During Write the World’s Fiction Writing summer camp, YA author Rowana Miller answered our campers’ burning questions about writing.
The interview below has been edited for length and clarity. To read the first part of the interview, check out this blog post.
When did you publish your first book?
My first book came out in fall 2025, but I got the book deal two years earlier in fall 2023. That's about the average timeline between the time when you get the call and the time that the book hits bookstores.
How hard was it to find a publisher?
So hard. One of the hardest things I've ever done.
The way that you get a book published is kind of in two stages. Stage number one is finding an agent, and you have to do that before you approach publishers because most publishers just will not read books that come without agents. Agents serve as industry gatekeepers. So many people write books, and a lot of those books are just not ready for publication. Publishers don't want to waste their time reading every manuscript that people write. That's why you need to get an agent in order to get in front of editors.
You pitch agents in a process called querying. You write a query letter, which has a blurb of your book and a couple of logistical pieces of information about your book—word count, genre, age group, and comparison titles. You send this letter out to a bunch of agents, and you pray. And then you get rejected a bunch of times.
Or at least that was my experience. There are some people who have an easier time with it. I queried two books before I queried the one that would eventually get published. I got rejected probably about 75 times between those two projects.
With the book that would become Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, I had a lot more agent interest from the beginning of my querying process. But then once you get an agent, that is still not getting a book deal. Your agent will turn around and do the same thing that you did to find an agent, but to publishers. And there's no guarantee that you will get a publisher interested in your book.
A lot of books that get agents do not get published, and I thought that that was going to be the case for my book. From what I've heard from other people, pretty much nobody gets a book deal after your book's been on submission to publishers for more than two years. So when the two-year mark rolled around for me, I thought, “Okay, well, this book's dying on sub.” But then, after another couple of months, my agent called me with Sourcebook's offer.
From the time that I started writing the book to the time that it hit the shelves, it was about 6 years. A lot of those years were spent waiting. The vast majority of authors have written multiple manuscripts that don't get published before they have one that does. Play the long game of improving your writing craft and just continue to hammer at the process of getting an agent or an editor until it happens.
What is your favorite part about being a professional writer?
This is such a cliché, but it’s when the book resonates with readers.
In Texas, there is an event called TeenBookCon. They bring in authors to run a conference for teenagers, where there are different Q&A panels with authors, and then afterward, there's a giant book signing. It’s this fabulous opportunity to meet the people who you're already reading.
I have lived in New York for almost all my life, and the only time that I was not living in New York was when I was living in Philadelphia for college. I am very lucky that being a queer person is not a big deal where I live. In Houston, Texas, that is not the case.
My book features a queer romance, and during the book signing, I had a handful of kids come up to me and tell me that they were surprised that there was sapphic representation in the authors who were there, or that my book resonated with them. One non-binary kid came up to me and said, “I just want to say, bro, I get you,” and then walked away. Another kid told me that she loved my book and is currently making her girlfriend read it. I was very touched by that, and it made me really, really happy.
What's the hardest part about being a professional writer?
The self-doubt never ends. I thought that when I published a book, that would mean that I would feel good about myself as a writer, but as it turns out, there are a bunch of other writers who are way better at writing than I am, and also better at being a writer.
I'm bad at social media, and I know and follow a bunch of writers who post reels regularly and are very diligent about sharing pieces of their author journey and connecting with their readers online. It's just not a skill set that I have the time to learn how to do well at this point.
I have to really fight not to compare myself to those people; it’s just not helpful. There's always going to be somebody who's more successful than you. What's difficult about being an author is what's difficult about being a person.
What tips do you have for getting yourself out there in a world progressively becoming obsessed with screens?
I've found non-social media-based ways of reaching my audience that have been the most effective and rewarding based on my skill set and my goals. For my day job, I run a creative writing education nonprofit called Cosmic Writers. We run workshops for kids, and because of that, I work a lot with teachers and librarians. The main way that I've gotten my book out there is by making it very easy for teachers and librarians to have me come and run writing workshops for their kids. I’ve designed my website around making sure that teachers and librarians know that I am accessible.
I've also used my internet presence to try to create opportunities to interact synchronously with my reader population, such as in-person events and virtual workshops.
What is the best piece of writing advice you have received?
I had a writing mentor in my teens who told me that every book is an alphabet. M is the midpoint, and your A, B, C, D follow this arc, and everything goes up to M, and then it starts to come back down to Z. And he said, A has to be parallel to Z, B has to be parallel to Y. He framed the idea of planting and payoff, of things happening in the first part of a book and coming back around to make what happens in the second act feel justified.
I don't follow that advice directly, but the concept totally changed my perspective on the construction of the story. I've come to my own conclusions about how to modify it for my own writing process. I think that he's wrong that M is the midpoint and the climax; R is more of the peak in the curve. And sometimes you have multiple events within the A through R range that wind up culminating in one of the points between R and Z.
What advice would you have for young writers?
You should write a book tomorrow. There is this idea that writing a book is something that you have to earn, that once you've put in your dues of however many short stories, then you're allowed to take on a bigger project.
If you want to write a book, I think that you should write a book. I'm not really a short story person; I write them occasionally, but I really love to immerse myself in a big project. Realizing that I had permission to do that was liberating for me.
About Rowana Miller
Rowana Miller writes about riddles, goblins, secrets, strange girls, and mischief. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Cosmic Writers, a nonprofit that provides creative writing education for kids and teenagers, and an adjunct professor at Pace University. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City with her wife, Penelope, and two cats, Alice and Jabberwocky. Her debut novel, Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, was named one of Marie Claire’s Best Thrillers of 2025.
About the author
As a College Essay Advisor at Write the World, Vivian Zhi supports high school students through their college application journey. Vivian looks forward to helping young writers find themselves through their writing.