Author Talk with Liselle Sambury

On February 24, 2022, Jes Trudel, co-founder of WritingCommunity.ca, interviewed Liselle Sambury, author of Blood Like Magic and the upcoming Blood Like Fate.

About the Author

Liselle Sambury is a Trinidadian-Canadian author who grew up in Toronto, Ontario, and her brand of writing can be described as “messy Black girls in fantasy situations.” In her free time, she shares helpful tips for upcoming writers and details of her publishing journey through a YouTube channel dedicated to helping demystify the sometimes complicated business of being an author.

About Blood Like Magic

A rich, dark urban fantasy debut following a teen witch who is given a horrifying task: sacrificing her first love to save her family’s magic. The problem is, she’s never been in love—she’ll have to find the perfect guy before she can kill him.

About Blood Like Fate

In the spellbinding sequel to Blood Like Magic, Voya fights to save her witch community from a terrible future. Perfect for fans of Legendborn and Cemetery Boys.

Recording of Author Talk

If you have trouble viewing the embedded video, you can watch the video on our Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kglp4S_V6Q4

Interview Questions and Answers

The following is a written copy of the above interview. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity and so should not be used in place of subtitles. Accurate subtitles are included with the video.

JES: So I’ve read Blood Like Magic, but let’s assume that people tuning in have not. What is it about?

LISELLE: Blood Like Magic is about a family of black witches living in a near future Toronto, and in particular 16-year-old Voya Thomas who’s given the impossible task of either killing her first love or losing her family’s magic forever. The catch is that she’s actually never been in love, but lucky for her a new genetic matchmaking program has just hit the market and she’s going to use that to find the perfect guy before she has to kill him.

JES: That’s a nice hook right there. How closely would you say you identify with Voya as a character? Would you say you’re an indecisive person?

LISELLE: To some extent. I do have some indecision, but it’s usually for really useless things that don’t matter in life. The things that do matter to me that are bigger in my life, I’m actually very very decisive and I plan out things very meticulously. Voya is very much the opposite. Little things that don’t really matter that much she doesn’t have that much issue with, but of course larger things in her life she struggles a lot with and her indecision is very extreme. I’ve never been that bad about anything, but she does have a really large amount of trouble making decisions and committing to things and will often try and find ways around having to make choices or to have other people do it for her. But in this case she’s really forced to make this decision on her own, though she does still attempt to not make the decision herself.

JES: Where did the kernel of this character come from?

LISELLE: I started this story with the image of a girl in a bath of blood and I had to figure out what she was doing there and what was going on in her life, and the brainstorming basically tumbled forward from there. I knew that I wanted to write about a family of black witches in Toronto so I was like okay she’s gonna be a witch. And I’m like maybe this is part of a ceremony for how she gets her powers. And then I started thinking about okay what would she have to do to get her powers. And then I thought well maybe she has to do some sort of task. And then I started to think who would be the worst character to be in this situation, like who would struggle the most with this. And so then it made sense that a person that’s very indecisive would be in that position, and then also a person who really values her family, and so it’s really difficult for her to have this pressure to do something that is you know to the benefit of her family or possible detriment of her family, and it requires her to make decisions something that she’s very not good at. So I usually start with a sort of scenario or plot for my books and then essentially I’m trying to figure out which character is most ill-equipped to be in that situation and to get that task done because for me it makes it a lot more interesting and easier for me to think of conflict that they’re going to come up against and to see their character journey when they’re a person in a position that is very very much not for them. Basically tailored to be the worst situation possible.

JES: Without revealing any spoilers for Blood Like Fate, which is the sequel coming out later this year, is that still a struggle for Voya?

LISELLE: She has a different struggle now. This is the first sequel I’ve written, so there were two ways I was learning about how you can move forward with a character journey in a sequel: you can carry on the same sort of difficulty that they had in the first book and just give them different kind of ways to confront it in a second book, or you can create a new difficulty for their character. And so in Blood Like Fate it’s something new. Voya still struggles a lot, it’s still very tailor-made for her to have a lot of difficulty going into that book, and still requires a lot of decisions, but there is definitely a different way that she is approaching them in this book.

JES: Does Blood Like Fate pick up right where Blood Like Magic ends, or is there a time jump?

