HARPERCOLLINS BOUGHT MY NOVEL!!!!!

Emily J. Smith
6 min readOct 28, 2023

My debut, NOTHING SERIOUS, will be on shelves in Feb 2025.

First of all, I’m dead. On the ground. It does not feel real that my novel will be published, in bookstores, for anyone to read. But here we are.

The image above is a visual writers know well. To see this card posted on the internet is to understand that a book has been sold, a wish has been granted, the poster has, in some sort of rigid but real sense, become legitimized. I’ve dreamed about this image, with my name in it, for a very long time.

Writing is excruciatingly lonely. Novels, especially. You have to be totally delusional to stare at a word document for years and years, spinning sentences into some form of a story, and believing, despite all the odds that 1) you’ll turn the mess of a document into a book, 2) someone else will ever want to read said book, and 3) one of the few remaining companies in a much dying industry will somehow want to publish it. THEN to do all this without any indication whatsoever that you have even a little bit of a shot — no MFA, no contracts, no agent, just you and your Word Doc. Is…utterly insane. Which is how I felt for years and years, until a few months ago.

In August, my agent reached out two weeks after we started submitting my book to publishers (I finally got an agent…

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Emily J. Smith

Writer and tech professional. My debut novel, NOTHING SERIOUS, is out Feb '25 from William Morrow / HarperCollins (more at emjsmith.com).