Publisher: Ballantine Books (Penguin Random House)
Genre: LGBTQ+ fantasy
Formats: $29 hardcover | $13.99 ebook | $20 audiobook
Released: July 16, 2024
Meg Shaffer is the author of The Wishing Game, which was a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist, a Book of the Month finalist for Book of the Year, a number-one Barnes & Noble bestseller, and a Reader’s Digest Best Book of the Year. Shaffer holds an MFA in TV and screenwriting from Stephens College and lives in Kentucky with her husband and two cats. The cats are not writers.
Inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Shaffer’s second novel, The Lost Story, is a fairy tale for grownups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case. As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell vanished in a West Virginia state park, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived. Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Jeremy is a famous missing persons investigator, while Rafe is a reclusive artist. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end when vet tech Emilie Wendel hires Jeremy to find her long-lost sister—the long-lost sister he and Rafe knew while living in a hidden kingdom. Now the former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories.
When asked what contributed to the book landing on USA Today bestseller list, Shaffer said: “Getting onto a bestseller list feels like climbing a wall, except you can’t use a ladder. You just have to pile a bunch of small stones together until you can scramble up high enough to crawl over the top.” Shaffer had significant support to help her amass the “stones” needed to become a bestseller, starting with prior fiction she wrote under pseudonyms, including romance she published with Harlequin and independently. These experiences helped her understand the various factors that lead to sales, including Ballantine’s advertising campaign on social media, Goodreads, and retailer sites. The publisher also sent out advance copies to reviewers and influencers, which led to mentions in outlets including LibraryReads, Indie Next, Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, Huffington Post, ScreenRant, Gizmodo, and others. Her agent (Amy Tannenbaum, Jane Rotrosen Agency) got the book to Amazon editors, which resulted in the novel becoming an Amazon Editors’ Pick for July.
Even with support, Shaffer still put in additional effort herself. She created shareable social content so fans could help amplify promotion on their own accounts, and she sent bookplates to independent bookstores, which prompted many to feature her book in displays or post about signed copies. She also organized book events for the release week and organized a pre-release campaign for signed copies through her local independent bookstore, Carmichael’s in Louisville, Kentucky. “Between the events and my signed copy pre-order campaign, that probably sold an extra 500 copies. That might not sound like a lot, but that can be the difference between getting on a list and just missing it by a hair,” Shaffer said.
Emily Wenstrom is a freelance writer and platforming expert and writes award-winning speculative fiction for teens and adults as E. J. Wenstrom.
E. J. Wenstrom believes in complicated heroes, horrifying monsters, purple hair dye and standing to the right on escalators so the left side can walk. She writes dark speculative fiction for adults and teens, including her new release, a young adult dystopian novel titled Departures (August 10, 2021). When she isn’t writing fiction, E. J. Wenstrom is a regular contributor to DIY MFA and BookRiot, and co-hosts the Fantasy+Girl Podcast. Learn more at her website.
