The Writer Story | featuring Author Julie Leong
Author interview with Julie Leong about her absolutely stunning debut fantasy, The Teller of Small Fortunes, discussing writing inspirations & tips to write the found family trope.
Hello and Welcome to the Writer Story!
Today is the last author interview of this season of Writer Story and I wanted to have an absolute treat for you all.
So when I cornered Julie over at Insta DM about this, the kind and amazing person that she is, she said yes, and here we are.
If you haven’t heard of Julie and her cozy, fantasy debut, The Teller of Small Fortunes, which is literally everywhere, the buzziest, splashiest fantasy debut this Fall 2024, here I am bringing you the insider news about Julie’s writer origin story and, of course, the origins of the The Teller of Small Fortunes.
Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly said in its review of The Teller.
Leong does a good job of balancing adventure, friendship among endearing outsiders, and humor with a thoughtful exploration of immigrant struggle. This whimsical and heartfelt tale is sure to win admirers. - Publisher’s Weekly
Okay, Let’s meet Julie…
Here’s her official bio :
Julie Leong is a Chinese-Malaysian-American fantasy author who grew up across both New Jersey and Beijing, China. She studied economics and political science at Yale and works in tech, but she has always nurtured a deep love for sci-fi/fantasy beneath her corporate exterior. Julie lives in San Francisco with her husband Drew, their rescue pup Kaya, and a magical Meyer lemon tree in the backyard that somehow always has ripe lemons. When she’s not writing, she enjoys making unnecessary spreadsheets and flambéing things.
Welcome Julie to the Writer Story. I have been following your journey since your PubTips subreddit post about getting an agent. It was so inspiring for me as that was when I had started to research about the querying process. So Thank you for that. The Teller of Small Fortunes has got some great reviews and is also one of the Buzz Books Fall/Winter picks. Tell us what the story is about?
Thank you so much! The Teller of Small Fortunes is a cozy fantasy about Tao, an immigrant fortune teller on the run from her past who gets roped into the search for a mercenary’s lost daughter. I’d describe it as Legends & Lattes with Studio Ghibli vibes and a dose of bittersweet diaspora feels. It’s ultimately a story about found family, but also a love letter to the fantasy adventure stories that I’ve always loved.
What was your inspiration behind this absolutely incredible concept? And how did you know this could be a novel?
In a general sense, the inspiration for writing Teller was simply that I’d been going through a difficult time personally (my father was very ill), and I was craving more warm and comforting fantasy novels. I’d read all the ones I could find, and when I ran out, I decided to try writing my own!
But for the specific concept behind a fortune teller who tells only small and inconsequential fortunes? The inspiration there was simply that I wanted to put a fresh, cozy spin on a time-honored fantasy trope: that of the wise seer who makes a fateful prophecy that turns the world upside down. I love epic fantasy, but I thought it’d be fun to play with a significantly less important sort of prophecy. Hence, “The Teller of Small Fortunes”! (The title was actually the very first thing I wrote down, and the rest followed.)
The Teller of Small Fortunes includes an incredible cast of characters who become unlikely friends. What do you think appeals to readers about the found family trope? And any tips on how to do it well, character traits and backstory?
I love found family stories; they’re one of my absolute favorite components of a good story. I think found family is so appealing simply because there’s a part of all of us that craves belonging. No matter what traumas or experiences we’ve been through, we have an innate human need for connection, and the idea of finding others in life who understand and love you–especially people who aren’t your family, but instead are the people you choose to make a part of your life, and who choose you in return – that’s a powerful theme, to me.
I think doing writing found family well can be tricky, because you want the relationships to feel earned. In real life, we don’t (or at least I don’t!) instantaneously become lifelong friends with someone we’ve just met; we learn more about someone over time and share things about ourselves along the way too, and only gradually do we become close with them. When you’re writing found family, you need to mirror that natural progression of the relationship, and show the characters revealing themselves in bits and pieces instead of dumping out their entire backstory in a single lengthy monologue.
I think it also helps to have at least one character who is more naturally wary and defensive, because the lowering of their armor over time is something that feels very vulnerable and real to me.
I think I know bits and pieces of your publishing journey. But would you please share your writing origin story for our readers? How did you start writing, queried and signed with an agent, got a book deal and beyond?
Absolutely! I’ll caveat this by saying that I have been enormously, ridiculously lucky in my publishing journey thus far, and I’m endlessly grateful.
The Teller of Small Fortunes is the first book I’ve written. Even though I’ve always loved reading, I’d never pursued writing seriously because I was busy with my career as a corporate strategist. But in 2022, my family learned that my father’s late-stage cancer had recurred, and the doctors believed it to be terminal. That news completely upended my life (all of our lives, really), and I decided to quit my job in order to spend more time with him.
During that year spent in and out of hospitals, I found myself adrift. I’d never been unemployed as an adult before, and my father was ill, and COVID was COVID-ing – in short, it felt like the world was falling apart around me, but at the same time, I had more free time than I knew what to do with. So I turned to binge-reading fantasy books as a form of escapism, and fell in love with cozy, warm fantasy books like Legends & Lattes. But I ran out of books like those pretty quickly, which is when I decided to try writing my own.