There’s a bit of a time jump. It’s a few months in between, so it’s now winter, which was a little bit hard for me. Winter is not my season, I do not enjoy it, but just the way the timeline had to be. I want them to have some space between the two books versus kind of picking up right away, partially because I think when you have that jump in timeline you can have a bunch of things that have kind of happened in between that characters are immediately having to confront right off the bat, so that was a big part of making that decision. There are also some plot things that just like needed that extra time. It’s very wintry. I think the cover they did a really good job at having the cover reflect that it’s very snowy.

JES: I’ve spent a good chunk of this morning shoveling, so winter’s not my season right now either. Unprecedented snow in Timmins these days. Speaking of Timmins and Canada and winter, how much does your setting reflect the places that you’ve lived?

LISELLE: Very much so. I usually choose to set books places where I’ve lived because I feel like I have a stronger connection to the area. It’s a lot easier for me to have the setting become its own character if it’s a place that I’ve spent at least a year living and I’ve been really entrenched in it. And I feel like it’s easier to pick up on local things that you might want to incorporate into a book that can add that local colour, not just for people from that area reading it but also from people outside of the area. And so I definitely have a preference to set books in places where I’ve lived. I don’t particularly love setting it in places I’m not really familiar with unless it’s gonna be very vague, for example like it’s gonna be a cabin in the woods. I’m like okay there are many rural places that I can say vaguely this is where it is and focus the setting really hard on that cabin so that the character of the setting is all about that cabin and all the details about it without kind of worrying about what that area is like. But I do tend to like being able to set it in larger areas and towns and cities. These two books are set in Toronto. I have other books planned that will be set in Toronto. My third book that’s coming out in 2023 is set in Timmins and Kenogamissi Lake area, and then I have ideas for books down the line that’ll be set in Kingston, Ontario which is where I went to university (I went to Queens there). I really prefer to do that and then it’s nice for me because then when I do my research I can like go back to those places and I can spend a lot of time and I can go around. I find it really fun to kind of have landmarks that you can point to in the book and be like oh I know where that place is and you can go to it and you can visit. I find that to be a lot of fun.

JES: I did notice when I was reading Blood Like Magic there’s a lot of references to places in Toronto, but since it’s set in the future I’m assuming that you had to think about and imagine what Toronto might look like in 30 or however many years. I can’t remember how many years in the future it’s set. Can you talk a little bit about that process?

LISELLE: It’s really interesting because I would take landmarks that I knew and I’d try to imagine how they would be in that sort of future. When I was a teenager, I volunteered at the Art Gallery of Ontario for a couple years and it was a really formative part of my teenage life, and so that Grange area I put in the book specifically. The OCAD building, so the Ontario College of Arts and Design, but this is a future in which STEM is really highly favoured and the arts have really fallen out of favour and so in that world OCAD is shut down and now this is the headquarters for that multi-billion dollar genetics company. And so things like that where I take places I love and I transform them. There’s one spot where it’s actually the old location of Black Market Vintage, that’s a little easter egg in there, and so the basement of that I’ve made into this like underground arts hub. And so it’s been transformed in that way even though it’s a space that exists in like a space that was something else because it’s already kind of moved on from there. They live in the Etobicoke area by Long Branch so I’ve changed the name. It’s now called Historic Long Branch. It’s that re-branding that you can feel in certain communities in Toronto where they’re trying to make it seem like something different than it originally was, but a lot of the features of that area have stayed, whereas surface things have changed. I think that tends to be something that comes up a lot in Toronto as well. There are some areas that stay very much the same, but a lot of the surface things change, the stores, the shops, the people that are able to afford living there, things like that. That was kind of how I thought about everything. I had to pick a place and then I had to think really hard about what might this look like in the next 30 years.

JES: You actually explore potential ways that social issues might change or advance over the next 30 some odd years, including trans rights and issues of race. What was the thought process that you went through for those, noting of course that at no point do you try to indicate that things have been resolved in the future, that these are ongoing issues. Can you talk about that?

