News

One Month to ATACAMA!

...and lots more updates, including a book signing this coming weekend, and status updates on other books!

Jendia Gammon

13 Apr 2025 — 7 min read

Dear Readers, this has been an absolute WHIRLWIND of a week and month. Hot on the heels of Doomflower publishing, I have other significant deadlines and things to wrap up. And now, a month from today, my next book arrives...in an unusual alignment of having two new books back-to-back: Atacama, a thriller with sci-fi and horror elements. If you love The X-Files, Black Mirror, and The Thing, you're going to enjoy this novel. The cover art is by Chris Panatier...but the interior, black and white illustrations--36 of them!–are all by me. It's a stunner of a book, front and back, and I think you'll find it quite special.

What's Atacama About?

A missing research team is found dead in the Atacama Desert under mysterious circumstances. Far away in East Tennessee, Appalachian researcher Fiona Hawthorne reels from the death of her best friend, Alva, among the Atacama team. When Fiona's university professor Dr. Bingham is visited by members of a shadowy corporation, she begins to suspect not everything is as it seems. Enlisting her intense coworker Lafe Lambert, the two dig deep looking for answers around Alva's death...too deep. Fiona soon realizes that she not only faces sinister corporate agents, but also a monster hiding in plain sight.

At its core, Atacama is one woman's journey of the soul and the unknown, set against a thriller backdrop. Fiona Hawthorne is a flawed, wounded, very real character that feels everything she ever understood sliding away from her. I wanted to explore what we cling to when our world falls apart in an extraordinary and terrifying situation.

Here's a terrific review blurb by Mallory Pearson:

“Jendia Gammon’s Atacama masterfully weaves a gripping sci-fi mystery that blurs the line between reality and nightmare. With lyrical prose, Gammon builds an atmosphere thick with tension and dread as she takes you on a heart-pounding race for answers. What begins as a twisted mystery quickly spirals into a cosmic nightmare, unearthing surreal horrors lurking beneath the surface that will haunt you long after the final page. A mind-bending exploration of grief, love, and the unknown, Atacama is as unnerving as it is hopeful, and left me clawing for more as it pulled me deeper into its eerie world.”

— Mallory Pearson, author of Voice Like a Hyacinth and We Ate the Dark

Where to Preorder Atacama

Here are some options for preordering Atacama. Or preorder from your favorite seller!

Bookshop.org US (paperback) Bookshop.org (hardback), Bookshop.org US (eBook), Amazon US (paperback), Amazon US (hardback) Amazon UK (paperback), Amazon UK (hardback), Apple (eBook), Barnes & Noble (paperback), Barnes & Noble (hardback), Barnes & Noble Nook (eBook), Black Cat Fables, Blackwell’s (hardback), Booktopia (Australia), Indigo (hardback), Indigo (ebook), Kobo (eBook), Waterstones

Book Signing for Doomflower

With Doomflower now out in the world, I'm gearing up for some book events for both it and Atacama.

This Saturday, April 19, I will be signing Doomflower at Black Cat Fables in Monrovia, California. SoCal folks, I hope to see you there! I'll bring treats and book swag. Here are all the details, and a link to order your book before the event (or order from afar and have them ship to you, after I sign it on the 19th!)

Early Buzz for Doomflower

Even though Doomflower has been out for only 5 days, it's already my most popular book yet. I've seen Instagram posts, Threads posts, TikToks, Bluesky posts, blogs talking about it, etc. and I have never had such a concentration of interest around any of my prior releases before. At one point, it even reached #1 in a category of new releases on Amazon UK (thank you, UK!) for a couple of days, and has been in the top ten for various new release categories all week. That may not be New York Times bestseller level, but it's still awesome.

There seems to be broad appeal, and honestly, I had no idea to expect. It's wild for me to see, but very exciting. Thank you to those of you who ordered the book. I hope you enjoy it! For more info and links to buy, head here:

Writing (and other) Updates

In other news, I had another number one moment this past week! My two-year-old book, The Shadow Galaxy collection, reached #1 in imported science fiction in Brazil! That marked the official first number 1 for me, prior to Doomflower's. So...wow. I don't know what to say, other than THANK YOU!

It's amazing this happened just before Atacama publishes. A short story in this collection, titled "The Scaffold," is now the prologue for Atacama!

Meanwhile, the rest of this month, on my writing front, I will focus on the completion and submission of the finished manuscript for my Choose Your Own Adventure book, Dungeon Crawl at the Haunted Mall. That book will be my most widely-distributed book ever, as Chooseco is now partnering with Penguin Random House for distribution. Also, I have a publication date circled for this one: April 21, 2026. Which...is 2 weeks after my first dragon book of a trilogy publishes, The Vale of Seven Dragons (April 7, 2026). I should be getting edits for that very soon, along with edits for The Secret of the Sapphire Sentinel (October 21, 2025), sequel to my Nebula & BSFA Award finalist book, The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern. And I should be getting cover art for some of my upcoming books as well! Very excited about that.

The leaderboard is now updated for all my current and forthcoming books, with some dates on some of them now.

So things are rolling! And I've not even talked about my editor-in-chief side of things at Stars and Sabers Publishing. We are very busy there. And currently, we're trying to get as close to our funding goal as possible for our second anthology, Of Enchantment, Enigma, and the Infinite. This one is filled with magical-themed stories. Support levels start at $5 if you'd like your name in the book, and perks get better at higher tiers, with different formats of the book available!

I'll be editing these stories from now through May with a completion date set for June, and then preparation and preorders will begin for publication in August. We should also have our third anthology's cover art next month, for Of Dread, Decay, and Doom, which is horror themed. And we have many more themed anthologies down the line, as well as several solo author books: novels, novellas, novelettes, and collections, already in the works by brilliant authors.

As you can see, I'm busy...and yet I have to job search as well. My science writing job is sadly going away this summer. I'm going to finish two new novels in progress and send those out to query for a literary agent, and hopefully strike a good book deal somewhere down the line with a Big Five publisher. That's the goal, anyway. It will take time.

If you've made it this far, thank you. There's a lot of info, and I appreciate your taking the time to read and support my words and my work.

Ad astra,
Jendia