How two Romanian authors scored a massive international publishing deal

It only took about a decade and over 300 rejections.

According to Instagram, I’ve been mutuals with Elizabeth Sagan since March 2017. Back then, we were both posting book-related content. While I abandoned the endeavor when I realized that taking pics isn’t my strong suit, she not only kept going, but grew her account with the help of eye-catching, elaborate shots. The kind that involve planning and time to get right.

Her pics would occasionally feature her best friend, James Trevino. I assimilated information about them in that weird way you learn stuff about people you follow online, yet never met in real life. Besides books, Elizabeth likes birds and occasionally nurtures hurt pigeons back to health. She has a thing for swords. She figured out how to take advantage of online trends in a way that never came naturally to me. More importantly, she and James were writing fantasy and hoping to publish one day. Cool!

Late last year, their book announcement dropped. I felt a surge of joy usually reserved for friend updates. Besides the deal being incredible, the fact that they wrote in English, landed an agent, and sold a fantasy novel gave me hope that this was something you could accomplish, even if you hailed from Romania. Once someone proves it can be done, the road ahead seems less daunting.

For Elizabeth and James, however, the journey was bumpy at best.

*

It’s not like there aren’t Romanian writers of international acclaim. I smile every time I see a cool girl post an Emil Cioran book. Mircea Cărtărescu was mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. Herta Müller actually won it. There’s Eugène Ionesco, Tristan Tzara, Mircea Eliade. The list goes on.

Still, we don’t really have the equivalent of a Sarah J. Maas. By which I mean, books written by Romanian authors with extensive commercial appeal in global markets. Gravespell, James and Elizabeth’s book, might fix that.

The first in a YA fantasy series titled Mages & Murder, Gravespell is set at the Deepgrove Academy for Magic, a modern school for wizards. The plot revolves around outcast student Alice, who gets an unwelcome premonition that her schoolmate Xena, daughter of the American President of Magic, will die.

Despite Alice’s warning, Xena perishes, but not before pointing the finger at the four main suspects in her death. Besides Alice, the list includes Xena’s wealthy ex-boyfriend Christopher, traitorous best friend Delvy, and new boyfriend Ben. Soon, the foursome is at the center of a media scandal, with the magical world at large on the brink of war.

The book is described as Wednesday meets One of Us Is Lying. There’s a mystery to untangle, a complex world to explore, and a touch of romance to spice up the action. Plus, the threat of a war hints at bigger things to come. Naturally, I wanted to learn more.

“The best comp title I can give you would be the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik. Take Scholomance, take One of Us is Lying, put them together, and you get Gravespell. We wanted to access that nostalgic feeling that comes with going back to a school for magic, but in a modern setting”, Elizabeth explains.

How modern, you ask?

“It’s a world where the mage society mirrors the human society; they move in tandem. To the industrial revolution of humans, there was a magical industrial revolution, when mages discovered they could mine magic from the ground, just like humans mine oil. With that magic, they created magical technology,” she tells me.

There’s a clash between traditional and modern mages. The old-school ones craft their wands from scratch by combining ingredients that have significance to them. A strand of hair from a loved one, a family heirloom, and so on. On the other hand, a big company sells wands with built-in spells, you can purchase spells on a subscription-based system, and there’s even social media for mages.

No one is safe from late-stage capitalism. The big company mines magic from the ground, with disastrous consequences to the world. As Elizabeth points out, you can’t take and take and take without repercussions. What was truly crucial for the writing duo, though, were the character arcs.

“I would say that the base of any good book has to be the character. Because you can have faulty world-building or a faulty plot. As long as the characters are outstanding, they can save the book. We did our best to treat every single part of what a book entails with care, but we were very focused on the arc of the characters,” she reveals.

As for romance, it’s more the cherry on top than the entire cake.

“There is an enemies-to-lovers trope, although by saying that, I feel like I’m giving away part of it, I’m spoiling it a bit. That’s entirely our fault because we commissioned a certain type of art. But it’s not romance-heavy. The book is young adult and the characters are in high school. I would describe the romance as that first crush you feel as a teen. Wholesome love,” she sums it up.

