It’s official! Super-Agent literaticat says I can share the news that’s had me over the moon for the past three weeks or so….
She sold my picture book to Chronicle Books! Here’s the official announcement from Publishers Marketplace:
| Children’s: Picture book | Kate Messner’s OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW, in which a girl on a ski trip discovers the secrets of the animal kingdom beneath the snow, to Melissa Manlove at Chronicle, by Jennifer Laughran at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (World). |
…and here are some of the juicy details.
If you read my blog much, you know that I love spending time outdoors in every season — especially winter. Really astute blog readers might even remember this entry, where I talked about a snowshoe trip I took with my 7th grade students in the Adirondacks. We saw tracks like these…
…disappearing into a crevice in the packed snow and heard all about the tunnels of the subnivean zone, under the snow. I was enchanted. So I started reading and researching and writing, and playing around with the poetry of snow, and then I went to the Kindling Words retreat and shared the manuscript with a new writer friend, Joan. She loved it and gave me a few ideas for revision. In early February, I sent OVER AND UNDER THE SNOW off to Jennifer, my agent. She fell in love and sent it out to a few editors she thought might fall in love, too.
One of them did. She took the book through the acquisitions process, and Chronicle’s formal offer came a few weeks ago.
I am thrilled — more than thrilled — to be working with a house that publishes such beautiful, beautiful picture books. Plus, there’s the added bonus of Ivy & Bean. My daughter LOVES the Ivy & Bean series and was very excited when she found out it’s the same publisher. I told her this kind of makes her related to Ivy and Bean in a way…like distant cousins or something.
Since then, my house has been a chatty, excited place — even more so than usual. There’s been a lot of squealing and jumping up and down and imagining what the illustrations will look like. I’m early for the Thankful Thursday blog post, but this time, I was too thankful to wait.