In mid-February 1998, Atwater-Rhodes met her agent, Tom Hart, and he would go on to contact her to announce that Random House had accepted her manuscript for publication. Hart also stated that it would be published on April 14, 1998, her fourteenth birthday. The novel, however, was not published until May 11, 1999, two years after she began working on the manuscript. The novel was written in first-person narrative, a feat she did not repeat in the three later novels. Hart stated that the novel was "the fastest sale ever had."