Enchanted Ever After is coming two weeks from today. The paperback will also be available then (actually, a few days before that so they can be shipped). I don’t know about the audio. There’s been some holdup in the contracts over there.

Since I’m coming to a close on the Enchanted, Inc. series, I thought I’d look back on how it all began. I usually tell the story about when I got the specific idea, but the groundwork actually came much earlier.

It probably should have been a sign that my first published book was a romance novel about a woman trying unsuccessfully to write a romance novel and realizing that what she needed to be writing was fantasy, but I still kept plugging away at romance, banging my head against that brick wall. My romance writing career came to an end when my editor at Harlequin returned the manuscript we’d been going back and forth on for about a year with a photocopy about the upcoming US publication of Bridget Jones’s Diary, which had been a hit in the UK, and how that sort of thing might be the next trend. Her note to me was about how that seemed more like the kind of thing I should do, that the book we’d been working on would probably make a better single-title book than category book, and she enclosed the business card for an agent she suggested I contact.

I had a minor panic attack because that sounded to me like a polite kiss-off, but Jenny Crusie (who I knew from some online groups, and I’d given her a couple of PR leads) talked me off the ledge. She said that if they just wanted to get rid of me, they’d have rejected the book, not recommended an agent, and the agent my editor had recommended was her agent. I talked to that agent, who said she wasn’t sure why they’d rejected it because it was the perfect category book. She guessed the line was about to fold (it did). She didn’t think she wanted to work with that book, but she said good things about my writing.

The problem was, no one in the US was publishing those Bridget Jones kind of books. They were republishing the British ones, but it was a couple more years before they started looking for American authors writing that sort of thing. That was the era of the single-title contemporary romantic comedies with the cartoony covers, and I kept trying to turn that book into one of those — unsuccessfully. Then the American publishers started looking for chick lit books, and I came up with a few proposals that didn’t go anywhere.

Meanwhile, my life had all the ingredients for a chick lit novel. My job was going in some annoying directions — the bosses who’d been supportive had left, the tech bubble had burst so we’d lost clients, and my new boss was threatened by me and shutting me out of things I should have been working on, so we lost even more clients. I dreaded work, even though I was working at home. My dating life was sputtering. Everyone I went out with who seemed promising disappeared without a trace or a word after a couple of dates, in spite of leaving the last date with discussions about a specific thing we ought to do together the next time we went out.

I’d gone on a couple of vacations to England, where most of my souvenirs were books — more of the chick lit books I couldn’t get in the US, and I’d picked up the first few Harry Potter books. I’d read those over the holidays, so in mid-January I guess that’s what was on my mind when I climbed the stairs one morning to go to my home office and had that “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter” idea burst. I liked the books about young women struggling with job, family, friends, and dating, and I basically had been Hermione Granger when I was a kid, so I related to her school life. What I wanted was a book that had all the chick lit stuff, but with magic, or something like the Harry Potter books, but about adult life other than school. Actually, my first thought was that I’d love to check my e-mail and find an offer for a new job that would take me away from what I was doing. Then I thought it should be a magical job. Then I had the “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter” flash. At the time, though, I was just thinking about what I wanted to read, not that I wanted to write it, though I did get that “ooh!” shiver that told me it was a good idea. I just ignored that shiver because I was trying to write something else at the time.

There was no magical job offer (unless you count the idea that gave me a writing career), and I got laid off a couple of weeks later.

It was more than a year before I started writing that book.

Those who follow me on social media have already seen this news, but I thought I’d make it official here. Book 9 of the Enchanted, Inc. series, Enchanted Ever After, is coming August 6. It’s available for pre-order as an e-book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo, and should be available at a few other places. There will be a paperback, but that’s not ready to order yet (it’s a more involved process). And there will be an audiobook. I don’t know when that’s coming. I originally set this release date to coincide with Audible, but I don’t have a contract from them yet, so I don’t know if we’re still on schedule.

This is probably going to be the last book in the series. It really ties things off nicely. I realized while I was writing it that I was ready for this series to be over, and I was running out of bad guys for them to go up against. It is possible that I’ll return to that world in the future, either picking up on the further adventures of the same characters or in a spinoff. I may continue writing some shorter one-off pieces in that world. But I’m calling it done for now. I’ve been working on these books since 2003, and that’s a long time to work on the same series. I’d rather quit while it’s still fun rather than drag it out. There have been four more books than I originally planned, so it went beyond my expectations. It’s been a lot of fun and I love these characters and their world, but there are so many other things I want to write.

