From The Bookseller:
Tor has landed a “masterwork” by The Atlas Six author and TikTok sensation Olivie Blake.
Publishing director Bella Pagan bought UK and Commonwealth rights with audio for Alone With You in the Ether from Chris Scheina at Macmillan US’s Tor division. It will be released in e-book by Tor UK and Tor US on 1st June and Tor UK will then publish in hardback and audio on 8th December.
The publisher said: “Alone With You in the Ether is a glimpse into the nature of love, what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you’re not broken. As Charlotte Regan works at a museum, and Aldo Damiani is a time travel-obsessed maths professor, it will appeal to just the same ‘dark academia’ audience who adored Olivie’s The Atlas Six.”
Alone With You in the Ether has already been a self-published TikTok hit, with more than 13.5 million mentions of the hashtag #AloneWithYouintheEther. Atlas Six sequel The Atlas Paradox will be published this October and the last book in the trilogy will follow in 2023.
Blake is a pseudonym for LA-based writer Alexene Farol Follmuth. She said: “I wrote Alone With You in the Ether so that I, and others like me, could make sense of life from inside the constraints of a mood disorder, explore the vulnerability of art and time and wonder, and ultimately face our own fractures to find something worthy of love. I am honoured that this story has resonated with so many readers, and I’m unbelievably grateful that this book will now find a home with my incredible team at Pan Macmillan.”
Link to the rest at The Bookseller
This item raised the question in PG’s mind about whether he should try to be a TikTok sensation himself.
The OP does mention that the book was self-published.
A question arose in PG’s mind when he checked out the top-rated review of the book. For him, the photo used by the top-rated reviewer looked quite a lot like the photos of the author of the book, but PG could be wrong.
As a many-decades reader of SFF, there’s not a smidgen of evidence that this is anything other than Tor doing it’s best to ignore the genre and try to pretend to literary credentials in Diversityland (TM), which the cover art confirms is the audience they court.
I weep for the therapy-craving portion of our citizenry.
It used to be that a common SFF theme might be “Let’s take this unusual perspective or situation (alien, robot, teenager, space traveller) which has adventure elements (daring, heroism, danger, first contact, new tech) and explore the universe accordingly.
SFF is all about “If X were the case, what might the resulting consequences be in the world…”
Now we get “Let’s take this broken person, affirm their situation as the template for “everyone should understand me”, and applaud their attempts to somehow simulate normality simultaneously with navel-gazing. It’s a version of “Given that X is the case, how should everyone feel about it…”
While I can sympathize with (if not approve of) this all-too-human condition, I fail to see what it has to do generally with SFF. The “science/tech/time travel/etc.” gimmick is not what makes SFF. Self-absorption is a literary trope, not an SFF one.
It’s no different than the Hugo winner about a snowflake that dreamed they were a dinosaur.
Its the reason nobody in the know takes Hugos seriously anymore.
Thing is, few publishers understand branding anymore.
Time was the DAW brand and its numbered yellow spine releases meant something worth a look, probably buying. Nowadays, DAW, DelRey, etc, are signs to avoid. Tor being the worst in that line.
No better example that David Weber, whose books at BAEN range from fun reads to really good versus his books for TOR that seem practically phoned in.
(Shrug)
Basically the OP falls in line with the thinking behind the infamous book by SNOOKI.
Their idea of a successful brand is one in the midst of tbeir 10 minutes of fame.
Live and let die applies.