Book Release Date Announcement for On The Way To Chicago
I have been waiting for this day for years. Quite literally over a decade. And it’s here!
On The Way To Chicago releases on June 16, 2026! Pre-order for the paperback edition is now available through my website, bookshop.org, and Amazon. Ebook pre-order will be available soon.
What can you do to support me and this book? I’m so glad you asked!
Buy a copy of the book! (Thank you in advance!)
Recommend the book to your friends and family!
Bring On The Way To Chicago to your book club
Post a review of On The Way To Chicago on Goodreads, Amazon, StoryGraph, and anywhere else you can think of posting book reviews.
Submit a testimonial to Alli! I can add these directly to my website.
Engage with my social media posts. Every like, comment, share, and repost helps increase the reach of my marketing efforts. If you’re not already following me, please do so.
Post on your social media about On The Way To Chicago and be sure to tag me (@bitterherbswrites) and use the hashtag #OnTheWayToChicago
Ask book review accounts to review On The Way To Chicago (if you’re active on social media). Getting folks with a book platform to talk about the book is a HUGE help.
Contact your local bookstore and/or library and request that they stock copies of On The Way to Chicago by Alli Parrett. They can order through Ingram or through me directly
Now for a little backstory…
I started writing this book 2011 when I was a sophomore in college. The book everyone will read is not at all the same story I started in my college dorm.
It took me 10 years to write the book and another 5 to get to this point. Between 2021-2025, I queried On The Way To Chicago with about 50 agents. I had 5 agents request the full manuscript, all of whom said something along the lines of “I really enjoyed the book but I don’t know how to sell it.” It wasn’t until I sat down and really focused on self-publishing that I realized why they said that. On The Way To Chicago doesn’t fit in a neat little genre box, and traditional publishing doesn’t like that. It breaks some rules, bends some traditions.
I wanted a story that encapsulated the uncertainty of our late-teens and early-twenties. Those are messy years where our frontal lobes aren’t fully formed and, even if we have good support systems and safety nets, we’re just trying to figure out what’s next. Rowan’s story is about trying to find her people, her community, her path in life. I would bet money that Rowan's journey in the book is representative of many people’s personal and career journeys. Start in one direction, go back, pivot, head another way, break, keep moving forward. Getting started in life is tricky and sometimes all we can do is put one foot in front of the other. Everyone is looking for their community, a place where they fit in and that’s not always the place where they were born. I was one of those people who didn’t like my hometown, didn’t find community there. It took me leaving and moving around to find my community.
So many of the stories I read or saw in the market at the time were genre fiction that followed very specific tropes, like Romance where a happily ever after with the love interest is required, or Women’s Lit where there were a lot of recently divorced single moms with kids, or Sci-Fi and Fantasy which encapsulate a lot of big topics but aren’t set in the real world. I wanted something set in the world we know that broke those tropes and has a happily ever after that looks a little different.
On The Way To Chicago blends a few sub-genres of contemporary fiction, namely new adult fiction, romance, and women’s lit. It’s genre-fluid, genre-queer if you will. So when those agents said “I really enjoyed the book but I don’t know how to sell it,” all I could think is I can sell the shit out of this book.
I’m a marketer by trade, that was my line of practice in the corporate world. It was my job to figure out how tech could solve weird problems and then tell that story. I figured, if I could do it for one of the largest companies in the world, I can do it for my little genre-queer book.
So here I am. We’ll see how delusional I actually am in a year or so.
