From Alexis Hall, the acclaimed author of Boyfriend Material, comes Glitterland, a deeply emotional romance about heartbreak, hope, and learning to love against all the odds. In this conversation, author Alexis Hall and his editor Mary Altman chat about all things Glitterland, the Spires series, and so much more!
Mary, what inspired you to approach Alexis with the idea that the time is right, right now, to re-release GLITTERLAND and the Spires series?
I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been a fan of Alexis’s work for years. I fell in love with Glitterland not too long after it first released and have been eagerly following the series ever since. The first book Alexis and I got to work on together (Boyfriend Material) was quite different in tone, but it has the same deeply empathetic and nuanced understanding of character that made me fall in love with Glitterland’s Ash and Darian—which inspired me to pull Glitterland off my shelf again and rediscover everything I loved about it the first time around.
From there it was a pretty easy hop from I love this series to I think this series needs to be in more libraries and bookstores to I think Sourcebooks can help make that happen. So working together on Boyfriend Material sparked the idea, but everything else just unfolded very naturally from there.
Alexis, what was your reaction when Mary broached bringing GLITTERLAND back out, to a much wider potential audience?
Well, I was thrilled, obviously. It’s a complex feeling because it’s a book I worked on quite a long time ago when I was quite a different writer in quite a different place. But getting the chance to see it polished up and repackaged for a new audience (and, eek, a new decade) is kind of amazing. The story is still really important to me, and the type of book it was had fallen out of fashion for a while, so I’m really excited to hopefully reach new readers with it (while also, hopefully, giving existing readers who may not have had an opportunity to pick up a physical copy a chance to do that if they want).
Alexis, committing to do this project with Mary shows a lot of trust; what made you confident about putting this project in her (and Sourcebooks’) capable hands?
It’s a bit awkward answering this question in a conversation with Mary because I worry that anything nice I say will either make her embarrassed or just come across as disingenuous. But, yes, I trust Mary with my work. She took a chance on Boyfriend Material when no-one else would and that does, actually, mean a lot to me. I think one of the weird things about the way publishing stories are told is that you always hear about two kinds of books, which are the ones that sold at a massive auction and got a twenty-figure advance, or the ones that everybody rejected and then became self-published TikTok sensations. And you’re told to aspire to the auction and then, if you don’t get it, sharply pivot into being Colleen Hoover. But, for me, my most successful books have been the ones where one person has definitely got it. And that’s been Mary for me.
And also, as well as Mary, I’ve had a huge amount of support from the Sourcebooks team as a whole. Different publishers work differently, and you don’t always feel like you’ve got the whole weight of the house behind you. But at Sourcebooks I always have and that’s the sort of thing that engenders trust.
Mary, I understand that you and Alexis worked closely together to look at GLITTERLAND and the other Spires novels; there is a bit of previously unseen content within the book (i.e. conversations between characters), but the true jewels of the edition are in the bonus materials. Can you talk us through those?
When I approached Alexis about bringing Spires back into wider distribution, it was with the idea that we’d be doing something a bit different from a traditional reissue. (Not that there’s anything wrong with a reissue!) I wanted to celebrate the series and make this feel like a special edition so fans and new readers both have something to discover. We had a lot of terrific ideas that will be playing out across the whole series, including really fabulous author annotations, a scene that explores the complex relationship between two key secondary characters, a story-within-the-story look at Ash’s book and—in a future installment—even a short graphic novel sequence bringing a key scene to life.
Alexis and I talk about the bonus content almost like those old DVD special features (was anyone else obsessed with the LotR bonus menu?) and wanted to kind of recreate that vibe. Not to get too nerdy about it, but I love when books are a full experience—whether that’s maps or bonus scenes or annotations or art or playlists or recipes or whatever. When I love a book, I want to live in that world in every possible way, and this was a really cool chance to make that happen.
(Also, there was a brilliant idea to try to make glardigans—and while I couldn’t make that happen yet, I’m deeply tempted to learn how to knit just for the experience of creating a glardigan of my very own.)
