"When
Martin suggested that I write about the ups and downs of crime-writing, I
hesitated. The ups, yes - the thrill of publication, the pleasure of nailing a
complicated plot, the satisfaction when a day’s writing goes well, the friends
I’ve made among other crime writers, meeting people who have actually read your
novel. I wasn’t so sure about sharing the downs. To lose one agent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks
like carelessness.
But perhaps my story could be regarded as
one of those morality tales the Victorians were so fond of in which hard work
and perseverance win the day - or else as an awful warning. Because it all
started so well. I found an agent with relative ease. Bob was a lovely man, a
legendary agent of the old school, already over eighty when he took me on. He
sold the first two novels in my Cassandra James series to Robert Hale in the UK
and to St Martin’s Press in the US. But then the crime fiction editor left to
go to law school (the irony of it!). She’d loved my novels and the new editor
wasn’t interested. They decided not to take the third one. In the UK I was
still with Hale, but with small prints runs and no paperbacks, things weren’t
looking rosy.
Perhaps it was time to write a bigger, more
ambitious novel. To that end, I acquired a young, ambitious agent. Too
ambitious as it turned out. Before I’d even finished the novel, she’d quit to
join a TV talent agency.
It
can be harder to get an agent in mid career than when you are setting out. Suffice
it to say that years went by and the pages listing agents in my copy of The Writers and Artists Yearbook had
come unglued by the time I gave up and decided to try to place the novel
myself. In the end a small independent press took Invisible, my standalone suspense novel, but only as a print on demand
paperback and an ebook. For my next novel self-publishing seemed preferable and
though there is no shame in that, it wasn’t what I wanted."
And then it happened: in September last
year at the funeral of a old friend (who had nothing whatsoever to do with
publishing) I got talking to a woman who asked me what I did. When I told her,
she said, ‘You must talk to my husband. He’s an editor . . .’ By Christmas I
had a two book deal with Lion Hudson. Deep
Water came out on 21 October (27 January in the US), I’m hard at work on
the second, and I couldn’t be happier with my new publishers.
My story isn’t at all unusual (though I
would advise new writers not to bank on meeting an editor at a funeral). Luck in
one form or another does play a part in publishing – your manuscript has to
land on the right desk. But so does sticking at it and I don’t know if I would
have done that without the support of other writers who shared their own
stories of disappointment and rejection and told me not to give up (yes, I’m
looking at you, Martin!). It helped to know that I wasn’t the first writer
who’s had to reinvent themselves. I certainly won’t be the last.
