Great news for my pals in Ireland who have been patiently waiting (for years!) for an event in their neck of the woods: we’re bringing the Hot Wax world tour to Dublin on October 22nd.
You can find tickets and more information here. Hope to see you there!
Calling all road dogs!
The US Hot Wax tour is live. I’m so excited we’ll be able to bring this book to so many cities this fall, and it’s going to be an absolute blast. We’re working hard behind the scenes to bring you treats, tunes, tour merch, and so much more. It’s a really weird time to be promoting a book but now more than ever is a moment to fight for the arts and celebrate–loudly–everything that makes life colorful, vibrant, and worth living. I can’t wait to meet you all.
For tickets and more information, please contact hosting bookstores directly; you can find links on my Events page.
It’s been too quiet here for a little too long. But the good news is we’ve got good news worth sharing, so I’ll get right to the point. Hot Wax launch is just about three months away. It’s wild how fast this time has flown, but now that we’re really in the home stretch we can finally share some things with you.
The first is NetGalley requests and pre-order links. If you’re a NetGalley member, you can request the US edition of the book here and the UK edition here. Our galleys–both print and digital–are pretty limited, so if you don’t get lucky this time, don’t fret! We still have some giveaways coming up, and you can always pre-order the book: you can find the US edition here and the UK edition here (or anywhere you buy books. Foreign editions will be coming in 2026; translators need time to translate).
If you’re not sure what all the fuss is about pre-orders and why authors always seem to be crowing about them, here are the basics: healthy pre-orders really help a book succeed, for two reasons. The first is enthusiasm, which should never be underestimated. A good volume of pre-orders lets booksellers/bookstores know that people are excited about the title, which makes them more likely to read it, stock it, and promote it to their local audience. That kind of word of mouth can do wonders for the life of a book in an era where nobody knows what else can actually move the needle. The second thing that pre-orders do is streamline production. An author’s worst nightmare–and their publisher’s, too–is having huge demand for a book and not enough copies in the first print run to meet it. This is trickier guesswork than ever with the tariff-induced destabilization of global trade (most of our paper and printing materials come from Canada and China, for instance). Pre-orders also go a long way towards making sure that there are simply enough copies of a book to go around. And, finally, pre-orders count toward first week sales, which can be a huge help in bumping a book onto the bestseller list. If you’re looking to support your favorite authors fighting to make art as the market is glutted with AI slop, consider pre-ordering titles you’re really excited about. It matters more than you know!
Because we appreciate it so much, we’ve arranged two options to pre-order signed copies of Hot Wax. You can snag a signed copy from Head House Books here in the States and from Waterstones in the UK. And if you pre-order a signed copy, you can still get it personalized if you come see me on tour! Which brings me to our next little announcement: UK tour dates are live and you can book your tickets now. We’re really excited about this route. Because the turnout for Graveyard Shift was so spectacular and we had such a fantastic time, we’ve got even more events this year and we’re hoping nobody’s too far away to make it. But because most of these events did sell out in 2024, if you’re pretty sure you want to come, don’t sleep on grabbing tickets. (If you’re curious what these events are like, you can find some recordings of the Graveyard tour on the Links page.) With any other questions, please contact bookstores directly! You can find all those hyperlinks in this post here.
US tour dates are still in the works, but should be announced very soon! We’re just waiting to nail down a couple of holdouts and plot a good route because yep, you guessed it–I’ll be driving myself again this year. With a road trip book like this, it just wouldn’t be right to do it any other way.
Hope to see you out there!
It’s been a busy few months for Team Rio. As is always the case with publishing, there’s a strange lag between when big things happen and when they can actually be big news. I’m thrilled to finally share this with you.
I wrote the first version of this book seven years ago. It’s been on a long, strange journey since then, and I’m so glad it’s found such a good home with Tim at Simon & Schuster. The next few years promise to be very busy, in a very good way. Without a great agent this never would have happened–I’m grateful for mine every day. But it also wouldn’t have happened without my readers, who have loved my first book so fiercely and made it possible for me to write more.
I can’t wait to bring you along on this fresh adventure. Because most of my online writing has migrated to my Substack newsletter, this is a great time to subscribe. You’ll still see all the big news here, but if you’re interested in the publishing process and want a peek behind the scenes as Hot Wax and Graveyard Shift go to press, Substack is the place to be. I hope you’ll join me. You can subscribe right here.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
You might have seen it on socials yesterday, but in case you missed it: new writing from me for the first time in a long time coming 2023.
I don’t normally do short stories, but I thought I’d make an exception as a thank you for all your support over the last few years. You can pre-order the anthology from any of the retailers listed here, or here if you’re in the UK.
More to come.
I’ll be talking Shakespeare and signing books at the Howard County Library (Miller Branch) on September 15th! Drop by if you’re in the DC/MD area. More info here.
Hope to see you there!
Since we’re on the subject of skulls: Ladies and groundlings, we have cover art!
If this is something you want to see on your shelves, don’t forget you can pre-order If We Were Villains right here.
M. L. RIO 