For years, publishing operated on an assumption: fantasy with Black protagonists just didn’t sell. Nobody said it out loud, exactly, but the shelves told the story. Eurocentric worlds everywhere. Millions of kids growing up without a single book that looked like them. The gap was right there, honestly — you just had to be willing to see it. Most people weren’t. Tomi Adeyemi was.
When she pitched Children of Blood and Bone, she wasn’t throwing another fantasy novel into an already crowded pile. She was making a bet, a big one, that publishers had gotten the math wrong. That the audience everyone assumed was too small was actually enormous.
It paid off. Before the book even hit shelves, she’d landed a seven-figure book-and-film deal. Then the novel came out and debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Young Adult Hardcover list. Not just a hit — arguably one of the biggest YA fantasy launches of the whole decade.
She Turned an Overlooked World Into a Franchise
By 2017, YA publishing had a stale-air feeling to it. Fewer big deals were closing. Sales were slipping in places they hadn’t before. And somewhere in that slump, publishers started noticing something they’d been ignoring: voices they’d sidelined for years could actually sell books. The numbers back this up, and they’re not pretty — in 2016, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center took in roughly 3,400 children’s and YA titles. Only 94 of those came from Black creators.
First draft in a month. Second draft in another. That’s the entire window she had to work with. Adeyemi wasn’t interested in the excuse that mainstream readers “wouldn’t get” African mythology. So she didn’t hedge. She built her world straight from Yoruba gods, language, power structures — no watering it down for anybody. And underneath all of that, she kept the skeleton of a classic high-stakes YA quest fully in place.
The risk here wasn’t abstract, either. In May 2016, she quit a full-time marketing career for part-time teaching work. Gave herself something like 70 days to get the manuscript ready for Pitch Wars. First draft in a month. Second draft in another. That’s the entire window she had to work with.
And then the payoff arrived, and it was big: a seven-figure pre-empt from Henry Holt for world English rights to a trilogy. Fox 2000 grabbed film rights before the book was even out. By the time the Bologna fair rolled around in April 2017, rights had already sold across eight more language markets — with more auctions still in motion. Then it hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
The market gap is what cracked the door open, sure. But the real story is what she did once she was through it — she turned representation into something durable. Actual intellectual property. A sequel. Translation deals. Screen potential sitting right there waiting. That’s the piece people tend to skip past.
Three Rules Behind the Breakout
Build where the supply is scarce.
Take something that already sells — a proven category — and pair it with a perspective competitors genuinely can’t fake their way into. “I knew I would find an audience,” she said in a 2018 Audible interview. And she meant it literally: she didn’t sprinkle African references over a generic fantasy just for texture. Yoruba language and cosmology were the foundation. The magic system. The characters. The politics. All of it, built from the ground up.
Make originality easy to buy.
Here’s the thing about unfamiliar ideas — they still need a familiar wrapper, something an agent can grab onto in seconds. Adeyemi’s own pitch was almost stupidly simple: “Black Panther with magic.” That’s straight from her guide on working with literary agents. But peel back the cultural specificity and what’s underneath is pure, recognizable franchise machinery — a young hero, a quest that can’t wait, a monarchy begging to be toppled, a magic system with actual internal logic, and plenty of runway for sequels.
Turn rejection into data.
This one’s less about craft and more about mindset. Separate how a “no” feels from what it’s actually telling you. “Every single time you send a query, you can learn from it,” she wrote. Her earlier manuscript went out to around 60 agents. Sixty. Nobody bit. Instead of taking that personally, she mined it for information — what wasn’t landing, why — cut her losses, and walked into Pitch Wars with something sharper.
Sixty Rejections, One Wrong Product
Four years. That’s roughly how long she’d sunk into a manuscript that never once landed an agent. And the issue wasn’t that she gave up too easily — it was the opposite, almost. She was persistent about the wrong thing. Once she saw that clearly, she course-corrected hard: stopped trying to rescue the old manuscript, scaled back her paid work, wrote faster, joined a structured mentorship program, and started treating her queries less like hope and more like a targeted campaign. The whole system flipped — finish-and-hope became test, revise, reposition, retest.
The People Behind Orïsha
Backers: Pitch Wars mentor Ashley Hearn helped sharpen the manuscript early on. Agents Alexandra Machinist and Hillary Jacobson at ICM Partners took her on. Christian Trimmer and Jean Feiwel bought the trilogy for Henry Holt, with Tiffany Liao editing. Fox 2000 gave it early validation on the screen side.
Protégés: What she built forward: Adeyemi has since become a visible advocate for other writers of color, running her own writing-craft newsletter and courses — a continuation of the access she fought to get for herself.
Strategic access: Her network is really what carried the weight — manuscript development, leverage during the auction, distribution into international rights markets, a real shot at film. That combination is what turned one debut manuscript into a multi-territory rights package.
The Takeaway: Build a Pitch That’s Legible but Uncopyable
Get your pitch down to one sentence. Something buyers already recognize, fused with an edge nobody else can copy. Then test it — properly test it. Can an agent position it in ten seconds flat? Is the difference actually built into the product, not just glued on for flavor? And can it grow — sequels, new formats, new markets — or does it dead-end after book one?