Proxy, 10 years later

10 years ago I published a queer-affirming young adult cyberpunk thriller critique of neoliberal capitalism, like you do. It nearly went out of print, and then...it didn't.

My timing was off when my first Young Adult novel came out.

It was June of 2013 when Penguin Books for Young Readers released Proxy, a young adult, queer-affirming cyberpunk thriller that critiqued neoliberal capitalism with rage and idealism. Three teens with very different ideas about life and very different backgrounds must unite to escape or destroy a vicious dystopian nightmare where the wealthy pay for poor people to take punishments in their place.

In terms of sales, the book missed the high water mark of the YA dystopian book market. It came out just as folks were burning out on teens vs the corrupt system books, though there were still several books like that selling millions of copies. Mine wasn’t one of them.

I was a little too late to rise on that tide.

I was also a little too early.

Proxy was one of the first in this genre from a “Big 5” publisher to feature a queer main character, and I was few years early for the golden age of queer YA and queer SciFi and Fantasy publishing that we recently entered (and are maybe being legislatively forced out of through book bans and cowardice and stupidity). Back then, a queer main character was not a selling point.

Now, thankfully, a host of imaginative and bold authors are publishing queer speculative fiction with great publisher support, but ten years ago, it was rare. Queer leads were usually in books about queerness—budding romance and coming out stories—not in books with killer robots.

But my book came out! Hooray! It wasn’t a top priority book for the publisher that season (the 5th Wave by Rick Yancey took just about every marketing dollar, and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green was still getting all the YA attention), but I got to do some events to promote it. There was a little bit of press (Utah’s Desert News, surprisingly, loved it). We even got an order from WalMart to carry it!!

And then…it didn’t work.

For whatever reasons a book doesn’t take off with readers, mine didn’t. Not enough romance. Too much? Who knows? The WalMart copies got returned en masse to the publisher. A lot of returns from Barnes & Noble too. Proxy just wasn’t selling, and the publishers bluntly described the situation to me as ‘untenable’. The warehouse was filling up with returned hardcovers.

But the good folks at Philomel (an imprint of Penguin) repackaged Proxy for paperback with a new cover. There was hope! The book was given another chance. A lot of novels don’t get that chance. I was lucky.

And something happened.

Readers came.

It started with a few generous young adult authors who decided to talk up my book on their own to their fans. Some invited me to do high profile events with them. As an author, you never know when hyping someone else’s book will change their life. I try do it as often as I can now (speaking of, everyone pre-order WHALEFALL by Daniel Krause immediately). The authors who did it for me kept this book in print long enough for a few independent booksellers to champion it.

And then the librarians came…

Texas librarians put it on their state reading list for middle and high school. Librarians in Oklahoma, Missouri, California, and Connecticut added it to state reading lists. The American Library Association picked it for several different recommended lists and from there, through this range of gatekeepers and book nerds and literacy champions, almost two years after it came out, it started to find readers. Tens of thousands of readers. A book that had barely sold any copies its first 18 months in print, one you could hardly find on a bookshelf in any store, went into a 2nd printing, then a 3rd and 4th and 5th and on.

And so here I am, 10 years later, and a book I wrote in rage and anxiety and hope for the future keeps finding new readers in a generation filled with rage and anxiety and (hopefully) hope for the future.

It’s been found by queer kids in the school library searching for heroes they can relate to, and its been found by straight kids who want to read an action romp and end up rooting for their first gay characters in fiction almost by accident (spoiler: it wasn’t an accident). It’s been read in detention centers and on military bases, in colleges and at international schools. I’ve gotten to talk about the book to thousands of students during author visits. Even a few celebrities have read it (and sent me fan mail! That’s not even a humble brag. It straight up was awesome).

I couldn’t be more grateful for the folks who championed this book this last decade, from the publisher and editors and publicists and sales reps to booksellers, librarians, other authors, and students. I’ll never forget the 7th grade boy in New Jersey who got two copies signed, one for himself because he liked sci fi action books and one for his best friend, who had just come out to him, and he wanted to give the friend a book that would tell him it was totally ok.

There are a times this career is the best in the world.

some students in the Bronx even made a board game out of it!

Sadly, the dystopian ideas in Proxy are as relevant today as they were ten years ago. Corporations are pushing deeper and deeper into our lives and our choices, seizing government services, harvesting our data, repackaging us, selling us our own anxieties back to us as ‘content’ and then distracting us from those anxieties with more of our own content, colonizing every second of our time and attention, and doing it all while wringing every last dollar out before the entire scheme collapses.

Sad to say, my story of 3 teens defying the alienation forced on them by corporate governance and capitalistic imperatives may be more relevant today than it was 10 years ago. I didn’t want it to be. I wanted one of the final exhortations in the book to be what defined the next decade for young people after I wrote it. “It’s your future; choose.”

But the assaults on reading choice, on education, on LGBTQ youth and on BIPOC youth and especially on BIPOC LGBTQ youth are unrelenting, organized, well-funded, and, for right now, working. They’re doing the job they’re meant to do: to distract us from the massive money grab at the top, the hoarding of wealth and resources by corporate leaders, quick to deflect and pit us against one another. Proxy is about that too, and it’s been affirming to see young readers notice. I wrote it for them, for their world, after all.

The thing is, I write from a place of optimism and I know that these attacks on young people’s futures will fail. Communities are coming together, organizing mutual aid, creating solidarity with one another, stepping up to protect the vulnerable, and fighting back. It takes time and effort. It’s hard and there are tragic losses along the way, but I’ve got a lot of hope because of what I’ve seen young people do when they pick up a cause, whether it’s fighting for environmental justice, LGBTQ rights, gun safety, or the freedom to read or to vote or learn. And young people are realizing those fights are all connected.

They will win and those of us who are older must help them win. We must show up for them. Those who can, can donate, volunteer, provide resources, guidances, tools, and knowledge. We can tell stories. No one of those acts is sufficient, but all are necessary. Books are just one tool in a big toolbox.

I’ve got a lot more books to write and stories to tell, but 10 years after Proxy, I’m grateful that it remains in print, finding new readers every year, helping them see their world a little differently, a little more empathetically, to ask questions, have adventures, and imagine other futures. I’m also thrilled that there are new stories being told by a more diverse array of authors than ever before.

The publishing market has changed a lot in the last decade, but the need young people have for ambitious, big-hearted, diverse, and unflinching tales about their world and other possible worlds remains. Stories are one of the only infinitely renewable resources we have. I’m grateful I get to share mine.

Here’s to another decade, and to making Proxy more a fantasy than a reality.