LISELLE: I always find social change is significantly slower than technology, so I knew going into it that even though I was going to have this very advanced technology, the social change would be slower and would be dragging alongside behind it. A lot of the time I was taking things that exist or that are kind of coming up and just giving it a little bit of nudge forward. In the case of police brutality, I think at the stage that we are now we kind of have this celebration of like one or two or three convictions, and so imagining in 30 years for me it didn’t feel realistic that that would stop, but it felt realistic that the consequences might be a little bit more. Not completely satisfying, but you know pitched forward into the future of where we are now. And even in the case of technology surrounding medical transition, I looked up what processes they’re looking into now technology-wise and I bumped it into the future and I made it possible, but then of course there’s still this issue that you know trans folks are facing in the book in which the technology has advanced, but the sort of genetic idea that they have in place it’s not accounting for trans folks. So it’s still kind of like we want to stick with what genetic fact is quote unquote because we don’t want to rock the boat. Those sorts of things butting up against each other to me felt realistic and that’s really what I wanted for the story. I wanted to paint something that felt like it could be our future.

JES: One thing I noticed that I liked a lot was that you you explored these things but you kind of sprinkle very brief moments throughout the book. You didn’t linger too long on any one subject, so it felt very natural. I actually I have the book in front of me and I marked off a passage that stuck with me that I really liked and I want to read it very briefly and then ask you to comment on it. So the situation is that Voya looks Luke up and down. Luke is a trans person and that makes him very uncomfortable to be looked up and down, and so he asks her not to do that and then she says that she’s sorry. The passage is: “Heat floods my face I’m sorry I won’t do that again part of me wants to go on a rant to explain myself and how much I didn’t mean that but I don’t sometimes you just need to say sorry and stop there.” I really liked that passage. I felt like it was a little bit of a nod to social media where the conversation gets sidetracked by a lot of people trying to explain their side of the things. What are your thoughts? Is that what you’re nodding to there?

LISELLE: When I include characters whose identity I don’t share, I’m really paying attention to people from that community, and those were a lot of the things that I had heard from trans folks on social media, things like misgendering. Very much this idea of please do not make this about you and like have this become so much a thing of you trying to explain yourself and trying not to feel like you have done something wrong and very much making it about I don’t want you to think that I am ignorant instead of you know it being about that trans person’s feelings and their experience. That’s kind of what I was trying to get at with her saying sorry and stopping instead of going on this whole thing and being like oh my god I’m so sorry and like you know I was just thinking about this and like all these explaining away and excuses that make it very much about the cis person’s reaction when it’s supposed to be about Luke’s feelings and his comfort. So that’s very much what that passage was trying to get across.

JES: Thank you. You’re agented now. Were you agented before you got your first book deal?

LISELLE: Yes, I was agented before I got my book deal and I’ve been with the same agent the whole time, Kristy Hunter at The Knight Agency, who is wonderful and fantastic.

JES: So what was the process for querying for you? Did did you query a lot and get a lot of rejections, or did you find someone quickly?

LISELLE: For me the process of querying Blood Like Magic was relatively quick. It was two and a half months for me to find an agent, but that was not the case for me across the board. Blood Like Magic is the third book I had written. I had written and queried two other books prior. My first one I was 18 and I didn’t really understand the landscape of publishing yet, and it was at that weird time where you had to mail in your query materials. It wasn’t like you could just like fire off an email. So I tried to find agents that would accept email queries and I could find like a very small amount. I sent off four. I didn’t follow follow proper querying format. I was really not savvy to it. I didn’t hear from anyone and I was immediately crushed and I was like “nope not gonna do this anymore.” I didn’t query a book again until I was 22, quite a bit later. I wrote a new second book and that one I queried on and off for two years. I ended up sending about 60 queries out with some full requests and things like that in between, and then it ultimately didn’t end up going anywhere and I shelved it. After I shelved it I realized it was problematic so then I was really glad that I hadn’t gotten that published. Then with Blood Like Magic I really buckled down to spend a lot of time editing it and revising it before I queried anyone because that’s something I kind of realized was a mistake in the past. I would be so anxious and impatient to query that I would do a draft and I would send out queries and I’d get rejections, and then I’d edit it and then I’d send it out again and then I’d do a little bit better, and each time I was doing a little bit better and I kind of just realized if I had worked really hard on revising everything the first time then maybe I would have a better chance. By the time I queried Blood Like Magic, it was a very different experience. I got full manuscript requests from agents pretty much right off the bat. I ended up sending out a bunch of queries, and Kristy contacted me around the two month mark. She offered representation and I took the two weeks that you take standardly to think about it, to let other agents know that you have an offer, and I got one other offer but I ultimately decided to go with Kristy because I felt that she had a really good vision for the book, I felt like she understood the book, she was really passionate and excited about it, and she had editorial experience. She had worked as an editorial assistant at a publishing house before and I really wanted an agent that would help me edit my book and help me work with it and make it better. Those were kind of things that were really important to me. She’s from a very reputable agency with authors signed there that I knew and that I really admired. N.K. Jemisin is an author with The Knight Agency that I super admire. We ended up signing together and that was kind of that process.