Elizabeth and James also sneaked in Romanian elements throughout the story. Alice’s best friend is Vlad Cantemir, who attends Deepgrove via a student exchange program.

“In the first version of the manuscript, he was a minor character. Then, our literary agent wanted to see more from Vlad, so he became a super important part of the book. He’s not a POV character in this first one, but he is going to be a POV character in the second one, and his journey will bring him to Romania,” Elizabeth teases.

Not only that, but Romanian readers will notice some other familiar terms once they pick up the book.

“I personally love it when I see Romania being randomly mentioned in a fantasy book. There were Romanian sentences in The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, and that made me feel a certain type of way. I wanted to create the same thing, so we sprinkled a few Romanian words like zacuscă, colivă, deochi. Everyone who has read the book so far has surely glazed over them, because they don’t understand the cultural context. We wanted to make it so that a Romanian teen who reads Gravespell feels like they too can be a part of a great story and they can feel seen,” she says.

As I found out, there’s a deeper reason for this – and it has a lot to do with how Elizabeth’s dream of landing a publishing deal was previously met with resistance.

*

“I was poisoned by this idea, this mentality that things are not possible, especially in art and especially in literature, because I was born in Romania and because I live in Romania. I have a personal vendetta against it,” Elizabeth confesses.

Back in December, she posted a lengthy YouTube video detailing her publishing journey. While the target audience of Gravespell is English-speaking, the video is in Romanian¹.

“I did it for the old me at 15, or even younger than that, who wanted to start on this journey and hoped it was possible, but was told by so many people that this can’t be done because you are Romanian. The Romanian authors who are at the level of success I dreamed for myself were so, so, so few,” she admits.

That said, the video wasn’t solely for her. It was for everyone who will (hopefully) come after.

“This is why it was important to me to talk about this journey in Romanian on YouTube. For an international audience, the book deal and what we managed to do is cool, yeah, but not that impressive. For Romania, I feel like it’s more impressive. I wanted my message to go to the 12-year-old, 13-year-old who dreams of one day having their book deal on Publishers Marketplace, and special editions of their book, and becoming a full-time author. I use my native language to talk to them because they might not know English. I didn’t,” Elizabeth elaborates.

In fact, the first book she wrote with James was in Romanian. She has always been drawn to storytelling and used to scribble stories in a notebook as a teen. At one point, she found Shauki’s Bookcase, a book blog that attracted a hefty reader community at the time. She met James in the comments, where they exchanged Messenger IDs and started chatting. That was around 2007-2008.

Despite her creativity and passion for reading and writing fantasy, Elizabeth decided to study Law in college. James did, too. It took him about two weeks to figure out it wasn’t for him. For Elizabeth, that revelation came a bit later. They developed a story together in 2014 and started writing it in 2015. Revisiting their conversations while preparing for the YouTube video, Elizabeth was startled to discover how dark that time in her life was.

“Re-reading those messages was a tough experience because, looking back, it’s obvious how deeply unhappy with my life I was. A shadow of myself. In those early 2014 conversations, all I did was complain about my life and the college courses. I was going through a small depression, and the only thing making me somewhat happy were the moments when my creativity rebelled and forced me to write,” she details in the video.

Elizabeth describes the moment when James asked her if she would be keen for them to become co-authors as being reborn. Suddenly, she once again had a purpose.

“I had a dream, an objective, something to work toward. I was so happy. I woke up with our story in my head, went to sleep still thinking about it. I was excited to jump out of bed to work on it, to brainstorm, to write, to talk to James. I don’t believe there were five consecutive minutes over that entire year when I didn’t have the story tab open in my brain. Anything that wasn’t the story became a chore,” Elizabeth remembers.

Around that time, they did research and discovered that the Romanian book market is small. Unfortunately, that continues to be the case, with Romania currently the lowest-ranked country in the EU for book reading. It’s mainly why James and Elizabeth aimed to publish overseas. They weren’t confident in their English skills, so they kept writing in Romanian, but moved the action to London.

That first book was finished by late 2016. For those at war with numbers, that’s almost 10 years ago.

*

The translation process was cumbersome and took around two years. They didn’t work on anything else, which Elizabeth takes much of the blame for.

