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$775K Book Kickstarter, RF Kuang’s Katabasis, and More Book News
RF Kuang,Rachelle Gardner, After The End
Kyle Colley
September 04, 2025
Happy Tuesday!
Or also known as the month of reading full books during football commercials:
Check out our newest Founders Talk Podcast with the wonderful Rachelle Gardner, President of Gardner Literary Agency.
Rachelle has worked in publishing since 1995 and has closed over 300 publishing deals for authors as their literary agent.
This conversation will teach you so much about publishing, the role of the literary agent, and more!
Enjoy!
This Week’s Commericals:
📚 Open Nook Katabasis
📺 After the End
📖 Katabasis: The Book
This Week On Bookum:
There are some authors who, when they drop a book, you know it will be conversation-worthy, and last week one of those authors released a book.
RF Kuang (Babel, Yellowface, The Poppy War) is back with one of her most ambitious books to date in Katabasis.
The reviews have been everywhere from “favorite book of the year” to “I have to DNF (Did Not Finish) this one!”… AKA our favorite books to talk about!
Join us today at 3 PM EST on the Bookum App as we discuss this book in an Open Book Nook (real-time group audio room)!
We will be joined by some special guests, and who knows, Rebecca Kuang might even stop by (she’s not).
Make sure to download the app to listen live and join the conversation!
This Week in The Book World:
As the motto goes, "we shout out creators," and we also love authors who take agency!
This week we stumbled on an awesome project that is doing numbers, and I mean $700,000+ higher than expected!
The Story:
One spring day in 2024, two well-known authors were eating empanadas and drinking margaritas when they started doing what all great storytellers do… tell story ideas. One story turned to two, two to three, and before you know it they not only had full bellies from all the empanadas but also a collection of stories that they knew readers needed in their hands.
Enter the premise:
After the End is a collection of dystopian novellas authored by NY Times bestselling author Ali Hazelwood, Adriana Herrera, and other beloved storytellers (one being friend of Bookum author Nicki Payne!).
The 8 Authors
Here’s the kicker (aka the Kickstarter):
The After the End collective started a Kickstarter (read: fundraiser) with the goal of using $10,000 to support efforts through printing the 8 books, digitizing the ebooks, and producing the audiobooks. But oh, as you know, when the romance community shows up, they show out!
As of this writing the campaign has officially hit $775,929 with over 5,701 backers and still over 19 days to go!
Creators, authors, and those beyond—take this as a sign to start that project, host that book club, and tell your stories because your community will find you. And when they do, you might be shocked at the overwhelming support!
To learn more or to get your After the End 8-book collection stop by the link below:
This Week in Publishing:
Seems pretty unfair to shout out the book we are discussing today without explaining the summary.
So for the book of the week let’s talk about Katabasis by RF Kuang:
Book Summary:
"Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang.
The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.
That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….
Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.
With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.
But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom."
Add Katabasis to your TBR on Bookum today!
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Happy Reading!
See you next week!
Footnotes (Aka other articles we are reading and Bookum content):
Bookum Club is Reading “Lead Boldly: Seven Principles from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Get Your Copy Today and Join Us for our Conversation with Robert F. Smith on Sept 30th - https://www.harpercollinsleadership.com/9781400244102/lead-boldly/
