Publishing is an odd business. Some part of it’s always booming (hockey romance, celebrity cookbooks), but the entire enterprise seems to be perpetually in crisis. So much of it is opaque, even to the people who work in it. Some of it’s just based on vibes—no one really knows what makes a bestseller, so a lot of decisions come down to guesswork.
This is all true, and it’s also what I tell myself when things don’t go my way in publishing. Which is what happened this week, when it became clear that the publisher who bought the first two books in the Dancers Down Under series, Pas de Don’t and Pointe of Pride, won’t buy the third and final book, Barre Fight.
Now, that book is already written, because that’s how fiction works: whereas in nonfiction you sell the proposal and then write the book, in fiction you write the book and then you sell the book. No guarantees, you just have to write the best book you can, all 100 000ish words of it, and hope someone wants it. (A very very small number of fiction authors get multi-book deals, in which they sell a novel with just a proposal. I don’t think Stephen King has to write a book first and hope some nice editor will make an offer).
Barre Fight is written, and I think it’s pretty good. It’s not quite enemies-to-lovers, because one of the characters hates the other while she is oblivious to his grudge, so let’s called it “unrequited hate.” It starts and ends in Sydney, but the second act takes place in New York City. It’s the first and only book in the series that tackles ballet’s obsession with a very specific and arbitrary body type, but not in the way people expect. It’s got multiple HEAs in it. It’s got serious spice. It’s got an adjoining hotel room door and many many musical theatre references. And I think you should get to read all of that.
So I’m self-publishing it. It’s off to an editor next month, and this fall—winter at the latest—it’ll be available for you to buy on Kindle. It’ll even have a gorgeous cover to match the other two books in the series, because Ivy and Justin are two hot heartbroken horny dum dums (affectionate) and they deserve it.
Here’s a little about them (if you’ve read Pas de Don’t and Pointe of Pride, you’ve met them both):
Justin Winters is a lover, not a fighter. But when a drunken homophobe steps out of line at a pub one night, mocking him for being a ballet dancer, he loses his cool. Unfortunately for him, the punch is captured on video and catapulted into virality by Justin's least favorite journalist, Ivy Page. Poison Ivy, as he calls her, has already savaged him in her reviews, and now she's putting his place on Australian National Ballet's New York tour in jeopardy.
Ivy Page once dreamed of being a ballet dancer, but she's found a new calling as an arts journalist. When she's abruptly laid off, she panics and accepts a job in PR at ANB, where she's promptly put to work cleaning up Justin's image so the board will allow him to go to New York. There's just one problem: Justin Winters hates her, and he won't cooperate.
But Ivy Page is allergic failure, and she finds a way to win Justin's grudging trust. Soon enough, they're on their way to New York City.
Once they're there, the thrill of sold-out crowds at Lincoln Center and Ivy's infectious enthusiasm for the city has country boy Justin falling—reluctantly, but hard. But can this showmance survive the return to real life, and the crisis that awaits Justin in the rural hometown he thought he’d escaped?
