From Middle-Grade Bestseller to Young Adult Debut

My third book for young readers, a YA novel called The Secret to Belonging, releases in a few weeks, and I’m frequently asked why I decided to make a shift from writing middle grade to writing young adult. The question is logical given my publication record, but behind the scenes, the sequence of events has been significantly less linear.

(Writing Dark Fiction for Teens.)

I started out as a poet, though I kept my poetry private for decades. Then my colleagues at the school where I taught showed me how submissions worked, and I began placing poems in literary journals and anthologies. I even published a chapbook with a small poetry press. But I always aspired to write a novel, and I continuously worked on fiction in long and short forms.

My first published novel, a novel-in-verse called ALONE, was originally written as middle grade, then revised to be young adult and submitted to agents as such. But my agent and I agreed that it worked better as middle grade, so I revised it again, and in our submissions we pitched it as “upper middle grade.” When we received an offer on the book, I was one month from retirement after decades of teaching. I was in my early 50s, and as my education career came to a close, my career as a writer of books for young people began.

It’s conventional wisdom that after you write a book, the best thing you can do is write the next one. When we went on submission with ALONE, I was already working on a young adult manuscript which I sent to my agent. Then when I finished edits on ALONE, I started a new middle-grade project which we offered my publisher as my option book. I loved the story, but it had a unique setting, was written in prose, and bore no resemblance to ALONE. After reading the manuscript, they wanted changes I wasn’t comfortable making, so we passed. I wrote another middle-grade novel with younger characters, but the timing wasn’t right for that one, either. My agent and I were philosophical: It only takes one yes to get a book deal, but it has to be the right yes at the right time in the right place for the right project. That’s when I began work on a fifth manuscript, the young adult story that would eventually become The Secret to Belonging.

In the meantime, ALONE picked up momentum. I was doing a lot of school author visits and presenting at conferences, and the book was resonating. ALONE had come out during the heart of the pandemic, and it explored themes of loneliness, survival, and isolation. The story struck a chord, and the verse format was accessible and appealing to reluctant and enthusiastic readers. School librarians and booksellers recommended it often, and over the course of three years, the book found its way onto more than two dozen state lists and won a significant number of awards and accolades.

Then, three years after its original publication date, ALONE hit the New York Times Bestseller List. For anyone who might not follow publishing (I had to explain to my husband why it was a big deal), this almost never happens. They say that middle-grade books can have a long tail, but to hit the New York Times list after 36 months? This was an extraordinary testament to the power of the school and library market. And I was suddenly a New York Times bestselling author with only one published book.

But over the same three years, a pattern had emerged during my school visits. Readers always wanted to know what happened to everyone who evacuated when the main character in ALONE was left behind, and they wanted details about the “imminent threat” that caused the evacuation. That’s when I realized that perhaps ALONE was not the stand-alone book I had once thought. Readers wanted another story, and I started to see where I might be able to write one.

My next published book, a multi-format, multi-POV novel called AWAY, sold on proposal, and the story specifically addressed readers’ curiosity about the evacuation and the threat. But AWAY wasn’t a sequel to ALONE, it was a companion novel. The two stories happened simultaneously, and the books could be read in either order or they could stand alone. The month before AWAY released, ALONE hit the New York Times list again. And when AWAY debuted on the list at number two, my name became solidly identified as a middle-grade author.

In the meantime, I never stopped working on other projects. I finished The Secret to Belonging, and it sold quickly. Now with its publication, I seem to be pivoting from middle grade to young adult, but I’ve actually been writing in both categories since the beginning. And a third book in the ALONE series releases next February. Called AFAR, a title that young readers helped me select, it is a middle-grade companion novel written from two points of view using verse and prose.

The happy coda to this story is that some of the other manuscripts I wrote during those unpublished years have since found homes and are forthcoming. And I continue to work on new projects in new categories, pushing the boundaries of my creative curiosity. All this to say, as circuitous as my publication history has been, the conventional wisdom has served me well. When there is so much that you can’t control, focus on what you can. Write the next book.

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