JES: Did you make significant edits to the book from when you submitted it to when you started actually getting a publisher?

LISELLE: Yes. We did six months worth of edits on the book going back and forth. We must have done like four rounds of editing. I rewrote like half the book during that time because my wonderful agent pointed out that I didn’t have any subplots at the time. I truly did not understand what subplots were and I learned what subplots were and I added them in and it made the book a million times better. I feel very strongly that we would not have gotten that published if I hadn’t fixed all of that. We went back and forth and then we sent it off to editors for submission.

JES: Can you give me an example of a subplot that didn’t exist in the original version?

LISELLE: I’m trying to think of without spoiling…

JES: Without spoilers.

LISELLE: There is a whole subplot with an ancestor that Voya finds out about that she didn’t know about and that her family very clearly does not want to discuss at all. That character did not exist at all, that subplot did not exist at all, including how it connects to other characters in the story. None of that existed whatsoever. And if you read the book, that’s actually a really huge part of it, so that really made a big difference. That strengthened other things that already exist. There’s a fashion show in the book that Alex, who’s one of Voya’s cousins, is preparing for and in the original version it just kind of happened whereas in this version I made it more of a subplot so it was more pulled together. You saw from the beginning that they were kind of talking about the fashion show you saw Voya working with her cousin and developing a relationship, deepening their character ties as they moved towards the fashion show, and you saw a confrontation and a fallout from the fashion show. It became a lot more in-depth. It connected to the rest of the story a lot better. I think that’s the big thing that adding the subplots changed is that I had some things that were happening in the book that seemed disjointed and seemed like events that were occurring and they weren’t really connecting to the main plot threads. That’s really what changed: I was connecting them very strongly to the main plot thread so there was nothing that was happening that wasn’t connecting to the plot or character development in some way.

JES: Do you use any kind of [craft books] or guides to help you plot your books or outline your books?

LISELLE: Yes so when I originally wrote Blood Like Magic I did not which is why I had to rewrite half of it twice because I didn’t really have structure in place and I kept figuring things out as it went. But now I do use the Save the Cat structure. I use a mix of Save the Cat from Jessica Brody’s book and Story Genius which is a book from Lisa Cron. I use a mix of their techniques. There’s also some other craft books that I’ve read as I’ve gone on and I like slowly incorporate bits and pieces of those as well into my stories. I would say for the most part I’m really using the Save the Cat structure and incorporating other little bits into it and kind of changing it as I need it.

JES: So how about the process for signing with the publisher. How did that come about?