“I used to say I wasn’t an author, I was just the writer of that book. I couldn’t fathom the book not succeeding. It was the book I gave up Law for, gave up a normal career for. It had to work. Which was the wrong mentality, firstly, because it was disrespectful to the craft. If you write a single book, that book will be the best thing you’ve ever written. If you write ten, it will be the worst, because it’s impossible not to improve from one book to the next. (…) I think it’s important for people to talk about their failures and celebrate them. Otherwise, you see a success story and have the impression that those people pulled it off on their first try,” Elizabeth goes on in the video.

James and Elizabeth didn’t. They queried agents and were almost willing to ignore red flags to see their dream come true. Towards the end of 2020, they had to admit defeat. They wrote a second book, in English this time. The list of agents they sent it to was smaller, so each rejection felt like a knife through the heart. It didn’t work out either. Neither did their third book, a middle-grade.

Then came Gravespell.

*

In early 2024, Elizabeth got a pitch to write a non-fiction book about bookish cocktails. She liked the idea. That book became Get Lit: Cocktails That Bring Your Favorite Books to Life, which came out in September 2025. It includes 50 drink recipes created by Sother Teague, with Elizabeth writing each drink intro and the additional sections.

During the same year, she worked with James on their fourth book. They finished it in August and kicked off the query process. In late October, they received their first offer of representation. The duo contacted all other agents to let them know, and the full manuscript requests grew. Soon, they got more offers. In November, they signed with their dream agent.

The next few months were hectic, as they had to finish initial edits in time for a March 2025 Bologna book fair. Thankfully, the hard work paid off, and the good news started pouring in.

After over a decade of hustle, James and Elizabeth sold Gravespell in more than a dozen countries, including the US, UK, Spain, Brazil, and Germany.

Fun fact: Shauki, the guy who used to run the book blog through which Elizabeth and James met, now works as an editor in Romania. Guess who will publish their book over here?

The publishers will also handle the translation.

“The editor asked us whether we want to deal with the translation ourselves, told us about a Romanian author who likes to be hands-on. We were absolutely not, because I read the first paragraphs and came up short, unable to comprehend how it would sound in Romanian. A skill, if you don’t use it, you lose it. We wrote the first book in Romanian, all the others in English. Now, the best I can do is a soup of Romanian and English. The publishing house is going to choose a translator. Good luck to them, because there is a certain joke that I’m thinking of right now. I have no idea how it’s going to be translated in Romanian so that it makes sense,” Elizabeth tells me.

*

Writing tends to be a solitary activity. It’s just you and the blank page. Maybe a drink. A helpful friend you can hassle via DM for feedback. The demons in your closet, who audibly grunt when you ignore them for too long. I was curious about how the process works when two people are involved.

“In the case of Gravespell, where there are multiple POVs, James might resonate more with a certain character and want to write from the chapters of that character. After he’s done, I go over his chapters and expand the scenes if I feel like it or do additional edits. He does the same with my chapters. We are equally involved in this part of the process,” Elizabeth says.

This works because a lot of the heavy lifting takes place before the writing begins.

“Right now, we are in the middle of planning Gravespell 2, spending hours on a daily video call to just brainstorm ideas and put the outline on paper before we go on a writing retreat. We are plotters. We have to be very organized since it’s two of us, and we have to know what we write. Things work so much faster that way. We have a document with world-building, character arcs – it’s 15,000 words long at the minimum,” she explains.

Once that part is done, they go on a writing retreat, usually to another city. They rent a place, stay for an entire week, and write from 9 am to 10 pm.

“It’s taxing physically and emotionally. By the end of it, we are absolutely destroyed. Still, it works for us because, in a few writing retreats, we have the first draft of the book. After that, there’s editing, but the point of the first draft is just to exist. You can make it better later. When we weren’t organized, it took us years to write a single book. Now, we have structure,” Elizabeth points out.

Concerning everything around the writing, their responsibilities vary.

“If a problem arises, we either pull our weight, both of us, or it gets passed to one of us because it’s the kind of thing that one of us can deal with better than the other,” she says.

As for promo, there is a lot of pressure for all creatives to market themselves online, writers included. I assumed this might come easier after creating book-related content on social media for 10+ years.

