Tag: publishing

A Two-Book Deal & Lessons Learned

Tiffany Tsao

An official announcement has been made! An announcement about something I’ve been sitting on for a while. This sums up my literary life: a perpetual sitting on good news, waiting for the time I can “officially” announce its hatching. (I’m not complaining! But think about how uncomfortable it is for the good news, to be sat on for prolonged periods like that!)

And the good news? Here it is, at the top of a weekly roundup for book deals in Publishers Weekly. With a photo of me and everything!

An article from Publishers Weekly, dated January 10, 2025, by John Maher. "In a preempt, HarperVia's Alexa Frank took world English rights to two novels by 2023 PEN Translation Prize winner TIffany Tsao from Daniel Lazar at WRiters House for Jayarpiya Vasudevan at Jacaranda Literary Agency. The first title, But Won't I Miss Me, set for spring 2026, is a genre-blending meditation on trauma and motherhood "set in a world of new mothers who face Rebirth – birthing an identical, fitter self who eats the original mother and takes her place – and what unfolds as one mother emerges from the process sickly rather than strong."

And because I’m vain, here’s another screenshot from the Publishers Weekly newsletter that reports on global rights. It’s the Deal of the Week!


A non-writer friend pointed out how confusing the language is to someone outside the industry. So I’ll translate: the publisher HarperVia has bought two novels from me. Alexa Frank is the editor at HarperVia who made the acquisition. Jayapriya Vasudevan is my agent, but she worked with a US agent – “a co-agent” – Daniel Lazar to make the sale. That’s the gist, basically. Apart from the fact that…MY NEXT NOVEL IS COMING OUT IN 2026 (which is actually called But Won’t I Miss Me. Spot the typo in the announcement text. But you know what? I don’t mind!)

Though it doesn’t feel like it, it has been a long time since I’ve had a novel of my own come out! And milestones are as good a time as any to reflect on lessons learned.

  1. Time Moves Fast. It really does. It feels like only yesterday when my last published novel came out, first as Under Your Wings in Australia in 2018, then as The Majesties in the US and UK in 2020. 2020 shouldn’t seem like such a long time ago, but on the publishing treadmill it’s already considered “old,” from the Covid era, which is fast receding into the distance too. Imagine that.

    Funnily enough, it’s not as if I lounged around eating bon-bons after Under Your Wings/The Majesties came out. Apart from being busy raising two tiny children and being depressed, and dealing with all the craziness of the Covid times like everyone else, I translated three books and wrote the manuscript of the third instalment of my Oddfits trilogy (which continues its search for a new home). I came up with the idea for this forthcoming novel But Won’t I Miss Me in early 2019. And felt I didn’t have the time to sit down and write it until the end of 2022, when the Copyright Agency gave me a Create Grant to do so!

    Does this mean I should have done something differently? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I could have written But Won’t I Miss Me sooner anyway. It took years to digest the experience and gain enough distance from its subject matter – the trauma of early motherhood – for me to write it well. But it does make me realize the importance of not comparing, despite the pressure to do so. It’s easy to look at other writers who are producing a book a year, a book every two years, and feel slow and incompetent by comparison. Some people are fast writers. Some people have more time to devote solely to writing. And some people don’t! It’s okay to go steadily at your own pace.

    Having said that, since this is a two-book deal, I do have to prioritize writing that next novel!

  2. Celebrate every win. Every win. Including announcements. There was a time when I would always be waiting for the “official” good thing to happen. And over time, I realized that the “official” time never came. After I’d sign a contract or a book announcement would happen, I’d think, well, but I’ll wait till the book comes out to really celebrate. And then once the book came out, I would think, well, I’ll wait for the reviews to be really good, or for it to get an award. No, no, no. Best to take the wins you have and recognize them for what they are: WINS.

    I’m SO excited about this two-book deal, and SO excited about But Won’t I Miss Me coming out in 2026!