LISELLE: The submission process, which is essentially your agent querying for you, we ended up using basically the pitch that I used in my query letter for Blood Like Magic because it worked out really well. So that was the pitch that my agent took and she created the list of editors that she thought would be interested in the book, and I looked over those. She shared all that information with me. I think different agents have different styles. With my agent she shows me all of those things. She shows me all the responses from editors. I know some agents have different preferences and some authors have different preferences, but that’s how we did it. So she essentially sent an email off to all of the editors with the pitch and basically said “hey do you want to read this if so let me know and I’ll send you the full manuscript.” That was the style of our submission which is to solicit the manuscript so they email back and they say yes and you send it. Some agents will send the manuscript right off the bat. Again, all different styles. And then it was just waiting after that original burst of like people being like “yeah of course I want to read it “which is very exciting and you know very validating to think of like editors at major publishing houses being like “oh yeah I’m absolutely interested and want to check this out.” And after that there’s a lot of waiting. I was on submission for four and a half months something like that which I think is actually like not bad at all. I think now especially during the pandemic those wait times have increased dramatically. At the time when I was going through it it was excruciating, but you know in the grand scheme of things it was a very standard amount of time. And rejections would come in and we would read them and we would kind of decide whether that was something we wanted to change or not. A good amount of my rejections were that editors didn’t really like the genre mix because it’s a blend of fantasy and sci-fi. Unclear whether they didn’t like it at all or they didn’t like the way I had done it. But those pieces of feedback were me and my agent were like well we’re not going to change that so we’ll continue moving forward and sending on to more. And then thankfully Sarah McCabe at then Simon Pulse reached out and said “hey I’m still reading but I’m really excited and I’d love to do have a sequel set up for this do you have any information about that” and during that time I had plotted out the entire sequel for the book and I had an outline and a synopsis, so we were able to send that over to her. I do highly recommend if you’re like on submission and you have a series that you’re wanting to pitch to start thinking about what the other books might look like in case editors ask about that. It’s also nice to know that in advance for when you’re going back to working on the first book. Then about a week later, we had an offer from her to purchase the book. That ended up being the only offer but it was great for me because I really wanted to work with Sarah. I was really familiar with books from Simon Pulse and I was really excited about the authors and her as an editor, so we ended up signing together. Simon Pulse was later dissolved and the book moved to Margaret K McElderry. I still have the same editor. Everything honestly is the same, it’s just a different imprint name. From there it was just okay now we’re working on the book together.

JES: Were there a lot of revisions then again with the editor?

LISELLE: Yeah, I mean standard amount I guess. We did two rounds of larger developmental edits. I thankfully did not have to once again rewrite half of the book. I’d figure things out by then. They weren’t like enormous edits. And then we did our more meticulous line edits, then the copy editor came in and we did those copy edits, and then final proof pages just to kind of make sure everything was all right. That was basically the end of it, but it felt like lighter edits because I had done such huge edits beforehand. It was actually very reasonable.

JES: How many months was it to have the finalized book after you got your book deal?

LISELLE: I am not sure. From when we got the offer it was like four months for us to get the contract and sign the contract and I wasn’t doing anything during that time, and then it was a period of months to wait to get the first edit letter. I think the first developmental edit I spent like a month on and the next one I think I spent like another month on and then the rest were like two weeks each time, but they’re spread out because it’s dependent on when my editor has time to get to it and juggle it with her other books, and when the copy editor gets back to us. I was working on edits for that book I want to say like four-ish months before the book came out, so we were still doing things you know butting up against the release, which is pretty commonplace. Even for Blood Like Fate I still have potentially one more edit coming up, so it’s kind of just dependent on how the scheduling is. I would say it was probably like three or four months worth of edits altogether working time but four months of waiting for the contract.

JES: That’s good for authors to know.

LISELLE: Right. Contracts can take a long time, and it’s good for authors to know that because usually your first payment is tied to signing the contract. I think that was something I knew already, so I was prepared for that, but it’s great to be realistic about that because I would hate for the horror story of an author that’s like “I immediately quit my job when they offered” and then it’s like “oh no.” Because sometimes contracts can take a very long time. I have friends who’ve waited six months for a contract because they had so many terms to go back and forth with each other. It’s okay if you quit your day job, just please wait until you have your contract.

JES: They’ve been talking a lot in the industry about publishers moving down to a four payment structure for advances and how that’s affecting agents and that sort of thing. Was that how they did it for you?

LISELLE: My publisher has always been fantastic. My payments are not cut that much. They’re usually three. It’s contract and then usually dependent on me handing in my edits. I know some publishers will have it based on when your book comes out, which I don’t particularly like the idea of and I haven’t been in that situation thankfully. I’ve always been very happy with my publisher.

JES: So when you handed in your manuscript, you got your final payment.

LISELLE: Yeah.

JES: That works nice because when the book gets published that’s when your royalties kick in ideally.

LISELLE: Hopefully you sold that much, but usually…probably a while after.

JES: Oh, that’s right. You’ve got to earn out first. Forgot about that.

LISELLE: Yeah.

JES: You have an author website, lisellesambury.ca. At what point did you set up that website?

