‘Lightlark’ author Alex Aster faced repeated rejection for her work. A TikTok video changed everything.
All Alex Aster ever wanted to do was write books.
When she was 12, she wrote a 300-page thriller about a teenage girl recruited to join the CIA. Somehow, she knew she’d need an agent to get published, so she Googled how to find one, and taught herself how to write to ask for representation.
As rejection letters filled her inbox, Aster cried in the glow of her laptop screen, but then got back to work, writing more novels, sending more query letters, harvesting more rejections, shedding more tears.
At the University of Pennsylvania where she studied creative writing, she wrote an adult thriller as her senior thesis. That got her an agent, though that novel never sold.
She sold her first book, a middle-grade novel, only for it to arrive in 2020 when the pandemic shuttered bookstores. By then, her agent had dropped her because Aster insisted on writing a young adult fantasy novel the agent did not want.
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That book, “Lightlark,” restarted the cycle: a new agent, seeking out publishers, and hearing that the novel was good, just not what they wanted at the moment.
“So that’s when I made that TikTok video that was like pitching my idea for ‘Lightlark,’” the 27-year-old writer says. “Like, ‘Would you read this book?’”
In just 15 seconds of text over a slideshow of photographs, Aster made her case for “Lightlark.”
“Would you read a book about a cursed island that only appears once every hundred years to host a game that gives the six rulers of realm a chance to break their curses,” she asked viewers of what’s known as BookTok, the corner of the social media app where book lovers congregate.
“Each realm’s curse is deadly and to break them one of the six rulers must die. To survive, Isla Crown must lie, cheat, betray even as love complicates everything.”
She uploaded the video on March 13, 2021, and waited.
“And within five hours, it had no views – like, no views,” Aster says. “I was like, ‘Oh, shoot, I’m proving publishing right. Like, no one wants to read this book.
“The next morning I was in a parking lot and I decided to just check TikTok,” she says. “And it had gone viral. Like, it had over a million views. I had thousands of comments and people were so excited about it.”
Within weeks, “Lightlark” had been purchased as part of a two-book deal by Amulet Books, the YA and middle-grade imprint of Abrams Books.
In July, as Aster arrived in San Diego for the Comic-Con panel titled “Going Viral: The Power of BookTok,” it was announced that “Lightlark” had been acquired by Universal Pictures for adaptation as a movie, even though the novel wasn’t even out until Aug. 23.
“It was a very long journey,” Aster says. “And now it’s coming out in a week.”
Welcome to the jungle
When Aster says she wrote her first book at 12, that’s not entirely true.
“I was signing a bunch of books a few days ago and my mom was with me,” she says. “She was telling me stuff that I didn’t even remember. Like that when I was five years old, I would get construction paper and fold it and staple it and write books that made no sense.
“I guess I was always fascinated by the idea that I could potentially also make a book,” Aster says. “I always thought books are so magical.”
When she and her twin sister turned 10, they asked their parents for a laptop.
“I remember I wrote this book called ‘Jungle Girl,’ and it was like 100 pages, but the font was huge,” Aster says. “So it really wasn’t 100 pages, but I thought, ‘I’ve written 100 pages!’
“It was a story about this girl that was raised in the wild, and I thought it was so cool,” she says. “I actually don’t think I’ve ever talked about that because I was 10 and it was so early. Like clearly, it wasn’t a book.”
As a pre-teen, Aster fell hard for YA literature, such as the “Twilight” books and various series by Meg Cabot of “Princess Diaries” fame.
“I felt like it was the only thing that would actually get my mind off, like, if school was hard or people were mean,” Aster says. “Like that was the only way that I could really just leave this world. And Barnes & Noble was like the most magical place.”
“Premonition,” that first novel about the girl recruited by the CIA, was a mashup of things Aster had been reading, she says. But even though it led to rejections and tears, she never considered quitting.
“My family, even now, they just don’t understand what happened,” Aster says. “Honestly, after so many years of rejections, they were like, ‘Alex, why?’ Why are you doing this to yourself?’
