Everyone has a story to tell
Image courtesy of Wix Media
Writing a book isn’t easy. What do you write about? Where do you start? Will people want to read it? Questions swirl around your mind whilst staring at the blank page in front of you. But millions of people do it, pushing past the blank page to create hundreds of pages filled with thousands of words. And sometimes people read those words. Words that came from one mind, one idea, and the decision to just ‘give it a go’.
Growing up, my grandma used to tell me and my brother stories. They were always about the same characters on different adventures. There were friends, enemies, and endless chaos that made us laugh until we couldn’t breathe, and they seemed so real that we thought they were. “How old are they now?” we’d ask. “Oh, I think they’ll be 52 this year,” she’d say, and we believed her.
My passion for storytelling started here, and I decided I would one day turn these stories into a novel. I have a notebook filled with all the characters’ names, and descriptions based on how five year-old me pictured them.
It’s surprising books are still popular in 2020 - we’re in the future aren’t we? Yet novels are still being written, published, and sold.
Admittedly, only around 190 million books were sold in 2018 compared to 334 million in 2011, but there’s now a balance between tradition and technology, with more embracing the digital world of e-readers and audiobooks. Amazon even developed Kindle Direct Publishing for self-publishing writers. But there’s something about holding a book, thumbing the corners, breaking the spine (sometimes) and flicking through the pages that nothing else seems to replicate.
A Different Direction
Magdalene Soleas, who goes by Lena but publishes under her full name, is relatively new to the publishing industry. Her first novel, The Woman Who Pretends, was written four years ago, but she doesn’t consider herself published despite having three novels available as e-books on Amazon, and working on at least two more.
“I do send to agents first, and I’ve been to writers’ summits where I’ve talked to them as well, and I don’t get any joy. So I thought you know what, I’m going to put it on Amazon and see what happens.”
We’re talking at her home in North London on another grey and rainy day, her husband walking in and out of the front room during the interview, their kids at school. Lena, who is 42 years old, has been a primary school teacher for 14 years, but always enjoyed writing, sending off film scripts for six years after doing a Masters in Mass Communications, before venturing into the publishing industry.
“It’s funny you kind of go in a different direction, and then you always come back to what you originally wanted to do.”
"There are authors out
there choosing the
self-publishing route"
Lena uses Amazon's self-publishing service to produce and sell copies of her novels
(image by Alysia Georgiades)
While writing scripts she worked at a jewellers, where she found inspiration for The Woman Who Pretends. “The idea just popped into my head while I was there because the book’s got a little bit of a jewellery connection to it,” and nothing seems to have changed. She now has ideas for another four novels, explaining, “you’ll find ideas just crop up from anywhere really, I just had another idea about half an hour before you came, from a WhatsApp conversation.”
An author who followed a similar path to Lena is Nicholas Blincoe, who won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for Fiction in 1998 for Manchester Slingback. “I tried to write a first novel as a teenager, and went to university with the intention of writing while I studied, but became fascinated by philosophy and didn’t write another novel until I graduated.”
Nicholas also finds inspiration through his own experiences, combining them into crime fiction novels. Publishing his first books, Acid Casuals aged 30, 25 years later he has written many more, including his latest title, More Noble Than War: The Story of Football in Israel and Palestine. They are all available on Amazon, but Nicholas admits his work is rarely read online. “I’m not sure why, but there are books that I feel are better as physical objects, and maybe my books fall in that category, something you might want to own and return to.”
If you're not disciplined, it's not going to get done
Everyone tends to hold a book from their childhood close to their heart, one that’s stuck with them as they’ve grown up, one they look back on and remember escaping into. For me, this was Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield. I wanted to be one of the Fossil sisters and explore the performing arts like Pauline, Petrova and Posy. I first read it with my mum, and every few years or so took it off my bookshelf to read again.
This love of reading inspired me to write poems, letters, and short stories in my spare time. But it was Tony Dickenson's English classes that sparked a real passion for writing, inspired by his own achievements of publishing his first novel, Tumbling in Bethnal Green, to pursue a career where I can write, and eventually reach the end goal of producing a novel.
“I’ve always written poetry and short stories, and just one day I said I’m going to write a novel. I can’t even remember how it started now. It probably would’ve been when I was about 38 or 39, something like that.” I’m sitting in a classroom with Tony two and half years after I graduated. We’re meeting after school in the middle of January. It’s dark outside, and the classrooms are cold. The cleaner is already hoovering the hallways, but music students can still be heard practicing upstairs.