  3. It takes a village to make a book deal. Or at least a small group of excellent people. A heartfelt thank you to Jacaranda Literary Agency and Jayapriya Vasudevan and Helen Mangham there for always championing and supporting my work. Thank you to our US co-agent, Daniel Lazar, (to whom credit goes for getting a US publisher for The Majesties as well)! Thank you so much to Alexa Frank, editor and fellow literary translator and wordsmith, for acquiring But Won’t I Miss Me and Yet-Unnamed-Next-Book! I’m so excited to be working with her!

    There are many others who deserve thank yous, and they’ll appear in the acknowledgements for the books. If I sound like I won an Emmy or something, it’s because, yeah, well, I’m celebrating every win! 😉

Late April News

Tiffany Tsao4 Comments

What better way to celebrate writing a 85,500-word document than by writing a blog post? But I want to share some exciting news: I’m finally finished with the manuscript for my most recent standalone novel But Won’t I Miss Me?

Towards the end, it was a marathon and sprint rolled into one: weeks of revising the draft late into the night (I hardly ever work late at night), resuming first thing in the morning and spending all the cracks in between kid-caring and household chores revising, revising, and revising. I’m a heavy reviser too, so this basically involved rewriting pretty much everything. On Saturday night, I sent it off to my agent. Since then, I’ve been incredibly hungry all the time and my body aches, as if I actually ran a marathon (not that I would know because I don’t run marathons). I feel an extraordinary amount of elation and relief. I know that my agent will come back to me with notes soon, and that, still later, I will have to work on it further with the editor at the publisher. But it is still a tremendous feeling to know that it is in as good shape as I can get it by myself. Thank you eternally to the Copyright Agency for giving me a Create Grant so I could write it!

I’ve mentioned the premise for this one before, but in case you missed it: But Won’t I Miss Me? occurs in an alternate-but-close-to-our-reality where having a baby also means birthing an identical but fitter self who will take your place. This bothers the protagonist, but no one understands why.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Don’t you have one unpublished novel manuscript already? Why add to their numbers?

I do! For Oddfans still awaiting the third Oddfits novel – my agent has informed me of some potential bites. But in case it doesn’t work out, I attended a one-day workshop on self-publishing back in February, taught by the lovely Michael Winkler, whose originally self-published Grimmish went on to win awards then secure a publisher because everyone loves a sure thing! I took this workshop so I could be prepared for the challenges that await if I do decide to go rogue and self-publish the Oddfits trilogy.

I know you mainly from your translation work. Tell me what’s going on with that side of things because I am not as interested in your self-authored work.

Okay, more of a demand than a question, but I’ll roll with it. I’m currently translating two Indonesian novels. One is a novella called Pasien (Patient) by Naomi Midori – a thriller that opens with a murdered family (which, by happy coincidence, is also how I chose to open Under Your Wings / The Majesties, so obviously I am the translator-soulmate for this book). This is a job commissioned directly by the Indonesian publisher, Penerbit Haru. The other translation-in-progress is the novel Olenka by Budi Darma. I am honoured to be translating another of his works. Olenka won the S.E.A. Write Award in 1984. It was composed during the same period as Orang-Orang Bloomington (English title: People from Bloomington) and is also set in Indiana, though it is very different, to my mind, in tone and style.

What else are you doing at the moment?

This year, I’m a judge for the translation category of the Singapore Literature Prize, so: Lots of Reading! I’m returning as a judge for the non-fiction category of the Woollahra Digital Literary Prize. I had a late-night chat on Holy Saturday / Easter Eve with Santai Ngobrolin Buku book club in Indonesia. And I was the speaker for Universitas Bunda Mulia’s Stadium Generale this year on “The Challenges of Translating Indonesian Literature.”

Keeping busy! But easier to keep afloat now that the novel manuscript, for now, I hope, is cleared. As my nine-year-old told me today, “Enjoy it while you can.”