Plus, their world moved so much more slowly than ours, to the point that they were more than a decade behind. I started writing in the near future (aiming at when I thought it would be published), then gradually caught up and then was writing more than a decade in the past, so I had to keep looking up what technology and pop culture existed then. If I return to that world, I’ll have to jump everything forward in time, so it will essentially be an all-new series.

But I have the next three or four things I want to write planned, a year or two worth of work, so I doubt there will be anything new in this series for a while.

One of the comments/questions I receive most often is along the lines of “Enchanted, Inc. would make a good movie or TV series” or “Why isn’t Enchanted, Inc. a TV series or movie?” Sometimes it’s “Why don’t you make Enchanted, Inc. into a TV series or movie?” I love hearing that question because it means people love my books and want to see them come to life, but it’s really not so simple as just deciding to make it happen.

I’m not the one who can make a movie or TV series happen. I could stop it, since no one can make that show or movie without my permission, but making a movie or TV series takes a lot of money. I’d have to have JK Rowling kind of clout to just decide I want it done and make it happen — and even there, it’s mostly because they know that movies made from her books are successful, so they want to be a part of it.

For a book to be made into a TV series or movie, it takes both love and money. Someone in a position to make things happen has to fall in love with the story enough to go through everything it takes to get a project through the whole process, and someone has to put up the millions of dollars it takes to get made. The person who falls in love may be someone at the network, production company, or movie studio. It might be a writer, producer, or director, who then has to get someone who can fund the project on board. It might be an actor who loves the book or sees a potentially powerful role who then finds someone who can fund the project.

Enchanted, Inc. has had a fair amount of interest in movie/TV series. There have been writers and actors who wanted the project but couldn’t get the funding (apparently, at one time Anna Faris was trying to get something done with it). It was actually optioned for film and a screenplay was written (by the guy who went on to write I, Tonya), but the project didn’t make it past that point. There was a team with a showrunner (from shows you’d have heard of) and head writer who put together a really good TV series pitch, but they didn’t manage to get any production companies to put up the money for them to put together a pilot to then be able to get network interest.

Mostly it comes down to whether the production companies, studios, or networks think that enough people will be interested in a TV show or movie for it to make money. The main reason they think a show or movie based on a book will make money for them is if the book is already a huge bestseller with a built-in audience. Most of the books made into shows or movies are already bestsellers — the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris were already big before the series, the Song of Ice and Fire books were already bestsellers before Game of Thrones was a hit on HBO, the Harry Potter books were a phenomenon long before the movies. They all became bigger after the shows/movies because more people see TV shows or watch movies than buy books, but there was a significant audience who knew about these things before they made it to the screen. Alas, while my books have sold reasonably well, they are nowhere near bestseller status, and if everyone who’d bought the books watched a movie or TV show, it wouldn’t even make a blip in the ratings or box office.

For non bestsellers, buzz can help — that sense that even if it’s not a big enough mainstream hit to be a bestseller, it does have a kind of cult following, so that the people who are into it are really, really into it. And that’s not really happening with the Enchanted, Inc. books. I know there are a lot of fans of those books, but there isn’t really a “fandom” (at least, not that I’m aware of). There’s nothing really to indicate to producers that there are people out there who would help raise the profile of a movie or TV series by helping generate buzz. There aren’t tumblr communities, memes, discussion groups, conventions. The last Google alert I got on the term “Enchanted, Inc.” was for a liquor distribution company that uses that name. The first book came out in 2005, so it’s pretty much old news, and people aren’t really talking about it anymore. I’m a fairly obscure author. I barely have 600 Twitter followers and there aren’t many more followers than that on my Facebook page (and only a fraction of those people actually see anything I post). That’s not the sort of thing that makes Hollywood executives sit up and take notice.

The other possibility is that it’s a kind of story or subject matter that tends to be successful, and that depends on trends. Right now, it seems like most of the fantasy stuff is dark. I can’t think of anything along the lines of the Enchanted, Inc. series that’s currently a hit. I do think maybe the time is right for a fun romantic comedy with a touch of magic, but someone at a network/streaming service/studio has to decide to make that leap and go against the current trend toward dark and gritty.

What can fans do if they want to see their favorite book on the screen? This applies to any book you would like to see made into a movie or TV show, not just mine. For one thing, buy the books and tell others about the books so they’ll buy them. Bestseller status does get attention. Leave reviews on the bookseller sites, on Goodreads, on Book Bub. Raise the level of buzz by talking about the books on social media. Make and share memes and reviews. Talk about how you think they’d make good movies or TV series. I don’t know if tagging the networks/streaming services in tweets suggesting books for them to make into shows would help, but it might not hurt (I do know that when a Netflix-related account asked for suggestions, Enchanted, Inc. wasn’t mentioned — as I said, there’s not a lot of buzz).