Now in his mid-fifties, Tony’s first book was published in 2015, before releasing his latest novel, Puffin Boy, in 2019. “If I’m going to draw a parallel, I might be Thomas in that book,” he says, tapping a copy of Puffin Boy on the table as he explains where his inspiration came from. “And I’d be the boy, Bethnal, in Tumbling in Bethnal Green.”
He also finds his mind is most creative when listening to classical music. “As I’m listening I’m usually making notes,” he says, writing ideas down on leaflets or programmes when attending concerts.
But as a full-time teacher, Tony explains it’s challenging finding time to turn these ideas into chapters. “I’ve got a laptop, and I have that on my lap going home on the tube now, and I’ll be editing a couple of paragraphs. And at the weekend I go to cafes, or stay home, just wherever I can get a moment. If you’re not disciplined, it’s not going to get done.”
But despite enjoying the writing process, he admits publishing was far from simple. “You’ve just got to be prepared for rejection. With both of these I sent off to literary agents, and you’ve got to look at what sort of books these people are representing. But then I went with independent publishers, and that’s when I got the bite.”
"Just one day I said I'm going to write a novel"
Tony taught English as a second language in the United States before becoming a secondary school English teacher (image by Alysia Georgiades)
The 'Slush Pile'
Nowadays there are many ways to publish, but the most common is still through literary agents who can help find a publisher. Tony published two books without an agent, but Lena is yet to have any luck, often told her work isn’t ‘commercial’.
“Women’s fiction is hot for established writers but when you’re a new writer you’ve got to hit what’s on trend, and at the moment it’s thrillers.” After releasing her most recent novel, When We Next Meet, Lena is currently working on a psychological thriller, hoping this might appeal to literary agents. But she says it’s more important to try and find her style. “What you need to do as a writer is find your voice. The style you’re going to write in, and I haven’t found that yet I don’t think. I’m realistic about it, you know, if I had there would be an agent interested, that’s the reality of it.”
David Bowker, author of crime novels including The Butcher of Glastonbury, and more recently How to Be Bad, believes it’s difficult to become traditionally published without a literary agent. “If you don’t submit your novel through an agent, publishers immediately place it on something called the ‘slush pile’, an unsightly mountain of manuscripts that no one asked for, and no one will probably ever read.” With 173,000 new and revised books published in the UK in 2015, the publishing industry is certainly competitive, so staying off the ‘slush pile’ may not be as easy as it seems.
“An experienced agent will be on friendly terms with a number of editors, so will often know exactly which editor to send your book to,” David explains, who has had four different editors help publish his seven novels, but is currently working on something a little different.
“My agent is about to finalise a deal for me to write a series of audiobooks for Audible, which means the finished products will only be available as digital downloads. For the very first time, I won’t be able to hold the finished books in my hand. They will only exist in cyberspace.”
Image by Alysia Georgiades
Hoop jumping
The Amazon Kindle launched in November 2007. It had buttons, a very dark screen, and around 90,000 books available to buy. Amazon has since released multiple versions of the e-reader, launched a Kindle app, and acquired Audible. Some wish books were the one aspect of society removed from the digital world, but Amazon seems to disagree.
Print book sales declined in the UK in 2018 after five years of consistent growth, and digital book sales rose by 4.6%. The majority of book sales are still from print publishers, but people are discovering the convenience of e-books and audiobooks, and finding underrated novels that don’t conform to trends publishers often look for - the ‘commercial’ aspect Lena was told her books needed.
Someone who has embraced this freedom is Veronica Garland, who published Flammeus on Amazon in 2019, the first of a seven book series titled The Emberjar, with the second instalment currently in progress.
“I wanted to write a story that was a little different to a standard fantasy fare, placed in a believable and relatable world which was just a little different from our own.” Veronica’s degree in Anthropology and an interest in human behaviour inspired the book’s plot, and she chose to publish through Amazon in fear of her work being added to the ‘slush pile’. “I do feel like it involves an awful lot of hoop jumping,” she explains. “There are opportunities at every turn to be judged and moulded, but if you want to write a story which is not typical for a genre, like mine is, it’s tricky to push through the requests for tried and tested tropes and themes.”
And it seems the increase of authors choosing this route has caught publishers’ attention. “Self- published authors were kind of like a joke within the industry,” says Lena. “But [publishers] have had to step up and take notice now. There are authors out there who are choosing the self-publishing route because they prefer having ownership over everything.”
Nice Things
It seems strange, but one of the hardest parts of publishing to deal with can be having people read your work. Writing is a personal form of expression, and sharing something that was formed in one mind from one idea can be difficult, as Lena found.
“Trusting someone to read something you’ve written, that’s the first step and that’s massive, I didn’t want anybody to read my stuff,” she explains. “But once you get one person to read it it becomes easier. And obviously now you want people to read it, but I was embarrassed. It’s so personal, they’re your thoughts and your ideas, and that was hard.”
