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The expatriate American’s First Voyager Book by Stacia Kane

My husband is English, and in fall of 2005 we packed up our children and everything we owned—sans electronics, of course—and moved from the US to the Southwest of England. Which was exciting, and scary.

And you know, when you’re an American living in England there’s a lot of adjustments that need to be made, from the very small—don’t ask for the elevator, ask for the lift; don’t forget to pay and display—to the very big, like remember to drive on the left or you’ll probably kill someone. And it can be surprising, the little  things you miss and the little differences you notice.

But the one thing I never had to miss were great books (even though I often had to wait longer for release dates than my pals back in America, grumble grumble).  And I never had to miss those because I had bookstores right nearby, where I spent ridiculous amounts of time. It wasn’t until we’d been there for about a year that I realized one day as I rearranged my bookshelves just how many of those books were published by HarperVoyager, and started actively looking for Voyager books at the store, because I could be pretty sure that if that classy little logo was at the bottom of the spine, it was a book I’d enjoy.

And meanwhile, of course, I was writing. Rural Devon is beautiful, but I’m a bit of a city mouse, so in my work I could escape to the city-est city I could come up with, Triumph City, and spend my evenings wandering its always-busy streets (incidentally, I’ve had several reviewers mention that although I’m an American, and although Triumph City is in America, there’s almost an English “feel” to Downside. Now you know why; we are influenced by our surroundings). At the time I’d already sold one urban fantasy series to a small press, which really skirted the edge of paranormal romance, but the new books—I’d already started thinking of them as the Downside books in my head—were more fantasy oriented; less romance, more worldbuilding.

I was very excited about Unholy Ghosts. And luckily I found an agent in the US who was just as excited about it, and he found an editor who was, too, and there we were, all we excited Americans. And of course, because I now had two series being published in the US, my husband and I decided maybe for the sake of my career we should consider moving back to the US, and we did.

Three weeks after we arrived back on US soil, my agent called me to tell me he’d sold the series to HarperUK. I will never forget the sort of confused emotional mixture of that’s-incredibly-awesome-news and you-gotta-be-kidding-me I had when I got that phone call!

I’d honestly never dreamed I would get to sell a series in the UK as well as the US. Or in any other country—the Downside books have sold in Poland and Germany, as well. Foreign rights sales were things other writers, those really successful cool authors I could never hope to be like, sold. I still have a hard time getting my head around it sometimes, to be honest, even when really amazing things happen, like the London Times listing Unholy Ghosts as one of their summer Fantasy Picks.

It makes me terribly homesick for England, I do admit. But it’s also tremendously exciting.

It’s tremendously exciting to get to work with the wonderful people at HarperUK and HarperAus. It’s tremendously exciting to see the absolutely stunning cover art Voyager has given the books. It’s tremendously exciting to be published in more than one country.

But most of all it’s tremendously exciting to think that my Voyager books are sold at the bookstores I used to visit regularly in England, and that when we go back there and I walk into a bookstore and search for that cool Voyager logo on the spines of the books on the shelves, my name could be written above it.