LISELLE: I set up that website quite early. I think I basically put up a website the second that we had gotten the offer I started working on it but I will say for me I’m a person that’s interested in website design and I’ve done website design professionally before, and so it’s something I’m excited about and I’m interested in. Fr me it was really fun to get my website set up and get all those things together. I’d already had a blog website in the past, so I also wanted to pull that down and get an author one up. aThat’s why I didn’t mind. But I know quite a few authors will wait until a little bit closer to time, sometimes they’ll wait until they’ve announced their book deal so then they have a place for people to go at that point. Some authors will wait until later than that even. I think it kind of depends on how they feel and like if they’re like oh my gosh I have to hire someone, because in that case then you might want to wait until you get your advance payment versus if you’re a person like me and that’s something you do for fun you might do that sooner rather than later. I change my website all the time. That’s something I find fun. I think it’s good to have something set up when you know your book is going to be announced because then you can immediately direct people to your website and get that in people’s heads, and you always have somewhere for them to go. I just like that idea of funneling people and knowing that if people Google me they’ll be able to find a website with all my information.

JES: And I imagine since you worked in social media in the past that you have various social media channels set up.

LISELLE: Yeah.

JES: What kind of content do you put on your social media?

LISELLE: That as well. It kind of depends per platform. I started on Twitter and I slowly added one platform at a time. Then I added Instagram and then I had Youtube and then I added Tiktok now. I go one at a time based on what I’m interested in just so I don’t get overwhelmed with like trying a bunch of new platforms at once. It really depends. I feel like on Instagram I kind of will post whatever pretty book pictures I have on my stories. I’ll share what I’m doing throughout the day versus on Youtube I’ll share you know kind of more structured content. I have some writing craft things on there, I have writing vlogs that show my writing process as I’m going through it, I did a little series there called debut diaries where I talked all about the things that were happening during my debut year. On Twitter it’s become a little bit more updates wise. I mostly lurk on Twitter, but you know I’ll post relevant things like if I have an event coming up or if you know there’s like a giveaway I’m doing. Tiktok is very as I feel like it. I’ll post a video on there, it’s not super structured. I would say Youtube is my most structured social media platform. I consistently post once a week there and I’m very dedicated to it, whereas other social media platforms I’m a little bit more loose with it. I always find that interesting about you know working professionally in social media. Absolutely I know all the things that I could be doing to be a quote-unquote perfect social media person, but I don’t want to do them. I don’t want to post on Instagram every day multiple times a day. I don’t want to so I don’t. That’s kind of the distinction between knowing the things professionally and kind of deciding workload-wise what I want to do, because you know at the end of the day, and I know people have different opinions about this, but to me at the end of the day I’m now an author. I’m not a social media marketer. My priority is that I do my author things and then you know I make time for Youtube and other things.

JES: Do you have a schedule that you follow for your writing or just whenever you feel like it?

LISELLE: It depends. I usually do like a project sort of schedule. I’ll look at the week and I’ll see what I have to get done, and then I’ll kind of decide from there. So right now I don’t have any what I would call quote-unquote active deadlines, and so I’m kind of looking at projects that I have coming up. I’ll work for three days this week on x project because I have the time for it and I know this is coming up, I’ll work for two days this week on x project, and I basically just kind of look at every week and I plan that out. It is very planned out in that way, but sometimes it’s stricter than other times. For example, if my editor sends me copy edits and says these are due in 10 days, then I’m going to get that done for sure in 10 days, and I schedule that out versus you know when it’s a time like now where I don’t have anything super pressing where I can pick and choose what I want to work on or if I want to look at uncontracted projects, projects I haven’t sold yet. If I don’t have anything super pressing, sometimes I’ll just not do anything which was like mostly what I did last week.

JES: Well during pandemic times we need to give ourselves a little more forgiveness to to just be lazy.

LISELLE: Exactly and sometimes I’m like I just need the break. I need the time to let my head do whatever, refill the creative well, read books, do what I like.

JES: How much help did you get from your publisher and your agent for the marketing and publicity of the book?