Alexis, can you tell us a little about the original reception for this iconic novel?
I mean, I flinch from describing one of my own novels as iconic. But actually I can answer this without triggering my aversion to bragging because the initial reception to Glitterland was very confused. I hesitate to say a lot of people didn’t get it, because that sounds like I’m attributing people’s distaste for my work to a failure on their part, but a lot of people, like, literally said they didn’t get what I thought I was doing here. It was critically panned, everywhere except Library Journal (God bless you Library Journal, I might have completely given up on this whole writing thing without you). I think it really didn’t help that it was my first published book (not my first written, but it just happened to be the first one out) and it was in the voice of … well. A pretentious, self-loathing wanker? And, don’t get me wrong, in a lot of ways I am a pretentious, self-loathing wanker but I don’t normally write quite that much like one. Like most writers, I try to adapt my style and my voice to the protagonist but a lot of people just assumed that the way Ash thinks and talks is just the way I write. And I can see why that might be off-putting to someone picking up a new author.
But—and, again, thank God for this—it did find a small audience of people who really appreciated what it was trying to do, and felt spoken to by that (although, as always, not everyone did—and that’s totally fine). And over time, this audience has sort of grown organically into the medium-sized group of people who like the book it is today.
Alexis, what are you most excited about, in regard to releasing GLITTERLAND to new markets and to readers who have only just recently discovered your witty and clever writings?
Also a bit uncomfortable describing my own writing as witty and clever. 😉
So Glitterland was originally published by a boutique press that had limited reach and then afterwards I self-published it to keep it available. And I have even more limited reach, because I don’t have the time, expertise or, quite frankly, personality type required to be a really successful self-published author. Like, I absolutely need other people who know what they’re doing to make publishing happen for me. All of which meant that Glitterland was on quite restricted availability—bookshops had to buy hard copies from Amazon which is a complex thing to have to ask them to do and I had absolutely no idea how to make the book available to libraries, and making my books available to libraries is something that’s very important to me, because I think libraries are very important.
All of which is to say, I’m excited that Glitterland will now be available in bookshops, especially indie bookshops (who have been vital in supporting my career and bringing me to readers) and—at last—accessible to libraries.
Alexis, tell us what’s next for the Spires series?
Oh help, now I have to remember. Over the next few years, Sourcebooks and I are going to be releasing each of the existing Spires novels in beautiful trade paperback. I think the order they’re coming will match the original publication order, which will be Waiting for the Flood (after Glitterland), then For Real, then Pansies.
Mary butting in here to confirm that yes! We’ll be releasing Spires in original publication order, all with covers by the incredibly talented Elizabeth Turner Stokes.
Alexis, will there be new books?
Yes! I cannot tell how overwhelmingly happy I am to be able to return to this series. I mean, I have wanted to for literally years and haven’t been able to find either the right opportunity or the right publishing partner. There are so many stories set in this world that I want to tell. Honestly, the hardest thing was picking the right ones to pitch to Mary to expand the series. In the end, I went for the ones that fed most directly into the themes and stories of the previous four books, as well as focusing on characters readers had been asking me about for a long time. So, the next new book will be Dom the dom’s book (he’s supporting character in For Real) and, after that, will be Niall’s story. He’s a support character in Glittlerand and perilously close to being an antagonist. I’m sorry to say he hasn’t learned a whole lot in time for his own book but. Well. Kind of the core message of these stories for me is that even terrible people can be loved.
ABOUT ALEXIS HALL
USA Today bestselling author Alexis Hall writes books in the southeast of England, where he lives entirely on a diet of tea and Jaffa Cakes. You can find him on Twitter and Facebook, and at his website.
ABOUT MARY ALTMAN
Senior Editor Mary Altman grew up reading everything from J.R.R. Tolkien to Laura Kinsale to Shirley Jackson. She loves books that introduce her to new worlds and happily reads (and acquires) across multiple genres. She started her post-college life studying law before coming to her senses and settling happily into a decade-long editorial career; she now lives outside Chicago with her long-time partner.
