Melanie at Mabel’s Fables in Toronto.

By Melanie J. Fishbane

This month, Maud (Penguin, 2017) is releasing in paperback. And I feel one thing…Gratitude.

In this unstable publishing climate, not all books go to paperback.

It isn’t the natural progression it once was.

My publisher—Penguin Random House of Canada and its imprint, Penguin Teen—continue to support the book with digital ads and worked hard on the paperback edition.

It looks beautiful.

I’m also grateful for what the Maud taught me about the process of publication, of having something now out in the world for people to read and how to step into one’s “author self”—whatever that is supposed to mean for you.

Grateful because I had hoped that the book would become part of the conversation about Montgomery, to encourage new readership and it has. To inspire readers to “keep climbing” to whatever goal they want to pursue.

Grateful because I’ve been able to travel and talk to people about Montgomery across North America, people who didn’t know of their personal connections to her, or about her struggles as a woman to be educated and get published in late 19th century Canada.

Grateful because through the wonders of online shipping, Maud has been read in Canada and the United States, and has found its way to Australia, Japan, Poland and Brazil.

I discovered one day that it was being reviewed on an Italian blog!

These things are extraordinary to me—that someone cared enough to want to read my book and have it shipped across the world.

Grateful because Maud connected with young readers in ways I never could have anticipated.

One reader I met at a book signing later contacted me to do an interview for a book report she was doing for school and, later, told me she received an “A!”

Grateful because a group of teen readers from Saskatchewan told me that they had passed the book around and had questions about what happened to my characters, about L.M. Montgomery and her books, and where they could find out most of these details. (I did have these things on my website, but it was lovely to see that the book inspired such passionate questions!)

When I was signing at a bookstore in PEI, a tourist from Croatia had heard from the woman who runs the birthplace that I was going to be there and had her parents drive her to Summerside to meet me. 

Melanie signing books at the L.M. Montgomery Conference.

And grateful because last June at the L.M. Montgomery Institute Conference, a graduate student spoke about Maud for 20 minutes—giving me permission to stay in the room while she did. And she said nice things! The book is now included in her master’s thesis. (I hope she’ll let me read it!)

It has been an honor to connect to these people. It was nervous-making putting a creation out into the world, having no control over what it was going to do. But Maud has shown me that when you allow things to unfold, beautiful things emerge.

Cynsational Notes

Author photo by Ayelet Tsabari

Reporter Melanie J. Fishbane covers Canadian publishing for Cynsations. She holds an M.F.A. in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an M.A. in History from Concordia University.

With more than seventeen years’ experience in children’s publishing, she lectures internationally on children’s literature. A freelance writer and social media consultant, her work can be found in magazines, such as The Quill & Quire.

Melanie also loves writing essays and her first one, “My Pen Shall Heal, Not Hurt:” Writing as Therapy in L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted,” is included in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years 1911-1942 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). And her short story, “The New Girl,” was published in the Zoetic NonBinary Review.

Her first YA novel, Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery, was published by Penguin Teen in 2017. The novel was featured on the Huffington Post’s Summer Reading List, a top pick for the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading Kids Summer Reading and winner of Hamilton Public Library’s Next Top Novel.

Melanie lives in Toronto with her partner and their very entertaining cat, Merlin.

Follow Melanie on Twitter @MelanieFishbane and like her on Facebook. Read an article by Melanie on Earning & Celebrating Success.