I wrote the book unusually quickly (because it was the only thing I was doing during that time) – it took only a few months, including finding beta readers, receiving feedback and revising, etc. I wasn’t even sure, then, that I was going to seek traditional publication for it, but my husband (then-fiance) was one of my earliest readers, and convinced me that it was good enough to try getting it published.
So I did a lot of research to educate myself about the querying process – in particular, reddit.com/r/pubtips was an absolutely essential resource, and a lovely, helpful community of fellow writers – and then started querying in January 2023. I received agent interest fairly quickly, and ended up having the choice of three fantastic agents. About a month after I first began querying, I signed with Paul Lucas at Janklow & Nesbit, who both seemed lovely to work with and also represented a number of successful fantasy authors whom I loved, like Katherine Arden and James Islington.
With Paul’s feedback, I did a light round of revisions on the manuscript, and we went on submission in March 2023. Almost immediately, we had editor interest, and the first editor call was set up 6 days later. That turned into a cascade of other interest, and we ended up going to auction with offers from multiple Big 5 publishers. I was thrilled to sign a two-book deal with an editor whose vision for the book aligned with mine!
It’s now been nearly a year and a half since we landed the US deal, and we’ve since also signed deals with Hodderscape (UK), Heyne (Germany), and Host (Czech). It’s been a wild ride, with more exciting news about Teller still yet to be announced–I’m so grateful to Paul and my wonderful editors Jess and Molly for everything they’ve done to make it possible!
What is your process for writing and editing? Any writing quirks?
I’m a pants-er! I start with a specific concept – whether a character, a worldbuilding aspect, or a plotline – and fill in the rest as I write. At some point, I’ll reluctantly accept the need for an outline, and will roughly sketch out the shape of the story, but that inevitably changes as I draft.
My writing quirk is that – perhaps unusually, for a fantasy writer – worldbuilding is not a huge focus for me. I’m a vibes-first writer! My worldbuilding happens sort of like a puzzle, where various sections and chunks of it come together first before I fill in the rest of it. Some of those starting pieces might be big (two great powers separated by an ocean, with an uneasy relationship between economic self-interest and nationalistic aggression; a Guild of Mages in alliance with the Crown) or small (cats and bees are inherently magical beings).
I prefer to do only as much worldbuilding as I strictly need for a given book, so as to avoid creating logic holes down the line – and personally, I like there to be some vagueness/unexplained things about the world, since I think it adds a sense of mystery.
Do you have any advice for writers starting out on their trad pub journey?
Read as much as humanly possible. You can’t create art in a vacuum, and I truly do believe that the best preparation I had for writing my first novel was simply being a voracious reader over a long period of time. Without even knowing it, by reading new releases in my genre, I’d been keeping up with market trends and reader preferences because I was one of the readers that I’d be catering to. I think there’s a lot to be said by learning through osmosis, and there are just so many wonderful, brilliant writers out there to learn from and enjoy.
What is next for you we should look forward to? Are you writing a sequel or something new?
My second book, tentatively titled The Keeper of Magical Things, is slated to come out in fall 2025! It’s set in the same world as The Teller of Small Fortunes, though with a new cast of characters, and is a sapphic cozy fantasy about two junior mages getting up to hijinks with a cache of malfunctioning magical artifacts in a neglected farming village. (While also processing some childhood trauma and maybe, possibly, falling in love.)
…I promise I’ll get better at pitching it before next year, haha.
Lastly, where can we find you online?
In rough order of activity, you can find me at @JulieLeongBooks on Instagram, X, BlueSky, and Threads! You can also sign up for my author newsletter at https://www.julieleong.com/newsletter for updates and sneak peeks. Thank you so much for interviewing me, Anima! It’s been a pleasure!
Don’t forget to order Julie’s pumpkin-spice-latte-level-comforting debut, The Teller of Small Fortunes and support her future writing endeavors.
Writer Story TODOs :
To Read :
Frankfurt Book Fair just concluded and you could get the Bookseller magazine covering Frankfurt Book Fair here for free. Definitely read to keep up with the publishing industry and what’s hot and what’s the vibes in general.
To Listen :
In Book Friends Forever podcast this week, it’s all about how publishers market books to Indie Bookstores, with much insidery info.
To Watch :
Okay, this week I am rewatching The Good Place again. It is definitely one of fav shows to rewatch, because it’s absolutely hilarious and fun with crazy characters. Sometimes rewatching a movie or a show which you love is comforting and relaxes the brain as you already know what to expect and you can look at it from a different perspective. It’s great. Watch something you already watched and love. Pick anything you like.
To Write :
I recently did a writing exercise to use color names in your writing and not just to describe the scenery, but other things too. For example, using green to refer to freshness or naivete, red for anger or embarassment, blue for calmness. It definitely made me think and made the prose better.
Thanks for reading The Writer Story. You can find me on social media - Twitter/X - @authoranima or Instagram - @authoranima
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Until next week,
~Toodle-oo~