Swoon Reads announces YA author tour for May
Swoon Reads, the YA romance imprint publishing under Feiwel and Friends (an imprint of Macmillan), is planning an author tour in May, and we're here to tell you all about it with the help of debut author Temple West (Velvet, coming in May), one of the participating authors. (The other authors on the tour and the schedule are below.)
Temple: I was an odd kid. Luckily, I wasn't really aware that I was odd, so my oddness didn't bother me all that much. In the summers I would roll awake around noon, grab a book from my library stack and read for 15 hours straight, day after day after day, forgetting to do regular, human-y things, like eat, or shower. During the school year you could always find me reading during recess, hiding under the stairs to the Spanish room to keep my books out of the constant Seattle rain. On the rare occasion I did not have a book, I would rope my friends into elaborate narratives about magical elixirs made from ground-up dandelions and wild raspberries. I spent my babysitting money on acting lessons and writing seminars and I spent my weekends making up imaginary languages and alphabets. If I wasn't reading, I was writing, and if I wasn't writing I was painting or carving swords out of scrap wood or pretending the greenbelt behind my house was Dagobah.
When people grow up, they often let go of the things they wanted when they were children. This generally makes sense, since we rarely want rational things when we're young. But I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to tell stories, to live in them and breathe them and bring them to life in every medium I possibly could.
So I did. I wrote short stories and I wrote books and I wrote screenplays and I painted and I sewed and I sang and I starved and I lived out of my car and it was hard and disastrous and incredible and humbling. And then one day, the thing I wished for most of all as a kid finally came true.
A book that I wrote when I was 19 happened to fit the exact genre requirements for a brand-new, community-oriented publishing company called Swoon Reads. I heard about it mere days after I had stepped away from a very stable, very corporate job. I uploaded my manuscript to the Swoon Reads site, skirting through under the deadline with literally minutes to spare. A month later, I got the call of a lifetime: My book had been chosen for publication. A few months later I got an even bigger surprise: Swoon Reads was sending me on a national book tour, something debut authors rarely get the chance to experience.
Seeing my book in print, getting to tour the country and share my work, partnering with a publisher to bring my story to life — it all feels so surreal, and so incredibly fulfilling. I have the chance to do exactly what my childhood self believed I should do. And I am so grateful to Swoon Reads for their vote of confidence, for their mentorship and for giving me the opportunity to follow my dreams.
ABOUT THE TOUR
Participating authors: Sandy Hall, author of A Little Something Different (out now); Katie Van Ark, author of The Boy Next Door (out now); Temple West, author of Velvet (May 12); and Kimberly Karalius, author of Love Fortunes and Other Disasters (May 12).
TOUR SCHEDULE
Tuesday, May 12
Cincinnati: 7 p.m. at Joseph-Beth Booksellers
Wednesday, May 13
Dallas: 2:30 p.m. at the RT Booklovers Convention
Thursday, May 14
San Francisco: 7 p.m. at Books Inc. in Opera Plaza
Friday, May 15
Seattle: 7 p.m. at University Bookstore
Sunday, May 17
Chicago: 3 p.m. at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court
Monday, May 18
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: 6 p.m. at Northshire Bookstore
Tuesday, May 19
East Brunswick N.J.: 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble
Find out more about Swoon Reads at SwoonReads.com.