On Publication Journeys (Or: How It Sometimes Takes a Donkey Ride)

Plus events and new totes!

Dear Scribblers,

A sold out launch at Waterstones Trafalgar Square AND a sold out film screening in Soho - GRQ (Get Rich Quick), the debut novella by Steven Bernstein, is officially launched! Set over a single tension-filled day in a collapsing Los Angeles, GRQ follows Marlon, a grieving husband on the brink of financial ruin. Desperate to save his home and family, Marlon is seduced by a slick financial advisor—our omniscient, morally ambiguous narrator—who promises salvation through a last-ditch crypto investment. What follows is a tragicomic spiral into chaos, delusion, and debt, told in short, punchy, cinematic chapters.

And our new tote bags are here! They’ll debut at our Summer party on Fri 25th of July at Seesaw, Manchester, (filled with free mystery goodies!) or if you can’t make it, you can grab a bag here from our website!

And it’s just 6 days until we launch the long-awaited fourth novel from Sheena Kalayil: historical romance ‘The Others’! Set across the fragile landscape of 1990 East Germany, Kalayil’s newest novel traces a love triangle between Lolita (a trainee doctor from India), Armando (a contract worker from Mozambique), and Theo (a writer navigating the decaying GDR). Their private dramas unfold against the seismic collapse of a surveillance state and a society in flux.

“One of the strengths of Kalayil’s writing is the space she leaves open for shafts of humour to illuminate the gathering storm clouds… The Others captures the climate of the GDR in collapse with a deftness of touch and deep compassion.” – Desmond Bullen, Northern Soul Magazine

Join us at Manchester Blackwells’ June 19th or Newcastle Waterstones June 27th to launch!

Today I’m sharing two writing journeys from the perspective of a novelist and a short story writer, both of whom have had experience of being agented and unagented whilst sending their work out into the world!

I hope it might help give perspective and inspiration to anyone currently sending their creative work to publishers or submitting to our novel and novella window.

John Ironmonger’s Publication Journey: (not so much a journey – more of a donkey ride).

“I was fifty eight years old when my first proper novel was published. So it must have quite a journey, then, you say?

Well – not so much.

My problem was a supreme lack of confidence. I never believed anyone would want to read my stories. So I wrote them, and I put them in a drawer, and no one ever saw them. Not even my family. Eventually, one by one, I lost them:

A novella about a genetically modified marathon runner. A novel about a brotherhood of monks who happen to be immortal. A half-finished book about a brush salesman who finds himself hailed as a new messiah. A novel in a similar vein about a student doctor who gets sent back in time to first century Israel to document the life of Jesus, but cannot find him. Anywhere. He trawls Jerusalem and Galilee looking. One day he uses his twenty-first century medical skills to resuscitate a man in a coma whose body is being prepared for burial. And later to save the life of a child. Oops. ‘I’m not the messiah,’ he tells people. But it’s too late. Already he has a set of disciples. And you get the idea from there.

A set of short stories. A novella about the last living tiger ‘Claws’ who has huntsmen clamouring to shoot him.

Not all of these were ever finished, some petered out halfway through, but all are dust now.

It's tough, you see, when novel-writing is your calling. If you’re a painter you can show your painting to a thousand people in a single afternoon. They will look at it for twenty-five seconds (that’s the average time apparently). It isn’t asking much of anyone to find twenty-five seconds to appreciate your picture. But a novel asks more. So very much more. For a novel I want a week of your time – for two hours a day. Frankly I never had the nerve to ask that.

But of course I did get published. And that is the next part of the journey. I wrote a non-fiction book (The Good Zoo Guide). I parcelled up the manuscript and posted it to Harper Collins and they phoned me at 9:00 AM the next morning to say they would have it. Gosh. I never thought it would be that easy. In trepidation, I sent them a novel – ‘Daughters of Artemis,’ a sci-fi tale about a world populated only by women. They didn’t want it. So I self-published it, barely mentioned it to anyone, and it is still out there somewhere selling about ten copies a year – presumably to people who buy it by mistake.

Then one day in my mid forties I sat at my laptop and wrote a first line. The line was:

‘I am Maximillian Zygmer Quentin Kavadis John Cabwhill Teller. My name includes every one of the letters of the Roman alphabet with the exception of the letter F. My father, it seems, took exception to F.’

I had no idea what this story was going to be about. I just wanted to start it. Then I discovered that the name lacked a P. So he became Maximilian Ponder. He became a man who had locked himself away to catalogue his own brain.

Well, writing was only a hobby. The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder took me about five years to write. Once it was done, I hid it away; as usual. But three years later I came across it on my hard drive and I sent a copy to my son, Jon, who by now was working as a journalist with the BBC. What did he think of it? Of course he told me he liked it. ‘You must send it away Dad,’ he urged me. But I didn’t. Not for two years. All the same, he pestered, so one day, on impulse I emailed three literary agents with the manuscript. And I guess the rest is history. There was a publishers’ auction, I sold the book to Orion for a six-figure sum, and it went on to get shortlisted for the Costa.

There is a moral to this story for young writers (or even for old ones).