“I do think it was almost delusional,” she says. “I look back now and I’m like, that’s wild. I don’t know how I kept going.
“At some point, it’s like, ‘Alex, take a hint, no one wants to go with you.’”
An island arises
The earliest seeds of “Lightlark” were sown when Aster moved from Philadelphia to New York City after college and settled into an apartment across the street from a beautiful old church.
“At night, I would just look at it,” she says. “Kind of imagining this fantasy world with this beautiful gothic church. And I just started from there.”
Aster sent early drafts of “Lightlark” to the agent who’d represented “Emblem Island,” the middle-grade novels inspired by folk tales her Colombian grandmother told her as a child.
“Over like two years, I sent her so many different versions of ‘Lightlark,’” Aster says. “Eventually she was like, ‘Listen, I get it, you’re not going to stop,’” Aster says. “And so she dropped me as a client.”
Agentless again, Aster refused to let “Lightlark” die.
The six realms of “Lightlark” sort residents by heritage and special powers. The Starlings, Moonlings, Sunlings, and Skylings all embody aspects of the elements for which they are named. Wildlings are home in nature, while Nightshade is realm of dark arts.
For 500 years, a curse has kept them from their homelands on the island of Lightlark and punished each with a realm-specific curse. The Centennial competition every 100 years allows the rulers to risk their lives for 100 days on Lightlark and try to break the curse.
“I wanted it to be less like ‘The Hunger Games’ with them all thrown in there trying to kill each other and more like court politics,” Aster says of the story which follows Isla, the Wildling ruler through the competition.
“And I wanted to throw Isla in there as the most inexperienced, like worst person, to participate in this,” she says. “Obviously, I have a soft spot for Isla even though she makes decisions I know people are gonna be like, ‘What?’ You have to let her make bad decisions because this is all new to her and it needs to be realistic.”
The BookTok breaks
“This is my thing – I got lucky and I’m gonna run with it,” Aster says of the viral BookTok video that helped get “Lightlark” over the finish line.
“I got extremely lucky that I was posting around the time when BookTok was exploding,” she says. “Because I didn’t know about it. I didn’t know it would change publishing. I didn’t know it would blow up.”
To her, it’s just another part of the modern writer’s job. Yes, the BookTok videos she creates take time she’d rather spend writing books, but it’s provided her things that she’d dreamed about, too.
The “Lightlark” book deal earned six figures, enough to quit her day jobs as a freelance editor and TikTok consultant. The sale of foreign-language rights to a dozen different countries brought in even more.
Her publisher recently increased the first printing of “Lightlark” to 200,000 copies in part through the buzz that’s been created around it. A second book in the series is scheduled to arrive one year after the first.
Temple Hill Productions, which produced such YA-friendly films as the “Twilight” series, “The Fault In Our Stars” and “The Hate U Give,” recognized the potential in “Lightlark” before anyone else and sold the rights to Universal in a deal that included Aster as an executive producer.
“Things are actually happening,” she says of the movie project. “I’m literally not allowed to talk about it, like threatened, because they’re like, ‘I know you share a lot on social media, please keep your mouth shut.’”
So sure, there was luck in what happened for her, but she’d also worked hard for this for years. And if it takes a little more time than she’d like to spend on social media, that’s a small price to pay for the success it delivered.
“Now I see it as a marketing tool,” Aster says of BookTok, through which fans were allowed to vote for both the cover and author photo for “Lightlark. “And it’s a big part of my career. Before I was desperate. I thought I’m gonna come here and see if I can maybe change my destiny.
“And it did. It changed everything.”
Alex Aster book event
What: In conversation with Alex Silvera, the YA author of “They Both Die at the End.”
When: 7 p.m. Aug. 29
Where: The Ripped Bodice, 3806 Main St., Culver City
Tickets: Tickets are required and are $22 which includes a copy of Aster’s book, or $43 which includes both her book and Silvera’s.
For more: Therippedbodicela.com/events-and-tickets