LISELLE: The marketing and publicity just comes from my publishing house. They put together a marketing plan and they showed that marketing plan to me and my agent, and then me and my agent we could see okay this is what they’re going to do for us, and then we would ask for additional things. Which I always recommend to new authors now, especially having had my whole debut experience, is that if you want your publisher to do something, ask them. Always ask them, because at worst they say no and you’re back where you were in the beginning, but at best they say yes and then you have one more thing off of your plate. and my publisher was fantastic. They did a lot of things for me that I asked for later, things like you know I didn’t see a Goodreads giveaway on the marketing plan… there’s those cool animated stickers on Instagram… can we get an animated cover, and they did that for the book. I had a really positive experience in that a lot of things I asked for, they did. I think the things that I did on my own were like my launch event on the day of, my Canadian publisher organized the Canadian launch for me so I had that with them as well, and then I organized one more event with a friend. There are a lot of events and requests that come through my publisher all the time that they basically siphon for me. Requests come through to them and they pass them on to me and say do you want to do it yes or no, and then I can let them know yes or no. I felt really supported which was really positive for me because you know you hear a lot of horror stories going into the industry. You do hear about unfortunately some authors whose publishers don’t really do anything at all and they feel really like thrown into the wind and left in the dust, and they feel like their book has been ignored. I’ve had a really wonderful experience with my publisher in that they’ve done a lot of great things for me. My marketing plan for the next book is even more extensive, so even more things will be happening. So yeah it’s been really great. They haven’t always said yes to absolutely everything I’ve asked for, but that’s reasonable and fine because they’ve said yes way more times and they’d say no. And there are certain things that I’ve just never asked for because I’m aware that it’s a touch too far. Like I wouldn’t have been like hey can we do an exclusive book box where you spend money to put my book in this exclusive box with all this swag and you send it to a bunch of people? I’m aware that that’s something that publishers do for lead titles, and got the feeling that my book was a mid-list title, and so I wasn’t going to ask for lead things. I was really happy with the publicity and marketing they did. Ones I did on my own were really only things I wanted to do. I did a few giveaways, I did some Youtube stuff, just because I would have done that anyway. That’s been my feeling with marketing. I really only do things on my own that I care to do. I didn’t do a pre-order campaign for example because it would have been really expensive for me to buy all those things and like mail out a bunch of stuff with the Canadian postal system being as it is, and so that’s something I decided not to do. Some authors feel very forced to do things because their publisher is not doing things, and so I was really fortunate that my publisher was doing a lot of things, so I didn’t feel that I needed to make up the gap by frantically doing a bunch of other things myself.

JES: There has been a lot of buzz about your book I have your media kit open in front of me, and it shows a list for the various honours. Of course, the really big one is the Governor General Literary Awards. You were a finalist. Tell me about the moment you found out you were a finalist.

LISELLE: It’s really funny because I was literally in bed and I noticed that my phone was pinging a lot. Usually I put my phone on silence as I sleep, but I guess I just didn’t bother that day or I just turned it back on from being asleep, and there were a lot of pings coming through. And I was like “oh that’s interesting” and at the time I knew that Indigo had put me on their Top 10 Teen Books of 2021 list, they had put Blood Like Magic there, and I’d been told that in advance and that it was going to be revealed soon and so I thought that’s what it was. And so I was like “ah leave that for a minute and then I’ll go back to it..” So I went about my morning routine and then I saw you know a tweet from E.K. Johnston who’s another author, and she was like “oh my god Liselle look at your phone.” I was like okay I don’t really know what’s happening, I guess people are really excited about this Indigo list. And then it said Governor General Award Finalist, and I’d had email from my publisher also being really excited, my Canadian publisher being super excited about it, and the Governor General Awards themselves. I hadn’t known much about it, so I was looking it up and then I was like oh this is like a pretty big deal. It was really exciting, it was really shocking, because within my publisher we like submit a little form that has a bunch of information about us and they take it and submit us to whatever awards, and I never really inquired about it and I never expected to be nominated for any awards. I really wasn’t paying attention to the award circuit per se, so it’s a really pleasant surprise.

JES: Was there an event that you needed to attend virtually?

LISELLE: There was not. In previous years they’ve done like an in-person event in Ottawa, and then I think they were deciding what to do with this one, but I don’t think anything ended up coming to fruition. So then they later sent us an email which was either you know “yay you are the winner” or “not this time but thank you so much and congratulations on being a finalist” which was the email that I had gotten. And then the “please keep quiet until we announce it.” It feels like honestly cliche to say “it’s just an honour to be nominated” but it’s true.

