I had heard of Kelley Armstrong before I started working for Spectra, but I had never read her. Why would I? I’m a guy, and she writes paranormal romance. Clearly, I wouldn’t like it.
But Dime Store Magic was in the pile of books my new bosses told me to I needed to read to familiarize myself with the Spectra list, and, since it was a mass market paperback, I figured I’d give it a shot. Worse came to worse, it was relatively small, and I could easily read it on the subway to and from work. So I opened it up on the way home.
By the time I got home–having missed my stop and just barely not gone all the way to Brooklyn–I realized how wrong I was.
Because here’s the thing: genre doesn’t matter when the writing is good. Kelley is such a great story-teller that it didn’t matter that there were elements in the novel that I would normally shy away from (Because I was raised as a SF geek to know that girls have cooties, even if the girls are bad-ass witches, werewolves, or demons). And while it wasn’t the beginning of Kelley’s Otherworld series, it was the beginning for me, and that’s something I’m very happy about.
Enough from me, though. Below, Kelley and her editor, Anne Groell, talk about how Dime Store Magic came to be.
(Below, too, are the original cover, and the new repacked cover–I kind of really like both)
” For an author, selling your first novel is supposed to be the huge break that launches you into a career of never-ending stories. That’s what we tell ourselves because that first sale is so difficult that we can’t–or don’t want to–imagine that it might only be the first of many steps on the way to a career as a novelist.I sold my first novel, Bitten, in 1999 in a two-book deal. It sold modestly well. It did not, I suspect, sell as well as the publishers had hoped. They didn’t make plans for mass-market paperback editions, which meant the books couldn’t reach the audience of young adults who can’t afford hardcovers.
I wrote book three, Dime Store Magic. No one was jumping to buy it. They weren’t refusing. They just weren’t…eager. I started to panic and my agent suggested I write something different, so I started a straight crime novel (that later became Exit Strategy.)
Partway through the writing of that book, Dime Store Magic sold to Spectra, who planned to release it as a mass-market original. I didn’t care that others took this as a sign that I was already fizzling out as an author–I knew mass-market was the right format for these books.
I was right. Well, Spectra and I were right. 
They brought out Dime Store Magic in 2004 and it sold well enough that my former publisher released Bitten and Stolen in mass market that fall. To keep up the momentum, Spectra followed with book 4, Industrial Magic, later that year. I haven’t looked back since.
Bitten may have been the book that launched me as a published author, but it was Dime Store Magic that made me a novelist. It catapulted me along the path to that lifetime of never-ending stories, and I’m extremely grateful to Spectra for that.”
–Kelley Armstrong, June 2010
“Kelley will always have a special place in my heart, as hers was the first urban fantasy novel I added to the Spectra list. The paranormal phenomenon was still in its infancy thin–at least, it its current incarnation. (I am now old enough that I remember the previous urban fantasy wave, and then the drought between then and now. About seventeen years ago, I distinctly recall telling people that vampires were dead, and don’t send me any more vampire novels. But then Anne Rice woke them up.)
At the time the manuscript for Dime Store Magic came in, the fired–such as it was–was mostly dominated by the new breed of vampire novel…with some occasional werewolves thrown in (as Kelley’s first two books had been.) I remember being distinctly worried about the possibility of picking up a book that was in the middle of an existing series, but Dime Store Magic had two distinct things going for it. First, it was told form the point of view of a different narrator from the first two books, and thus represented a perfect re-entry point into the series. And second, the heroine was a witch.
At the time, as I recall, there were very few witch book out there–although Harper Collins had just bought one by Kim Harrison which would come out almost simultaneous with Kelley…and we all know how well that went! But at the time, doing a witch book seemed a fairly novel thing.
And then, of course, there was point number three, which is that I just fell head over heels in love with Paige and her book, and had to have it. And once it came out, I was gratified to see that so did most of you, because Kelley’s books just kept selling and selling, before ling, Kelley was a New York Times list author, and I totally loved sharing that transition with her. (Plus, I was entertained that, for a while, her editorial team in the US, Canada and the UK were Anne, Anne and Antonia.)”
–Anne Groell, Senior Editor, Spectra
To see the complete list, click here
