![]() I remember emailing or texting the other authors to ask things like: “How would Tessa say this?” or “How would Amelia respond if Izzy said this?” It was an interesting experience. We also needed to be able to write each other’s character into our books and get their descriptions, behavior, and dialogue right. Some changes were requested, but once our stories were approved, we started writing. Lissa sent all four synopses over to Focus for approval. ( Challenge accepted!) Then we also each needed to write a synopsis for our book. I ended up with the cell phone trouble issue. (Mine is book three.) We chose the issues for our books. We needed to know each others’ stories because our characters lived through those events, and that would be relevant when we wrote our own books. The girls would meet in drama class in the first book and become friends. Once we had nailed down our characters, we took turns hashing out our plots on Zoom. She also loves stuffed animals and Marvel movies. She loves to bake and give her friends presents (not cupcakes, though). My daughter (Kaitlyn) is the happiest girl I know. My daughter was fifteen at the time, and she became a large inspiration for Izzy’s character. Lissa also wanted us to work hard to make our characters authentic by continually checking in with the teens in our lives. I remember volunteering to give Izzy a bigger family. For example, early on we had too many characters who were only children. Several times we had to tweak our characters to keep them from being too alike. *blushes*) We talked about our characters in our Zoom meetings, and we worked hard to make sure these four girls were different from one another. And also her “I’m not smart about boys” decisions. (That’s where my character, Izzy, got her boy crazy nature. ![]() ![]() Lissa wanted authentic characters, and one of her assignments for us was to list some of the struggles each of us authors had when we were teens. Then we worked on creating our characters. We invented the town of Riverbend, Indiana and the high school our characters attended. Once all four authors had signed on, our editor, Lissa Halls Johnson, began scheduling meetings in Zoom where we worked together to create the series. ![]() Talking to readers at a convention in Cincinnati. *guilty grin* Thankfully, Focus approved a higher word count, asking me to just keep it at 70K or below. True to Jill Williamson form, my book came in over 70,000 words. The books were supposed to be 50,000 words long. They also wanted each book to deal with an issue facing teens today. They wanted the authors to work as a team to create the overall story and characters, then each author would write one POV character. They wanted to publish a series for teen girls that was similar to the one they put out in the 90s but relevant for today’s readers. I started emailing with the editor, who eventually told me that the publisher was Focus on the Family. I’d never written for hire before, but as I looked into the opportunity, it seemed perfect for my situation. I then saw a call for young adult writers for a work-for-hire project. I would not be able to substitute teach during that time, which was how I was supplementing my writing income at that time, and I was a little worried how our family was going to pay the bills while I was in school. It was a 20-month master’s degree program at Washington State University that also included a year of student teaching. In early 2019, I had just been accepted to grad school to earn my teaching credential. Authors are usually paid a flat fee with no royalties, though sometimes royalty or bonus clauses are added should the book sell over a certain number of copies, say 20,000 or something significant. Why would an author do it, then? For the paycheck. That might sound sad to you, but to do work-for-hire projects, authors sign contracts that spell all this out up front. They created them for that work-for-hire job, and all rights belong to the publisher. If the author created a town or mythical world, they don’t own that either and also can’t write about those things. The author doesn’t own the characters and can’t write more stories about them. With write-for-hire, the publisher who hired the author owns that book. The person who hired them now owns that cover. It’s similar to how cover artists are hired to design a cover. ![]() This book is different from most of my other books because it was a write-for-hire project.Ī write-for-hire project is when a publisher hires an author to write something. Today I want to tell you the story of my new book The Me You See, which came out on August 3. ![]()
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