JES: Cliches exist usually because they’re true.

LISELLE: It was really exciting. That will continue to be a thing, I guess, [the Governor General] will always be associated with the book and that’s really exciting. It was just really you know uplifting and validating for me to see the book acknowledged in that way. All authors we all work so hard on our books and that’s not always acknowledged, and so it was really a big deal to me and really exciting to have that happen.

JES: I see there were various places that picked you. You mentioned Indigo. Amazon Editors you were the pick for June, Kobo you were the June, CCBC Best Books of the Year for 2021, so lots of buzz about this book. That’s really exciting! Congratulations. You got a Kirkus starred review too, which is a big deal.

LISELLE: Yeah, yeah, thank you. It was. I really did not expect all those things to happen. I was excited for my book to be out and was like yay the book will be out in the world and people can read it and I hope they like it and that was kind of where I had stopped. I think I was very realistic. I was like I’m not going to hit like a New York Times bestseller list or anything, and so I just really want people to enjoy it and read it and I would love to earn out and that was kind of my like expectation or wishes for the book. And so it was really amazing because it really did exceed expectations, and it’s very humbling and exciting to see it resonate with so many people.

JES: And you had a couple of major endorsements on your book. The author of Cemetery Boys I think did a blurb for you. How did you go about getting those? Did your publisher take care of that or did you have to reach out to authors?

LISELLE: My editor had a list of people that she wanted to ask. There was some people where I had already kind of communicated with them, and so it seemed like it would be better if I just went ahead and asked them myself. So we asked a few people and I was very very excited and happy that Tracy and Aiden both blurbed the book. I absolutely loved both Cemetery Boys and Legendborn and so it was really really exciting. Because blurbs are kind of a weird hidden thing like not everybody gets blurbs on their book, and so it was kind of you know being realistic going into it as maybe not everyone will have time to do this and then we might get none and that’s okay. No book fails just because it doesn’t have blurbs, but you know as an author you always kind of secretly hope that you know authors that you admire will read it and enjoy it and so that was really exciting. And I’m really thankful to Aiden and Tracy for taking the time to do that because yeah it does take time to sit down and read a book and write a blurb for it, and writing blurbs is kind of difficult. I find I’ve now been reading some books myself and doing blurbing and it’s hard to come up with a nice succinct piece of text to say about the book.

JES: To close things out, do you have any words of encouragement for pre-published authors? Was that a point where you almost gave up in your journey?

LISELLE: I think I’ve always had an on off period with writing. When I was 18 and I’d had those four rejections and I was like okay well I guess I’m not particularly great at this, and then I was busy with school anyway and so that kind of became an off period. And then I kind of explored doing short fiction, I did some short adult literary fiction for a while, and then I found my way back. But for meI always think for pre-published authors about following your passion, doing the projects that you are passionate about even if you’re not sure that there’s a place in publishing. I think especially for BIPOC authors. Sometimes it can feel like is publishing not open to my stories? And so for me I always feel like you have to write the story that you’re most passionate about and go forward with that one. I had my own doubts going into Blood Like Magic of like oh my gosh this is a genre blend and I know some people just don’t like those, feeling that sort of pressure and thinking about how much room is there for me as a black author. But I’m really happy that I stuck with the book that I wanted to write because at the end I ended up with a book that I wanted to write being published, and I think it would be really difficult to kind of write a book trying to cater to what you think publishing wants and then to end up publishing something that you don’t feel really represents who you are as an author or your writing or your passion. I find it’s a lot easier to complete projects when you’re passionate about them and when you’re excited about it and when you’re really looking forward to that story.

JES: So tell everybody where they can find your book and where they can find you to follow you and support you.

LISELLE: I have a website lisellesambury.ca. You can find all of the buy links, purchase links, Goodreads links, all of that on my website for all of my books. Also some information about upcoming books as well. I also post when I have events coming up there, too. I can also be found on social media on Twitter and Instagram and Tiktok and Youtube, all under Liselle Sambury because it pays to have a unique name. I post on all those. I post once a week [on Youtube] all sorts of things, so writing craft videos, videos about different writing topics, different publishing topics, or even if you want to see all the vlogs I’ve done detailing me working on each book. I have playlists and things like that so you can watch those as well.