult. My debut, in fact, into the full-length adult romance genre (I have a novella in an anthology right now, and 3 more coming next year).

The book is called UNTIL SUMMER ENDS, and it begins the Redwood Bay series, which will have at least 3 books.

These past two book deals -- this one and my YA sci-fi one -- are big firsts for me, because they're multiple book deals, something I've never gotten before. It's both exciting and terrifying. I've never had to write a book under contract, and that pressure is intense.

Anyway, I wrote Until Summer Ends only a year ago. That's right. I started it in November 2014, and I finished it at the beginning of December. It was the second romance novel I'd attempted (the first was horrific!).

Over the next couple of months, I wrote a few more romance novels, but Until Summer Ends was the one I was preparing to shop. I sent the first few chapters to critique group, and then I had a professional editor work on the whole thing.

With their feedback -- which was mostly positive -- I felt encouraged to start querying. So I did, to both literary agents and publishers that accepted unagented submissions. On April 1, no less. No April Fool's Day here!

I got quite a few requests, mostly because I did my homework. I researched the agents and publishers, looked at the things they'd sold or published, and tailored my queries to them. I went wide, don't get me wrong, but I still did my homework. And in romance, there are quite a few publishers you can submit directly to.

I went to a local conference and pitched my book to an editor at St. Martin's Press. She requested it. Things were looking up!

Especially when I got an offer on the book the second week of May, from one of the publisher's I'd submitted to. That spurred me to let other pubs and all the agents considering the full know about the offer.

A couple of weeks later, I got another offer, from another publisher. The day after that, I got an offer from a literary agent. She was one of the top ten dealmakers in romance on Publisher's Marketplace. Even if she couldn't sell the book (hey, I'm realistic -- I've had several books on submission through an agent in New York that didn't sell), I figured I had the two publisher offers to choose from.

So we submitted, and we actually ended up getting several offers. I was sort of shocked. Ha! We ended up going with Cleis Press, because the editor there, Karen Thomas, was incredibly enthusiastic about the project, and after speaking with her on the phone, I knew it was the right place to be.

So that's how I went from the drafting of a novel in November 2014, to querying only 5 months later, to an offer just a month after that. It was fast. MUCH faster than any of my other book deals, that's for sure!

But it just shows that the journey is different for each book, and each person! And UNTIL SUMMER ENDS will be out in July 2016! Which is also fast! Meanwhile, I have two more novels to write, so... I better get doing that!