Rock the Boat celebrates success of first virtual showcase

Rock the Boat kicked off its first live, virtual showcase this week, introducing a number of YA authors with hotly anticipated sequels by writers including Angeline Boulley and Kathleen Glasgow.

The showcase was hosted by the Tandem Collective, and compèred by YouTuber Leena Norms to an audience of several hundred online viewers. 

Glasgow’s Girl in Pieces has now sold several hundred thousand copies, according to the publisher, and Firekeeper’s Daughter by Boulley was shortlisted for Waterstones Children’s Book of the Year.

“It’s so exciting for us to have such a star-studded author event,” said Shadi Doostdar, editorial director. “Tandem did such a great job reaching out to book lovers and bloggers. We had questions from readers and an exclusive cover reveal. The whole office watched it together on a big screen over pizza in what was a really fun night.”

Glasgow and Liz Lawson discussed The Night in Question, the sequel to The Agathas, and were followed by Josh Silver, the author of HappyHead, a LGBTQ+ thriller publishing in March, which Rock the Boat expects to be one of the biggest YA débuts of the year.

Amie Kaufman, whose novels include the Illuminae Files and The Aurora Cycle with Jay Kristoff, spoke about her solo YA debut, The Isle of the Gods – a fantasy duology “full of magic, romance, and slumbering gods”.

Boulley presented Warrior Girl Unearthed, her follow-up to the bestselling Firekeeper’s Daughter. The novel is set within the same Native American community, and features a feisty heroine who stages a heist to steal back ancestral remains held in a museum and return them to her tribe.

Xiran Jay Zhao rounded off the evening talking about their new book, Heavenly Tyrant, the “hotly anticipated” sequel to their first book, Iron Widow, which hit number one in the UK YA charts. It will be published with a major campaign in August 2023.

“It has been such an exciting project and working with Tandem really helped to make the event such a success,” said Oneworld marketing manager Lucy Cooper. 

A spokesperson for Tandem Collective said: “Helping facilitate Rock the Boat’s first virtual showcase has been such an amazing project to close out 2022. They’ve got an awesome roster of authors that both the team and our community were extremely excited about and it’s been a joy to get it off the ground.”