What if living forever was a death sentence?
Decades after the discovery that a small percentage of the population has stopped ageing, the Avalonia Zone is in crisis. From overpopulation to food shortages, the ‘Undying’ have been blamed for the state’s problems, banished to the fringes of society, and punished for every minor infraction.
When sixteen-year-old Sadie takes the fall for an attack by a rebel group, The Alchemists, she suddenly finds herself wrenched away from her quiet life and from her ailing father. Armed with little help and even less knowledge, Sadie is thrust into a cold and cryptic ‘correctional facility’ – The Tower. Here she’ll have to rethink everything she’s been told about the Undying population in an attempt to save the life she knows, protect a group of unlikely friends, and give voice to the voiceless in a society on the brink of catastrophic upheaval.
Melissa Welliver
After a long silence from me on the blog (sorry), please accept a guest post as an offering, from UKYA author Melissa Welliver all about the journey of her debut title, recently re-released by UCLan Publishing (she has also, in between, had 2 dystopian YA novels published by Chicken House, both of which are great fun):
From Self Publishing to Traditional
In 2019, I signed with my second agent and went out on submission with the book that would become The Undying Tower. We edited over the summer and then in late 2019, we hit the submission trenches… around 4 months before the pandemic hit. Obviously this meant we were submitting to editors that had been sent on Furlough. And this early in the pandemic, the work-from-home strategies hadn’t really been put into action, so we entered a traffic jam of manuscripts all seeking an editor. This went on for 11 months and I quietly lost hope for TUT and started a new project.
In November 2020, almost a year after we went on sub, we had interest from a digital first publisher called Agora Books. They were small but mighty, and really loved the book. They wanted to schedule a 2021 release and, while there was no advance attached, the royalties looked good. It wasn’t quite a traditional publishing deal in all the ways I thought it would be, but it was an offer. I bit their metaphorical hands off and we got going.
The book came out in October 2021 to a small but enthusiastic fan base. Over the next 6 months we sold maybe 500ish copies and I worked steadily on the sequel. In March 2022, the Agora team emailed to ask for a meeting. Assuming it was about book 2, I logged on, eager to chat about future plotlines. But sadly, the future of any plotlines had to go on hold, because the pandemic hadn’t been kind to small publishers. Agora told me they were folding, and the trilogy – plus distribution of book 1 – were going with it.
My editor was great and despite my initial concerns, she gave me all the publication files to allow me to self-publish, in the hopes of earning enough to self-fund book 2. I had signed up to a lot of festivals over the summer of 2022 that I needed to sell the book at, so this was a good short-term solution. However, the sheer workload of self-publishing soon took its toll. By the time I did my last summer gig, a panel at UCLan in late September, I was exhausted.
After the event, the UCLan editorial team pulled me for a chat to say they were pleased with my work and to ask about the book, so I explained it was self-published and in a moment of madness, I pitched the idea to them. They seemed enthusiastic, so I went home and asked my agent to submit The Undying Tower to them directly. And six months later in spring 2023, the mighty UCLan offered – an advance! Bookseller distribution! – for summer 2024.
So I always tell this little book’s story as this: once upon a time, there was a book that wouldn’t die. And The Undying Tower certainly lives up to its name to this day.