But Veronica, who is now 52 and living in Derby, has embraced and enjoyed hearing people’s thoughts on her work. “It’s great when people really engage with the book and get involved with the characters and the story, interacting with readers is really rewarding.”
Parents who read Puffin Boy offered Tony the chance to give a talk, where he heard people discussing the characters he created for the first time. “They were saying ‘oh well she knew about...’ and ‘she knew what she was doing...’ and I was like, well yeah sort of!” But he welcomes feedback of any kind. “While I love to hear nice things about it, if people criticise it too it doesn’t really bother me because they’ve got the right to do it. Once you put something in the public domain it’s out there for criticism, and I’m all for that.”
You've got to tell a story
I never really knew where my passion for writing came from. My mum taught me to read, my grandma inspired me with her stories, but neither of them write. Then I realised my grandad has. In the last 20 years, Geoff Bond has produced three non-fiction titles about the human diet based on anthropological research. I admit I have never read them all from start to finish, but they are useful guides to own and flick through. I can’t imagine that’s as easy on a Kindle.
Now 76 years old and living in Cyprus with his wife, I sit down with Geoff at home while he’s visiting the UK to give a talk about his research. His books are stacked on the coffee table in front of us, and we’re sitting on the sofa opposite each other, Geoff holding a cup of tea as we talk. When I told him I was hoping to write a novel one day he said, “I had the same feeling when I was 10. I wanted to be writing. And I ended up always writing scientific stuff.”
Geoff was an engineer for many years before pursuing his passion for anthropology, and started giving talks in America when a publisher asked him to create a book on the topic. This was eventually published as Natural Eating in 2000, and 17 years later he published his latest book, Paleo in a Nutshell: Living and Eating the way Nature Intended.
"It would be an expression of me writing what I want to write"
Geoff still gives talks in Europe and North America about the research behind his three non-fiction books (image by Alysia Georgiades)
“My editor says ‘you’ve got to tell a story. You’re trying to set out an argument but you’ve got to tell a story,’” he explains. And after years of trying to master this balance, he reveals he’s now attempting fiction, something he’s always admired - quoting Kipling, Keats and Shakespeare during our conversation - but never tried to write.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” he laughs. “I started writing about six months ago, but I need to discipline myself.” Asked if he would ever consider publishing this, he says it would be for one reason only. “It wouldn’t be to make a huge public success of it, it would be something that would be an expression of me writing what I want to write.”
A buzz
There are general stages of publishing that writers goes through. Sending a few chapters and a summary off to literary agents and publishers, redrafting the manuscript countless times and designing the cover, before finally getting it sent off to print, waiting for the box of books to arrive a few months later.
“When you get older, birthday presents and Christmas presents don’t really mean a lot any more because you know, you’re old,” Tony says, describing the moment a box of Tumbling in Bethnal Green books arrived on his doorstep. “This made me feel like a kid again at Christmas. I remember opening up the box and it was just like ‘wooow’,” he gasps. “It was a buzz you know, that was a nice little moment.”
For David, the moment didn’t quite have the same impact, as he was disappointed with the cover he had designed for his first book, The Death Prayer. “I went to art school, so I really cared how things looked. And this cover design that had looked great in my head just looked cheap and nasty when it was printed. But they used a different cover for the paperback and that was a massive improvement. When I held that in my hands, I felt like I’d really achieved something.”
The cover is arguably as important as the book itself, with many judging its appearance - despite how the saying goes. “That was probably the hardest bit,” says Lena when uploading her novels to Amazon. “Trying to find a front cover that will fit with your story. They provide you with as many themes as they can, but it’s hard.”
Veronica on the other hand knew exactly what kind of cover she wanted for Flammeus. “I knew I didn’t want a conventional fantasy cover with swirling purples and castles and clouds, or dragons and swords. Because my book relates to colours, it was important to carry the theme through to the cover, and luckily I found an artist who understood exactly what I wanted.”
The end
Why people write is tricky to answer. Everyone has their own reasons, but whether they are published in print or online, they all share a passion for writing, and that’s what drives them.
“The unexpected within the plot is really thrilling,” Tony says. “As I’m writing, if another character just happens to come in...it’s quite a thrill.”
For Lena, the ending is always special. “You kind of want to cherish that last bit. You get to the end and your fingers just keep hovering and hovering, and it just naturally goes.”
I find my notebook filled with the names of characters from my grandma’s stories. It’s been a while since I last opened it, but Tony’s advice is to “get writing” - something a professor at Georgia State University once said to him when he was a student. So I guess that’s what I’ll do.