Chapter Two: We Publish Our First Novel

Hello!

We’re Homeward Books, and we have three very exciting pieces of news:

• We’re publishing our first book!

• You can pre-order it right now!

• We’re hosting book-rec parties in New York City and Seattle!

More on all of this below.

With esteem,

Lara, Huw, Rachel and Rebekah

We’re delighted to introduce The Witch of Prague

A novel about body autonomy, coming of age, fighting authoritarianism, surviving misogyny—and also, unicorns—set in 1960s Czechoslovakia.

Get your hands on a copy via our Kickstarter, which launched five minutes ago!

We even made a video to tell you all about it.

The Kickstarter supports both The Witch of Prague and Homeward Books. That’s because publishing one book will allow us to publish another, and another, and another…

Since we’re asking you to spend money, let’s be clear who’s making money out of this: our author, illustrator, book designer and art director. We don’t pay ourselves—the four of us work for free. Any “profit” goes into the publication costs of our next book (which is being designed as we speak!)

We’re celebrating publishing a real book—join us!

We’re gathering with fellow book lovers in New York City and Seattle to celebrate The Witch of Prague and indie publishing’s continued existence (especially ours).

You need a ticket for these, but one ticket covers both you and a friend. As usual, bring a book along to recommend to others.

Not to brag, but we throw a pretty good party: people told us that our event at WorldCon was the “best party of the bunch”. One person actually said “coolest”. Another, more realistically, told us that they had “a lovely time”.

How we discovered, acquired and edited The Witch of Prague

We’d like to share our book-publishing journey with you: the process of taking a book from manuscript to physical object. (It’s a lot.)

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Our dream book

When the four of us started Homeward, Lara told us about a novel called The Age of Ice, which she thought represented the ideal book we wanted to publish: unusual, incredible, underrated.

It turned out that Huw knew its author, J.M. Sidorova. He also knew that Sidorova had an unpublished novel; he’d been reading drafts of it for the past decade. Would Sidorova let the rest of us read it?

She would, and we did, each in our corners of the world: Rachel and Huw in Seattle, Lara in New York, Rebekah in New Zealand.

We’d message each other about where we were up to, what we thought. Rebekah felt like the book was a dream she couldn’t forget. Lara had the sense that she was reading a book out of time—it felt as though it had been famous in the 60s in Czechia, and had just been translated. Rachel cried (and would do this on every subsequent read).

We couldn’t believe our luck when Sidorova agreed to publish The Witch of Prague with us. First, though, the manuscript needed an editor’s eye.

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The developmental edit

Rachel and Sidorova met in a bagel shop in Seattle last fall. They talked for two and a half hours about the themes of the book, and how those themes unfolded.

“It was incredible to just come to conclusions together,” says Rachel, “and then have Sidorova go and implement them.” Rachel has commented on many novel manuscripts—for friends and enemies alike—but she’s never worked over a novel so collaboratively.

Sidorova describes writing as like “making mist”, and Rachel’s questions as a process of clearing away the mist, requiring Sidorova to make decisions about what she’d put on the page. Things she hadn’t been able to see or commit to at the time of writing. “And then I go away and make more mist,” says Sidorova, “and I come back and we talk about it again.”

They met three times: again in the winter and the spring. Each meeting was narrower in focus, but just as long. First, they talked through plot lines, then discussed specific scenes and moments, then a few key paragraphs. Then just the final page.

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The author’s experience

We asked J.M. Sidorova what being edited was like: 

“Editing a novel with Homeward Books is what editing should be like and what I imagine it to have looked like when books ruled the world. My experience has been at least as good, professionally, and in some ways better than when I worked with Scribner on my first novel, The Age of Ice.

“I should say I am not one of those writers whose work births like Venus from the sea foam, fully formed and perfect. And with The Witch in particular, I came into the process already knowing that I wanted to change—to improve—certain load-bearing elements, and that’s what I said I wanted to do. But I did not yet know how to do it. 

“Rachel asked me quite a few questions, and then, like a seer in a fairy tale, she essentially told me this: there are three paths; I can take any one of them but have to walk it all the way. She mapped them for me with uncanny precision—my own thinking along those paths had been muddled and meandering, in comparison. And so I went home to ponder my choices, and then, since everything was illuminated, I suddenly saw a fourth path, and that’s what I took, actually.

“This was the first and biggest breakthrough, and since then we had a few more of them, of varying magnitude, and everything just kept getting better and better. Who is to say working with a publisher should not be a fun and rewarding time for a writer?”

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The book design

More about this next time!