Lexington author behind ‘Amari and the Night Brothers’ credits success to Twitter hashtag
B.B. Alston of Lexington became a best-selling author because of a misplaced form.
Alston distinctly remembers waiting in an office at Amazon as he was in the process of being hired for a customer service position. The company had misplaced some document — a 1099 or a W2 — so the Lexington resident absentmindedly checked his phone.
On Twitter, he noticed a hashtag prospective authors were using to pitch their ideas to publishers and agents, part of an organized event that allowed those inside the industry to scout for new talent. It made Alston think of that manuscript for a young adult novel he’d completed in his spare time between jobs and classes at Midlands Tech, which he’d never been able to get much interest in and kept in a drawer for years. Wouldn’t it be fun, he thought, to give it another shout out on social media?
So he fired off a plot synopsis in 275 characters, added the hashtag #DVPit, and then put his phone away and went back to thinking about work in the real world.
Three and a half years later, Alston, now 39, is the published author of the New York Times-bestselling “Amari and the Night Brothers,” the story of a girl who goes on a quest to find her missing brother, when a mysterious package leads her to a summer camp at the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs.
Alston just turned in a completed draft of a sequel to his publisher, part of a planned trilogy. He spoke to The State right before he flew to the U.K. for an award ceremony — which he admits will be his first international flight as an adult. And his first book is in the early stages of being made into a film, to be produced by Don Cheadle and starring Marsai Martin, the young actor best known for playing a little girl in the family sitcom “Black-ish.”
Sitting in the Lexington home he shares with his wife and mother, Alston still seemed somewhat stunned that a tweet actually got him an agent, that got him a publisher, that got him a movie deal, that completely changed the course of his life.
“It’s been surreal,” Alston said.
He came up with the idea of Amari, a young African-American girl suddenly thrown into a supernatural world, because of his own desire to see someone like himself reflected in the stories he liked to read.
“I hadn’t seen myself (in these kinds of stories) growing up,” Alston said. “And people had said to me, ‘you can’t sell this story with a Black lead character.’ But ultimately I decided it was a story worth telling.”
His own background plays out in Amari’s interaction with other characters who have known about this supernatural world their whole lives, and fit into it much more naturally than she can. He said he imagined if someone from his background got into Hogwarts, the magical school from the “Harry Potter” series — but also realizes it works as a metaphor for someone who might be the first in their family to get into a real-world college.
“I’m someone who comes from a low-income background, who has a single parent who got really sick,” Alston said. “I remember going to these summer camps in Dutch Fork and seeing these houses and thinking, ‘I didn’t realize some people had so much’... I had to learn to accept myself, to learn self-confidence the same as Amari does.”
Alston spent his 20s working a string of minimum wage jobs in restaurants and warehouses, before deciding to take pre-med classes at Midlands Technical College, inspired by his mother’s battle with rheumatism. He met his now-wife in the nursing program, and she still works as a nurse locally even after he sold the book.
But in his spare time, Alston had always enjoyed writing, going all the way back to his time at Gibbes Middle School in Columbia.
“In eighth grade, I would write horror stories about field trips gone wrong, and all my friends would want to see who would make it,” Alston said. “They would die in crazy ways, like the bus would back over them or they would fall in a hole.”
That was the first time he realized “what I write could make other people happy,” Alston said.
He was born in the Atlanta area, but moved to South Carolina with his mother when he was young. He and his younger brother Steven graduated from Columbia’s Eau Claire High School.
He started working on “Amari” in 2015, but he was never able to sell the finished book to a publisher. “It was just a bunch of no’s,” he said.
Then in 2018, while waiting at Amazon, he saw the #DVPit hashtag trending. Launched by the publishing industry in 2016, the hashtag is part of a social media event meant to highlight prospective authors of color or people from other marginalized backgrounds looking to sell their work to an agent.
His tweet almost immediately got a “like” from agent Gemma Cooper at the Bent Agency, who was able to get “Amari” published by HarperCollins last year. Even before the book came out, the story’s movie rights were bought by Universal Studios in 2019, and is now in development by Mandeville Films, which did the live-action version of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.”
Alston isn’t directly involved in the filmmaking process, but he did talk to producer Cheadle on the phone and has reviewed work on the script by Jack Thorne, who worked on the HBO series “His Dark Materials.”
“They asked me questions about the story, like how I thought this or that might look,” Alston said.
While filming of the movie hasn’t started yet, Alston has turned in the manuscript for “Amari and the Great Game,” the second book set to publish in August.
Alston still lives in Lexington, where his success as an author can still come as a surprise to some. He remembers seeing a girl carrying a copy of his book in the local Target.
“I told her I wrote that, and she looked at me and went, ‘Did you though?’” he remembers. “I showed her my photo on the book jacket.”
Alston said he plans to stay in the town close to where he grew up and where he wrote most of his first book. Writing, he says, is a job you can do from anywhere.
He still seems amazed at the overnight success of the book, after he struggled to get his writing career to take off. All of that seemingly changed with the right tweet at the right time.
“It’s amazing how much your luck can change by believing in yourself,” he said. “I’ve worked hard, but I’ve also had a lot of luck.”
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