Basically, the books that get made into movies or TV shows are the books that are being talked about publicly. Telling the author doesn’t do a lot of good. The author is just going, “I know, right?” You have to tell the world.

It may also help to support movies and shows like the books you’d like to see hit the screen. If something like that is successful, it raises the chances of more like it being made. Then you can also use that as a discussion point for your buzz — if you like this series, you should read these books, and they’d make a good series, too.

So, long answer. The short version is yeah, I’d love to see it happen, but it’s not something I can do a lot about, and my books may have good potential but don’t have the awareness to really push a project like that through.

I realized yesterday that it was around this time fifteen years ago that I started writing the first Enchanted, Inc. book. I’m not sure of the exact date, but I know it was early October.

I’d had the first spark of idea in early 2002 but didn’t do anything with it because I was focused on some other projects and wasn’t sure there was a market for it because I’d never seen anything like it. I hadn’t seen much fantasy in a contemporary setting, and the early bits of “urban fantasy” that had come out were much darker and more serious. “Chick lit” was a hot market, but I hadn’t yet seen any with fantasy or paranormal elements.

Then I had a conversation with an editor at a conference in the summer of 2003, and she was enthusiastic about the idea. I had something else to work on first that I’d promised to another editor (that ended up going nowhere).

In early September, I started doing research, and I added a side trip to New York to a trip I was taking in late September so I could do location research. After I got home, I spent a few days doing a bit more development of the plot and characters, and then in early October, I started writing.

That means I’ve been living in that “universe” off and on for more than 15 years. I’ve known Katie and Owen longer than I have most of my current friends (whom I met after that first book was published).

And yet, the characters have barely made it through two years. I’ve been trying to stay on the same timeline with them, so I’m at the point where those books almost count as historical fiction.

The ninth book went off to the copyeditor this week. I’m not going to say “never” since I never know when an idea will strike me, but I think that’s going to be the last full-length book in this series. I may do some short pieces set in that universe. If I get another idea, I will probably make it the start of a new series and do a big time jump. But I think nine books and fifteen years is a good run for a series, and I’d rather not get to a point where I’m bored with it.

Of course, now that I’ve said that, I’ll probably get hit with an idea that will distract me from the book I’m supposed to be writing.

I’d have to look at a calendar to find the exact day, but we’re approaching the 15-year anniversary of when I started actually working on the first Enchanted, Inc. book.

I’d had the idea about a year and a half earlier, but I really wasn’t sure what to do with it because there was nothing quite like it in the market. It was “girlier” than most fantasy and was in a contemporary setting, which was quite rare at the time, but it wasn’t really romance. Every so often I’d play with the idea and add to it, but I was focusing on writing other things.

Then at some point in July, I was at a conference, and there was a party to launch a new fantasy imprint from Harlequin that was going to be more female-focused. The pre-launch guidelines said they were looking for traditional fantasy, which meant that even if it might be a good fit for the “girly” side of my book, they probably wouldn’t be interested.

But at the party, one of the editors wandered over to me and asked if I had any questions. I asked if they’d ever consider contemporary settings. She said they might and asked if I had something. I started telling her about this idea I had. She seemed quite interested (one of my friends who was nearby said her nostrils flared) and kept asking me questions. By this time, I’d run out of what I’d already developed and was making things up on the spot. She handed me her business card and said she’d love to see it. I told her that I’d just told her all I had. I hadn’t written any of it yet. She said, “Then why are you standing around here? Go write!”

And that was why I decided to try writing that crazy idea I had.

That editor actually ended up rejecting it, but I might not have started writing it if she hadn’t shown interest.

I never did really find the right market for it. It ended up being published as “chick lit” because that was what was really hot in the market at the time. It was up between two publishers, one that was going to publish it as chick lit/women’s fiction and a fantasy publisher, but the fantasy publisher couldn’t get the auction bid together. The chick lit market utterly tanked a couple of years later, and the books being promoted as women’s fiction and sometimes paranormal romance meant that fantasy readers didn’t really find them unless they heard word of mouth. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if the other publisher had been able to pull things together, since female-focused urban fantasy became huge not long after that. I’d have been on the leading edge of a trend instead of the trailing edge.

But that’s water under the bridge, and that book has done well for me. It’s still selling steadily and most of my income comes from that series. I’m thinking book 9 will be the end, aside from shorter pieces, because nine books is a pretty long series and I’m ready to try other things. But I also love those characters, so you never know.