“There were many reasons why it was a good thing that it didn’t work out with the first books. Over these many years, we have somewhat learned how to do things. We are comfortable putting ourselves out there to some extent, showing our faces. Not everyone is comfortable doing that. I have a bit of a feel for how to use trends and sounds to talk about Gravespell. We commission art. We’re doing the best we can. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And I know that what must be done is for us to continue speaking about it. Because I’m proud of what I did, so why wouldn’t I?” Elizabeth asks.

Both she and James have large followings on Instagram – Elizabeth has 239K followers, James 353K. I asked Elizabeth if this helped on their publishing journey.

“If things with our fiction writing had worked on the first try, I would have said yes. But since we had a big following from the very beginning and were still rejected… We amassed 312 rejections in 10 years, and only with Gravespell we finally got our first yes,” she emphasizes.

Then, she goes on.

“Our books were rejected because they weren’t good enough. We weren’t good enough and had to go through this process of becoming better with every single book. In fiction, the most important thing is the book. If an agent doesn’t like the book, if they don’t think they’re going to sell it, they’re going to reject it.”

Given how long it took, I wondered how she kept her sanity over the course of her publishing journey, especially considering the pressure to get a “real” job.

“It was terrible. I’m very glad I’m out of that period of my life. Imagine watching the people around you advance in their lives, and you looking at your own life and realizing that you haven’t advanced on paper, year after year. Actually, we did advance, but we couldn’t see it because we didn’t get that first yes. Many people expressed that sort of, oh, she wants to be a fantasy author, bless her heart,” Elizabeth confesses.

With time, however, she understood that the naysayers have their place:

“Those people are the first obstacle you encounter when you embark on a journey like this. If their making fun of you stops you or sidetracks you, maybe you didn’t deserve to get there. If they defeat you, then you wouldn’t have been able to deal with the obstacles that come after that. I have a few certainties in life, and one of them is that you absolutely need pushback. You need things to be just hard enough for you to get better. You can use them as fuel. Now, no one says anything anymore, of course. But it’s funny that right when I was at the beginning of my journey, when I needed support, that was when I was attacked, in a way. I grudgingly thank them for being terrible people; it’s what I needed. When things are too easy, something is not okay.”

I quip that this is a very Eastern European way of looking at things. We find it suspicious when something comes easily.

“Yeah. Could I have learned what I learned without them? I don’t think so. As long as it doesn’t break you, it makes you stronger. I’m not saying this just to say a cliche. It’s real,” Elizabeth highlights.

*

Elizabeth and James are currently working on Gravespell 2 and on what they hope to become their adult fantasy debut. Equal parts overwhelming and exciting.

“I like this quote, what a blessing it is to be tired in the pursuit of your own choosing. It’s exactly the kind of life I wanted, and even the overwhelming parts or the hard parts, I want them all. I love the fact that this is my reality, and I’m forever grateful for it. For the fact that my thing is just to write stories and to brainstorm worlds,” Elizabeth says.

Gravespell comes out in spring 2027. Pre-orders will open once the cover is done, likely around June. Until then, you can add the book as want-to-read on Goodreads. You can also subscribe to James and Elizabeth’s Substack, where they share book updates.

Before ending my conversation with Elizabeth, I ask her to share something she finds inspirational at the moment. A book, song, movie, that kind of thing. She mentions the nihilistic penguin meme. I’m not familiar.

“There was a documentary, and there was the penguin who broke from its group and started toward the mountain, toward certain death. The story was tragic, but that section of the documentary was edited with epic music and turned into a symbol of perseverance. The penguin became a symbol of doing things because your soul requires you to do it. I ate that up. I felt like I was that penguin when I pursued this dream of publishing, despite me being a non-native English speaker, despite living in Romania, and despite the poisonous mentality that it can’t be done,” Elizabeth explains.

“But the penguin dies, Elizabeth. That’s sad.”

“All of us die. Shouldn’t you at least try to go for your dreams?”

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Quotes have been condensed and edited for clarity. Photos courtesy of Elizabeth Sagan.

1. Auto-translated English captions are available if you want to watch.